Spam: Just don’t.

From: jhjhjh ggddgf (email withheld)
To: (my Gmail account)
Subject: hi Dear friend!
Hi My name is Neollita. How are you doing today over there and how about your health? i hope that you are doing great and your Family, i just saw your profile here and i want to make friendship with you to discus a lot of things with you, what is your opinion about this? please reply me back so that i will tell you all details about me with my photo. thanks.

I’ll be waiting to hear from you,

Yours lovely, Neollita

Dear Neollita,

My health and well being are none of your concern. You have nothing that interests me, and spamming me for a photo is not going to net you what you want.

Die in a fire you stupid cunt.

Sincerely,
Biafra Republic

On e-PoliticalCorrectness and Sudden Change

Swear bubble

Recently, I was going through my usual wekday routine of watching videos in between job application and such, and I was watching for a second time, the Zero Punctation review of “Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons” and “Papers Please” (both fairly good indie games on XBLA and Steam/GOG/HumbleStore, respectively). During the re-watch, I noticed how one parts of the interview of the former of these two games was changed from…

I’m not gay, I only suck off pre-op transsexuals.

..to..

I’m not gay, I only suck off pantomime dames.

…despite none of the visuals being obviously changed

I also noticed how much of a furor there was about the subject from transsexuals and corresponding rights groups about alleged transsexual bashing in the review, and that it should have been more politically correct in the first place.

I am a gay furry. I also live in southeast Texas, which is a generally conservative, fairly family-oriented place, and one of several places in the US where being and open homosexual carries the same result as walking around with a sign saying, “I molested your seven year-old child, please viciously curb-stomp my ass.”, despite the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009. One of the main things I do to deal with the stress of being a closeted-off-the-internet gay furry in one of the most conservative areas in the US is be as politically incorrect as I can get away with. I say that things are “so gay”, I use the terms “faggot”, “butch”, “queer”, “homo”, “dyke”, “fag”, “tranny”, and other such slurs regularly. I used to feel upset at myself, but now I do not feel shame about it, mainly because most of the non-white people I know use slurs in their daily speech between themselves. I’ve seen and heard numerous instances of two black people at the local Walmart using the N-word in their conversations, and I came to the resolution long ago that as long as blacks and other minorities use slurs among themselves, I would continue to use these slurs and I would actively encourage gays I know to just let it the hell go.

That goes ditto for the furor over the aforementioned review.

Moving on…

A while back, you noticed my blog stopped updating to its various social media services for a time. This was because of a botnet stemming from several thousand IP addresses in Asia going after installations of WordPress to get login credentials. In an effort to stem the tide, my web host decided to create a system-wide block of all access to all wp-login.php files hosted on his service, via an Apache Basic Authentication login. Unfortunately, the block was put in place without anyone hosting a WordPress blog on his service being given warning, so I had zero notice of what happened until emailing him complaining. As far as I know, the block is going to stay in place until he is satisfied that the botnet has moved on, but I have zero intention of waiting. The only saving grace that is keeping BiafraRepublic.ME here is that the block mentioned above is override-able in .htaccess, so I punched holes through for several major ISPs in the US, as well as for Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com. Hopefully, service will be restored to these mirrors. Granted my host does not recommend this, believing that anything that goes through wp-login.php (read, almost every WordPress plugin there is) is doing it wrong, but unfortunately, I also believe that springing a block to defend against a real threat without at least sending a system-wide email is even more wrong.

So, tl;dr…

  • I liked the original ZP video review better
  • I am a politically incorrect twat and a RL-closeted gay furry
  • Webhost needs to learn to communicate with his users, rather than fix and answer complaints later.

My Twitter: A Retrospective

Picture of Twitter for Windows 8

After taking a look at @SilverSonic having a conniption over reviewing his early tweets, I decided out of morbid curiosity (and a rainstorm overhead) to read some of mine. Unlike most people I know with Twitter accounts, I didn’t use mine all that much for the first year, mainly because I only was able to use the web interface. At one point I actually didn’t bother with it much for six months. After that, I got the text interface working I started posting at least 1 tweet monthly.

Probably some of the most memorable shit on my Twitter was

• The rise and fall of the old u.nu URL shortener
• My tweets from back when I worked at Walmart (not my finest moment)
• My lack of tweets around the time my stepfather passed away in 2009 and my mom’s subsequent battle with breast cancer
• The first tweets of Summer of Sonic, back before Truman Brewery became home of RinseFM.

Through it all, I could find three major point when I really picked up tweeting:

• When I first discovered the text Short code at 40404
• When I got my first smartphone (Looking back, I wonder what I ever saw in BlackBerry) with Twitter app capability.
• When I really got acquainted with the guys over at this place, especially Nemain the Incomparable.

Looking back, there are moments when I tweeted something that now I can see look very childish, boorish, or even borderline bigoted. Fortunately, almost all of those tweets (including all the borderline bigoted ones), are all replies without any context, leaving me to assume that I was right and the other party was fucked up.

This is probably not the case at all, but I still like to believe the better angels of my nature telling me this.

