I’m trying to take my writing “career” more seriously, and I figured instead of using this website (which discusses everything from homophobia to the troubles of late capitalism to that one time I pushed my French teacher out of a doorway) a central hub, I’d use a place somewhat more focused on my topic of writing. For now that means I’m just posting interesting links, videos, articles, ideas, etc. that I find online or create myself. Once I actually have writing to post or talk about, it’ll gradually shift over to that, and once I have an army of adoring fans, it’ll be about that. Yep.

So enjoy, or something.

Also, the site design isn’t completely done yet, so those of you who know me for my failures in the world of WordPress… Just be patient, okay?!

Quoth the bible:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.

-Leviticus 18:22

Let’s leave out the fact that a  two thousand year old text that has been translated and retranslated, edited and re-edited, can’t possibly have retained its message over that time. We can’t even understand some of the things Shakespeare wrote down, and that stuff is technically modern English. Those who believe in the Bible consider it the word of their god. Fine. Good. That’s what faith is. Alright then, why leave out all the other things? Why is nobody raging about blended fabrics? Why aren’t the physically deformed kept the hell away from churches? Why is slavery banned?

The Bible, like all successful religious texts, is so successful because it so easy to pick the things you like from it and ignore or bury the things you don’t. I mean look at it, it’s huge. You don’t really think that those who quote Leviticus to turn gays into subhumans have really read and studied the whole thing, do you? Ok then, fine, so why do they choose 18:22 over the passage that tells them they should be executed because they’re pissed at their parents?

Because it has nothing to do with the Bible. For most people who identify themselves as Christian, the Bible is in the background. It is the basis of their religion, and possibly their faith, but it isn’t more than that. Most Christians (and yes, I’m generalizing here, as indicated by my usage of the word “most”) are not Christian by conscious choice, but because they were raised Christians. Oh, there are plenty of people who may have doubted their faith at some point during their lives, and then still decided that they wished to follow Christ (whatever that may have meant for them personally), but it’s not really hard to decide  you’re a Christian after all in a culture which has historically always been, and still predominantly is, Christian down to its core. I will most definitely concede that many of the values which are dominant in western society have Christianity as a source. But keeping it at that would ignore both the moral and cultural elements that Christianity itself had taken from the Romans and the Greeks, both during its early days and during the various revivals over the centuries. It would also ignore the moral and cultural knowledge taken from other, non-western cultures over the millennia. Most importantly, it would ignore the increasingly rapid moral, cultural, and even technological developments of the last century. To say that the majority of Christians get their morals from the Bible is as ignorant as to say that homosexuals enjoying the same rights as any other human beings is a threat to the stability of society.

For the politicians it’s, well, political, of course. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a compromise for Obama. It was an easy way to convince those who voted for him on the basis of HOPE that he actually did have some form of power, however symbolic it might be. The current circus show of Republican candidates don’t believe in compromise or moderation, so they’re just screaming loudly over each other. Whatever active brain cells they still have remember that the gay marriage debate, much like the “debate” around evolution, riles up the base like a pack of howler monkeys, and more importantly gives the media something to distract us all from the real issues with, and confuse this with actual popularity.

Ok, so it’s an easy issue to distract people with. But what are we being distracted from? Lizard people? Donald Trump notwithstanding, no, it’s not the lizard people. Those screaming the loudest, the white Christian majority, are realizing what white supremacist racist dickshits have realized for a long time now: They are losing their monopoly. It’s not that their morals are actually being corrupted, it’s not that society is actually in any risk of decaying (at least for these reasons), it’s simply that they have always been the ones who were in complete control, and that’s now changing. Oh, sure, it’s still a ginormous majority. The western governments are still composed mostly of White Christian Males, after all, and a huge influx of poor non-white, non-Christian immigrants doesn’t change anything that much, as they would have to assimilate themselves into white Christian society to get anywhere anyway. But it’s no longer a monopoly. If 9/11 did anything outside of give the west excuses to invade the Middle-East, it’s that it put a big fat spotlight on the Muslim communities living in the Americas and Europe. Not always in a good way, as my pathetic excuse for a fellow Dutchman Geert Wilders so clearly illustrates, but we are no longer in denial. These people are here. They have been here for decades now. They are as much a part of our society as we are. This is an irreversible realization. That’s why you have people like Wilders proposing desperate solutions like “let’s just throw ‘em all out and go back to the way it used to be, please?”

