Peg Tittle's Blog, page 30

A tale of two athletes – thanks to ovarit

 

reposted from ovarit

Unfuckingbelievable.  Seriously.

Male vs. Female re sexual offences

“Around 13,000 males are in prison for sexual offences compared to fewer than 150 females. “

(according to a post at https://fairplayforwomen.com/stop-mis... about England and Wales)

Says a lot, doesn’t it.

Smartphones and Pictograms: A Regression to the Primitive

Given the size of smartphones, one is reduced to using one or two digits to create a message (compared to the ability to use all ten digits when using a laptop/keyboard). That probably explains the increase in the use of pictograms: touching a happy face from a menu of emoticons is easier than inputting the ten-character (including spaces) ‘I am happy’.

Also, given the size of smartphones, pictograms are more efficient: at the font required to be legible, ‘I am happy’ would take up more space.

Thing is, the use of pictograms is a regression to a primitive mode of communication. Pictograms are less expressive—capable of less complexity—than words and sentences. Does anyone even know the definition of a sentence anymore? It’s the expression of a complete thought. As opposed to an emotion (or a simple assertion—’yes’ ‘no’) such as can be conveyed by a pictogram.

Such regression is also evident in the forementioned use of two digits (or even one) rather than ten for input.

Which begs the question: are we regressing and therefore using pictograms and two digits or are we using pictograms and two digits and therefore regressing?

“For All Mankind” (an apple tv series)- absolutely appalling

I know.  Given the title, I never should have bothered.  And I certainly shouldn’t’ve expected, let alone hoped, for anything remotely alternative (the series is billed as ‘alternative history’).  Alternative to the male dominance, the white male dominance, the relentlessly juvenile competition and all the rest of disgusting masculinity (when the Soviets landed on the Moon before the Americans, the American astronauts were told, by their superior [sic] ‘Go, get angry, kick your dog, do whatever you have to do …’ [instead, many of them get in their hot cars and drive so dangerously, they put everyone on the road at risk of serious injury and death] — not one could cheer that humans had travelled to the Moon) … I lasted fifteen minutes.



Then I skipped ahead to episode three, because it looks like there’s an all-female crew … and lasted until the man said to the woman he was teaching to fly something like ‘Take it easy, hon’ …”.  Hon’?



So.  If this is not imaginative, but realistic, well, it’s worse than I thought.

How Not to Deal with Smoke from Your Neighbour’s ‘Campfire’ that Forces You Inside with All the Windows Closed

(This may well appear in CottageGetAway.com: Satan Takes Over, the sequel to TurboJetslams: Proof #29 of the Non-Existence of God, but I thought I’d give a heads up to women  attempting to stand up for their rights in a straight-forward, rather than simpering, manner.  (Not like you need one, probably.)

So I’m down at the water enjoying a lovely summer day, looking out at the sparkles on the water, music in my headphones, a cup of tea in my right hand, a book in my left, the fresh air—fuck.  Someone’s started a fire.  I can smell it.  Instant headache.  I turn to my right and sure enough, I see smoke rising on the property six lots upwind of me.  It’s 11:00 in the morning.  Why—

I try to take shallow breaths …   I turn my chair a bit …

Nope.  Not working.

At 1:00, it’s still going strong.  Determined to enjoy at least part of the day, I head out in my kayak.  And as I pass by, I see that there isn’t even anyone outside enjoying the campfire.  (Though since I don’t see any flames, I’ll call it a smokepit.)  And that really pisses me off.  It’s one thing to have to go inside for an hour while someone upwind has a campfire, chatting with friends, maybe toasting marshmallows with the kids.  That I accept.  It’s quite another to have to spend the whole fucking day inside for—what?  Because someone mindlessly associates being ‘up north at the cottage’ with ‘campfire’?  Even though they’re inside, probably watching ‘the game’ on their huge flat-screen tv?

I decide that if it’s still going when I return, I’ll stop and say something.

And it is.  Still going when I return.  At 7:00.  And there’s still no one there, enjoying it.  So I linger at their dock, hoping someone will see me.  Sure enough, someone appears at the door.

“I’d like to talk to you,” I call up.

“We’re in the middle of dinner,” she calls down.

