The Lockdown Diaries (2)
Time for an open thread, in which to share links and bicker. I’ll set the ball rolling with three topical items.
Via Damian, tensions mount.
Via Julia, a lockdown mystery.
And via the Beagle, today’s word is improvisation.
For those in need of further diversion, the Reheated series is there to be poked at.
Wut?
It’s florid, hyperbolic, and largely unsubstantiated. It just sort of hangs there, waiting for applause. I think you generally have to approach Laurie’s outpourings as a kind of emotional fog, rather than something with discernible structure. Any connection with logic and reality – something one might verify rather than take on trust – seems at best intermittent, and often entirely absent.
Let’s not forget Laurie’s belief that businesses don’t need to be competitive or economically viable and that therefore it’s “not that hard” for any business to pay its employees whatever sum she, our enlightened radical, deems a “decent” salary. Hence, presumably, the invitation to Harvard, free of charge, to become a “leader in journalism.” And also – yes, also – an expert in “economic justice.”
How dare we question her.
I think you generally have to approach Laurie’s outpourings as a kind of emotional fog, rather than something with discernible structure
That kind of trademark blizzard of hyperbole might have seemed cute about 10 years ago.
Back then, in 2010, she was a 23 year-old Oxford graduate and Left wing firebrand so to a certain kind of person – Kirsty Wark, the editors of Woman’s Hour and Channel 4 News – she must have seemed like a flattering image of what they imagined to be the legacy of their own activism and reporting.
A decade on she’s 33 and, as she lately never tires of telling people, is a screen writer based in Los Angeles.
So if it’s all starting to ring just that little bit hollow now, goodness knows what it’ll look like if she’s still trying to write like that at 40.
“is a screen writer based in Los Angeles”
Wait – did she work on Picard? Because that could explain some stuff.
That kind of trademark blizzard of hyperbole might have seemed cute about 10 years ago.
I imagine that’s enough for her supposedly educated readership – students, non-specific “activists,” and people who declare their pronouns – who appear happy to retweet and gush with approval despite the obvious shortcomings. Apparently, there’s a demographic – again, supposedly educated – that isn’t troubled by the lurid overstatement, the gaps and contradictions, the endless begged questions and leaps of leftist faith. As long as the preferred emotional conclusion is arrived at and affirmed, little else matters, it seems.
“is a screen writer based in Los Angeles”
Screen credits or it ain’t so.
She seems to be building quite a career of non-accomplishments accompanied by breathless Twitter announcements at every stage. What has she really done, besides blathering on?
Given that Picard seems to be in bad odour generally, can I add The English Game to the *ahem* “shit list”?
It’s terribly clunky, being basically Trouble At T’Mill with a bit of Downton-esque intrigue plus the occasional Old Etonian Toffs vs. Shithole United game of footy. During said games, the protagonists are all sporting extravagant facial hair, scoop-neck henleys, braces, corduroy breeches and hobnail boots- it’s like watching the staff from your local barbers’, craft brewery and vinyl record shop having a lunchtime kickabout. Avoid.
Do, however, have a look at Netflix’ latest true-crime saga, Tiger King. It resembles nothing so much as three mid-period Elmore Leonard novels happening simultaneously and yet the whole ghastly spectacle actually happened. I would advise putting a cushion on the floor in front of your favourite TV chair before you begin to watch. That way, when your jaw does hit the deck, which will happen several times during each episode, you reduce the risk of doing yourself a serious injury.
Was Wired always this bad?
I hadn’t read it in years, probably decades, when a couple years ago during a period of project paralysis, I picked a copy up off my OT director/project lead’s (it was a small startup company) desk. Don’t recall exactly what the article was about. Something technical of course, but The Narrative manner in which even something that technical was written…well, SMDH. It did help me understand why we were stuck and why I couldn’t get through his thick know-it-all head. Not that Wired, as I recall, was ever a serious technical rag, but I didn’t recall it being as bad as that. Almost like someone did a Mad Libs effort using a People magazine article for a template and giving it to a techy guy. Yes, I exaggerate. But I understand that’s all the rage now and why should I always be the unfashionable one?
IT director, not OT director…though now that I think of it…
…and now for something completely different, Iowahawk invites us to learn our quarantine names, if you scroll down* to Montana and laugh, you are a very bad person.