My predictions for what will happen by 2015

Here are a list of various predictions I have for what will happen over the next five years:

  • Apple is forced to unlock the iPhone after the U.S. Supreme Court denies to hear its appeal of a lawsuit filed by the EFF.
  • iPhone OS is still not Flash enabled, however the suit requires Apple to fully open the source code of iPhone OS.
  • Mac OS X becomes legitimately available for PCs. InsanelyMac and InfiniteMac close down, as they have no purpose left.
  • Boot Camp for PCs is released open-source. GRUB becomes obsolete.
  • Mandriva, TurboLinux, openSUSE, and Fedora merge into one hyper-distribution of Linux.
  • Canonical takes over the Debian Project, merging the mainline and fork back together.
  • SEGA West further consolidates, closing down all US-based functions. All nine Community Managers engage in a fight to the death for the four openings left.
  • SCEA is shut down, its function effectively split between Europe and Japan.
  • Nintendo releases the successor to the Wii, which incorporates cloud-based gaming. It’s jokingly referred to as the “Skynet”.
  • Steam buys out SecureROM, and suppresses the once vaunted DRM mechanism to the delight of pirates everywhere.
  • The Pirate Bay wins their appeal. The MPAA succeed in appealing the appeal; by then, newly-elected Sweedish PM Richard Falkvinge issues a general pardon and/or amnesty, much to the chagrin of the other WIPO signatories.
  • Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 is overturned in a overwhelming display of near-unanimity (the sole dissenter being his widow, Mary).
  • Defense Of Marriage Act is overturned in the US Supreme Court as 2 conservative justices are replaced with more liberal members, giving Republicans new reason for fear.
  • A constitutional amendment barring states from defining marriage by either law or State constitutional amendment is passed with overwhelming support from Middle America.
  • After the Mossad screws the pooch over an operation against the West, public opinion goes sharply against Likud. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is toppled as the people overhwhelmingly vote mainly Labor (the more conservative voters pulling for minority partner Kadima). The new Israeli government makes a seperate peace with the Mahmoud Abbas-led West Bank.
  • Benedict XVI dies. The ensuing Papal Conclave is deadlocked on his successor.
  • The Church of England votes to solemnize gay and lesbian marriages. Peter Akinola and the Global South primates leave the Anglican Communion in protest and form their own union.
  • Dissenting churches and dioceses are brought back into line in the Episcopal Church USA, the last act of outgoing Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. Gene Robinson is elected Presiding Bishop.
  • Mass anarchy in the People’s Republic of China causes the Communists to open talks with the Dalai Lama.
  • Nationalists gain the upper hand in Northern Ireland, and in the ensuing plebiscite, vote to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic of Ireland. Much work is credited to an accounting scandal in the DUP, and the work of future Taoiseach Gerry Adams from Sinn Féin.
  • The British cabinet is embroiled in sex scandals, 3 of whom are engaged in a love triangle. Five general elections later, no party is able to form a majority.
  • France elects their first Socialist president since Mitterand.
  • Silvio Berlusconi is toppled from power in another Romano Prodi led government, convicted, and sentenced to life inprisonment.
  • Greece forced to unban video games to get their financial house in order.
  • Hosni Mubarak voted out of office. Despite vowing to stay on, he reluctantly steps down after threats from the US, allowing Mohammed El-Baradei to become the first fairly elected President of Egypt.
  • Helen Zille becomes the first white President of South Africa since de Klerk, heading a coalition of Democratic Alliance and Congress of the People.
  • AOL shuts down all dialup services, followed swiftly by MSN, AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and Qwest
  • Houston Astros become the only MLB team to have never won a World Series, despite winning back-to-back National League Championships.
  • Houston Texans narrowly lose the Super Bowl the season before going 0-16 and tying the Detroit Lions record

McCain is going to lose Part Deux: Change we can achieve vs. America’s Hottest Governor

“Why did you do that? You realize he thinks you’re trying to get him into a three-way with us now, don’t you?”
– Dante Hicks from “Clerks II”

It’s now official, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has officially jumped onto the bad ship Lolipop (a.k.a. the John McCain Republican ticket), surprising (read: completely pissing off) the party elders. Palin, elected in 2006, is barely in her first term as governor, when McCain asked if he could tap that her to be his running mate. Since her only political credentials are:

  1. America’s Hottest Governor (according to News@AOL)
  2. Membership in the National Rifle Association
  3. Having a kid in iRaq
  4. Not having an abortion

One can only come to the following conclusion (and mind you this is pure conjecture, based on prior scandals, personal bias, etc. and should not really be taken seriously, but fills all the facts, since McCain is a complete hypocrite for appointing her after railing against Obama’s inexperience)

  • McCain wants to get him, his wife Cindi, and Palin together in a three-way

Hillary V. Obama

A message for you two…

No one wants to hear the attack ads. We are tired of the castigations and the half-truths and all that BS. Can you two just shut up for one day and run a reasonably clean campaign without resorting to the ‘I’m better than you’ crap?