aarondirebear

The clutter of my room had gotten so ridiculous that it was time to clean. Oh the discoveries! There, under a blanket near the door, blue cloth shopping bags/ They were full of things brought home, dropped like a burden, and filed under “will sort out later”, oh how fun it would be to rummage through them! But all of a sudden, there was a shock. A sudden pain and a sensation of electricity running through the back of my head. Was there somebody in the room, that that struck me from behind? Nothing, nothing but blackness...not even the sensation of striking the ground. My eyes opened to the sight of a bedroom wall. A presence lingered and hung over like gravity itself. My entire body was frozen, which killed any notion of turning to look and see what breathed down my neck.. Only my eyes could move as they raced around their field of vision, in vain, to see what was going on. Had my limbs been bound? No...they just could not move. Whatever held my limbs also seized my voice...so much for screaming. But then movement returned to my fingertips...could it be? Had the screaming of my heart shattered whatever horrible binding had been placed upon me? Locomotion creeped slowly, tingling, up an arm. The room changed...my eyes saw the ceiling, the top of the other wall, and then...what in the hell is that? It looked like a person, superficially. A person of some sort wearing a white robe with a cardboard box on its head...one could say it looked like a cheap costume, except for the fact that the flesh of the creature's neck melded perfectly with the box. Creepily, it held its hands towards me, it took a step back...and then it lunged. Our arms struggled together, the weight unbearable, but somehow my strength triumphed. I threw down my enemy, and in that moment grabbed Surprise Katana, my wooden practice sword, from its shelf and then, swinging with all the strength of my will, obliterated its skull. Free completely from whatever spell or psionics the thing had over me, or over the effects of the blow to the head, whichever, I sat down in a heap. The robed figure discorporated into black ichor, and was no more. 

More amendments will be added as suggestions are made.  Send this to your friends who work in electronics. Spread the word around.  Put an end to moronic MP3 Player designs and fight Steve Jobs' war on user friendliness (not to mention his perverse obsession with sleekness).

I have the right to turn off my device with a simple, physical, circuit breaking on/off switch that protrudes frm the side of the device in such a manner that it is easily toggled with my thumb.

I have the right to not be required to hold down a button for three seconds in order for it to work.

I have the right to buttons or keys with separate functions. Never should the power button be the same as the play button, or the volume buttons be the same as FF/REW, or the "next song" button be the same as any of the aforementioned buttons. Furthermore, if my device has a digital screen with a menu, these will be six separate buttons: 4 arrows, select, and cancel.

I have the right to access my menu easily and without holding down buttons.

I have the right to charge my device without going into “data upload” mode, or keep it plugged in for extended play. Therefore I have the right to an AC Adapter port separate from the USB data port. Especially if the device in question has a built in rechargeable battery.

I have the right to adjust my volume with a wheel or a knob, preferably on the same side as the OFF switch, for easy thumb access.

I have the right to screens that will not be ruined from the slightest bump, the slightest amount of pressure, or the lightest of taps. Screens will have an outer protective layer made out of a sturdy material positioned not less than 5 mm above the fragile inner screen, and shall not be able to bend more than 2 mm downward if pressed upon. Therefore, if sat upon or dinged by a sudden collision with a door or wall, only the outer screen will be harmed and the expensive LCD screen will remain undamaged

I have the right to replace my batteries if they fail to work or stop recharging. Make lithium ion batteries in AAA form, and simply design the device to accept any AAA battery.

I have the right to battery casings that do not require me to void my warranty. A sliding door with thumb ridges has been the norm for 20 years, bring it back

The right of the digital photographer to focus manually shall not be infringed, nor shall any autofocus lack the option to turn it off.

I have the right to packaging that does not require destruction in order to open, and that which may be easily closed in case I wish to store my item somewhere, or return it if I am dissatisfied. No packaging shall be made in such a way that necessitates causing it damage.  Furthermore, packaging must be easily reassembled by the consumer. 

Instead of telling me to "calm down", how about actually saying something that improves my mood like "gee that sucks that your bowl of pasta plummeted to the kitchen floor, i sympathize with you" or "I am sorry it struck your knee on the way down, causing excruciating pain, need some ice dude?". Why is it that in today's society it is looked down upon to be kind, to show pity, to help someone who is emotionally distraught?

What part of "saying calm down only makes me angrier" is so hard to understand?

Why do you reply "i am saying it because you won't calm down" even after I have explained that? Do you honestly believe that phrase actually works? Do you honestly believe that saying it more will help, as if I am just a big angry lug who needs a bigger dose of an ineffectual tranquilizer?

And why is it you're so concerned with how people feel about the way my cries of agony sound, and NOT about my emotional state? Am I the only person that fails to matter? So what if the sound I make is "annoying"; why is it that a minor annoyance to strangers is unconscionable and yet the pain and torment you inflict upon me is "nothing"? I'll stop yelling when my heart stops crying. I'll calm down when I am not being subjected to stimuli that further enrage me. Being told to calm down is a giant "fuck you" to my feelings. When you tell me to calm down, you are saying that you care more about the possibility of scaring someone then about the possibility that I very well might be hurting inside.

Did you ever consider that I may have began to relax if the first reaction had been "what happened" or "are you all right"? NO! you did not. Immediately it's "calm down". Then you wonder why my rage got worse, and exasperate the problem by further invalidating me, telling me why I am wrong, telling me how others might perceive me, then denying it all. You claim I am twisting your words, but the truth is you don't understand that which comes from your own mouth.

