Disqus - Latest Comments for kamikazemark

Re: If your iPhone friends hate your green bubble, then you need better friends

Mark Damon Hughes — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 19:06:17 -0000

"Kids are dumb so it's OK to exploit them" is not an acceptable argument, and most people with Androids are obviously adults. They should know better.

And if you know better, you don't use SMS, and don't let anyone talk to you over it, because it will be read by others.

Re: If your iPhone friends hate your green bubble, then you need better friends

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 04:11:25 -0000

The entire reason for this, which Androids never mention, is that iMessage has end-to-end encryption. A green bubble is SMS, insecure and readable by the pigs, phone company, or anyone with a stingray device. You are unsafe to communicate with! It's like a whispered conversation, joined by someone who shouts back over a bullhorn.

If you use WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or Line, nobody minds talking to an Android because it's secure. You try texting to us, it's "iPhone, who dis?"

Re: New Apple Park Visitor Center T-shirts are inspired by classic designs

Mark Damon Hughes — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 06:05:46 -0000

I think it's weird and out of place.

Apple 1980s was cute and fun (anyone who doesn't like '80s fashion has no fashion). Their logo was an apple or some pop text in bright rainbow colors.

Apple 2010s has this appalling white-room sterile anti-aesthetic; the machines still mostly "just work" ("mostly"…), but they're not pleasing to humans. So their logo is a black curve vaguely in the shape of an apple.

Having something cute and fun on modern Apple stuff just reminds you how awful white/"alu-minium" everywhere is.

If Apple was retheming everything to bondi blue, and rainbow colors, I'd be all for it.

Re: Discovering good music on Apple Music

Mark Damon Hughes — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 15:36:53 -0000

I haven't had nearly the trouble everyone else seems to have. I routinely go mark things as Liked or Disliked.

For You: Playlists shows 3/6 that are what I like, 1/6 meh, 2/6 stupidly wrong. Albums: All relevant, tho it's very '80s pop heavy today. Artist Spotlight: 6/6 exactly in genre for me. Favorites Mix looks all good, heavily liked; a bit of whiplash going from Front Line Assembly going to Concrete Blonde, but machines aren't good DJs. Chill Mix has some stuff I like and some modern whinging emo shit. New Music Mix is doing a good job of picking mostly metal and industrial, looks like; there's not enough new blues to show up I think.

The Browse tab is exactly like 30 years ago when you'd walk into a record store. Up front is a bunch of "popular" garbage for morons, then you go back to the genre racks and there's the good stuff.

What I do want is the ability to kill certain artists. If I mark Taylor Swift or Drake as "Dislike", I don't ever want those hate-crimes against hearing to ever be visible for me, in any playlist, any search, any mix. I've filed feedback with Apple to this effect, and like all Apple feedback it's a black hole.

Re: First time Tooter, long time Tweeter

Mark Damon Hughes — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 18:20:15 -0000

There's a large non-technical population on Mastodon, so it's not that confusing; you sign up where your friends do. But there is a selection process of extremely Twitter-focused PR flacks being incapable of getting into it, because their PR job is impossible there. Everyone is OK with this.

Re: Renowned film director Wim Wenders hits out at “phone photography”

Mark Damon Hughes — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 19:36:50 -0000

I love a couple of Wim Wenders films, but most people take photos not to show in museums, but to remember a moment later.

Re: Red-Caped Catholic Loons Hold “Chivalry Camp” To Train Boys About The Evil Church Of England [VIDEO]

Mark Damon Hughes — Sun, 24 Jun 2018 13:50:42 -0000

If their god existed, it wouldn't need these assholes to defend it. The fact that blasphemy can be done without lightning, pillars of salt, floods, or Jesus cursing bushes, proves the Christian god is fictional.

Re: Google, the Pentagon, and weaponized AI

Mark Damon Hughes — Thu, 31 May 2018 15:40:06 -0000

It shouldn't be polarizing at all: Don't give autonomous machines the ability to kill. Anyone who participates in this is a war criminal and probably a traitor to Humanity, should be tried and hung.

Re: Pay-To-Pee App To Launch For NYC Restaurants

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:49:26 -0000

How are they going to compete with New York's famous open-air urinals, called "every street in New York"?

Re: Have a look at 157 new emoji, coming this year, and a Super Villain issue

Mark Damon Hughes — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 06:21:24 -0000

I often tag 👾 when discussing videogames.
🎍is a Japanese kadomatsu, I expect millions of people use it every New Year. The levitating dude is from the Softbank emoji, IIRC.

Re: Two major Apple shareholders push for study of iPhone addiction in children

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 16:47:34 -0000

They're exactly who I mean; people do not have gambling addictions, they have poor decision-making abilities and want to blame someone else.

Don't make statements about how much I know or have researched, just because I disagree with professional victims.

Re: Two major Apple shareholders push for study of iPhone addiction in children

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 08:56:12 -0000

I want misuse of the word "addiction" for anything but habituating chemicals, made at least a misdemeanor, possibly a felony with mandatory sentencing and electrical behavioral modification.

We have no good word for "things that are fun, so you keep playing with them instead of doing things that are not-fun", but that's what phones are.

