mindbleach

They're the best option available.

They're fucking up the reasons why.

Welcome to every year for the last twenty years.

I've got a white whale album. I routinely bought CDs from a secondhand store and found some half-decent techno labeled Amixiam - Dream Frequencies. Quite possibly just some guy's personal work, packaged with a modicum of professionalism. No internet search has ever turned up a damn thing, and I no longer live on the same continent as that thrift shop.

But then - a few years ago - I was going through old CDs, ripping them anew for modern codecs and decent bitrates. CDex filled in the track names automatically. A database recognized the disc! Someone out there had this information! And seconds later I realize that someone was me, sending the data to CDDB automatically, when I had ripped it the first time. I played a fifteen-year brick joke on myself.

The null hypothesis is almost funnier. Someone out there murdered a stranger for no sensible reason, ran away, and hid somewhere private, glued to the TV and wracked with guilt. Then it turns out that the victim was a fucking Nazi and he can breathe a sigh of relief.

"Could have."

Between these and an ongoing Penny Arcade re-read, I am reminded that standards for webcomics were low.

Apply boot to ass.

It's like a pineapple.

Oh.

That's so much worse.

'The CEO wasn't a murderer, he was just apathetic and greedy to the point that thousands of people died and millions suffered, so he could make a bit more money. What's so immoral about that?'

'He was only in charge of the whole business, and headlining a celebration of how assholes like him made their companies so filthy rich; I don't see how that makes him responsible.'

'Nobody's allowed to have a moral opinion until they can define razor-sharp boundaries for every possible crime and punishment like Hammurabi's code. Unless that opinion is that this is bad!'

If you don't support what happened, great, fine. If you don't understand what happened, you're fucking blind.

He's an M&M.

Yeah, it's a costume party.

... how is he holding that beer?

There are no good software patents. The concept should be abolished.