And it spreads, of course. It starts with the Muslims. In the Americas, the realization that Mexicans are there to stay is leading to cognitive dissonance among hicks on a scale previously only reached by the Vatican. The idea seems to be that as long as they’re able to send the illegals back and prevent more coming in, all the legal Mexicans will stay quiet and not influence things too much. But more and more people are realizing that, hey, those Mexicans aren’t Mexican at all, they’ve been American all along! The majority Americans also realized that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to elect a black president after all.

Things are changing, and it’s scaring the hell out of the White Christian Majority. The funny thing is, of course, that the majority of the Majority doesn’t care. They couldn’t give two shits about the color of the president’s skin or the geographical origin of the country’s immigrants. So the Majority isn’t a majority at all, but they still have some power, and they’re screaming and shouting as if they’re going to lose it any day now.

So why target the gays? Aren’t most gays in the west white and Christian by default? Sure, but gay bashing is still morally accepted or at the very least ignored by a large section of the population. Overt racism just isn’t accepted anymore, which is not to say that all old white men get this, or that it doesn’t happen in the background anyway, but at least we’re living in a time when saying “fuck dem niggas” would swiftly end anyone’s political career (luckily I don’t have political aspirations). Racism itself causes some form of moral outrage these days, which only supports my point, but gay, uhh, -ism, doesn’t. It’s therefore a great political tool. And this does not just apply to those who are running for or are already a part of government. Anyone who is in a position of power, or believes he should be, whether its political, religious, or someone in the media, can easily rile up anger at, well, anything, either to get people to follow him directly, or to distract from the real issues like their actual impending loss of power. You see this happening in some African nations too, where to increasingly educated populace gets misled into hunting down gays by those who can feel the power slipping out of their hands. You might as well blame this for a shitload of injustices inflicted on the people of Middle-East by their leaders as well.

This is the true source of all racism, populism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. It’s not the fear of the thing itself. It’s not people reading the Bible and then all of a sudden realizing “hey, God doesn’t like this after all.” It’s preachers, politicians, the media, (unfortunately) influential people in power who are ridiculously desperate to maintain that power in the face of a changing world.

So don’t worry, gays, there’s nothing about your behavior that these people really think is wrong, nor are they actually afraid of you. You’re just a symbol of a world that is changing, and has in fact never really ever stood still anyway.

And to you homophobes out there, reality is hard to face, isn’t it?

I’m happy.

Here’s a picture of a couple of cute, colorful birds.

Yep, not only did I win this year, I did it with a few days to spare. And now I’m going to explain to you how I did it.

1.  The Difference

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Not Albert Einstein

Now, I’m not going to claim that I’m not insane, but I did think it would be a good idea to try things differently this time around. Step 1: Get a support group. Nothing motivates me better than showing off to people, it’s the only reason I do, uhh… anything. So, I joined fellow NaNo’ers on a particular forum I’m not going to mention because I don’t want worlds colliding. I would say that posting my word count there (almost) every day and discussing my progress with other people really helped to keep me going. There is one thing that motivates me almost as good as bragging, though, and that’s shame. So I decided to post all my writing on a public Tumblr, letting everyone who would be interested know that I failed. I posted my progress on Twitter for extra attention/threat of shame.

Another change I made was not using an ordinary word processor. Distraction-free writing is very important to a hyperactive-procrastinating-oh-look-how-many-funny-pictures-and-videos-there-are-on-the-internet-and-also-look-how-many-unplayed-games-there-are-in-my-Steam-list kind of guy. So I started with Ommwriter, and boy did it help. A soothing background, soothing music, soothing typing noises, it was all very soothing indeed. Unfortunately it started acting up after a while, with the on-screen text lagging behind my keypresses by a microsecond. This may seems like nothing, but a microsecond lasts a lifetime when you have ideas bursting out of your brain, so I sought an alternative. I found one in WriteMonkey. It isn’t quite as polished as Ommwriter, but I set a soothing blue background and typey sounds, and replaced the music with Grooveshark’s Ambient radio station, and I was set. I could write without distraction… as long as I kept my fingers away from alt-tab…

So outside of software, how did I keep myself from being distracted too much? More software, of course, come on. For a bit more than a year now, I’ve been adhering to my own interpretation of the Pomodoro Technique, using a simple little app called Focus Booster to measure how much time I’m actually spending getting work done. I plan all Pomodoros in a little notebook, and check them off whenever I’ve completed one. Keeping to this routine has given me great results both for school and work, so applying this to the writing of a novel seemed like an obvious choice.