*(twitter, being an illogically laid out and designed POS, you have to scroll down to “Replies”, then hit “View more replies”, then scroll up to the original twit, then down…only a Silicon Valley millennial would think that makes sense)
twitter, being an illogically laid out and designed POS
They do seem determined to make it counter-intuitive, with the thread you’re trying to follow being needlessly interrupted with random shite.
twitter, being an illogically laid out and designed POS
It’s not unlike the approach taken by any number of websites, where, before you can get more than a couple of sentences into an article of possible interest, you’re being barraged with distracting and unwanted toss: HI, THERE! WOULD YOU LIKE TO ALLOW NOTIFICATIONS? Er, no, thanks, I haven’t even begun to read the thing I came here to… OOH, HERE’S A MODAL WINDOW WITH SOMETHING ENTIRELY UNRELATED! WATCH IT SLIDE IN AND OBSCURE WHATEVER IT IS YOU ACTUALLY WANTED TO READ! This is all a bit premature. I just… HERE’S A VIDEO YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR AND DON’T CARE ABOUT. But I was trying to rea… NO, YOU CAN’T CLICK IT AWAY AND YES, IT WILL FOLLOW YOU DOWN THE PAGE. ISN’T IT SHINY AND DISTRACTING? Look, I just want to read the fu…
And so forth.
The desperation and gun-jumping is quite repellent.
Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility David!
Have fun: https://2018.bloomca.me/en
Have fun
Exactly. Only it’s sometimes, quite often, worse than that. A while ago, I was trying to read one barely-interesting article on the website of a local newspaper and it was like the scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture where Spock is having to answer a barrage of near-simultaneous questions about philosophy, history and higher-dimensional geometries.
It was so badly designed, so user-hostile, it was almost funny.
The eternal question “Why are you here today?” has been asked by legions of college students in late night hookah binges. Now those philosophical depths are being tested by the storied Cheshire Constabulary. In their case, however, there is a correct answer. It is “I will just go on back home now, Officer. Thanks for the warning.”
…a screenwriter based in Los Angeles….
Er, what exactly are the qualifications for licensing in that profession, or is this something that anyone can be simply by saying it?
In that case, I am a screenwriter based in rural Mississippi. My screenplay “The Boy Who Grew An Apple Tree in his Stomach Because He Listened to Jake” is currently in the concept stage… and has been so for two years. So far, I have the working title firmed up: “Apple Boy” for brevity.
…There has been no vision, because these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top…
I’ll ignore the obvious sexual reference in the last phrase, but here comes Mike Lindell, noted Start-up entrepreneur, Capitalist Oppressor and Religious Nutcase with his obviously phony actions to retool 75% of his production to medical garments and make 50,000 a week.
Apparently, there’s a demographic – again, supposedly educated – that isn’t troubled by the lurid overstatement, the gaps and contradictions, the endless begged questions and leaps of leftist faith.
Stella Gibbons’ 1949 novel The Matchmaker has a lovely sketch of the intellectual mis-education of one of the characters, a Land Girl from a leftist family, who’s spirited and opinionated but has no discipline and no attention span, needing issues to be presented in terms of “the acerbities and generalisations of the Brains Trust“. Acerbities and generalisations – an apt summary (if perhaps a bit acerbic and generalised) of the stock in trade of BBC panel shows.
Another thing that hasn’t changed much is the wallowing in popular culture and celebrity watching under the pretext of anthropological data-gathering: “A fascinated scorn of the film stars drew the Scorbys [the girl’s family] three times a week or so to the pictures”… A caste who perceive themselves as possessing a more subtle imagination than the man in the street, but who are so possessed by grand narratives that it’s made their imagination crude and vulgar, and made them blind to individuality and diversity…
you’re being barraged with distracting and unwanted toss:
About 50% of the blame rests on fairly idiotic “privacy” regulations, and the other 50% on the utter failure of ad-supported content.
In that case, I am a screenwriter based in rural Mississippi.
Which reminds me, as I recently passed through Columbus, of the eternal mystery why a guy born there, raised in Missouri, and who lived in New Orleans and New York, chose to call himself “Tennessee”.
About 50% of the blame rests on fairly idiotic “privacy” regulations, and the other 50% on the utter failure of ad-supported content.
It increasingly strikes me as a hopeless model, at least for a huge swathe of sites. Very few articles are worth the interruptions, distractions, bad scrolling and general aggravation. Even the demand that I disable my adblocker now feels like a significant test of how much, or little, I want to read something linked by someone else.
And hence, hereabouts, the quarterly fundraisers.
Which reminds me, as I recently passed through Columbus, of the eternal mystery why a guy born there, raised in Missouri, and who lived in New Orleans and New York, chose to call himself “Tennessee”.
Lanier, cut that out!
The eternal question “Why are you here today?” has been asked by legions of college students in late night hookah binges.
Also by an elderly friend: “Why am I here? I walked into this room for a reason but now I cannot remember.”
[L]ate capitalism has…
I got precisely this far before thinking, “Gee that sounds like the fatally predictable-in-disorder Dreadful Penny, but why would even so pretentious and lightweight a technical rag as Wired ever let her on its pages?”
