Fuck You, Logitech

Yeah I'm done with your shit here, guys. I realize I sound like an angry idiot, but it has to be said...

Despite carefully designing pretty good peripherals, you decide to use the world's shittiest microswitches, from OMRON, with flimsiest metal contacts and springs I have ever seen, meaning that eventually, the user has to open up the mouse, tinker the little switch enclosures open, and then adjust the tiny metal plates that have become too weak to enable continuous contact, AKA 'click-dragging'. And eventually, after a couple of these procedures, the metal piece snaps off, and I find it was soldered onto the switch (despite older models of the same switch sliding in and out of a frame) and now the whole thing is broken, since I don't have an iron or anything (I'm not an electrical engineer or even a hobbyist) and that M-500 I was so happy to use (even though both the right and left buttons began to fail all the time), is a write-off because I'm not going to buy and solder new microswitches to replace the shitty, terrible ones you so casually throw into your mice. Oh and they're situated in such a finnicky little manner it's almost as if you expect them to work forever and people will never have to do home repairs on them. If you used your own products you would see differently.  Fuck you very much.

After this heartbreak, I will never buy another Logitech mouse. I will return to bargain mice and terrible scroll wheels and bad ergonomics, and I will lament the 40 dollar mouse that lasted just a bit longer than two years when it is traveling to the dump with the rest of the garbage - compromised as it was by a tiny and central component. Months of annoyance and little procedures and really, they have no excuse because far shittier mice ($5-10 bargains) have lasted so much longer, with contacts that didn't fail until the actual plastic bits gave out... but sure, Logitech'll keep making pretty sweet, $40 dollar mice with 5 cent components, because quality means higher than average prices and worse than average components. It's not rocket science to test how many millions of times a microswitch can operate before failure, and it's simple logic (tech logic even) to ensure they can last – after all, nobody is paying that much for a mouse who is going to use it only casually.

While I'm at it, in an era of optical mice that use lasers instead of the ancient system of balls in a rolling enclosure, why have the mechanics of the switches not changed at all? I get that there is a bottom line...  you know that's basically all that matters, come to think of it. Still I don't think most companies intentionally hamstring their products so blatantly... years of complaints and no specific response says plenty about your business.

People, if you use a mouse more than an hour a day, and you need it to be good, and you want it to last, just don't make it a Logitech and it should keep working for at least four years. Theirs was the first mouse I'd ever used where the buttons failed in such an annoying and prompt manner, only to precipitate such a discouraging incident where I am forced to play technician (this way it can be claimed that my actions caused the product to stop working as intended, disregarding the fact that the product no longer functioning as intended caused my actions). In fact just use the mouse you got with the that tower you bought in the mid-2000s, despite being basically free it will outlast a 'quality, ergonomically sound, easy to use' Logitech mouse. Or just get a used ball mouse out of the garbage dump - it'll probably still work and when you're done with it the little ball can be used as a projectile.

Most peripherals in the computer world are shit. The more they cost - the dumber the buyer. That seems to be the law all the big players operate by. You either buy really cheap things or really expensive things, and everything in the middle is a big risk... like the $40 Logitech M-500, which will stop clicking correctly long before your computer is obsolete, and which has probably the best scroll wheel of all time, which you can actually take out of the old mouse and, if you know enough or intend to learn, jury rig onto another mouse.

So ends the saga of the computer mouse.

Why I am Fucking Tired of Things

A bunch of people in conflict are dying and the first, most natural response is to pick your side and demonize the other. That was cool in World War II when there was a 'right' side to pick, but World War II and the weird days that followed set the world up for a lot of misery. It's pretty surprising to me as well, but one of the big takeaways from studying history is that humanity is great at holding grievances and using them as twisted and sick raison d'etre. So I'm pretty fucking tired, not of the people who see themselves as wronged and want to find the most violent and counterproductive solutions (though they are as exasperating as crying children on a flight, or schoolyard bullies, or Jihadis, or Zionists - what's the diff, really?), but of the commentators for whom it is a sport to make one side seem more wronged and the other more evil. Ignorant people step into this and even the wisest among us can only look on sadly and wish for a speedy return to normalcy, where only 50-90 people die every year from this particular shitshow.

Nobody's right, everyone's a goddamn asshole, and if I had any power at all I would salt the more contested parts of the Levant so liberally that everybody had to get the hell out, and napalm would discourage the hardier dissenters, followed by low flybys with extremely dilute chlorine gas until every living thing had caught the idea. Then I would build a wall around it and keep everyone out, and if I caught people sneaking back in I would irradiate the whole thing so that it would have to be abandoned, and people would have to give up their crazy, outdated, offensively made up shit which tells them it's okay to pitch fits, murder others, and basically act like it's 1359 B.C.

If we can't have nice things like myths, and big old useless cities filled with the bloody residue of bible stories and twisted histories that turn us into murderous savages, then it is time to destroy the myths. If Millenialists get angry, so much the better. If it's considered anti-Zionist than I don't know what to tell you except oy-fucking-vey. If it's anti-Muslim I am going to pretend it's not ludicrous for THAT to be the breaking point in the struggle. Maybe I'm a zionihadi for peace and there is no better option than to take away the toy the kids are fighting over and getting hurt about. It's time that this species grows the fuck up, and lately we've been very extremely fucking ignorant about a lot of important things, and very greedy, and very uncooperative, and extremely self-centered (unless we're unthinkingly demonizing whole groups of people on others' behalf). If you think this is O.K. then I have a whole world of misery and hatred and slavery to show you. Selling the dumbest possible reactionary narratives is the new game, but it's actually the old game, and whether you're lib or con (believing in these arbitrary and distracting dramas, ignoring truth to feel self-fulfillment - I really hate that) there should be a certain level of decency so that we don't all degrade into shouting matches and talking over each other with factoids and anecdotes.

I really hate the commentators. Not all of them, but the worst of the bunch are so malicious and so invested in explaining the situation as if they were there, are omniscient, and really understand what's going on. We all understand WHY but we do not know HOW/WHAT quite as well, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either a senior Hamas or Israeli official, or a fucking goddamned piece of shit who ought to shut the fuck up and go back to commentating on why an effective tax rate is a burden on capitalism, or why factory farming is excusable, or why exceptionalism is healthy for national character. While we're at it: fuck nationalism of all kinds, that has literally never ended well and if we don't learn from that... we'll have to learn that expensive and wasteful and stupid lesson again, I guess, because we're not good students of anything that doesn't make us rich or respected. Well leave me out of it. Go back to hell and let this world slip into doom without your misleading bullshit turning friend against friend, turning me against almost everyone with an opinion who doesn't have family in the game, and making me want to commit felony level libel on everyone with a big & ignorant mouth. Shut up and stay shut up, because nothing you do is even trying to be helpful.

You can't even call it news anymore. Just shut the fuck up. Let them ruin it further... after all what the fuck did anyone ever do for Syria? Fuck.