Oh yeah, I kind of had an outline for the story. Not a real outline, mind you, I didn’t even have any idea what the ending of the story would be until about a day before I finished it, but I did have a setting, a few characters, and an idea of what kind of tone I wanted. This helped, but I do find that making shit up as you go along is, well, fun.

And lastly, I made sure to use Dropbox to keep a cloud backup of my text. This didn’t really increase productivity, but it did save my ass a bunch of times. My computer is a piece of shit that sometimes has random Blue Screen of Death attacks, and getting one of those while you are saving your txt files leads to, guess what, a blank text file. I almost had  heart attack when it happened the first time, as I was closing in on 25,000 words, but good ol’ Dropbox keeps older revisions, so I was saved.

I’m sure there were some internal psychological thingamajigs going on which also made a difference, but they wouldn’t have been reinforced if I hadn’t taken action to be better prepared.

2. Numbers

 ”I couldn’t think of a good quote for this section.” – Me

Here’s my progress chart from my NaNoWriMo profile:

As you can see, I kept a pretty steady pace with the benchmark in the first week, lagged behind a bit in week two, and then sat on my ass for most of the third week. I hadn’t given up, I was just very busy with school and such, and couldn’t find any proper time to write. But then I got over my slump, and used the last two weeks or so to gloriously sprint to the finish, completing the goal a few days before the end of the month. I’m not gonna waste time posting the daily numbers here, but you can find them on the top of every post on the Tumblr.

Speaking of the Tumblr, I made sure to add some Google Analytics to it to see if anyone actually read it. I linked to it on the forum I was active on, my Twitter, and my Facebook, but of course I didn’t expect much. Still, I’ll post the some of the totals of November here for posterity. I had 111 Unique Visitors and 368 pageviews. This is much, much higher than zero, so I am happy.

Lastly, I want to take a look at how many hours I actually spent writing. This is easy because I recorded all the Pomodoros. Keep in mind that some of these I spent outlining, and every now and then I wrote on paper in the train or while away from home. In total I have 110 Pomodors of recorded work, which averages out to roughly 55 hours of writing.  Dividing my total word count by this number gives me about 912 words written per hour, which matches my observations. There were plenty of times where I was a writing machine, pumping out words like I was personally getting my ass slapped by Stephen King, but other times I just kind of stared at the screen and drooled.

3. Results

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining …researching …talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” – E. L. Doctorow

On my Twitter profile I describe myself as a “pretend writer.” This is because I had never really written anything, but loved to come up with stories in my head. Sure, I have one shitty story I put on Fience Sciction, but it’s nothing I’m proud of, just something I wrote so that I could have something. NaNoWriMo, of course, exists exactly to help people get over this hump, to allow them to say “sure, it sucks, but I wrote a 50,000 word novel. Suck on that, dad!” Did I expect to win? I’m going to be honest here, yes I did. I’ve changed a lot since last year, and I took the challenge seriously this time. I can definitely say that actually writing has started to allow me to find my voice, my own way of writing and describing things. I haven’t yet reread what I wrote (more on that later), but I do feel that the last 10,000 words are a lot more elegant and well-written than the first 10,000. They certainly came out easier. The whole experience really slapped into my brain what I knew before but never acted upon. It’s exactly what that quote up there says. I can come up with worlds, ideas, characters, storylines, etc. all I want, but unless I’m actually going to write them down they won’t exist anywhere but in my head. There is no worse place for something to exist than in my head. I would know, I live there. So I’ve learned to just write, and in fact I already got some ideas for the next edition of NaNoWrimo, though if things work out I can pump that novel out even sooner. Or short stories, or whatever. I’m excited about my newly unleashed abilities, is basically what I’m trying to get across here.

