READ RECEIPTS ARE THE WORST THINGS ON THE INTERNET, this list seems pretty correct to me
***
Here’s the deal, team: I have always, and always will, use the Caps Lock button rather than the Shift key in order to type even a single upper-case letter. It seems convenient-er to simply hit an on/off switch than to have to hold down a separate key with my left pinkie while attempting to continue typing normally. Am I entirely mad? Does anyone else do this?
***
Rebecca Carroll in The Guardian about calling out individual acts of racism at the expense of acknowledging white supremacy:
And yet, this country continues to mobilize around incidents of racist behavior and not against systemic racism, pushing public statements filled with shock and lip service to “diversity”, individual expulsions and university-wide disassociation. But naming, shaming and shunning individual racists – if it has any deterrent effect on other would-be racists at all, which seems increasingly doubtful in 2015 – doesn’t solve the systemic racism faced by black people in employment, in housing, in university admissions, in interactions with the judicial system and for the love of God, in the value of life.
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“After less than a minute, the genetic algorithm reached a near-perfect solution that makes a complete trip around the U.S. in only 13,699 miles (22,046 km) of driving. I’ve mapped that route below.
Note: There’s an extra stop in Cleveland to force the route between Vermont and Michigan to stay in the U.S. rather than go through Canada. If you’re able to drive through Canada without issue, then take the direct route through Canada instead.”
LET’S GO ON A PERFECTLY OPTIMIZED ROAD TRIP
***
100% of art should just be this:
***
JIA NO
JIA YESSS
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Mat Johnson! Oh, do I like you, Mat Johnson.
What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?
This whole damn book I just wrote, Loving Day. I spent the first decades of my life overcompensating for my whitish appearance within the black community, rejecting mixed identity as an escape plan for self-hating blacks of mixed descent. Then as an adult, I slowly began seeing the merits of self-identifying as biracial, and eventually the need for it, despite larger ambivalence to it in the larger black community. So I was petrified to actually talk about this directly in my new novel. I know some old allies are not going to be happy. But art shouldn’t be about making people happy, or confirming their existing ideas. I had to say this, my truth. This book is my coming out as a mulatto.
What is the responsibility of the writer?
To speak her or his moral truth. That’s about it. Spreading ideas, notions of society and identity, that the author knows to be false, that is a failure of responsibility on the part of the author. Besides that, it’s wide open.
While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose?
Do all writers share a collective purpose? I’d like to say, Yes, to speak their truth. But that would be naive. I think it would be more accurate to say that a majority of writers share one purpose: to share their own vision of truth to the world.
***
Thank you @daveexmachina, this URL does not disappoint. http://t.co/WYF2Rmu8t8
— Ken Lowery (@kenlowery) March 17, 2015
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“Since his birth 33 years ago, Jonathan Keleher has been living without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain’s neurons.” This is pretty interesting, I think! There is a bit of a “isn’t it remarkable” tone that sometimes accompanies pieces about people living with unusual neurology that isn’t necessary, but I think it’s remarkable the things we’re learning about NEURAL PLASTICITY and also there is a pretty great Rodney Dangerfield joke in there.
***
Here is a video of a platypus getting petted that my mom sent me, it is very good.
Tags: link roundup, the internet
I barely ever use the caps lock button, even if I’m typing an entire caped sentence.
Same. I’ll sometimes do multiple sentences before I realize that I could have been using caps lock all along. It’s like I want every capital letter to be organically hand-crafted.
organic free-trade cruelty-free artisanal capital letters
In high school I learned to type on a typewriter, and there the rule was that you had to use the caps lock key for any number of capital letters more than two.
For whatever reason, this stuck with me, but not “where the number keys are on the keyboard”, so I habitually use caps lock instead of shift, but have to hunt and peck when i want to write “38”.
At about three allcaps sentences I’ll suddenly remember that capslock exists, and tHEN eVERYThing wiLL SUDdenly start veEring WILDLY in and OUT of loWERCase because I STILL WANNA Use the sHIFT kEY and I LOST My rYThM
Won’t go back and edit cause at this point that probably captures the tone better anyway
I never use the caps lock key unless it is a hotkey in a video game.
I may go so far as to say that I’ve never used the caps lock key except accidentally
There are two people allowed to use the caps lock: Chelsea Peretti & John Irving when writing the dialogue of Owen Meany.
Everyone else and it’s just annoying and pointless.
Or Terry Pratchett writing dialogue for Death.
I only remember to use it when writing all-caps sentences if there is an apostrophe. That’s the only thing that triggers the “Oh, hey, there’s a button for this,” reflex.
Have we talked about Steven Universe?