Maybe they take her claim of being a cyborg more seriously than they ought to.
…learn our quarantine names…
Homemade Taco Pioneer it is then.
…barraged with distracting and unwanted toss…
I’ve worked at the blue collar end of an ad-supported industry (outside broadcasting) and as a copywriter/editor for a successful niche business. What you see in online advertising today is the unholy union of desperation and utter ignorance of what makes for successful attention-getting. Result: websites with little to offer in content, desperate for ad money, letting incompetent advertisers centered on what THEY, not their potential customers, want, splatter the World Wide Web with history’s most-ignored bukkake.
Stella Gibbons’ 1949 novel The Matchmaker has a lovely sketch of the intellectual mis-education…
This had me thinking of the 90s sci-fi novel The Bellwether (though for some reason I remembered it as a short story or novella). One of the most important aspects of fads, as understood by the protagonist, is a low bar for entry in terms of required physical skill, mental capability, or depth of understanding.
What you see in online advertising today is the unholy union of desperation and utter ignorance of what makes for successful attention-getting.
Online advertising is particularly unpopular, much more so than print or even TV, because it feels more like clutter, an obstruction. I suppose we’re also generally more territorial about our phones and laptops, and so more sensitive to intrusion. As you say, online ads are so often badly done and actively hostile to the audience. The users of those modal ads that slide across to obscure whatever you’re trying to read should be hunted down with nail guns.
What you see in online advertising today is the unholy union of desperation and utter ignorance of what makes for successful attention-getting.
For the reasons, I have Google Alerts for a number of authors. “Sherlock Holmes” regularly returns the latest breathless news about story and cast changes for both the BBC show and the Robert Downey Jr. vehicle, neither of which are anywhere near production.
These sites ape Western news sites in format like Screen Rants but whose writers evade the stereotype of “wow, you write English better than your original language.”
PST314, I spend a lot of time thinking about the hereafter. I go into a room and then I wonder what I’m here after.
Is that what those slide-across ads are called, modal ads? That’s nothing like the name I use for them.
Apparently, there’s a known phenomenon where passing through a doorway can cause you to forget why you went into a room. This happens to me frequently, especially as I continue to saunter down my world-line, unless I remind myself not to let it happen.
My own theory, unsupported by anything so crass as research or even a cursory web search, is that it’s a survival trait. You are entering a new environment – it’s important to have “checking for threats” at the front of your attention. Hence you forget the previous “front of attention” thing. Perhaps the depth of my memory stack has decreased as I aged, and things now get irretrievably pushed off the bottom of that stack.
…learn our quarantine names…
Clementine Brave. Holy crap — I think I’m halfway to a YA bestseller already! Also, I remember enjoying Bellwether, but I can’t remember the details of it to save my life. Is it worth picking up again?
there’s a known phenomenon where passing through a doorway can cause you to forget why you went into a room
My dad used to say that there’s three stages of that:
Stage 1: You walk into a room and you forget why you went in there.
Stage 2: You walk into a room and you forget why you went in there, and that room is the bathroom.
Stage 3: You walk into a room and you forget why you went in there, that room is the bathroom, and it really doesn’t matter anymore.
letting incompetent advertisers centered on what THEY, not their potential customers, want
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer – you’re the product.
That’s what people who rant about online ads tend to forget: you’re not the customer. The advertisers, who give the site the money, are. If you want to be the customer you have to give them money.
Oh, ding, by the way.
‘Late capitalism’ is one of those go-to cliches the left seems to rely on – some of whom, like Penny here, can pad out an entire article with such cliches. And it’s long struck me as being a particularly wistful cliche: the imminent demise of the economic system, as predicted by Marx, is going to happen any day now!
They’ve been repeating this cliche since at least the ‘60s!
Is it worth picking up again?
Probably? I read it as a teenager. Mostly I remember the big plot twist, and the bread pudding scene.
The advertisers, who give the site the money, are.
And the advertisers, who are either creating the ads in house or paying for and signing off on the work of a third party, are doing it wrong. The sites that have turned into obnoxious advertisement clusterfucks, too, are doing it wrong. It is a synergy of errors.
Is that what those slide-across ads are called, modal ads? That’s nothing like the name I use for them.
It’s a programming term. To quote Microsoft:
Modal dialog boxes: require the user to respond before continuing the program
Modeless dialog boxes: stay on the screen and are available for use at any time but permit other user activities
I go into a room and then I wonder what I’m here after.
I call that sometimers, as opposed to alzheimers, because sometimes I forget stuff I shouldn’t forget.
