I type in full questions all the time, actually. Especially if it's medical and not something technical, where there's likely to be an autocomplete of the full question and established pathways to answers.
Autocomplete is definitely your friend for complete questions.
Also, I generally think of the complete question first. I could edit it down into keywords but why bother? Google will pick out the important words for me.
Interesting--I had reversed the generations, thinking that people our age and younger would think of themselves as "searching" (hence, keywords), while older people might think of themselves as "asking the computer a question" (hence, full sentences).
But you're right, the real question is whether or not we're old.
Nah, in general the younger you are, the more likely you are to be a fast and accurate typist.
But still, I think keywords are better. Putting "where" into the question might miss the important city ordinance that it is only legal to buy chihuahuas in Shreveport in months ending in 'r'. Shady dog dealers are a problem. More generality and then narrow the search.
"we can see her softly fingering the window lever as if it were a penis, "
Last night, looking for reviewers mentioning this, I searched "La Chinoisie train scene" I called it a 'handle" and used "caress". I don't know how you get grammatical and specific without missing a lot of sites.
I also wanted reviews of the movie and the scene in general
Yeah, I've been allowing myself to just type the complete question lately, because it totally works. Save the Boolean shit for Westlaw.
Recently I've had to help a number of "millennials" (I can't believe they put up with being called that, but they do) solve computer problems. Many of them are insanely terrible at using computers. They click all over the place, very rapidly, lunging at any icon that might be promising before they have a chance to figure out what it might do. I tell them, "Slow down, tweaker." It's the opposite of the problem that old people have, which is being afraid to click anything. But I'm kind of amazed that these very bright kids who barely remember a time without the internet apparently don't have a clue about the background architecture of the shiny screens they stare at.
How do you "narrow the search" in a google search? You're just starting a new search, ain'tchya?
Checking, last night I did spell the title correctly.
7:I have a little Google window upper left. Search term gets a page of links with a much bigger box. Add words to narrow search
"La Chinoise"
"La Chinoise reviews"
"La Chinoise reviews train scene"
"La Chinoise reviews train scene jpg gif"
Do people really type full grammatical sentences into the little search box?
Bob seems to be under the misapprehension that Google searches only and exactly for the conjunction of your keywords in hypertext documents. There's actually a fair amount of natural language processing and fuzzing going on to try to find what you meant rather than literally what you said. Using full-sentence questions won't always help, but it can't hurt.
Yes. That was the case even when there was a link that purported to Search Within Results.
8: But you're just doing a new search. You could have searched "La Chinoise reviews train scene jpg gif" initially, and your results would be the same.
10 -> 7. In do full questions a lot of the time. Sometimes you get a direct match on Yahoo answers or somesuch. You generally do not get the answer (or an authoritative answer anyway) that way, but often it provides clues and guidance on how to further search.
I google full questions sometimes. If what you're looking for is the answer to a specific question ("has RuPaul had plastic surgery?") it is often more effective than keywords ("RuPaul plastic surgery") which get you lots of general co-occurrences of the terms.
Nah, in general the younger you are, the more likely you are to be a fast and accurate typist.
Eh, sometimes. I find older people are more likely to have had hardcore typing classes. (No correction allowed!) They were just starting to talk about changing the name of the class to "Keyboarding" when I took it in high school.
"Does any Internet reviewer of La Chinoise mention Veronique caressing the window handle in the train scene with Francis Jeanson?"
This worked, the third hit. It still feels ridiculous.
For one thing, I am kinda used to seeing what I type as I type it, not just the last ten characters. Maybe this is why we have comment boxes.
Kids.
9:I know that, whippersnapper. I am ever so grateful to fuzzies.
I can remember a time when the question in 9 wouldn't work because I left the diacritical mark off Veronique.
Save the Boolean shit for Westlaw.
Do you use Westlaw more or lexisnexis, and does lexisnexis require boolean terms? I've forgotten.
6: It seems entirely reasonable to me that Kids These Days would be worse at computers than us. The inner workings of the machines have become steadily more opaque, and consequently easier for new users. When we were coming up, on the other hand, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to have some idea of how the damn thing worked below the surface of the GUI.
A FB acquaintance related a story of looking at his nanny's search history on their home computer, and apparently she would google everything. As in, if she wanted to get to amazon or yahoo or random URL she was given, she would google amazon.com or yahoo.com or random URL, then click on the first search result.
Google has gotten much shittier in the last year or so, I think under the guise of making it more "non-search-savvy friendly" but it does stupid stuff like finding forms of the word or leaving out words entirely (I guess because they're referenced by linking pages or something?) I've found myself having to put quotes around individual words to make sure they're in the search results I want. I guess there's probably some setting I could change for that, but then I have to either set it on every computer I use or always make sure I'm logged in to google before searching.