CAN WE TALK ABOUT STEVEN UNIVERSE?? http://www.autostraddle.com/steven-universe-and-t…
ALWAYS HERE FOR STEVEN UNIVERSE
I cried so much watching that episode! Garnet was already my favorite, but now she’s my extra-favorite.
GARNET. My daughter and I love her and are torn between wanting to be her or Raven from Teen Titans Go.
We are all of us Pearls or Amethysts who aspire to be Garnets.
OMG me too. And Marceline.
Steven Universe and Adventure Time are key items in my How to Raise Awesome Feminist Sons syllabus that I’m making up as I go along. My five-year-old son loves both of them. What else should I include?
Up until recently I’d have said MLP:FIM, but bronies. They ruin everything, and it has bled into the show, so much so that I can’t/won’t watch it anymore.
When he gets a little older, definitely throw some Gravity Falls in there. Mabel is AMAZING.
Mabel 4 lyfe. My husband sort of makes fun of me for cracking up every time at the part in the intro where Mabel turns on her light-up sweater, but I can’t help it!
Avatar: The Last AIrbender (the animated version, if that needs saying)
Okay but what is the thing that happened in the last week and a half that I went from never having heard of it to EVERYONE in my internet world talking about it??
Gayness happened. For real and not subtext and all. We are blessed.
Late reply, but
SPOILERS AHEAD
It turns out that Garnet is actually a permanent fusion and her two fused gems (Ruby and Sapphire) were so in love with each other that they decided they literally never wanted to be apart and fused full-time. I think. This may be a really general description but I haven’t seen the episode in full just yet, only Garnet’s song!
END SPOILERS
YES FACEBOOK IM-ING IS TERRIBLE AND THE AUTOMATIC READ RECEIPTS ARE ACTUAL HELL. Membership in a social network should not necessitate having a special ‘friends group’ blocked on chat with the title “Guys I Made Out With Once Who Won’t Go Away” (but aren’t terrible enough to defriend).
I refuse to install Messenger, but the normal fb app still gives you an alert when someone fb IMs you. It’s the worst.
That is a good call, because for some ungodly reason Messenger makes it so that when you get a message, the person’s stupid face sits in a bubble taking up your whole News Feed until you do a weird draggy-motion to move it. WHY.
I had Messenger on my phone for like two days. I deleted it for this very reason. It will not be installed again.
Like, the reason we invented the internet so we could hide behind our screens and not have to see people’s stupid faces when we don’t want to. Why would you make it so people’s stupid faces show up unbidden on my internet?
That is why we have the internet. . .right?
You are all really validating my instinctive “NOPE!” reaction when Facebook Messenger happened. I don’t know why that was the line, but it was. And I still get a notification on my phone; I just have to wait til I’m at a laptop to see what whoever-it-is said.
I also refuse to install messenger and I have IMs turned off when I go to FB on a regular computer because of that one person who every single time I would sign on would be like HI LET’S HAVE AN IN-DEPTH CONVERSATION ABOUT MY HORRIBLE LIFE CHOICES AND BAD IDEAS.
SAME! Send me a message. I will reply at my convenience, sorry not sorry.
what’s amazing to me are the number of people who send me FB messages who have other ways of reaching me. Like, okay, you’re my high school history teacher and you don’t have my email, fine, send me a message via FB. But you’re my college roommate? Send me an email or a gchat!
Seriously!!!!! Like, you are a person I text with and see in meatspace on a regular basis why on earth are you sending me a FB message???!!!
Can’t remember where I read this but some of the more on-point advice I’ve seen regarding the internet: “Good luck avoiding drama in a world where the read receipt exists.”
I’m pro read-receipts!! I just kind of think that any scenario in which I don’t want somebody to know I’ve read something is usually because I’m being kind of childish? Like, ooh, I need to play cool with this boy I have a crush on and not reply for 2 hours.
Did you folks read that Hairpin advice article about being a chill texter? (http://thehairpin.com/2015/02/clean-killjoys-a-lack-of-chill-and-crop-tops) GAME CHANGING! (Game ending?)
Hmmm, see I agree with your overall point about being a chill texter but I think Read Receipts actually encourage that kind of childish thinking. Like, when I have ever looked at one it’s because I’m being “OMG did that boy read my message? Is he playing it cool or does he just hate me? Whyyyyy won’t he respond faster?” It enables obsession over if people have gotten your messages and why, when we should all just chill out and accept that people will get back to us when they have a minute, or not. And I hate feeling like I’ve done that to other people by not responding right away after reading something, too. Misery lies on both sides of the read receipt.
Ah, good point. I was just thinking about whether I mind that I send read receipts. Receiving them is another whole well to drown in
I will defriend people I simply don’t want to hear from all day because I am a heartless monster who cares nothing for your three-year-old Internet social conventions; why would you not do this
Jewish guilt?
