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Two Lynx products to complain about today.

Lynx Mixology

The concept is nice. You get two fragrances, you squirt them both at once and get a third fragrance from the combination. They smell quite pleasant on their own, and the third smell is just as decent, but the entire thing is clearly designed so you buy and consume two cans of deodorant in the time you’d otherwise use only one. An intelligent person would buy the set and use the scents one at a time, but when you have them in front of you, you can’t help but squirt them together as the can says.

Lynx Shock

Here we have a form of shower gel, in this case scented with “Glacier Water and Deep Sea Mint”. Basically, it’s shower gel with menthol in it. Menthol makes your balls feel like they’re immersed in liquid nitrogen. If that’s your thing, knock yourself out.

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I love spam e-mails. Enjoy:

Hi my friend!

I only wished to write to you the letter and to tell as in general my letter got to you! First I would like to speak a little about myself my name is Kristina to me 28 years I live in Russia to Kazan. All the others wash data and a photo in the appendix to the letter data. I was in agency of acquaintance and to me advised yours e-mail the address I do not know whence they him took but they gave me yours e-mail that I could have acquaintance to you. And I only wanted that you have spent about 10 minutes both looked wash a photo and wash data and received
from you the answer you would like to have acquaintance to me or you only would not like this? Tell to me I so only the nobility it much would like. Also I shall wait much your answer. I started to search the man as to me very alone and 28 years and I do not have man if you wish to begin with me correspondence or easier to begin acquaintance tell to me your answer. I shall wait much!

I hope your new friend well I hope that I can become for you friend
Kristina! Can you send me you photo and story life on my e-mail: **

P. S. My photo and all data are in archive. My e-mail: **

I’m assuming this is the worst machine translation I’ve ever encountered, because it seems as though it could have, once, been a legitimate missive. I’m quite fond of this e-mail. It’s spectacularly ambiguous. It waits until the last couple of sentences of gibberish before it alludes to “Kristina”/”Kristinka” being on the hunt for a man.

Anyway. There was a picture included. Nice curtains.

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Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan. They’re Scottish, they’re gay, and they do a spectacular job of decorating people’s homes. Usually without their permission. But they annoy me, slightly.

Together, they’ve made numerous TV shows about bad design ideas, how to decorate your home so people will buy it, and so on. Today, I’m focusing on two of their shows. One is a British series called “How Not To Decorate”, the second is a newer Canadian series called “Home Heist”.

The former of these series’ consisted of Colin and Justin appearing at someone’s poorly designed, badly executed and generally ugly home, and proceeding to renovate the Christ out of it until it resembled something awesome. This does not annoy me in any way.

The latter series is much of the same, with the part about the house being badly designed and ugly being substituted for the house being basically an average house, much like the one you’re sitting in now. This annoys me.

It annoys me because of the format of the show. The “plot”, as it were, of each episode is as follows.

Colin and Justin “break in” to the victim’s home. They mock everything within. Stealing a couple of artifacts, usually an ugly arm chair and a component of the poor person’s collection of dolls or beer bottles or something, they ambush the person at some point in their day-to-day activities. Usurping their house keys, Colin and Justin now begin re-inventing the home.

Along the way, they force the home owners to wear t-shirts with demeaning phrases on them, which I acknowledge is all in good fun. They also “teach” the home owners three lessons regarding parts of home decoration that they’ve decided the home owners suck at. Which, in many cases, is fair enough.

I’m also happy to acknowledge that the end result of all of this is that the home owners get a brand new, professionally designed interior over four rooms for nothing. I’m not oblivious to this.

The part that really jostles my coconuts is the way Mr. McAllister and Mr. Ryan mock people’s homes. I grant that in some cases, bad design prevails. In the vast majority of cases, though, it’s very clear that a lack of money has prevailed. For example, the family who’s baby daughter’s bedroom was also the laundry, complete with dryer. Same for the family who’s child’s room contained a fully fitted kitchen, minus stove. It’s not a case of someone deciding this would be a fantastic design move, it’s more a case of the home owners could not afford an alternative solution. It gets my goat when people are insulted for things that clearly aren’t their own choices or their own fault.