I have a theory about that too. By the time you reach the age of 45 or 50, your memory has absorbed about all it’s capable of absorbing. At that point, in order to remember something new, your brain has to throw out something old. Unfortunately, you have no control over what gets thrown out and it may be totally out of balance with what you keep. So you could throw out your understanding of quantum physics to remember where you put your car keys. Worse, you could recite string theory and end up taking the bus.
are doing it wrong
Depends on what your definition of “right” is. Remember that ad-supported web sites get paid per “impression”, which simply means the ad is loaded by your browser. As long as the page loads, the site owner gets paid. It doesn’t matter what the viewer does (although actually clicking on the ads usually brings the site more money).
That’s why those slide-in modal windows exist, by the way; they’re there to prevent the user from leaving the site long enough for the rest of the page ads to load in the background.
“The desperation and gun-jumping is quite repellent.” I send them email. “Your efforts to be noticed have worked. I wrote down your product and company name and consider it my sacred duty to never buy your product. Ever.”
By the way, is it Dreadful Penny or Penny Dreadful?
…a screenwriter based in Los Angeles….
Er, what exactly are the qualifications for licensing in that profession, or is this something that anyone can be simply by saying it?
Exactly.
Or, better yet, for certainty, a successful screenwriter is one who has actually written a screenplay. Which is apparently rather a quantity of the Los York/New Angeles metroplex.
And, in turn, does getting a script written mean that the material will wind up on screen?
Maybe.
—With internet access and ease of recording video becoming more and more accessible, at this point in time, all sorts of concepts can wind up on screen . . . . . . the screen may never get larger than a cell phone screen, and the platform never more than a very obscure corner of Youtube, But . . . . .
Now, rather most importantly, does such capability translate to getting handed large quantities of cash?
Only if one can successfully get it to.
In turn, for commentary on and by an actual regularly paid screenwriter, Quite Highly Recommended.
If you want to be the customer you have to give them money. Oh, ding, by the way.
Bless you, sir. May all of those unwanted ‘media relations’ emails invariably include an ‘unsubscribe’ option. After all, anything else would just be rude.
That’s why those slide-in modal windows exist, by the way; they’re there to prevent the user from leaving the site long enough for the rest of the page ads to load in the background.
When you visit a site casually, with no particular interest, and within seconds you notice that your adblocker has blocked over a hundred ads, on one page alone, this doesn’t generally result in a positive view of the site in question. Likewise, if you disable your adblocker and immediately find that said site has become slow, jerky and all but unusable, with the actual written content an obviously low priority and repeatedly obscured, and endless crap actively thwarting your attempts to read…
Well, this too seems unlikely to inspire warm feelings.
in order to remember something new, your brain has to throw out something old.
Ah! Kelly Bundy syndrome.
Homer: But every time I learn something new, it pushes out something old. Remember that time I took a home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?
Marge: That’s because you were drunk.
Homer: And how!
=======
I wonder what long term impact the use of computers will result in, seeing that temporary memory seems to be used more often than in the past. In the past you’d learn a skill and it would stay with you for decades but now software tools are constantly changing (although a part of that is just GUI modifications and shuffling program commands around to
make you buy the new releaseimprove the software).Time spent learning / re-learning a new or updated software tool is time not spent doing the actual thing the software is helping you to do.
Wut?
Barkeep!
A drink to soothe this guy’s troubled brow.
Apparently, there’s a demographic – again, supposedly educated – that isn’t troubled by the lurid overstatement, the gaps and contradictions, the endless begged questions and leaps of leftist faith. As long as the preferred emotional conclusion is arrived at and affirmed, little else matters, it seems.
That.
Keep the change and have one for yourself and the upkeep of this … [[ wipes what suspiciously looks like dried hamster urine from counter top ]] … fine establishment.
Screen credits or it ain’t so.
From IMDb
The Nevers Series 1 Episode 9
Writers: Laurie Penny, Joss Whedon (created by)
Stars: Ahmed Bakare, Elizabeth Berrington, Ben Chaplin
From her current Twitter her profile:
Author, journalist, feminist, nerd, ‘extremely powerful witch.’ Screenwriter: The Nevers, The Haunting, etc. Latest book: ‘Bitch Doctrine’. Patreon below!
London/Los Angeles
Keep the change and have one for yourself
Bless you, sir. May your regular supermarket be one in which, while people are every bit as clumsy and spatially oblivious as they are anywhere else, they’re at least awfully polite and apologetic about it afterwards.
in order to remember something new, your brain has to throw out something old.
The Sherlock Holmes theory of memory:
The Sherlock Holmes theory of memory
That’s probably where I got it from. I’ve read “A Study in Scarlet” at least a dozen times. I received the two volume “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes” for my 18th birthday.