All in all, this accomplishment symbolizes a turning point for me. I have conquered NaNoWriMo, I will soon finish my first game, I worked for money this past month (just a temp translation job, but enough to afford a nice holiday season), and most importantly, I am finally approaching the end to my academic career, making my mom proud and leaving me with a potential backup if this whole “make money on the internet somehow someway idk lol” plan doesn’t work out. This is important to me, because I’ve always been that guy who doesn’t really work hard enough or finishes his projects, but somehow still always lucked his way into reasonable success. Sure, being lucky is fun, but it’s not a reliable path to success, you know? And it made me spoiled as hell. Why try, when things always work out for you anyway? Well I want certainty, that’s why. And I have great, great plans for the future me, but I need to change this “shit just kinda falls into place” attitude to reach them. Changing this attitude has been hard, and believing that it can be done was even harder. But here I am, I have completed the First Challenge. To the rest, I say: Bring it on.

4. FutureJer

“If you don’t think about the future, you cannot have one.” – John Galsworthy

So I wrote myself a novel. Now what? Well it has always been my intention to become a self-published author. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the old TwenCen concept of writing a manuscript, and then leaving the rest up to an agent and publisher who will compensate you as they see fit, will not work for me. We’re living in a time when being self-published is most certainly a viable option. This takes work, of course. I’m going to have to rewrite the whole thing so that it doesn’t look like it was hastily written in a month, edit it or get it edited, and do all the marketing, etc. That will all take time, and effort, but I’m willing to put those in to maintain control of my work. However, I think it’s a good idea not to touch the work for a while, to let it sit for at least a month, maybe longer, so that I can look at it with fresh eyes again. This is why I haven’t even read it yet, and why I’ve been trying my best to ignore all the possible improvements to it that have been popping up in my head for the past week.

So until I’m prepared to take a look at the work again, I’m going to have to keep myself busy with other things. School, of course. Finishing Outer Space Hot Rod. Finally getting some kind of WordPress theme production going. And most important, coming up with an interesting idea for a webcomic which I will write and my most talented sister will illustrate. I’ll probably be doing lots of other writing in between. Oh, and there’s also the matter of a BA Thesis that has to be done before the summer starts.

However, if you are still interested in reading the very first draft in what will (un)doubtedly become the first of many bestselling adventures of Thomas Thing and his friend, then please, by all means, check out Good Excuses.

Also I’m totally the first person to use the word “nonchievement.” Write it down.

I would like to add another log of criticism to the fire, but first let’s run trough the ways this story is stupid (as an English literature student, none of my instructors would appreciate describing a work as “stupid” but this is my blog and I break academic boundaries, yo.)

1. Men are brave scientists uncovering the world, women tell them to buy underpants. Understood. Not only that, but there is a biological divide between men and women so huge that women are able to access a parallel universe. This counts for all women, and all men Unless you’re still one of those aging men pathetically living in the past, or a heavily indoctrinated woman, or somehow transgender but still fixated on heteronormativity because you’re oblivious to the real world, it sounds pretty stupid.
2. Science is when a couple of biologists (?) come up with a very non-biology related theory of parallel universes while shopping for panties, blog about it a bit, and then let the real scientists work it out. But we’re still the ones who found it. Okay, I guess. The real scientists are just the computers who work it all out for you? It’s the idea that matters, not the enormous amount of work required to find real data (not @replies), test it a billion times over, and reconcile it with our current understanding of the universe? Alrighty then.
3. It’s poorly written. Look, okay, I’m not gonna go into it because I still am in that zombified state, and I understand that very short fiction has its limitations, and I still suck at writing myself (I’m about 10,000 words behind on my NaNoWriMo adventure to boot), but how the hell did this story get published. Seriously.

I am one of those nerds.

Whether or not I’ll fail remains to be seen (spoiler alert: I will) but it doesn’t hurt to try, right? The goal is to have a 50,000 words novel done by the end of November. Luckily for me the quality of the work doesn’t matter, but that wasn’t enough to motivate me last year: 2345 words. And it took me a week. So I’m trying something different this year. I’m gonna try to motivate myself by placing all of my writing on a blog, have it be open to critique, and so I can cry when I see that over the course of that month 3 people have visited it. Still, I feel it’ll get me motivated, and maybe something semi-good will come out of it. Can’t be worse than Twilight, right? And that shit sold bajillions.

I’m not going to spam this blog with (hopefully) daily posts, as I have other plans for this site, so instead I have made a little Tumblr, named it after the name of the novel, and prepared myself for incredible digital shame.

You can check it out, and learn more about the currently non-existent novel, here.

Hopefully I can balance this with school, work, and girlfriend, because winning NaNoWriMo would make me feel pretty good.