Me too. I don’t understand it. If you’re not friends with them in real life, if defriending them will not result in you being fired from your job or evicted from your home, why do you care? I regularly purge my friends list, not because I necessarily dislike the people, but because they’re not actually “friends” and we have nothing in common and never speak, even on FB. Maybe it comes from opening a FB account when it was first invented and friending literally every single person I knew or met for the space of year when it was all so novel and we didn’t know how terrible unlimited contact with random acquaintances could be. Ugh, life is too short for people who add nothing positive to it.
If we are talking about Mat Johnson, can we talk about Pym? I wanted to love it, and at times I did. Such a cool idea for a book! But mostly my enjoyment was spoiled by the lazy hateful caricature that is Garth.
I loved it, but i can’t remember who Garth was. So….I don’t know if I have much to offer here actually.
Ok wait I do. I remember being like, “this needs some more something, but I can’t wait to see what novel 3 will be like.”- I got the sense that overall it needed some time to temper his work and smooth out some unevenness.
Point 2, all his kinkade bashing made me unaware of all other issues.
Garth is the narrator’s fat, blundering, much-yelled-at “best friend” who moves forward a great deal of the plot action by being clumsy, lazy, or greedy (he eats all of their provisions, like, twice).
NOT OKAY.
The Kinkade shade was one of those times that I loved it, though.
The right to ignore people must be preserved.
Yes, and this is exactly why I love read receipts. If I’m deliberately ignoring you, I damn well want you to know it.
what I hate are read receipts in Outlook. I get the little pop-up window on my screen when I get a new email at work, and I often read things as they come in. If your email is “thanks”, I’ve read it and don’t need to open it. But I had a client who would put read receipt requests on EVERYTHING, and often times I wouldn’t actually open her emails until hours later, which is when I would see that she had requested the receipt. Also, if I am CC’d on your email or it isn’t actually TO me, you don’t need to know whether or not I’ve read it (plus, do you really need that cluttering up your inbox?).
Yeah, in my comment above I was referring to read receipts for texts or messenger apps.
if I am CC’d on your email or it isn’t actually TO me, you don’t need to know whether or not I’ve read it
a good rule of thumb is DO NOT CC ME ON YOUR EMAILS
I would have liked them when my phone was broken and I couldn’t read my text messages, because then ppl would know I wasn’t ignoring them, but I literally had not gotten their message.
(A friend of mine who usually texts me missed when I shared the broken phone situation on FB, and so finally FB messaged me to see if I was mad at her, because she had been texting me and I hadn’t replied. And rather than email me or use my alternate phone number or send me a gchat or DM me on twitter, she used facebook IM, which I am still incredulous about)
If someone jumps to the assumption that you’re mad at them because they didn’t get a response to a text, I don’t think the technology is the problem. Unless you were in the middle of fight or something.
In fairness to her, my phone was broken for over a month, so who knows how many texts there were. But she is also habitually self-centered and often assumes that other people’s mood or behavior is caused by her, so.
I find it much more satisfying to ignore/mute people without informing them, because every once in a while you’ll accidentally load up some dude you started filtering out months ago and the whole entire time he’s been sending messages, just gibbering into the void unable to distinguish and possibly no longer caring whether nobody’s there or they’re just all finding him beneath acknowledgement as per usual.
That Facebook wants to take simple joys of the Internet like this away from me is why I will never stand to use it for more than thirty seconds per decade.
But really, aren’t we all just gibbering into the void?
omg one of my exes. right here.
Ah, good, I was coming down here to quote this exact thing, but I’m glad you got to it first.
“The right to ignore people” should really become the new 2nd amendment.
Agreed. The current 2nd needs to be tossed out, so how better to shut up those protesting the tossing-out of the 2nd than with a new 2nd that allows us to ignore them forever 😀
~*~the tRuE mEAniNg of deMoCRacY~*~
Wow I have so many opinions on this Link Roundup!
First: I do not use capslock instead of shift when typing on a computer, but I totally do it when typing on my iPhone. Maybe because iPhone autocorrects all words into oblivion so nothing matters anyways?
Second: So, as someone who really likes machine learning and thinks it’s hilarious to declare things “optimized” that were clearly just brute forced, that optimized trip is some bullshit. There should have been a built in constraint that was “use route 101 to get from California to any other place on the West Coast.” Also, I get avoiding Chicago traffic, but I have driven across IA, MO and IL a few times in my life and those are empty, horrifying hours of your life you will never recoup. Also, Boston-New York traffic is worse by orders of magnitude.