As I said before, I didn’t have a problem with the first show. It was British, the humour was more prevalent, and nine times out of ten, the homes actually were total home design disasters. For example, the house that had one room with alternating pink and black walls covered with fluourescent hand-prints. Yes, please, mock that. Don’t mock someone’s choice not to re-paint their home from the original beige, nor someone’s decision to keep hand-me-down furniture, nor someone’s decision not to store their crap away.

Oh, yeah. People’s crap. I take umbrage at this part, too.

Sure, yes, design-wise, having your belongings in your house is a horrible idea. It makes everything look messy. However, we don’t all live in IKEA catalogues, and it just so happens that we all own shit. And most of us want to see it. Not two items of it. Not just the items that match colours. I don’t consider it materialistic to want to own things that remind you of your life, and I don’t consider it bad design to want to display them, in any number.

I actually wonder how the people who own the homes Colin and Justin renovate manage once C and J have left and they’re left with the dilemma of re-assimilating their own belongings back into the (admittedly very nice) design they’ve been presented with.

The British version had a follow-up segment at the end of each episode showing how the home owners had adapted the final design to work for them. Canadian one doesn’t.

Anyway. I’ve ranted about two gay guys renovating houses for far longer than I really wanted to. I like the show, but it irritates me for the above reasons.

Hoorah.

Tags: Rants and Vitriol // 11 Comments »

This is awesome. I was just reading up on the Crossovers & Spin-Offs Master Page, which I’ll happily credit for everything I’m about to say. The CO&SOMP is a database of almost every case of two television series meeting that have ever occurred. There’s a whole bunch of nifty stuff on there, but I’m particularly fond of Group 10, the “Jean-Claude Van Damme is dead” group.

The group consists of the following TV shows: Bewitched, Crossing Jordan, Enterprise, Heroes, Knight Rider, Las Vegas, Medium, The Office, Passions, Star Trek, Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: Voyager, Tabitha and Team Knight Rider

Thanks to an episode of Las Vegas in which Jean-Claude Van Damme made a guest appearance as himself, and was killed off as himself, he is now dead in that entire universe. This means that on Las Vegas, Passions, Crossing Jordan and Heroes, there can be no new Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, because he’s dead.

It’s bizarre and I love it.

Crossovers & Spin-Offs Master Page: http://poobala.com/crossoverlistb.html

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I’ve been reading a lot of reviews for Super Nintendo games, recently. Mostly because I have an annoying desire to force myself to like playing RPGs, and it’s not working very well. I hate leveling characters up. I hate fighting in role-playing games. I want to beat you up, not do math.

Anyway. Having read many reviews, I’ve come up with some pointers for anyone who plans to write their own and doesn’t want to come off sounding like a mentally retarded eleven-year-old.

1. Don’t pad your review out with twelve paragraphs about the game’s story. If you can’t summarise the plot of a video game in one paragraph, that’s a strike against the game, and you shouldn’t be dwelling on it. Or even worse, you shouldn’t be counting on it to increase your word count.

2. Don’t list things. It’s great that the game has thirty different weapons in it, but please don’t tell me about all of them individually.

3. Do not use any of the following phrases:

• “Why are you still reading this review and not buying/playing the game?”
• “Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!”
• “BEST GAME EVAR”

4. Learn to spell.

5. Please actually play the game you’re reviewing before you review it. If I had a dollar for every review I’ve read that focused on the first two levels of a game and nothing past that, I’d be wealthy. If you can’t play it past level two, tell us why. Don’t try to make up a review about parts of the game you haven’t seen.

6. Same thing goes for your screenshots. Don’t just include the title screen and the first level. Show us you played the game. Comment on the screenshots. Sell what you’re trying to tell us.

If you can take those six pieces of advice, maybe the internet will become a less embarassing place.

Also, upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. It seems pretty.

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I’d like to know which dickhead on the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles production team came to work one morning and said, “Y’know what this show needs? More ballet”.

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Okay. This thing’s been floating around the internet for at least a decade now, and I’ve just StumbleUponed (go grammar, go!) on two consecutive websites. Both of which were categorised as “photographs from nature”. This photograph is about as natural as the particle accelerator at CERN.

I speak, of course, of this:

I’d like to give the “photograph” credit, but I don’t know where it’s originally from.

Allow me to elaborate on exactly what makes this image fake. Bearing in mind I do know a little about what lightning is supposed to look like.

