My cat died

She was nearly 12 years old.

Sooty 2005-2017

The fact that I am calling her "my cat" is quite an achievement. My wife persuaded me that we should get a cat in 2005. I was quite reluctant. There is a joke that goes:

Women love cats; men say they love cats; when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

And whilst I never actually kicked the cat, I wasn't all that keen on it for the first year or two. Note the "it" there.

Time changes people though. And she was a very sweet cat. She would often come and sit on my lap... and she hardly ever scratched me, badly.

Cats become one of those constants in your life, like the Queen. They are always there and they change so slowly that you don't notice. We had a lot of bad things happen to us, and Sooty was always a reminder of better times.

That became abundantly clear to me in 2011 when my wife died. After that, Sooty was a walking reminder of her. It was a dark time, and Sooty helped me get through it. Maybe more so than any of my human friends. A cat never says the wrong thing.

And so here we are in 2017. It was a type of cancer called lymphoma, apparently. Which spreads quickly and is incurable. At least it was over quickly; I would have hated to see her decline and suffer over a long time. I was with her when she died.

Now it is just me.

DVD Player

I've had a few DVD players and Blu-ray players. They all do odd things. 

1. Why does the player always ask me what language I speak for some disks?

The player is set up in English. Why not use English unless I go and change it? Also, it seems to be able to remember where I last watched up to if I have seen the disk before. How can it remember that and not remember the language?

It's really annoying when I pop in a disk, nip to the kitchen to get snacks, and come back expecting the ads to have finished... but the "language" menu is there instead.

2. Why do they have 2 types of menu? Menu and Pop-up Menu. At least one of these never works for any given disk. And it is impossible to guess which will work for any particular disk.

And don't even get me started on why every disk has its own style of menu... many with little icons for "play" and "setup" that mean nothing to anyone but the graphic design intern that came up with them. Galling after I selected "English" and then don't get any English words in the menu.

3. This operation is not permitted. WTF? I can't use the menu now because who says so? It's my damn player and my disk. I should be able to watch whichever bit I want at the speed I want!!!

It might seem like a good idea to "make" people watch that trailer for your new film... on a new disk. But I'm still being forced to watch trailers for films that came out years ago (many of which were shit, by the way).

Compare all this pain to the experience of watching something on Netflix... and you can see why streaming is winning. Disks will soon die out.

Bye for now

I only write on this blog when my life is too miserable to do anything else.

No doubt I will be back. But for now I'm done.

Social media is not news

I wish the BBC and newspapers here would stop reporting what people have said on social media. That is not news.

You wouldn't say in a report "X was overheard saying Y in a pub about Z" so why dignify the digital equivalent with a higher status than it deserves. 

What The Fuck 2016?

Sorry for the strong language, but it kinda seems appropriate. What is wrong with 2016? It seems like it's not enough for one of my heroes to be dying every 5 minutes... no, the democratic world seems to have gone insane.

It's not that I think people are making the wrong choices. It's that they are being presented with terrible options and then picking one in completely irrational ways.

Is this the best we can do? Come on. This is everyone's problem. Blaming other people for voting the other way wont help. And blaming people for being unhappy with the results wont help either.

We need better options. We need more options. A binary choice might seem easy, but we need people to have to think more than that. And we need leaders who can work together not fight over who is telling the bigger lies.

World, get a fucking grip, please!

Spy apps

I installed the Instagram app on my phone, just to try it out. But it wouldn't work unless I allowed it to access the microphone as well as the camera.

Why does a photo app need to have access to the mic?

Alarm bells rang.

I uninstalled the app.

Fuck you, Instagram!

Fakers

They used to say "on the internet, no-one knows you are a dog". Which kind of meant anyone could be anything, even themselves, if they really wanted to without being shot down immediately.

Things were kind of fun then.

There were a few trolls, but you could mostly ignore them. There were a few correctivists, but you could mostly ignore them.

Social media doesn't seem very sociable to me. People aren't themselves, or even a more interesting version of themselves. Everyone is scared of saying the wrong thing and being humiliated by the next shaming fad.

The other day I was notified that I had a new follower on Twitter. People don't often follow me so I took a look. It was a woman that I had met the previous week, so I assumed she was interested in my film club and had actually looked me up... which she said she would, but people often say that and then don't.

So I sent her a message with details of that week's film.

And got a puzzled response (what?)

It turns out that it wasn't her. It was a student in the Ukraine. Odd, I thought. She seemed quite chatty and I wasn't busy so we exchanged a few messages.

All seemed fairly normal until she mentioned that she was a big gamer and wanted to meet me inside one of her games. He next message had a link in to download the game.

Which sounded a bit suspicious.

I didn't click the link. I googled the game instead. It didn't sound like the sort of thing she would be into... given the little information she had told me about herself.

Then, of course, I realised that this wasn't a free game. She was just trying to get me to buy the game. It was marketing.

When I mentioned this to a friend (a little smug that I hadn't fallen for it) he said that she probably wasn't even a real person. It was probably a "chat bot" that just tricks you into thinking you are talking to a person.

Smugness evaporated. I was fooled by a bot.

For a few minutes I thought I had found a friendly voice out there in the big world. That's what the internet is good at, right? But it was a trick. To try and get some money out of me. Which made me really sad.

The next time someone follows me on Twitter, I probably wont even take a look. I've already stopped looking at Facebook because I don't understand why it shows me the posts that it does... and there seem to be a lot of ads on it now.

Which is probably a good thing. Talk to your friends in person... and their dogs.