I, too, used to be keyword-only, but now sometimes type in full sentences, because it often seems to get better results.
But I'm kind of amazed that these very bright kids who barely remember a time without the internet apparently don't have a clue about the background architecture of the shiny screens they stare at.
As my brother pointed out to me, kids these days grew up with computers that work properly when given intuitive instructions. They didn't have to understand anything about the machine in order to make it work. So when they are confronted with applications that aren't carefully designed to anticipate their needs, they are useless.
This notion that "millennials" are "net native" and therefore naturally good with computers is bullshit.
21: I was just thinking that there's this strange escalation going on where google wants you not to realize that you're using an interface to a computer system and users want to understand how to make google do what they want. So in practice what's happening is that users are trying to figure out the rules of a completely opaque, ever-changing user interface while google tries to keep them from doing so in the interest of ease of use.
I think in general there's also an overestimation of how much people really knew back in the day. Sure, all you nerds knew the underlying technology stack of every website in 1996, but the people who today are all, "Please tell me where I can find a recipe for pumpkin pie, Mr Google?" didn't even bother trying until a few years ago. (I don't mean the exact same people who are now older, but within the new cohort of kids the kinds of people, ie non-nerds, who in the past wouldn't have even touched a computer.)
20, 23: I do not much buy these conclusions. Having a computer that works poorly is not the key to facility with computers. If anything, I would imagine that "millenials" lack facility because they're used to dealing with broken, poorly configured windows systems where 1. there are eight ways to do anything and 2. a random subset of them work correctly at any given moment.
25: yup. There are people my age who, ten or fifteen years ago, spoke proudly about how they just didn't "get" or "do" computers. I do not think there are people ten or fifteen years younger than me who say this.
I feel like the bifurcation I've seen, anecdotally, with the young folx, is that the people who actually have some interest in coding or whatever are scarily competent generalists -- just seems like more comes under their purview than the boffins I grew up with. On the other side, the kids who don't really care about anything programming-related are indeed in general less sophisticated, but they assimilate new GUIs and similar with much more rapidity than older people. So they sometimes give the appearance of being much more competent than they actually are, because they've learned all the "tricks" very rapidly and intuitively.
On the third hand, I was talking to a fellow, an artist, who took a community college course that worked through all the entry- and mid-level usages of MS Office a couple of years ago. According to him, he wound up getting steady temp work and later a permanent position (one that I had also applied for) doing bookkeeping, based solely on the fact that he knew all the most efficient ways to do everything in Word & Excel.
Ironically, acrually running the search in 25 gives the first non-sponsored result as lmgtfy. So maybe there's even a point at which google is subtly saying, "Don't be a douche."
Google's been pissing me off lately by not paying attention to all my search terms. I'll type in like 5 or six words, and the first item in the search results won't even have one or two of the words on the page.
I refuse to Google using full sentences on general principal. If I wanted to do that, I'd be using Ask Jeeves.
As in, if she wanted to get to amazon or yahoo or random URL she was given, she would google amazon.com or yahoo.com or random URL, then click on the first search result.
There was a funny moment a few years ago when the first hit for "Facebook" was not, in fact, Facebook. The website that was the first hit was then inundated with comments complaining about the new interface.
26,27: These are really two different things we're talking about: comfort with computers and competence with computers. Back in the day, if you had one, you necessarily had the other. Now it's possible to be comfortable with computers and also incompetent with them.
The best thing about typing the full sentence is watching what the autocomplete guesses when you type in the first couple of words. I feel like I'm communing with the collective hive mind when I do that. (Unless even the autocomplete is tuned to my preferences somehow).
That 'random co-occurences' thing Sifu mentioned above is a very annoying element of Google. If I'm trying to find e.g. what well-known person X has said about Medicaid I get page after page of news aggregator or headline sites with one article about Person X and another about Medicaid.
It occurs to me that in general natural language processing-type interfaces are going to lead to shitty user experiences, because you have a very strong prior belief that you understand how they work, but you're always going to be wrong. So any unexpected behavior is inevitably going to be way more confusing than it would be on a system where you're relatively agnostic about what the underlying rules should be.
This must have occured to somebody before me.
That is, with any natural language interface, you know way more about how the computer should work than the computer does.
21: This would be easy to do in the new version of safari where the google search bar is in the same place as the address bar. I hate it.
27 -- present and reporting for duty, sir, along with my 1991 typewriter.