Oh yeah, if you follow me on Twitter or are one of my few Facebook friends, you will get spammed daily (maybe) by my updates. Deal with it.

Bloody well right

I am a man of few friends. My Facebook friend count, the ultimate indicator of True Popularity in this increasingly retarded world, has hovered comfortably around the mid-70s for years now. Of these 70-ish people, I have daily face to face interactions with exactly 1, weekly to monthly face to face interactions with exactly 2 more, see about 5 others a few times a year, and I’m lucky if I see 3 others once every half decade. Beyond those persons, it would be difficult for me to find more than a handful of the remaining 60 who I actually like and are deserving of existence. Basically, I use my Facebook to spam imgur.com links and show off my superior grades. Clearly, then, I may just have less social interaction than Joran van der Sloot, and he probably meets at least 3 Peruvian prisoners face to crotch every day.

The question is why. Why does this intelligent, hilarious, huge-donged dude not have many friends? The long answer is, well, long, complicated, and not always comfortable to accept, and will be elaborated on right after this next punchline. The short answer is that none of you are worthy.

Take the long way home

Let’s list potential reasons for social isolation, shall we?

1. I am diseased. A common explanation for social awkwardness is some light form of autism like Asperger’s. Clearly I don’t have Asperger’s, or I would be bragging about my “alternative condition” and I certainly wouldn’t call autism a disease. Also, I’m socially awesome, not awkward, just ask all those hordes of people who are my frie- Uhh, just ask anyone but all those morons who don’t like me because I tell them they worship false gods and smell bad.
2. I smell bad. Factually incorrect, just ask my loving girlfriend who I’ve been with for six years and who TOTALLY DOES EXIST MOM.
3. I don’t know how to make friends. False. I’ve had friends, I’ve had friends, sometimes even multiple ones at the same time, ok? Don’t tell me I don’t know how to make friends!
4. I don’t know how to keep friends. Ok, uhh, you might be on to something there, but you’re getting ahead of yourself, alright?
5. There is a global conspiracy to keep me friendless. Come on now, don’t be silly. If there was a conspiracy I would surely know about it because the conspirators are less intelligent than I am. I’ve played Deus Ex, alright, I know all about conspiracies.
6. A combination of random chance and attitude. Ooh, I like this one. Let’s delve deeper!

Give a little bit

The logical song

Here’s the thing, right… society… in other words, all those assholes who keep telling you what to do because it’s what they do, and who will throw you in a prison cell just because you hacked every appendage off that annoying loud neighbour of yours and fed his remains to the local seagulls… society is bullshit man. Especially when society’s opinion conflicts with my own. Because here I am, in 2011, with a very small, very strangely constructed social circle, and I’m happy. Because fuck you guys, you don’t know what’s good for me. You hardly know what’s good for yourselves! My delusion is much better, shinier, and sexier than your delusion, and I have no regrets whatsoever.

Though I do kind of miss that blonde chick whose life I saved back in high school…

Expect the rest of the site to get a visual and functional update not all too long from now (within the next 48 months).

A few posts ago I expressed my frustration at having the terrible, horrible option of two amazing phones which would be released right around the time my contract was up for renewal: the HTC Sensation and the Samsung Galaxy SII. Both devices came packed with amazing displays, 1.2GHz dual cores, a shitload of RAM, and were big enough for my gorilla hands. Those of you who are weird mutants from planet Kwuarfator may have skipped the title of this post and are still wondering which one I ended up choosing. Well wonder no longer, my friends, because, contrary to my expectations in the versus post, it turns out that I am now the owner of my very own shiny Galaxy SII.

INCEPTION

So why the GSII, when my last phone was an HTC with which I was quite happy? There are a few reasons:

1. It was out earlier. I am not a patient man.
2. The reviews for it were overall pretty spectacular. Coupled with point 1, this decreased the likelihood of any other phone being equally good to my primitive caveman brain.
3. Seriously, it was out earlier. Both of them were gonna be fantastic phones anyway, and I really am not at all patient.
4. I learned that the Sensation would definitely have an encrypted bootloader. This is irrelevant to the average consumer, but I like to have control over my devices whenever I can.