Third: Awww that worst of the internet tourney. I agree with many, I am chagrined by many (because I am part of them. Hey, my mom loved the blogging class I got her for her birthday!). I think “people on the internet calling things on the internet ‘the worst'” should have been seeded, though.
“thinks it’s hilarious to declare things “optimized” that were clearly just brute forced” this is fascinating, would read more!
I always use the caps lock button. My husband thinks I am insane. But it’s more natural to me! And it works just fine!
Same here! With Mallory, we make three.
ETA: I type at 80wpm, so it’s not like it slows me down much, either!
Jia’s Jezebel journalism is just (I’m so sorry once I started I couldn’t stop) so good.
“just kidding I am aping the language of the oppressor rather than replicating it; it’s subversive”
Ahahaha this is pretty much how I expect all of these conversations to go.
I’m a big fan of Jia’s writing, but her “interview” with Mac McClelland on PTSD and secondhand violence made me really, really angry. It felt like the two of them were just congratulating each other for being oh so brave. First world narcissism at its worst. She was also really dismissive and nasty to anyone who took issue with the piece.
I just looked up the interview because of your comment. I’m interested in what made you angry. It’s important to talk about secondary violence for journalists and caregivers, social workers, teachers. These jobs are important, burnout is real, and everybody’s emotional wellbeing matters. What am I missing?
I have a hard time imagining anyone who was actually trained to touch-type either (a) using the shift key exclusively when typing all caps or (b) using the caps lock to type a single capital letter. Both of these variants are amazingly inefficient and cumbersome. Get an old-fashioned typing book and spend a few weeks learning to do it right; you’ll thank yourself.
I once got into a heated discussion with a fellow developer at a certain fruit-flavoured computer company over the fact that their new keyboards no longer had a caps lock key that actually locked (their Extended Keyboard II was the most wonderful computer keyboard ever manufactured); all it did was toggle its setting, but there was no way to tell what state it was in without looking — which a touch typist doesn’t have to do. He didn’t see the point.
I sometimes think that proper typing, like handwriting, is on its way to becoming a lost art, despite the proliferation of computers and keyboards; so many people I watch type with the same level of skill as a child gripping a crayon in their fist. Sad, really.
Don’t worry, there are other people who share your worries.</a
Lord save us from Suboptimal Typing. Why those of us who write mere thousands of words a week could in aggregate shave whole seconds off our time spent at the keyboard; time that could be better spent absently clicking through blog links for half an hour in between remembering what it was we were going to say.
Touch typing is one on the skills I’m glad I learned as a child — it has been so useful (until now, as I write this comment on a touch screen keyboard with my thumb)
I was trained. In 1998. I had to take an extra class to make up my requirements for Year 11, and I picked Office Skills at our local technical college.
So I was taught the traditional way to touchtype, which has turned out to be more handy than I could have possibly guessed. I still follow the correct placement for all the keys and can type at 80wpm with 100% accuracy (I was tested last year for a job).
(I remember complaining about it, and my uncle, who was in his early 60s at the time, correctly said, ‘Stop bitching. It will be one of the most useful things you ever learn’. That uncle is now in his mid 70s and routinely skypes his little granddaughters.)
But, when we came to practising capitals, it turned out –
Both my pinkie fingers were too short to reach the shift keys while I held down another key with another finger.
I asked the teacher what to do. She said:
Just use the capslock whenever you want to make a capital – you can reach that can’t you?
So
Fuck prescriptivism, people do what works.
Just out of curiosity: did they not teach you to use the opposite hand to hold down the Shift key when typing a shifted character? You’re not supposed to try to hold the Shift key and the key your shifting with fingers of the same hand, for exactly the reason you describe.
I always use the CapsLock button for capitalizing and will never stop. I’m pleased to know I’m not the only one! Also very excited to read the Mat Johnson interview–one thing I’ve noticed lately is greater discussion of what it means to identify as mixed, and since I’ve never identified any other way I’m super happy about this.
I touch type, so remembering to adjust my left little finger at a slightly different angle to hit capslock instead of shift is more trouble than it’s worth. Shift key user.
Here’s the thing though- being born without a cerebellum and being functional is REALLY FUCKING AMAZING. Like holy shit, the cerebellum is the most conserved structure of the brain- basically every mammal has one and it looks almost identical across species. In my neuroanatomy class, we were taught that there were more neurons in the cerebellum than in the rest of the brain combined (mostly because a lot of the cerebellum is made up of very, very small neurons called granule cells, BUT STILL). Some estimates put it at 80% of all the neurons in your brain.
Basically, there have only been a few reported cases of people born without a cerebellum and many of them don’t even get diagnosed until autopsy. They can literally live a full life without a crucial part of their brain and while they may show some strange symptoms, they still get along fine because the rest of the brain picks up the slack somehow.