I don't really articulate questions all that often. I want to know something -- how many games now has the visiting team won The Brawl -- and use search terms. But then I was using Westlaw and Lexis well before the Google search era.
where the google search bar is in the same place as the address bar. I hate it.
I love this feature of Chrome. I get exasperated now when I have to think about which bar to type in.
along with my 1991 typewriter.
Joey was going to a Lego camp, where each week they were assigned to build something out of Legos. One day the teacher announced that they were going to build a typewriter. Most of the 7-year-olds did not know what a typewriter was.
One volunteered, "It's like a keyboard."
Another added, "But paper comes out."
The first confused 7-year-old then said, "You mean it is like a printer?"
DUDE, WE'RE ALL GOING TO LIVE TO BE 500, WE'LL HAVE TIME TO FIGURE IT OUT.
39, 42 - god yes, much better, who wants to have to go to a whole new page to search?
I type more questions (or abbreviated questions) now. Like people said above, why bother thinking more carefully when it seems to work?
37- Fucking Siri. I tried using it for texting, especially seemed useful for when biking. So I would say "text _person_ done" when leaving my lication and it would say "I can't find _person_ Dahn in your contacts." Then I read how there are trigger words to let it know what you're doing, one of which is to say "that" between addressee and message. So I started trying "text _person_ that I'm done" and it responds "I can't find _person_ Pat in your contacts." It seems to expect a two word entry for names unless you're using a predefined relationship (mom, dad, my wife) but who the hell talks like that? Apparently all of us, soon enough.
This notion that "millennials" are "net native" and therefore naturally good with computers is bullshit.
When I was teaching one of my students emailed me to ask how to rotate a pdf.
48: Hopefully they didn't mean after you had printed it.
46: I strangled the bitch after a few attempts to get her to understand me.
When I was teaching one of my students emailed me to ask how to rotate a pdf.
I have had multiple students whose excuse for not having done the reading was that the pdf was sideways, and therefore too hard to read.
I wonder if someone will position themselves as the search engine alternative for smart people who know what they're doing and don't want some of their search terms ignored, punctuation dropped, or 20 pages of the same damn news article.
I love this feature of Chrome.
Yeah, me too.
37: Sort of the Uncanny Valley of natural language interfaces. I get this with Android voice commands all the time. The commands are fairly tightly constrained (e.g, "send text to _person_" or "note to self") and I'm always vaguely remembering them and getting them wrong (e.g., "text _person_" or "memo") and it just doesn't work at all. Touch keyboard prediction/auto-correct is similar. When it works you feel a pleasant one-ness with your device. When it doesn't you feel an intense aggravation that your phone just doesn't "get" you.
I may have mentioned this before, but I had to teach a student how the shift key works (due to a software bug that ignored caps lock, which was the only way the student knew how to capitalize letters).
45: in the old version it wasn't a separate page just off in the upper right hand corner-- like in Firefox.
The single searchbar/urlbar is my favorite development in software in years.
42, 53: The downside is that people get really confused about searches vs. URLs. I had to have a screen-sharing tech support session with my father once because the URL of a company-internal site was stuck in "search" mode in Chrome and he just kept getting an empty list of search results.
52: If you find search terms are being ignored, it's usually because they provide little or no extra signal. E.g., the probability of "foo" occurring in a page containing "bar", "baz", and "qux" is >95%.
Ok, how about if a search engine that doesn't also search for alternate forms of the word I'm searching for, or synonyms of the word I'm searching for?
I think a lot of students just try one thing and if it doesn't work, ask for help or just give up. I think you see this more with young students.
It reminds me of my kids. As soon as something goes wrong with what they are doing, they ask me to do it for them. Yes, I know this means they're spoiled. I'm trying too counteract my earlier mistakes by making them do things themselves, but it may be too late.
56 - yes, but that's ALMOST as much effort! I use chrome, Firefox and IE sometimes, as well as the Android browser, and they all just let you type stuff into the url bar now. Much more civilised.
62: I find that too confusing visually. I also like to be able to switch to yahoo or whatever other engine in the same bar.
63: I also liked that function on Firefox, but for me it's been supplanted by Chrome's typing the URL or a part thereof, hitting tab, and getting the search function. (It doesn't work for Maps, but not much else.)
36: If I'm trying to find e.g. what well-known person X has said about Medicaid I get page after page of news aggregator or headline sites with one article about Person X and another about Medicaid.
Atlantic Wire had a post recently on Google search tips, which linked to this page from Google itself. It strikes me that some of the search restriction terms there might be of use (maybe 'allintext'?)
