Bloating.

[tetsuo]

The Nero thread brings to mind a number of things that I won't go into because I'm too lazy to write another thesis right now. But:

The New Bloat seems to be the latest psychological fashion.

For example, Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro was great. Then it became Adobe's Audition, but still seemed to be as good to me; it's my primary wave editing studio, and secondary multitrack studio. Then Adobe came out with Audition 2.0 (I use Audition 1.5, along with Reason 3.0, Absynth, FL 6, and a couple of Korg soft-synths) and it was a huge program, all shiny and slick-looking. Takes much longer to load, and doesn't seem to offer any real improvements (but to be honest I used it only about 15 minutes). And it's not backwards-compatible with the older Audition without conversions.

And Vista, need I say more?

This same principle right now applies to almost everything I think. Cars, clothes, relationships. Everyone wants a "pleasant" (but not necessarily aesthetic) design to everything. The new movement right now in marketing, whether political, social, or consumerist, is organic shapes for eyes and mind (nice, round ideas with no painful corners). On the off-chance you haven't, give it some thought for me.

Then read Hagakure and The Art of War, and shoot your television.