So how am I liking it so far? Well let’s just say this: the thing is fucking awesome. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, it’s big, and I might leave my girlfriend for it. So overall my impression is very positive, but it’s time to GET ANAL *cue theme song.*

First off, I must mention that, while perusing a number of tech forums in anticipation, I have noticed a number of people having hardware or software problems with the phone. Such reports can give the impression that there’s something wrong with all phones (which in the case of the original Galaxy S and its GPS issues turned out to be real), but I’m happy to report that I do not suffer from any dead pixels, strange scratches, software problems, issues with Kies (Sammy’s terrible excuse for syncing software,) strange colors popping up on the screen, or overheating. So don’t worry too much; as is usually the case, those with the most to complain have the loudest voices and do not indicate the actual distribution of manufacturing issues.

So, let’s start with the things I’ve noticed that I really like, in detail. This is outside of anything I could achieve with rooting the phone or slapping on a custom ROM. I’m just focusing on what the phone came with out of the box.

GOOD

The Screen

My lord. Look, my old phone was an HTC Hero, with a tiny low-res LCD screen. My computer screen is a 5 year old 19 inch LG LCD with a giant red stuck pixel in the middle. Every now and then I would take a look at my girlfriend’s HTC Desire’s AMOLED screen and become very, very jealous. No longer. This Super AMOLED Plus (how can you possibly top that name, Sammy?)  is glorious. On full brightness it makes you feel like it’s projecting the screen onto your face, Hackers style. Even then, the blacks are, well, very black. I read ebooks with Aldiko in bed sometimes, and my old Hero on it’s lowest brightness setting and with a black background the LCD’s backlight would still make my eyes burn. With this phone, however, I am staring into the void, what the universe looked like before the big bang. Seriously, in the right conditions it can be hard to tell where the screen ends and bezel begins. It’s really, really good.

Performance

Alright, let’s start by saying that the browser is faster than Chrome on my PC (and my PC isn’t that old.) Again, coming from ye olde Hero, which I pushed waaay beyond its capabilities, it’s kind of strange having a phone that just doesn’t stutter, freeze, crash, and explode no matter what you throw at it. The only thing with comparable smoothness is the iPhone 4, and then we’re talking about a device whose software is especially tailored to its hardware. Sure, Android may need a little extra horsepower, some more Gigahertzes and another core, to get things equally smooth, but it is that smooth, and that makes me a happy camper, yo. Now let’s end by saying that the browser is faster than Chrome on my PC. Holy shit son.

Hardware Design

So you may or may not have heard that Apple is suing Samsung because they maybe perhaps possibly took some design cues off the iPhone when putting the Galaxy S 1 together.

You can tell they're not the same phone because one has "Samsung" written on it.

Err, yeah, lawsuit understood, Apple. Luckily, while you can still spot the relation to the GS1, the new phone has a more original look. It doesn’t look as distinct as the HTC or Sony-Ericsson phones, but it works. It’s a black, shiny slab on the front; a textured, non-shiny, non-grease-attracting back, and very few other details.

It’s simple, but it works. I like it. It’s also really thin, and really light. It doesn’t feel cheap or fragile though, and I’m not afraid of sticking it in my pocket and going wherever with it, without a case. Some have complained about the  flimsy battery cover. It is indeed kind of scary to pull it off, but as can be seen in this video it’s actually pretty strong. It’s quite wide, but as long as your hands aren’t microscopic that shouldn’t really be a problem. The bump on the back might look a little weird, but it doesn’t get in the way because the phone is already so thin.

Touchwiz

If you had read my previous article, you might remember that Samsung’s own version of the “let’s slap some makeup on Android” party was one of the reasons the Sensation pulled into the lead, in my opinion. I must say though, that I’m pleasantly surprised. Not that it’s in anyway super good or anything, or even superior to Sense or stock Android, but it doesn’t get in the way as much as I had feared. While still colorful, it seems to have lost much of the candy coating it had on the GS1. More importantly though, is how little it really interferes with stock Gingerbread, which I had running on my Hero for a few months now. Touchwiz 4.0 just doesn’t get in the way much. Sure, there are a few complaints, which I’ll whine about in a few paragraphs, but overall I’m so happy I haven’t even installed Launcher Pro (yet). UPDATE: Oh, and Swype, while I’m not a fan of the way it lays out numbers, is AMAZING.