Over the course of the past couple of weeks I have pored through the tome known as “The Sui Dynasty: The Unification of China” (henceforth referred to in the shorthand as Unification) and now I have the pleasure and honor of reviewing it. The purpose of Unification is to inform a western audience the importance of the Sui Dynasty to the development of Chinese history and culture. The author accomplishes this by first describing in detail the geographic, social, political, and cultural environments in which Yang Chien, the founder of the Sui was born into. After having done that, he proceeded to present us with the biography of Yang Chien, the first Sui Emperor, discussing at length his upbringing, and his rise to power, while interspersing information about the religious and cultural things that influenced his style of ruling. This of course segues into the exact methods that Yang Chien used to unify China; his court policies regarding religion, his political innovations, and his conquest of the southern lands. Finally, the death of Yang Chien, the reign of his son, the fall of the Sui, the rise of the Tang, and the eventual legacy of the former Dynasty are all laid out.

One of the very first thing I noted when I opened its pages for the first time was that the author went to great lengths to make it easier for a dumb westerner such as myself to understand the information he presented. When I read that China at the time of the Sui was “as far as New York to the Rockies, east and west,” and “as far from Philadelphia to Havana, north and south,” I quite literally felt a tangible map of North America embrace my mind as a massive triangle drew itself across the landscape, thus giving me the distinct feeling that he was talking about a massive region. Throughout the first half of the book he keeps fairly consistent with the habit of making such analogies, but sadly these all but disappeared by chapter 3.

The second thing I noticed is his meticulous attention to details. Any given subject, such as the precise political maneuvering that Yang Chien used to reunify China, is described in no less than 5-10 pages. The inclusion of such a high level of detail is helpful in driving the author’s thesis across the range, but in many places there is so much information that it comes across as “padding” meant for the sole purpose of increasing the page count. The book first makes a statement, and then piles up redundant information in gobs making me want to shout “yes, we get it already, get to the point”. The first two chapters just drag on for what seems like forever, making it very boring and trite to read. The second half of the third chapter talks about how Yang Chien was influenced by three main people (The Empress, Yang Su, and Kao Chiung), but instead of being concise and brief, he drags it on by going into each and every one of their personal lives in agonizing detail; how much do we really need to know in order to understand that these people were influential, and how much of their personal life is really relevant to the unification of China? Another thing that grated me was the fact that, in the chapter Reunification, he repeats the same story as chapter three, only the second time around he also pads it down by repeating what was said in chapter one, in even more painfully long walls of text.
Furthermore, the information, though highly detailed, is ironically missing very many crucial elements that would give me, as a reader, a better sense about what he is trying to say. More specifically, I refer to his apparent disdain for using proper nouns, which greatly obfuscates the meaning of the passages. I cite page 57 chapter 3 where I very briefly believed that Yang Chien had died before he could unify China, because he failed to use a proper noun; instead he used a less sensible generic term “capable leader”, which at that point could have meant either Yang Chien, or the emperor he was serving at the time (turns out it was the emperor). Secondly, he often will use confusing speech or obscure metaphors to say something that could easily have been stated with conventional terms. As an example of this, in the very same chapter, he refers to the death of the child emperor as happening “at the will of the Sui” (Wright p. 63); I had to go online to find out he meant “he was executed”, because that could easily have meant “the gods that favor the Sui willed him to get sick and die”. The use of proper nouns would really have eliminated a lot of the confusion and would have made it so that I didn’t have to spend 2 hours reading a single page trying to figure out exactly whom the heck he’s talking about.
Overall it does its job of presenting information, but it could really stand to be organized better, be trimmed down a little bit and given a better sense of clarity. Being descriptive is good, but there is in fact such a thing as too much information; once you’ve hit the nail on the head, there is no need to take a jackhammer to it. Further, the more information you have the more important keeping it organized becomes; with this much information, the lack of organization; going back and forth in time and moving from place to place without a warning is very confusing, especially when you use so much detail. Finally, being clear at all times will make a book easier to read, otherwise it becomes a chore. It was like being thrown into a room with a trillion unlabeled mechanical parts jumbled together in a cardboard box, and told that I was somehow supposed to construct a clockwork monkey with no instruction manual; oh, yes, additionally, I would have been blindfolded and force-fed a bottle of Everclear.

Unification appears to be lacking in bias. Wright has a very balanced viewpoint with regards to the various cultures and kingdoms represented within China. He doesn’t overly demonize anyone nor does he try to canonize the Sui people. Furthermore, rather than trying to make Yang Chien into some kind of godlike folk hero, he presents him as a balanced (in the yin yang sense, not necessarily the mentally stable sense) human being, who was “devoted to his wife” and at the same time “had little affection for his sons”. Yang Chien was a ruler who would kill an advisor for questioning him, then feel remorse about at and become angry with his other advisors for not questioning his decision to kill the first advisor. His son, the second emperor, however, is portrayed as a complete and total dick; though to be fair I have in fact looked at other resources on him and have determined that such an assessment is actually justified.

On and ending note, I would like to make it a point to acknowledge my own bias so as to not prevent anyone from trying the book out for themselves; if you are like me with a combination of restless leg syndrome, only having a bloody week to read and critique the book, and A.D.D., and can’t stand being smote with redundant information, avoid it, but if you can sit still for ten hours at a time reading the same facts over and over again, then this book is for you. If a lot of information is what you’re looking for, Unification delivers; just don’t expect the information you want to be easy to find; for that you’d best check wikipedia instead.

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