There are a lot of useless keys on a standard PC keyboard, but only the insert key has the power to fuck with your work. I would rather the insert key be replaced with a button that gives you a mild electrical shock. Prior to pointing devices, the insert key might have had some utility, but now it’s just a trick button. What it does is it transforms your keyboard into a living nightmare in which everything you type replaces the text in front of it, as if all that other text in your document was just hanging around for decoration. The only scenario this would be useful is if you wanted to get rid of the proceeding text of your document, but only in a quantity of characters that was exactly equal to your newly-inserted text. What kind of asshole would make such an edit? “Man, I really need to delete the thirteen characters to the immediate right of my text cursor, and I also need to insert a word that’s exactly eleven characters long, leaving two extra characters for spaces. Time for my trusty insert key!” How about you insert a bullet into your head? Meanwhile, the insert key is located right next to backspace, which is for people who edit text in an educated fashion. So I’m constantly hitting the insert key on accident, and there’s no way to tell that you’ve toggled on overtype mode until you notice that your new text is eating the shit out of your old text. Maybe there’s a way to disable this—maybe there is. Maybe there’s also a way to pry the button off with a carving knife. But I would like to know if any sort of person needs their insert key, because perhaps I speak out of ignorance. Do coders use overtype mode? Has anybody in the last twenty years hit this key on purpose? Or should I organize a protest?
Toys ‘R’ Us
I don’t know why I never realized this as a child, but “Toys ‘R’ Us” is an absolute grammatical nightmare. In 7 short letters, they managed to violate nearly every rule of the English language. And just what are they trying to communicate in this street jive of theirs? “We Are Toys”? Go fuck yourself, Geoffrey, that doesn’t even make any sense. “Babies ‘R’ Us” works a little better, considering you could kind of imagine a baby constructing such a poorly-worded sentence, if babies somehow figured out how to talk. But are you really naming your store “We Are Babies”? Who says that? Guess what, I was kind of hoping there was an adult salesperson around who could sell me some fucking baby clothes. Or at the very least a baby salesperson who can speak without using illiterate gang jargon.
Acer is crap
I must apologize for not updating in many days. The only excuse I can think of is that my laptop is a complete joke and never works properly. Here is a picture of my Acer on a typical day.
Ignoring the childish warning screen for a moment, take one look at that keyboard. In their lunacy, Acer decided to include two separate euro keys, one of which is somehow crammed into the 5 key. How the hell do you even access that? I tried every possible combination of alt/shift/Fn/ctrl keys, and then I tried slamming my fist onto the 5 key as hard as I could, but nothing happened. I now believe it’s not a “5/euro” key at all, but a “5 euro” key—useful for when you need to express that something costs 5 euros. That’s probably the average hourly wage of the morons working at Acer.
What’s interesting about the euro key over by the arrows is that it’s literally not mapped to anything, and neither is the nearby dollar key. Basically I have two euro keys and neither of them work. I guess I have to map them myself? I probably should have built the entire laptop myself.
The first thing that went was the Acer’s ability to sleep and hibernate. It has to be awake at all times or else it freezes, like some sort of reverse bear. You can close the lid without powering down, but it’s not a smart idea because you’ll just crash the system. My laptop was not designed for such taxing activities as closing the lid. These early warning signs began to occur prior to the warranty’s expiration, so I guess I could have shipped it off to Acer to be fixed. But I didn’t really want to be without my laptop for 2 months while they wiped out my hard drive, and furthermore I didn’t exactly trust the same geniuses who designed my laptop to fix it. Also, I naively assumed that some of my issues might have been software related.
After my warranty expired this past February, that was my laptop’s cue to really begin falling apart in earnest. Increasingly it stopped booting successfully. What it usually does after you power it on is it emits three piercing beeps and then you’re treated to the douche chill screen shown in the above photo. One of my favorite hobbies is to browse the internet for a solution to this problem, but the consensus seems to be that it’s due to a faulty mainboard. A good temporary solution I’ve found is that when the laptop starts beeping at me, I beat the shit out of it and try to restart. After much experience in hitting my laptop, experimentally varying the intensity and placement of my wallops, I’ve determined that if I apply steady pressure to the area just to the left of the touchpad, it will actually boot up with no problems. The only problem is that I usually have to continue to exert this pressure throughout my laptop use, or else the system will lock up or I’ll lose my wireless signal. Sometimes I actually have to operate my laptop with a dictionary balanced on the left side, which is not exactly the portable solution I envisioned when I purchased my laptop.
Of course, my Acer isn’t really a laptop anymore. The mere idea of placing this device on my lap is cause for laugher. I’m well aware that any subtle movement of my legs would create far too much commotion for my machine’s brittle constitution. In general, physically moving my laptop in any way once it has successfully powered on is asking for trouble. At best the wireless functionally will be disrupted, and you’ll have to manually reconnect to the network, but most often you’re just going to lock up the machine—and it serves you right for attempting to adjust the position of your laptop. Laptops were not designed to be carelessly placed on top of your lap.
I’ve opened my machine up numerous times to make sure everything was cleaned and properly in place, but to be honest I don’t know the purpose of most of that circuitry anymore than the retards over at Acer. Eventually I’m going to have to just replace the machine entirely—I haven’t even mentioned the inch-wide band of scrambled lines that occasionally appears on the rightmost side of my monitor. Needless to say, I would never again purchase a computer product made by Asser. They should switch to an industry in which the excel: making hilarious practical jokes.
I thought paper would protect you
This is a story about the moronic, arbitrary manner in which things become popular on the internet.
Commenter Ueli asked if an old pre-9/11 eKarjala entry about rock/paper/scissors was the “first instance of this quote that’s passed around so much.” The entry in question is an analysis of the old hand gesture game, written in the traditional style of “internet rant,” which is where you assume a tone of contrived rage as a means for creating jocularity. It’s as if you’re saying, “I would like to make some observations about a well-known topic. These observations make me angry! LOL!” You might recognize this tone from 90% of eKarjala.
Time capsules
Excavating a time capsule is the most satisfying activity conceivable. It’s so frustrating, though. Why aren’t I currently unearthing a time capsule? Why couldn’t people from exactly 50 years ago have spent a mere half-hour fixing me up a little care package? 1958’s junk would have been my absolute treasure. But people from the past were too selfish to think about me in this fashion.
There’s really no reason we shouldn’t be constantly unearthing time capsules, one after the other. Just imagine if people from 1908 had thought to bury time capsules for us on a daily basis—like every morning, just have all the townspeople throw some shit in a barrel. Such a simple daily chore, and yet how much would we have benefited? Everyday would have been like an old-timey Christmas. We’d be cracking each other up with their amusing everyday objects, twirling their parasols and pretending to enjoy their tedious marble games. And each day would be a complete surprise—we’d never know what hilarious antiquated relics would be awaiting us. By ignoring our appetite for time capsule, the past has deprived us of endless joy. That’s why I think we would be completely justified to start snooping around in their graves.
