Angry Sascha is angry.

The latest act of vileness Facebook has committed is to share your information and that of your contacts with certain partner sites. The feature called “Instant Personalisation” totally buggers all sorts of personality rights and is yet another reason to quit Facebook as quickly as possible. Or so too many of my contacts tell me, with the same copy-pasted text. The accompanying outcries from Baby Datajesus are more diverse, but all include a certain getting-molested-by-Big-Business™ quality.

Chrissakes.

Bloody well read the bloody manual! All Facebook shares with its partner websites is the information you yourself labelled as free-for-all to begin with. Like, anybody not on your friends list. Even your inlaws. Or your Rabbi. And pretty much all search engines/robots out there. Like you intended to do because Social Media aren’t much fun if people who know you can’t find you. That’s why you chose to set certain bits of information to “Everyone” in your privacy settings, right? Right?

But hey, everybody knows Facebook is evil, has been Satan incarnate from the very beginning. That’s why you still stick around. Yeah.

You like what you see on the cam’s display? Sure you do. Great colours! The contrast – w00t! You enjoy working with your camera, getting the shot right™ while framing it, hate the idea of post-processing. And anyways – them colours! Woah!

And then you switch to RAW because somebody told you that’s professional, JPEG isn’t. And then you wonder why this funky RAW software thingy you need to actually see what you’ve shot delivers such lame-ass pictures. No oomph. And what the hells, I made this picture in black and white! It’s in colour now! This software sucks!

No it doesn’t. You have to take RAW literally: it’s a collection of the raw information captured by your camera’s sensor. Without all that funky stuff happening inside your cam like Virtual Films or Art Filters. Or the less funky stuff that happens internally so you can actually look at a picture on the camera’s screen. Sometimes, RAW even ignores your choice of aspect ratio as the sensor captures everything anyways. The horror, the horror, etc.

It’s like the difference between getting photos developed and shooting negatives you develop yourself. Later on, in the dark-room with a bottle of Whisky nearby and the tingly sensation of chemicals on your skin. In this case, chemicals are replaced by (sometimes) expensive software while the booze remains the same, if hopefully of Irish provenance.

You like to control your pictures on-site? You don’t want to meddle with Burn, Dodge, different virtual “chemicals” and whatnot just to hold a decent picture in your alcohol-stained hands? Then shoot JPEG, save a lot of time, and stop complaining. The software can’t read your mind, and as long as camera manufacturers stick to proprietary RAW formats and settings, i.e. until the sun burns out, it also can’t know what “Vivid” or “Art Filter No.43” means.

Fine, you changed “Contrast” in your camera’s settings. And how exactly should third-party applications such as Lightroom or uvraw know what +2 Contrast in your camera relates to? The file might be readable, but the JPEG engine inside the cam that interprets +2 Contrast is a heavily guarded, copyrighted, and patented secret.

Get real. And take your pick. JPEG is perfectly fine if you like your camera’s results and won’t go all wonky colours later on. It’s neither more nor less “professional” than shooting in RAW. But please, baby Jesus please stop bitching about the status quo of RAW developing and stop expecting the impossible from manufacturers who don’t have full access to your camera makers’ intellectual property. Or, better choice, do something about that IP thingy by voting for the right™ parties next time round. Okay? Thanks.

» Take everything literally. Like, real literally.

» Be offended at out-of-context retweets from an original poster you’ve never heard of.

» Make sure all your followers know of your instant dislike regarding abovementioned original poster by retweeting the offending retweet.

» Twitter Snooze is for pussies. You have to read each and every single tweet that comes in.

» If the burden of staying up-to-date proves too much, bitch about it (bitterly) in a tweet. Ignore the irony.

» Hire a Social Media Manager to spam remotely relevant hash-tags with your marketing blurbs. Call it “participating in the community”.

» Set up a Facebook profile which re-publishes all your tweets. Make sure that’s all there is to find on said profile.

» Also, tweets shall include nothing but links to your blog postings.

That said – I’m looking for a native OS X Twitter client that lets me set the maximum number of tweets to download, and download them manually. Any suggestions?

This is a no-brainer. You feel dirty after you dated dudes you met in a chat room? Stop doing it. If it’s part of your psychological profile, an expression of your illness, a tendency to use Sex and the City as a guideline, whatever: Stop doing it.

Might very well be the shortest article on this site to date. Figures.

Enjoy using Helvetica? Be it for ad copy, corporate web sites, or the odd letter to your granny? Think again.

Somebody with more oomph than yours truly explains the dire situation of Global Helveticaism in plain words and with shitloads of credibility. Yes, the name Bruno Maag might only turn the ears of typo geeks like meself red with glee. But his frankness and sarcasm make this interview well worth a read – even for people who constantly mistake Arial for Times. Or something.

Check it out. And stop bloody using Helvetica for everything. It’s not “Swiss Style” or something, we guys have been employing better typefaces for ages. Helvetica plain sucks for longer passages, and never ever even think about using it for body text. Pretty please? You’ll make baby Jesus cry if you do. Don’t be lazy. Look for better alternatives for what you want to do. If it still ends up being Helvetica, so be it. The typeface still blows for copy, though.

Now excuse me while I check my style sheet for accidental irony.