Veronique, the bullets fly;
Veronique, she close the door
and start the Franco-Prussian war.
Veronique, the femme fatale;
Veronique, the fleur-de-mal;
Veronique! Veronique! Veronique! Veronique!
The single searchbar/urlbar is my favorite development in software in years.
This is almost incomprehensible to me.
What's odd, is that I know that I'm just reflecting the force of habit; if I had always used a combined URL/Searchbar I'd probably think it was natural. But I think of typing in a search and typing in a URL as two different things, and it feels wrong to me to combine to the two functions in one input.
(It also seems designed to encourage the behavior in 21, which irritates me, but that's a secondary objection.)
It saves a second dozens of times a day, plus it saves several seconds a few times a day when you accidentally end up typing in the wrong bar. It's a real improvement for me.
67: I was just trying to decide whether I should confess that I, too, like SP's nanny, google everything, including unfogged, every time. So now I'll ask, why is that irritating behavior?
As someone who also finds it irritating, it's because (a) it suggests the user doesn't know the difference between a URL and a search, (b) it tells google absolutely everything you're doing, (c) if the user didn't have google, would he/she be unable to function?
(a) and (b) are my principal frustrations.
An example of how (a) leads to problems: a sometime coworker is of the google-everything species. If an email comes in that looks suspiciously like malicious phishing, he'll ask me about it. I explain that he can hover the mouse over the link given in the email to view the actual linked URL. This is like greek to him: URL? Web address?
Of course it's not necessarily the case that all users who google everything (including web addresses) have lost track of what's actually happening.
69: At least in my experience, it's irritating because it means the person relies utterly on Google to be getting to the right location. They don't know or check the address at all. They just blindly assume they are on the right site.
This is a particularly dangerous habit for people with a poor baloney detector or limited literacy skills, who end up searching "drivers license" and getting one of those scammy fake sites that tries to look like the real DMV. Before you know it you have given your credit card number or SSN to something that is not actually a government site.
Or this one: For a while, the first hit you got under "Mozilla Firefox" was a virus site. If you weren't smart or quick enough NOT to click on the first search result, hello infected computer.
I try very, very hard to teach all of my colleagues and interns and clients good critical thinking skills. Some of them are much more gullible than others.
69: 'Cause it's not cool. Like people wearing Crocs are undateable. Or something.
I must say it is staggering to me how many people of every age have absolutely no idea how computers work. I just sat through an agonizing webinar led by somebody who clearly didn't understand the differences between applications and documents, or live web pages versus or screen shots. By the end of it, I was not only horrendously embarrassed for him, but deeply doubting the wisdom of the webinar organizers.
I endured several other webinars earlier in the year that were teaching people how to log in to a website. I kid you not. Forty-five minutes of sympathetically telling everyone how they knew it was a big change, and really difficult, but stick with it, and you'll get the hang of it. To a group of people with college degrees. Many of whom had questions.
74.last: Oh, you mean Heebie U faculty members? I no longer go to any training of anything, and thank god we no longer have the provost that took roll. That made me furious.
Google probably makes a fortune from people who google a website's, then click on the pay-per-click ad for that website that is the first link at the top of the page.
70: Well, since I do know the difference between a url and a search and I am, more generally, capable of functioning, I'm happy enough to have google know how very much I love unfogged.
So now I'll ask, why is that irritating behavior?
Other people have explained why "google everything" is vaguely suspicious behavior. When I wrote my comment, however, I was actually thinking that it's irritating that google encourages the "google everything habit."
It is, like so many things google does these days, a clear example of them making decisions which benefit their business and which are neutral at best for their users.
(The other obvious complaint is that it takes an extra click to google "facebook" and then select the top link compared to just going to facebook.)
It saves a second dozens of times a day,
I believe it works for you. For me, I'd lose more than the the one time a day that I mistyped a URL, got a bunch of search results back, and had to mentally re-calibrate to respond to a result which I wasn't expecting. Obviously that's something that I could get over pretty quickly, but for now it's still distracting enough that it outweighs the performance advantage. CHANGEBAD!
I am very often tempted to read the "<3" emotional icon as an ice-cream cone with two scoops that are adjacent to rather than stacked upon each other.
It makes me really angry that Google has lightened the "Sponsored links" box so much. It's well-nigh indistinguishable on some computers, especially if you're viewing it through a projector. It wouldn't be such a big deal if they were just running ads for for-profit companies, but they consistently host ads for outright scams and frauds.