The same things were said about TV and those of us in the MTV Generation. And about arcades, pinball machines, radio, comic books, even novels! Old boring people universally hate whatever fun thing people like today. Screw them.

Re: Data reveals the films where critics and audiences disagree most

Mark Damon Hughes — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 16:16:09 -0000

Meanwhile, I would classify Naked Lunch and Barton Fink as Turing tests. If one doesn't like them, they're barely a person, and certainly not weird enough to be interesting to me.

Forrest Gump was a trash ripoff of Zelig, over-emotional nonsense about an idiot, for idiots.

Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert were a great pairing, because 90% of the time I liked what Siskel liked, and thought Ebert was an emotional sap afraid of his own shadow. Ebert hated A Clockwork Orange, Siskel loved it; that says everything.

Now, I check christian fundamentalist review sites; if they hate a film and think it's the work of their Satan, I'm likely to enjoy it.

Re: Paper is not dead

Mark Damon Hughes — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 12:57:03 -0000

Ha ha he doesn't know how to use the three seashells!

Re: Ireland Will (Finally) Hold a Referendum on Its Absurd Blasphemy Law Next Year

Mark Damon Hughes — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 02:54:26 -0000

Off-topic of the post, the RSS feed no longer shows full text, which is super annoying. At this point I may as well unsubscribe. If you're hoping for ad money from views, I block all ads, like most people now. Patreon and book sales aren't happening if I can't read the site in my feed reader.

Re: How a Twitter hack taught me to take online security seriously

Mark Damon Hughes — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 21:17:00 -0000

Nobody believes they need security until they're hacked. Nobody believes they need backups until they lose a drive.

Re: Some Liberty University Graduates Are Taking Part in a Misguided Protest

Mark Damon Hughes — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 16:59:23 -0000

Much of a university's money doesn't come from student tuition, but from alumni donations and bequests. So returning their diplomas is a signal he won't be getting any more money from them.

They're foolish to have gone to "Liberty" University in the first place, but trying to push it towards less foolish is something.

Re: Ask the iTunes Guy: The last one

Mark Damon Hughes — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 03:26:11 -0000

Goddamned autoplay video: +1. Is the WebKit nightly up yet to disable those forever? I'd rather have a flaky beta browser than videos. I feel that links to Macworld should have a content warning.

Kirk's in a better place now, even if that's a gutter.

Re: How the web became unreadable

Mark Damon Hughes — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:53:37 -0000

I wrote a bookmarklet that works even on sites Safari Reader View doesn't: http://markdamonhughes.com/...

Just hit one key or find it in my favorites on phone, and readable page.

Re: What Are the Differences Between Religions and Cults?

Mark Damon Hughes — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 07:56:08 -0000

I agree (and the medieval Popes were far more direct cult leaders than a dead idolized Muhammed), except that *was* 400 years ago, and they didn't have machine guns and C4.

Re: What Are the Differences Between Religions and Cults?

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 12:34:28 -0000

This is not a mistake.

Re: What Are the Differences Between Religions and Cults?

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:47:08 -0000

So by this definition, Islam is a cult.
1. Islam kills you if you're an apostate.
2. Islam kills you if you get too close to unbelievers (in particular trying to marry one).
3. If you're a woman in Islam, you're a slave who can't leave.
4. Muhammed.
5. If you argue with Islam, present "heretical" ideas, or draw Muhammed, they kill you or threaten to do so; ask Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or the dead cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
6. A liberal/lazy Western Muslim who drinks and doesn't pray 5 times a day is not equal to a devout Muslim who bangs his head on the ground at Mecca.
7. No secrecy, but it's not needed when you already rule by fear.

Re: The New York Times headline broadside on Apple AirPods

Mark Damon Hughes — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 23:08:21 -0000

They're asking The Wirecutter, which is supposed to choose the best product of a category, about AirPods, of course you'll get that response. They're terrible headphones! They're thin, reedy little earbuds, just like the wired ones. It might be reasonable to use AirPods or any earbuds when jogging or whatever, but not for actively listening to music, or noise cancelling.

I keep some substandard Apple earpods (the ones with the rubber dildo tips that don't stay in) in my pocket when I go out, but at home I have Beats mixr (better for metal, industrial, and gaming, and best build quality of anything I've seen) and Sennheiser HD650 (former DJ, so I'll likely choose Sennheiser for life) for anything else.

I can't fully comprehend someone choosing AirPods with BT latency and terrible sound for $130, but apparently some will pay $100 to not have wires on the tinny noises barely making it into their ears.

Re: Nintendo’s risky mobile games push with paid Super Mario launch on iPhones

Mark Damon Hughes — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 19:36:31 -0000

It's not much, but App Store customers are skinflints, expectations of everything being free or underpriced set by Apple. Squenix usually sets prices in the $10-20 range, and gets hated on by many (I buy almost everything they put out).

So I'm cautious about it. Nintendo might get a lot of downloads, then a lot of complaints about the $10 upgrade.

Re: Getting 50-somethings to pay for streaming music

Mark Damon Hughes — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 16:09:43 -0000

I almost never get pop music in "for you", mostly metal, blues, and old rock (industrial is a non-genre in iTunes, so finding any is very hard), but I'm aggressive at hitting follow & "love" on bands and appropriate playlists, and "dislike" (burn before listening) on country and such.