BAD

Battery Life

I’ll admit, I haven’t had much time to really test it, but it’s not looking good. I’m glad I haven’t had to go out of the house for the whole day since I got it, though I’m sure it would still do alright. I know for a fact, from all the forum discussions going on, that this is a software problem, perhaps something deep within the bowels of Android itself, having to do with dual cores and other technical stuff you wouldn’t understand. I have confidence that it will be fixed, so I’m not worried, but for now I keep my eyes open to make sure I have juice when I need it.

Hardware Design

There’s one thing that, as a new owner and perfectionist, bothers me a little about the design. This is the most anal thing ever, but I paid good money, or at least eventually will, for this phone, so I’m allowed to bitch as much as a please. It’s tiny, both figuratively and literally: there’s a minuscule gap between the glass front of the phone and the plastic which wraps around the edge of the phone. Dust can gather there quite easily, but is a pain to remove.

OH GOD WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT

There, I said it. Now I can move on with my life.

Two more things bother me a little, maybe. First, there’s no notification light. Coming from an HTC phone, I’ve gotten pretty used to it, so I kind of miss it. On the other hand, that little blinking light would annoy the hell out of me sometimes, especially when I was already on the computer (22 hours out of the day) and was already well aware of any emails etc. so maybe it’s good riddance. Alternatives which use the screen or the light up buttons for notifications have already been made for the GS1, and will probably be adapted for the GSII in no time, but I’m not even sure if I’ll need them.

The last problem I have has to do with capacitive buttons. While I am used to the Hero’s physical keys, I don’t have any problems with capacitive buttons in principle. But please take a look at the positioning of the back button:

It's the one with the arrow pointing BACK, doofus

It’s really easy, especially with tree-trunk fingers like mine, to accidentally hit the back button as you switch to landscape mode. This is annoying, but I’ll guess I’ll just have to get used to it. UPDATE: This seems the right place to put it: both the USB and charging cables are about 50 centimeters too short. This is annoying.

Touchwiz

Yep, it’s on the list twice, and here’s why: The app drawer scrolls sideways, and that’s stupid and annoying. If anything is making me consider moving to another launcher, it’s that. Secondly, the default home screen is the one on the left, from which I can only conclude that Samsung has chimpanzees working really high up in their design department. The screens don’t scroll continuously either, even though in the app drawer they do. This is a particularly stupid inconsistency. I’m not particularly a fan of the lock screen either. Well, ok, actually I like it’s simplicity: you just move the screen to the side and it unlocks. It also has tabs for missed calls or messages, so you can pop right into those when you need to. That’s fine and all, but it kind of sticks sometimes (I wouldn’t really call it stuttering) and is not as smooth as it should be.

Lastly, and unfortunately all to expectedly, there’s a bunch of apps Samsung has thrown onto the phone which I will never use. This bunch consists mostly of Sammy’s “hubs” which are completely useless and a waste of time. Removing these, of course, requires root, but I’m waiting until the updates die down before I bother rooting.

THE END

So there you have it. Those are the main thing’s I’ve noticed in the two and a half days since I’ve had the thing. The camera’s also supposed to be good, even recording 1080p, but I’m not much of a picture taker or video maker. I’m just glad it has flash so that I can take a picture in the dark if I so choose. Overall I’m very happy with this phone, and if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go play with it now. Thanks for reading.

Oh yeah, apparently this thing can also make phone calls, but I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much.

FINAL SCORE: 7 out of pi Linux Kernels

This is what happens: the days start getting long, the lambs start froliccing across the fields, and the trees start growing green once more. Simultaneously, my mind goes completely fucking crazy. Again, this happens every single year.

I start doubting myself, more than normal, at least. I start wondering about the future, and questioning the past. Initially, none of this is conscious, it’s just a nagging feeling just beneath the surface of my skull. Sometimes it’s almost crippling, I feel so numb that I start wondering what the hell exactly is going on.

So then some weeks follow where I annoy the girlfriend with questions of reality and the purpose of life. Then summer comes along and I forget about The Madness.

This happens every year, and it always leads to some kind of revelation. This year it’s all about my career, and how exactly I can squeeze money out of society without ripping my hair out.

I believe that the nature of the season, rebirth, etc. has a large part to play in the appearance of Springtime Madness. The  ending of the academic year also seems to be a factor.

While the experience itself is never very pleasant, it’s kind of cool how my mind automatically periodically sets aside some time to reflect on itself. It means that at least once a year I do some mental bookkeeping, and that seems like a pretty good thing.