SERIOUSLY HOW DOES ANYONE STUDY ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE BRAIN also my friend wrote a blog post about this for our neuroscience writing group and it’s really awesome and there’s a link to the paper where they discuss all the reported cases and what signs and symptoms the patients report.
One of these days scientists will finally figure out that the brain is mostly there for skull ballast and it’s the liver that does all the important cogitation
The liver, yes, with help from the travelling uterus?
Stuff like this amazes and impresses me about how our brains are wired wire themselves. (And then you have people like gender essentialists who think that a tiny difference in hormone balance is going to be a defining characteristic of someone’s whole personality and I’m just like… do you even KNOW how awesomely wrong you are? Brains are too cool for that.)
HOW DO THEY WALK HOW DO THEY BALANCE HOWWWWWWWWWW (I actually began typing this before reading the article and the first thing it mentions is that he walks weird and his balance isn’t great but WHATEVER the fact that he’s in the “not great” camp and not completely dead is still so cool)
I agree strongly with the “how does anyone study anything other than the brain” sentiment. The brain is the best.
I have so much respect for the millions of scientists who don’t study the brain, but I genuinely can’t imagine wanting to research anything else. Like, HOW, THE BRAIN IS THE COOLEST AND WE KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT IT.
That’s exactly how I feel when I see titles of talks outside my field or read the table of contents for more general journals – “that’s all very well and good, I’m sure you worked very hard, but are you aware the brain exists and there’s so much to know about it?”
I was editing a grant for a postdoc in my lab and she was writing about why she went into neuro. She said something along the lines of “the kidney is just a filter, the heart is just a pump, but the brain!!!!” Who needs all those other body systems.
Well shit that’s what I keep telling people but they always whine so much about it when they wake up in the tub of ice
Those other systems are essentially just mechanical parts that sustain the meatsuit that carries your brain around.
“SERIOUSLY HOW DOES ANYONE STUDY ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE BRAIN”
yes this is how I feel, yelling about brains is my life and blood and soul expressed
Oh, Mallory, you are so wrong about the Caps Lock thing! Mavis Beacon would be ashamed! The point of shift is that it gives you ease of flow while typing. There are shift keys on both sides of the keyboard for a reason! I use caps lock for MORE THAN ONE WORD IN ALL CAPS and that’s it. For example:
READ RECEIPTS ARE THE WORK OF SATAN. I want to be able to ignore people but still see what nonsense they’ve written me. OKAY MARK ZUCKERBERG??
Help I have forgotten if I ever use the shift key on the right side of the keyboard, I don’t think I do??? How did I go this far in life without ever using it? Have I failed Mavis Beacon???
I don’t think I ever use it either, but I also have very long fingers and taught myself to type. It languishes, unused except for accidental punches every now and again when I’m aiming for Enter.
So sorry, Right Shift Key. I’m sure you’re lovely. It’s just that…well, I’m in a long, committed relationship with Left Shift Key and we’re never gonna break up.
Right Shift Key is useful if you need to capitalize something on the right side of the keyboard and your left hand is occupied with a cat who desperately requires petting RIGHT NOW PLEASE.
Not that I know from personal experience or anything.
Or a mug of tea you aren’t about to put down.
I barely ever use the shift key on the right side of the keyboard, so it baffles me that some keyboard makers have decided to cut the size of the left shift key in half. I have observed other people making errors and being annoyed by this type of keyboard too!
(sorry, I just had to rant and this seemed like a decent opportunity)
One of the things on my To Do List That Will Never Get Done is to learn to use the shift key on the right side of the keyboard. Having to type A, Q, or Z breaks the flow of my typing, but not severely enough that I am likely to actually take the time to get used to the other shift key. :/
I don’t use it, except maybe some of the times I need to type these guys: < >
That’s it.
You probably use it for exclamation marks! And capitalizing things you type with your left pinky.
I still just hit shift with my pinky & then hit the exclamation point with my middle finger, or use my ring finger for A or Q or Z. I don’t even remember right shift is there except when I hit it instead of enter accidentally & then get annoyed.
Right shift is my good friend. That’s how I started both these sentences.
It just occurred to me that “shift” isn’t really a thing on smartphone screen keyboards and “on/off’ is basically what you’ve got? Is this a generational divide or something?
iPhone, you touch the shift key once and it capitalizes the next letter before returning to lower case. Double tap is all caps.
So…it depends on the smartphone? or at least the OS automates the “on/off” thing?
(Shift key only user here! Yeah, touch typing! Though I still have to look at the keyboard a lot when I type, because I get paranoid that I’m going to mess up touch typing the longer I type without looking.)
