A Rant and Some Recommendations on #BlaugustReborn Day 7

Daily Ramble 10: A Rant and Some Recommendations on #BlaugustReborn Day 7

When did we all become prisoner of Google and their advertising engine? Is there anything we can look up online that doesn’t get tracked and thrown back at us on youtube or on any page that features “adsense”? I’ve just about had it with Google trying to tell me what I should be doing and what I should buy and I hope there will be a reckoning soon. We need to have our 1984 moment and break out of the chains that Big Brother Google has shackled us with and scream at the top of our lungs – “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

I Can’t Stand Advertising

Wow! I do one search and suddenly everywhere I look on the web is showing me useless ads for something I’m not gonna buy.

I’m sure you’ve all experienced this situation before.

It started when I noticed that the zipper on the case of my Sleep Number bed broke. You know how that can be – both sides of the zipper are open and for the life of me, I couldn’t reset it. The bed is 10 years old so I can kinda expect a bit of wear to have occurred but I really want to have a working zipper.

So I call up Google and type in “Sleep Number zipper cover replacement”. I get a bunch of links, most of which are irrelevant for some reason, I mean a simple query and Google returns info about pillow tops, new beds, mattress covers, restoration foam kits, and finally what I think is where I want to go…the Sleep Number web site replacement part page. Too bad that page doesn’t list any actual replacement parts and just tells me to call a “sleep professional”.

Ok great, I don’t have time to dig through all these false options or make any phone calls – I was only doing a casual check to see how much a repair or replacement would cost.

The problem is that since that search yesterday, every YouTube video, every blog I go to, every website I look at is “yelling” at me to buy a new bed.

I DO NOT WANT A NEW BED!

I simply wanted to research zipper repair for my current mattress. It’s to the point where I’m gonna start looking things up with Bing or Yahoo or something since I can’t believe how invasive Google has become.

When did Google become so desperate to advertise to me? Do people really buy things because of the assaulting ads? I can’t really believe I’m the only person who refuses to purchase crap that is shoved in my face.

Oh well, I suppose in our current society where “free” is paid for by suffering I’ll have to live with it. I just have to rant to get out my frustration every once in a while.

Book Recommendations

Endalia over at Princess in a Castle has a huge project she’s working on – to accomplish 101 goals in 1001 days. It sounds pretty monumental to me particularly since I usually have trouble getting through a handful of goals in a year. Regardless she put out a post the other day asking for book and movie recommendations so I though I’d at least throw out a couple of my favorite books as recommendations. Well, first I took a look at her Goodreads profile to see if she’d read any of these but since I didn’t see any of these, I figure I’d be good suggesting them…

• The Rook by Daniel O’Malley – this is the first book in The Checquy Files and it was so much fun, I’ve read it twice in the past couple of years (and that’s with over 100 other books that I’ve only read once in that time). The idea is that the protagonist Myfanwy Thomas has lost her memories and this isn’t a good thing when she’s involved with a secret government organization called the Checquy that’s tasked with defending the United Kingdom against supernatural threats. I haven’t read the second book of this series yet but from what I’ve heard, this one has been picked up by Starz for a show that’s supposed to air in 2019.
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik – better known for her Temeraire series about dragons in the Napoleonic Wars, Uprooted is a standalone high fantasy novel that won the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. The idea is somewhat formulaic in that a wizard protects the land from a evil as long as the villagers offer up a teenage girl in tribute every ten years. The cool part of this story, though is that this wizard picks the wrong girl and that could spell doom for the village and beyond. It’s a fun read with wonderful references to the author’s Polish ancestry.
• We Are Legion We Are Bob by Dennis E. Taylor – this is a fun and enjoyable read that kicks off the Bobiverse series. Set in a future where the protagonist – Bob – is imprinted on a self-replicating AI and sent into space to find worlds to colonize, this book is full of geek humor and pop culture references that any gamer or scifi nerd will love. If you liked The Martian you’ll most likely find this one enjoyable as well.

Those are just a few recommendations, I’ve got more. So if you still need to fill out your goal let me know.

Oh yeah and if you want a movie recommendation, the film I quoted in my introduction above is called Network and it’s a very good one directed by Sidney Lumet (who also did 12 Angry Men), written by Paddy Chayefsky (who also write Marty), and featuring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall.

#BlaugustReborn Day 3