1. It’s yellow. Granted, some ridiculously incorrect white balance settings or damaged film may produce this effect. Either way, to have lightning (which is generally pure white, or tending to pink) appear yellow, the rest of the photograph should be so off-colour it would be very clearly a bad exposure. And it isn’t; the sunset is (lightning aside), a reasonable photograph. The pink colour of actual lightning is due to the nitrogen content of our atmosphere. For lightning to appear as yellow as in this photograph, we’d need to be breathing sodium.

2. Lightning generally comes from somewhere. Like, possibly, a storm. While it’s slightly cloudy in the photograph, there’re no real signs of inclement weather. It’s possible there could be a storm behind the photographer, but it’s unlikely a photographer intending to photograph lightning would face away from its source.

3. Lightning does not branch in an awkward horizontal fashion. Lightning seeks the shortest, fastest and most efficient path between the cloud and the ground. Generally, it branches only at the top of the strike, and weak branches terminate very quickly. Once a bolt has hit the deck, there’s no charge left in it to fire out the bizarre horizontal fingers this yellow thing has coming out of it.

4. It glows uniformly, and there’s a perfectly circular aura around the point of contact. It almost looks as if someone’s just tapped a Photoshop airbrush there. Gasp!

I’m sorry to whoever originally created this image. It’s a perfectly acceptible piece of Photoshoppery. I’m not sorry, however, to anyone who is convinced it’s a real photograph, because it is not.

Tags: Rants and Vitriol // 1 Comment »

I’ve recently obtained a 256MB MicroSD card. “Yay,” thought I. “I can now resolve my memory issues on my phone, perhaps with room for an album of Mp3s, too.”

Well, it doesn’t work. Apparently the handset is supposed to be equipped with a small door that covers the MicroSD card slot. My phone does not have said door. So the software is stuck in a permanent state of thinking someone’s left the damn door open, and won’t acknowledge my card.

Also, found out why the message tones won’t sound. Apparently in order to have them make a noise, you have to enable keypad and feedback sounds. Which is awesome for being notified of incoming messages, but arse-grindingly fucking frustrating when every simple action on the keypad becomes a cacophany of beeps, tweets and Japanese jingles.

Also, the un-deletable Telstra garbage it comes overloaded with apparenly can be deleted, if you’re willing to hack the buggery out of your phone. Which I’m not.

I hate this phone.

Tags: Rants and Vitriol // 1 Comment »

Howdy doody. Added a new energy drink review, this time in the form of Battery, a drink in a can shaped like a…..battery. Didn’t see that one coming, didya?

Bzzt, ow.

Tags: Exotic Beverage Reviews // 1 Comment »

I realise there’s not much point writing a review for a product that is, by now, virtually obsolete. I got this mobile phone a year ago. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to want it now. Regardless, I intend to be informative. Maybe someone has the same phone, and will read this and nod along with my observations.

I obtained this phone as part of Telstra’s bungled CDMA-to-NEXT-G changeover. It was, at the time, the best option available. It was either this handset, a ridiculously overpriced PDA/phone combo, or a brandless telephone with a Telstra logo on it. I chose this one. Supposedly it has the best reception, which I figure is a useful feature.

I have nothing against LG whatsoever. I have an LG television. I have an LG computer monitor. I have an LG refrigerator. Life is indeed good. However, this phone leaves something to be desired. Allow me to summarise the good points.

PROS:

• The battery life isn’t bad. It lasts probably five days, six at a stretch. More on battery life in a moment.
• 1.3 megapixel camera. As a camera, it’s pretty crap. As a phone camera, it’s not bad. It’s certainly adequate for everything I need to use a phone camera for. Which isn’t much, considering I own many cameras.
• You can call people on it.
• It’s a flip phone. I like flip phones. No locking handsets with stupid key combinations.

Okay, so those are the good points. Brace yourself, the bad points are ahoy.