It’s the same on my android, but I’m thinking more in terms of you tap a key rather than holding one down. (I’m mostly a shift user and I also do 90% of my typing on a computer keyboard, not a screen.)
I had my own personal copy of Mavis Beacon at home (as opposed to just at school where we were forced to learn) because I guess I was a majorly nerdy child who really wanted to type well for some reason. I always use the Caps Lock. I do not remember if I learned this from Mavis Beacon, but I can’t help but feel if I was doing it wrong she would have punished me for it.
i had a pet chicken named mavis beacon once
jia and jane marie are like the only good things about jezebel. basically i guess that means i just want to read the hairpin. (and the toast obviously)
I refuse to send red receipts at work and have had more than one person call me to ask how I could reply to them without sending them a read receipt. I was like bro, you know I read it because I replied. I didn’t say bro, but you get the idea. Why does this upset them so? I am like I HAVE THE POWER TO DENY THEM TO YOU, AND I SHALL USE IT.
Also, Home Depot Sells pants??
Also, guess how I made that all caps sentence? SHIFT KEEEY. *flexes powerful pinky* I’m an OG Shift Key user from way back because that’s how it was taught in school! I’m just an O really. Old, I’m pretty old, is what I’m saying.
At my last job I had one colleague who requested read receipts for every email and it was SO IRRITATING. There was something so passive-aggressive about it, like “I am assuming right off the bat that you won’t reply to my email, and I want the read receipt so I can proove that you read it when I complain about you later.” I always reply to work emails within like an hour. I just wanted to call her and yell “YOU KNOW THIS ISN’T NECESSARY!”
I refuse to send read receipts on principle. That little thing that comes up that says “do you want to send a read receipt” is a WASTE OF MY TIME and the waster of my time must be PUNISHED.
I often play ignorant. “Huh, what? What read receipt? No, I didn’t get a pop up of any kind. Hmm, maybe your settings are messed up, you know how Outlook is! Technology, amirite???”
Oh Outlook, you are definitely in my Top Five Scapegoats list.
Let’s blame it all on Outlook.
My hatred of read receipts at work is second only to my loathing of people who have the “high priority” setting as their email default. That red exclamation mark is for emergencies only, not for telling us you’re going to the dentist.
Christ on his throne, yes, spread the word. I don’t think I’ve ever used it. If my email is going to be about something that fucking dire, I will call you.
I once tried to subtlely call someone out for using high priority on stuff that wasn’t by asking her why she had marked it as such, and she completely missed my point, but then she quit (THANK GOD)* and it was no longer an issue.
*(typed while using the right shift key, not caps lock)
The little red exclamation mark of doom is used like this in my office:
Subject: URGENT
Subject: TOP URGENT
Subject: SUPER TOP URGENT!!
Subject: !!!TOP SUPER URGENT!!!
Subject: !!!4TH REQUEST TOP URGENT!!!! *red exclamation point*
(Note: I jused used the right shift key exclusively for those all-caps setences. Apparently I’m a weirdo.)
I always feel so vindicated when someone else is as bitter (still!) about the death of Google Reader as I am.
I miss it so terribly.
An announcement of the Death Day came up on my Timehop the other day and I got sad all over again.
I’m still bitter.
Said bitterly as I read my email from The Old Reader telling me it’s been too long since I’ve looked at. I migrated all my feeds over before Death Day, but it’s just not the same. I lost Google Reader and I lost all my love for RSS feeds.
i read that and felt vindication immediately replaced by a reminder of the loss.
You are not alone. This bitterness actually came up in conversation with my husband and a coworker of his last night. We all talked sadly about what other RSS readers we’d moved on to and how they weren’t as good.
I can think of a couple friends who will probably join me in ranting about Google Reader 30 years from now.
> I have always, and always will, use the Caps Lock button rather than the Shift key in order to type even a single upper-case letter.
Wait, Mallory, are you saying you use Caps Lock even for the capital at the start of a sentence? Or just when it’s like… “exhibit A” or whatever? Pretty sure I do the latter a bunch.
My husband does the Caps Lock thing, too! I THINK it’s because he’s a programmer and often has to type in all-caps so he got used to just hitting Caps Lock, but I have no clue…
Read receipts should be user sparingly and with wisdom. People who use them for every email piss me off. But the few times I have used one it has kept me from walking to someone’s office and throttling them. I know you’re busy and more important than me, but I am not sending this to you for shits and giggles, I am sending it to you because it has something you need to follow up on lest a deadline pass and I lose my job because you didn’t respond.