So?  She expects me to sit in my kayak, paddling to stay in one place, until they’re done?  Or go home and paddle back?  She can’t stop eating for a minute?

“I’d like you to put out your fire,” I call up.  I add that it’s been smoking for eight hours, no one’s even enjoying it, there are six houses downwind …

“I’ll do it after dinner,” she replies.

No.  Her casual response indicates that she hasn’t understood the incredible rudeness of her behavior, the utter lack of consideration …

“No.  Put it out now.”  I’d decided I’d get more aggressive with asshole renters because there’s little chance of retaliation—they don’t know where I live.

Her response is unclear.

“Well, I’ll be contacting the owner then,” I say as I start to paddle away.  Hopefully, it’ll kill their chance to rent again.

“I AM the owner, BITCH!” she screams at me.

Oops.

Then she yells something like she’s heard about me and I’m a bitch and get the fuck out of her face …

“Move along!” she says then, dismissively, actually shooing me away with her fingers.  As if I’m a child.

I do not move along.

Next thing I know, there’s a guy running down the hill onto the dock yelling at me, “Why don’t you just fuck off and mind your own business!”

“I am,” I reply calmly.  “When your smoke comes onto my property, it becomes my business.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

I repeat what I’d said about eight hours, downwind, headache, no one’s even enjoying it …

Then another man comes down to the dock, says he’s also the owner and I’ve upset his wife, they’re having dinner.

What?  I’ve upset her?  Because she’s had to stop eating for a minute?  (What is it with people and eating food?)

Well, I’m upset too.  Because eight hours, smoke, headache …  I’ll apologize for a two-minute interruption when she apologizes for a three-hour headache.

I try to explain.  “If you could keep your smoke on your own property, no problem, but you can’t, so—”

“That’s scientifically impossible,” he says.   Oooh, ‘scientifically’.  Such a smart man.  “Just think about it,” he adds, helpfully.  I’m tempted to scratch my head and look like a complete idiot.

By this time, the other guy is really losing his shit.  He’s charging the full length of the dock at me again and again as if trying to scare away a bear.

“If I used a paint sprayer while on my property,” I say to the man, the second one, “and because of the wind, much of the spray drifted over onto your property, and you ended up with your screens, your windows, your siding covered with a fine mist of red paint, that’d be okay?  No cause for objection? Mind your own business?”

No response.

Well, except for, “You know what you should do?” It’s the other guy, the first one. He’s practically spitting, he’s so excited.  “You should take your headphones off, get some rocks, and smash them against your head, then jump in the lake, and drown.”

Part of me’s thinking, ‘That’s a lot of words.’

Another part of me’s thinking, ‘That’s a hair away from a death threat.’

So now, I move along.

I’m surprised at their seeming surprise.  (I’m crazy!)  This is not a new issue.  It’s why, for example, chicken farms are widely hated.  And it’s why there are zoning bylaws in so many townships.  (Not our township.  Of course not.)

Of more obvious relevance, weather websites have been for days issuing air quality alerts for our area because of the forest fires northwest of us.  And the smoke drifting through the neighbourhood from their smokepit is way worse than the slight haze we’ve seen from the forest fires.

And I’m stunned at how easily it came to them, the verbal abuse.  Did I say fucking fire?  Or fucking smoke?  Perhaps.  But I didn’t tell any of them to fuck off.  I didn’t call her a bitch.

So, how should I have dealt with the problem?  Well, first, I shouldn’t’ve been a woman.

And second, I—no, actually, that’s it.  If a man, greying at the temples, had stopped on his way past, I suspect the whole interaction would’ve unfolded quite differently.

Reasons You were Not Promoted that are Totally Unrelated to Gender

Another brilliant piece at McSweeney’s: Reasons You wee Not Promoted that are Totally Unrelated to Gender

The Evil of Touchpads: Menus

I recently rented a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula and found myself infuriated by the tiny device to control the smart tv: to search for a specific movie in Netflix, you had to swipe across and across and across, back and forth, to move the cursor along the alphabet arranged in a long 26-characterer single line, to click on the desired letters one at a time, understandably often overshooting the mark, then having to swipe across across across to the ‘x’ to backspace and delete … My god, it took me a good thirty seconds per title. Back home, when I watch Netflix I do via my laptop, which I’ve connected to my (dumb) tv. Thus, using all ten digits and the qwerty keyboard, it takes me three seconds per title to search.

