I’m Scared

I was writing about Gil Thorp for yesterday and remembered that Cow and Boy character I mentioned. One of the enormously many running gags was a giant panda who wanted to destroy the Moon and ultimately succeeded. And that would have been a great side joke to include in a story about kids protesting local radio jerkface Marty Moon. Trouble is I didn’t remember any particular date when Cow and Boy featured its Moon-hating giant panda. Couldn’t find it by searching gocomics.com either. None of the keywords that made any sense got me anything relevant. So I turned to DuckDuckGo because shut up I just do. And then I got this.

By the way if you don’t include ‘comic strip’ you get pictures of people with black-and-white cows which, hey, great for you but that’s not what I need just now. Yes, after this I refused to try "cow and boy" comic strip moon.

While I’m soft-spoken, I am not a timid soul. I have seen, and coped with, stuff on the Internet that I will not be able to talk with my parents about even after we are all dead. But this? This shakes me.

In Which I Am Disappointed By DuckDuckGo

Oh, first, yeah, did I mention doing some more comic strip review over on my mathematics blog? I did some more comic strip review over on my mathematics blog. Thanks for noticing. I changed the theme over there because there’s no such thing as a theme I’m actually all that happy with.

Yes, yes, I’m that guy using DuckDuckGo. I like how it keeps asking me to make it my default search engine, even though it has been for years now. But when you get something like this, I just …

Yes, yes, there’s no telling whether the problem is DuckDuckGo or MetroLyrics, since there’s few things worse at song lyrics than song lyrics sites. Song lyrics sites are so bad it’s surprising to think they aren’t a part of iTunes. But still.

Putting aside everything else there’s at least two mistakes in the lyrics for the song they are doing and it’s taking all my willpower not to drive over to MetroLyrics Master Command and berate what I’m guessing is a strip mall’s communal mailbox station. I should probably go lie down a while and twitch.

Those Mysteries, Eurovision Edition

I spent most of yesterday watching Twitter friends, none of whom know each other, talking about Eurovision. And that was fun. Since I wondered why Australia was in it I went to DuckDuckGo because yeah, I’m that kind of guy, and started asking the question. This led to this fine selection of autocompletes:

Related queries: why is there France? Why is there Spain? And why am I here and why is there rain?

• why is australia called the land down under
• why is australia called oz
• why is australia a continent
• why is australia in eurovision 2015
• why is australia not an island
• why is australia dangerous
• why is australia so expensive
• why is australian dollar falling

I appreciate the joy of that sixth one particularly. Anyway, it seems that Australia was in Eurovision 2015 because everyone involved thought that would be nice. And then they were brought back in 2016 because everyone figured that worked out so well last time why not do it again? There are much worse reasons for everything everybody does.

My love mentioned getting the Eurovision question as an autocomplete after just entering “why is au” on Google. So I thought to try it on DuckDuckGo and while Eurovision didn’t turn up, “why is autonomy important” did. This suggests DuckDuckGo’s user base is much more likely than Google’s to be a bunch of Intro to Philosophy students cramming the night before finals.

I never heard of Austin and Ally so at least I’m not broken up over its ending. I had expected “Au the symbol for gold” to be on the list.

Also there’s people who had to look up why Australia would be called Oz, because apparently they’ve never said the word “Australia” aloud in their lives? I don’t know either.

A Heavenly Autocomplete

In my normal job I do computer programming stuff, so I spend a lot of time annoyed with computer programming stuff. Here’s a secret about being a professional computer programmer, though: when stuff doesn’t work you can type it into a search engine. And search engine autocompletes are great because they so often guess what you wanted to know before you even finish the question, adding that little touch of existential despair to looking up where it is that great music sting from the old CBS Special Presentation teaser came from, because now you know you’re not even in the first 25,000 people to wonder about that today.

Anyway, for the computer programming stuff, I’ve been busy since Wednesday trying to find a sufficiently large cudgel to bash in Visual Studio 2013, which is a program that lets you make other programs as long as you can make it behave. Since it’s not behaving, I went to DuckDuckGo because yeah, I’m that guy, and tried to get a hint about the trouble’s source.

By the way, I still haven’t got my problem fixed.

I admit, somehow, I had failed to consider that the problem might be that Visual Studio 2013 didn’t feel the touch of God’s love. And now I have to wonder if my problems getting the hang of Objective C have been theological in origin.