SRS BIZNS
Auto-playing ad content is the WORST THING EVER, and every time I have to frantically hunt down whichever tab is responsible for the unwanted audio coming out of my speakers, I want to find the person or persons responsible and stab them in the face. Repeatedly.
I don’t know why people think that an autoplaying web ad will make people want to buy their product. All it does, for me at least, is induce homicidal fury and make me determined to NEVER EVER BUY THAT THING.
in your face/ears/screen webvertising kind of fascinates me, because WHO DOES THIS WORK ON?
i mean “work on” in other ways than “inspire thoughts of violence toward said products/companies. with blunt instruments. maybe sporks.”
also! sometimes when clicking on a link on my mobile browser i’ll get redirectes to the app store homepage of some terrible mobile game. does this ever work? or is this just a lowgrade form of penance for spending too much time on my phone?
it’s real fun when the ad pops up over the video you want to watch and autoplays and won’t shut off.
Also yesterday I was browsing Tumblr and someone’s page auto-played music and it was like a flashback to geocities.
I am here for that amazing Rousseau painting, Mallory. Lady on a Horse is GETTING IT DONE. Every Rousseau is just unbelievable, especially when you consider that he never left France and spent most of his life being a customs official.
I was trying to remember which Jezebel writer also does the caps-lock-for-every-capital-letter thing, and it turns out it’s Jia! (warning: it’s mentioned as an off-hand detail in a longer story about difficulties with IUD installation, so)
I love all the gun-shaped things on the worst things website. It’s amazing to me that there are people who are like, “let’s just take normal things that people use and make them gun-shaped, that is a great marketing strategy that will work.”
BECAUSE THEY ARE CORRECT, THIS IS A THEORY THAT THE MARKET WILL REWARD
ATHEISTS WHO LOVE TO ARGUE. Here’s a fun one: tell them there’s a gap in the fossil record and then immediately mute them. This will banish them to their own specialized Hell, thereby disproving their argument.
Well hot damn I think I can solve the problem of people on Facebook trying to message me right there.
Also re #4 of The Worst Things on the Internet, “Facebook Re-arranging Your Feed,” if this is a problem for you maybe you should just go out and capture your natural Facebook feed where it lives in the forest completely untampered with by evil Facebook people OH WAIT THERE IS NO SUCH THING ALL OF FACEBOOK HAS BEEN DESIGNED BY HUMANS AND IS CONSTANTLY BEING REDESIGNED!!!!!
People saying this kind of idiotic crap drives me insane, obviously.
but some of those design decisions are SO BAD and really make me wonder how* it is that those designer humans view their product SO DIFFERENTLY from many many human users.
*I know, someone will explain that “how” = “ad money,” but still.
I have no issue with people preferring it one way over another, it’s the assumption that there is some kind of “natural” Facebook feed that pisses me off.
But on Twitter or Tumblr or (back in the Pleistocene Era) LiveJournal or whatever, if you say “Here’s the list of people I want to follow,” the result will be a feed of everything those people post publicly, in reverse chronological order from top to bottom. On Facebook, some of those posts will appear in your feed out of order, or maybe fail to appear there at all, based on an algorithm whose workings are opaque to you. That’s what doesn’t make sense to me and strikes me as terrible — not the inherent design of the feed or making me look at ads every 5 posts or whatever, but HIDING THE SHIT THAT I TOLD THEM I WANTED TO SEE.
Should there be a link roundup that is just “things people’s moms sent them”?
Yes.
Cocktail umbrellas. She doesn’t drink.
a lot of it involves looking at robots that are running into things they shouldn’t be running into and saying, “there is positively nothing we can do about this, it’s optimized”
The eternal debate: North side or South side of Lake Erie? Is Cleveland worth long the south side? If you cut through Canada, you can see Windsor, London, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, and the loveliness that is the industrial heartland of southwestern Ontario on the 401.
Although, taking Highway 3 directly along the north side of Lake Erie from Windsor to Fort Erie is very pretty…
I’ve used a read receipt exactly once, it was entirely necessary, and I have no regrets!
(Multiple ignored business emails to a colleague, finally I put a read receipt on one and got a message that it had been deleted unread. Hah!)
HEY TOASTS, did you know that today is the 50th anniversary of the first spacewalk? I can’t even imagine what it feels like to step into the empty void of space, never mind knowing that you’re the first person to ever do so.
Despite having grown up in an age of relentless and incredible technological innovation I still can’t believe that people ever looked up into the night sky and said “We can totally go up there! See that moon? We’re gonna walk all over its stupid face!” and then ACTUALLY WENT AND DID IT. Humanity is so amazing and beautiful.
So many Space Feelings, all the time. Granted, I cry at just about anything, but going to the Space bits of the Air & Space Museum is a sure-fire way to make me super weepy almost instantly.