I understand the absence of a qwerty keyboard, because it was designed with the mechanics of typewriters in mind, but even a five-by-five (plus one) layout of the alphabet would’ve been more efficient. A wireless keyboard rather than the ipod-sized device would’ve been more efficient still.

But I guess this is the way of the world now? I don’t have a smartphone (no need—I have a laptop for work at home and a pay-as-you-go phone for emergency calls when I’m on the road) (and a gps unit and maps for navigation). Nor do I have a tablet (again, no need). So—touchpads have taken over?

I find that as incomprehensible as the take-over by 16:9 screens for laptops. (I suspect that laptop designers didn’t realize that some people, perhaps even many people, use laptops for reading and writing.) (Substantive reading and writing, not texting-twitter reading and writing.) It seems to me that touchpads are either designed by idiots or designed intentionally to discourage personalized choice—after all, with them, it’s so much easier to just choose from a provided menu than to search for something. In theory, a touchpad could display a qwerty keyboard that one could then use, which nullifies most of what I’m about to say, but at the size of a smartphone or a tablet, it’s not going to be easy to use, in which case most of what I’m about to say is not nullified.

So what am I about to say? That the consequences of the ubiquity of touchpads and therefore menus are scarey indeed.

1. Loss of initiative. The menu—i.e., the realm of possibility—is completely determined by someone else. Poking at options may feel active, but it’s really just reactive. Furthermore, offered only orange or apple juice, one ‘forgets’ there may be pear and pineapple juice out there for the asking—and so they don’t ask.

2. Loss of imagination. Yes, sometimes it’s nice to just choose from a menu or catalogue, but as a habit, for everything in life, it’s a good way to kill imagination and creativity. (I think this is what’s happened to music composition. No one actually composes music anymore: they don’t think of, imagine, a melody, then arrange the harmonies, then the instrumentation, etc.; instead, they just keep choosing from menus and submenus and subsubmenus of music software programs until they have end up with something they like.)

3. Loss of social diversity. When most people use the menus (rather than search beyond the menu or even just past the first ten options), most people are exposed to the same things. Well, you are what you expose yourself to.

4. Loss of product/service diversity. Surely a menu of drama, comedy, thriller, horror, action, and romance doesn’t exhaust all of the movies out there. Some providers (for example, Prime Video—at least on my laptop; maybe the menu is reduced for device/smart tv use?) also list categories like indie films and foreign films, but a complete directory would be a nightmare to access on a touchpad. (You’d be scrolling down for hours just to come across what you want … ) (Unless of course, one could search for a genre or an element—hey, that’s an idea!)

5. Loss of product/service quality. The menu approach opens the door, widely, to errors in categorization. Suppose I want to see such and such a movie, so I look for it in drama, but since it’s not there, I assume it’s not available, so I go to another provider. What if it turns out it was filed in comedy instead? This sort of thing is likely if the categorization is done by idiot algorithms (see “IT, AI, and Us”). I was horrified to find a mud wrestling show on a list of feminist shows; I guess it was deemed feminist because it’s dominated by women—is that what the guy who programmed the algorithm thinks feminism is? And see, right there: with touchpads and, therefore most likely, menus, we’re at the mercy of some guy with a limited education: most programmers are male and, I suspect, haven’t taken a science or humanities course since high school and probably didn’t do well in either at the time, so they very likely have a skewed and woefully inadequate awareness/understanding of the world (I was appalled to hear even a male poli-sci student confess to being unaware of sexism). And that skewed and woefully inadequate awareness/understanding is creating your realm of possibility.

The difference between women and men

Can’t stop staring at the picture of Serena Williams and Andy Murray. It seems to sum of the difference between women and men.   https://nypost.com/2021/07/10/trans-women-athletes-have-unfair-advantage-over-those-born-female/

Proposed Official Men’s Volleyball Uniform – Equality in Sport

Why won’t men shoot free throws like …

See article here at a great site for, of, men examining masculinity (it’s about time!).