CONS:

• Battery life. It’s great, providing the phone is within an awesome coverage area. If it needs to search for a network on a regular basis, it lasts a day, two maximum. On standby. Battery life is also shit after about a three day period anyway, and one call is enough to knock it on its head.
• The camera is adequate, but the provided built-in memory is not. The unit comes with 16MB of internal memory. It can be expanded by inserting a memory card, but I don’t own one, and I don’t feel any optional expansion should be necessary for a phone to function adequately. The next few points detail why the internal memory is not anywhere near enough.
• It’s “common” memory. If you take some photos, you can no longer store as many text messages. If you receive a lot of messages, you can no longer take photos. This is a stupid system.
• You cannot delete any of the default crap that comes pre-loaded in the phone. Telstra logos and wallpapers that no one in their right mind would use, ringtones that sound like arse, a stupid video of a woman looking in a fish tank, and the games (which I’ll get to momentarily). All of these things, by default, take up a phenomenal amount of space. In fact, they take up more space than the available free space when the phone is brand new. Awesome.
• The games. The TU500 comes pre-loaded with two games. One, a pinball game aimed at girls, the other a sudoku puzzle. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. They’re decent games as phones go. However, you have to pay for them before you can play them for more than one minute. It’s a $300 phone handset and they provide two shareware games with it. Jesus.
• Messages. Oh, God. Messages. Where to start? Firstly, the memory issue means you can, at best, hold only one hundred sent and one hundred received messages. Less, if they’re multimedia messages. There’s no function to automatically delete older messages when new ones arrive, so you’re constantly deleting your inbox and outbox. Also, the alert to tell you your inbox is full appears for about half a nanosecond and does not re-appear, so once your inbox is full, the onus is pretty much entirely on you to notice for yourself.
• For some ridiculous reason, you cannot always correct text messages. Suppose you write a lengthy SMS, then read over it and notice that predictive text has made a few errors, or decide to change a few words in it. If you go back over the message and change some words, there’s a reasonable chance when you send the message nothing will be corrected. There seems to be some correlation between correcting using existing dictionary words and correcting using words you’ve added to the phone yourself, but I haven’t been able to figure out what actually causes it, or how to avoid it.
• Inserting smilies into messages is a chore because the ape that designed the menu system put the “common” smilies (the ones everyone uses) on the furthermost page of symbol options, meaning you have to scroll through multiple pages of smilie faces no one would ever have a use for before you get to “: )”.
• The overall menu system on the phone is very poor. Each menu item is associated with a number on the phone keypad, meaning the only form of “shortcut” available is to memorise the number sequence required to quickly access a function. There’s no “commonly used items” menu, like every other phone has had since 1992.
• The calendar is ugly. It looks like a badly designed DOS program.

• The “video call” button is located directly beneath the left-hand function button. Nine times out of ten, when answering a text message, you’ll hit the video call button and the phone will start dialling. So you’re forced to rapidly mash buttons to get it to stop before you’re charged eleven squillion dollars a femtosecond for a video call you didn’t ask for.
• The reception isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. My parents house is right on the frontier between reception and nothingness. Numerous other phones on both the CDMA and NEXTG networks get decent reception there. My LG TU500? I have to lean it up against things. I have to wave it in the air. I have to go to the most awkward and uncomfortable parts of the house and hold it between thumb and pinky, hoping not to disturb its signal. It’s shit.

So there you have it. The phone sucks. I can’t let you go, though, without telling you the two annoying things that absolutely drive me batshit crazy fucking insane about this phone.

It’s not possible to get it to make a noise of any kind when you receive a text message.

Seriously. It has ten built-in factory message tones. Nine of them sound like crap.

It’s not possible in any way, shape or form to make them sound apart from playing them through the mp3 player feature. I’ve set every profile in the phone to use them, I’ve made custom profiles, I’ve adjusted volume, I’ve done everything you can do to the damn phone, and it refuses to make a peep.

Ringtones work fine for incoming calls, messages remain totally silent. The only notification I can get it to make is vibration, which is wholly impractical because then I cannot have an audible ringtone. LG, this is stupid.

The alarm clock and calendar can’t co-habitate.

I use my phone as an alarm clock. I always have. I probably always will. I’m sure there’s a Facebook group about it that I should join.

The LG phone allows you, as most phones do, to set daily reminders for appointments, TV shows, whatever. This is awesome. I set it to remind me when Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts so I don’t miss it. I like this feature.

It falls to pieces, though, when you try to set an alarm clock for the same day as a reminder. The alarm does not sound. The two cancel each other out. I theorise the reason for this is that the little “alarm clock” icon occupies the same space at the top of the phone screen as the little “calendar reminder” icon, and due to this technical limitation, the two cannot function in the same universe.

The sad part is, that’s probably the real reason.

Don’t buy this phone. It’s arse.

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