SPAAAAACE Oh I will watch anything and everything to do with space ever. EVER.
And can we all meet up again on the 27th to talk about Scott Kelly and his year-long mission and the fact that we can do a TWIN STUDY on the long-term effects of 0G living? And on the isolation? And how cool it is that we have twin brothers who HAVE BOTH BEEN IN SPACE who can lean on each other and teach us SO MUCH about what this does to your body?
Seriously, going into space is my life dream. At this point part of me is like, “Okay, if I were one of those people in Interstellar and I knew going into space could mean never coming back to Earth, what would I pack?”
Buzz Aldrin was at Stonehenge yesterday, doing his best superman. https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/5774862892…
MONK #1: what does a womans hair look like
MONK #2: like a long rodent pelt is glued to her head
MONK #1: is there hair behind her head
MONK #2: no, only on the sides
I was driving through Iowa, in those long stretches of straight uncurving road and somehow got up to 120 mph. A state trooper passed me and simply waved.
HELLO FRIEND AND FELLOW SPEED FIEND. What a glorious experience!
Lalala. I don’t have Facebook. I feel better about this decision every time I read these kinds of posts! If I want to be in contact with someone I will email or text them. I will admit to being a bit of an Instagram addict.
That Guardian article reminds me of Jay Smooth’s latest video: If my defense of racism was a Robin Thicke song, would I get sued for it?
For all the other Toastie Jay Smooth fans.
The brackets article is SO GOOD if only for the item “Someone asking ‘Did you get my email?’ in real life.” I have a coworker who annoys the shit out of me for this and many other reasons, and I will absolutely reply “No, actually, I don’t have a computer” next time he does this. Bonus points if he comes over to my physical desk to ask (he does this surprisingly and disappointingly often) and I’m in the middle of writing an itinerary or working through an Excel sheet at the time.
To be fair there have been times when people asked me that and the answer was actually “no” because of technical difficulties. But of course there were also many more times when the answer was “yes and I would be able to reply to the email more quickly if you stopped interrupting me to ask if I got the email.”
From The Worst Internet Things:
“ROUGHLY 85 PERCENT OF INTERNET MEN. You’re being yourselves and I wish you would stop.”
I’m an editor, so the one time I use those is as a relatively late step in the Where Is Your Chapter, Asshat? Process. Like, if I’ve sent some polite emails and I’ve called and I’ve gotten no response, I’ll escalate to emails with the little exclamation point, then turn on the read receipt and the other, as a hint, that, oh, you know, I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU GOT THIS because I have no other way to tell since you’re NOT ANSWERING ME AT ALL ABOUT THAT THING YOU AGREED TO DO, WHICH WAS DUE THREE WEEKS AGO BY THE WAY.
I have no remorse. 🙂
Please tell me I’m not the only one who clicked through from the Brackets article to that CrossFit message board where two guys argued about how many days are in a week?
I only read the FIRST OF FIVE PAGES (caps lock key there, def not for one word or less) but I tried and failed to hold in the laughter.
Oh help I went to the second page and it’s even better, other people start joining in at that point.
My father *only* types in ALL CAPS and refuses to change his ways even after his children explained that it translates as yelling. His reasoning is that his pinky fingers can’t reach the shift key while typing so he decided to just throw on the caps lock and never look back. Every typed message I’ve ever received from him has been in all caps and signed off with “LOVE, YOUR FATHER.”
It doesn’t help that while explaining himself he’d always pantomime typing on an air keyboard and then overemphasize how far that damned shift key was from his dainty hand. He’d usually make a distressed face too, so we could see the hardship he’s been saddled with. He also *insists* that typing in all caps is “less wrong” than typing in all lower case.
My dad is, without question, the real life version of George Costanza.
Garth is the narrator's fat, blundering, much-yelled-at "best friend" who moves forward a great deal of the plot action by being clumsy, lazy, or greedy (he eats all of their provisions, like, twice).
NOT OKAY.
The Kinkade shade was one of those times that I loved it, though.
Late reply, but
SPOILERS AHEAD
It turns out that Garnet is actually a permanent fusion and her two fused gems (Ruby and Sapphire) were so in love with each other that they decided they literally never wanted to be apart and fused full-time. I think. This may be a really general description but I haven't seen the episode in full just yet, only Garnet's song!
END SPOILERS
Whenever I get a new keyboard, the very first thing I do is pry off the caps lock key and toss it in a drawer. It’s far more trouble than it’s worth.
I use the shift key, but I’m going to see if I can train myself to use caps lock instead, because holding the shift key with my little finger is incredible aggravating to my ulnar tunnel.
I did it on this sentence, oh my god was it hard.