77: I'm absolutely with you Mme. Merle, URLs are for antiquated losers, bookmarks are worse (except for rarely-visited sites, or archives). I tend to search everything. In context other people's concerns are valid, but in general they're are on a par with the fucking fuckwads who thirty years ago lamented that kids these days didn't know what LRECL or BLKSIZE meant. You're all old washed up geezers before your time. Time to step aside.
I endorse everything Witt has said here.
I also like ice cream cones.
I mean, I don't really type in the URL or go to the bookmark either. I just type "unf..." or "fac..." in the bar and it pops right up and I just tap down to the right website. Are JP and Merle saying that you make it actually search, and then go click a link?
87: Yes, and it wasn't until this discussion that I realized that the rest of you must instead be doing something like what Heebie describes. And so I just tried it myself, and indeed, typing "unf" in the bar gets me here in one click rather than two. So that'll save a second or two of my valuable procrastination time.
But I do see the points that Witt and NickS are making, and I can see how Google is a problem for people who are naive about the sources of information.
I just type "unf...", press enter before autocomplete loads, and end up at the University of North Florida or the UN.
88: Better living through Unfogged!
"millennials" (I can't believe they put up with being called that, but they do)
Given that the main alternatives I've seen are "echo boomers" and "Generation Y" (both of which seem to have mercifully passed out of common usage, if in fact they were ever in it), I'm quite happy with "millennials" as a description for my generation.
As for the search/URL bar question, I wasn't crazy about it when I first switched to Chrome from Firefox, but I've gotten used to it. It's okay.
press enter before autocomplete loads, and end up at the University of North Florida or the UN.
Tangentially this reminds me of one of the other areas in which I'm crotchety -- I dislike the ways in which more and more of the web is built around the assumption of unlimited bandwidth and, more generally, the level of bloatware on the web.
Google's one of the worst offenders, really, as they add more and more to their home page and gmail both have gotten actively slow to load, when they used to be relatively lite. But, at least I know they've though about that tradeoff, I see so many websites in which they clearly haven't even though about the idea that it isn't ideal to have the front page load a giant flash video. Really . . . ?
||
Anyone got an audiobook recommendation? I signed up for Audible to get my friend Dushko's reading of Lightning Rods, highly recommended, and now I've been accumulating credits at the rate of $15/month. I've put it on hold twice, but it keeps coming back. I want to buy a bunch of books and cancel it.
For fiction or memoir, I'd love something where you can recommend the reader as well as the book. For non-fiction, anything engaging, nonspecialist and not super long (no Caro). As long as the reader isn't hated I'll take a chance.
Got an account? I'll give you a gift copy of Lightning Rods.
|>
Anyone got an audiobook recommendation?
Roger Ebert has a memorable recommendation (which I haven't followed up on myself).
The audiobook, read by Sean Barrett, is the best audio performance I have ever heard; he snuffles and sniffles his way to greatness and you almost believe he is inhaling bliss, or the essence of a stone. I once almost destroyed a dinner party by putting it on for "five minutes," after which nobody wanted to stop listening.
I am very often tempted to read the "
Cannibal, eating testicles last.
dammit. see 81.
thanks for the tip, 95. I liked that movie. Will add the book.
I still bookmark stuff, though by now I've accepted the fact that bookmarking a page pretty much means I'll never read it again, ever. The odds of rereading are much higher when it's something I know I'll remember how to search for (mostly because that's an indication that I'll remember it at all).
Dammit, it's not available on Audible. But the reader has a cornucopia, including Dickens, Jo Nesbo, Beckett, and (!) Zizek on Trotsky. Will investigate.
I'll second 93. It's particularly annoying on a mobile device, or so says heebie-heebie.
OTOH, things I love: online sites, stores, etc where new images load only when you scroll down past the visible images. And you never have to go onto a next page of results.
It's okay.
That's really more a Gen-X emotion, youngster.
I also like to be able to switch to yahoo or whatever other engine in the same bar.
Even when I had that search bar with several sites I visited all the time, I usually ended up just typing "wikipedia [search term]" or "leo [german word]" in the google bar instead of bothering to use the dropdown.
94: John Hodgman's trio of fake trivia books have epic audiobook counterparts.
"live web pages versus or screen shots"
I must admit I sometimes fool myself when I need a screen shot for a presentation I capture the whole screen (because I always forget the windows command to just capture the active window), paste the result in paint and copy the needed part, then accidentally switch back to paint which I think is actually my desktop and suddenly I think my mouse is broken because no clicks work any more.
Search for Unfogged? Really?
Uhh, Firefox upper right "Most Visited" has the blogs I read most often and a couple other sites
The Bookmarks toolbar has the next set, dragged and dropped:IMDB, Wiki, AMG, Amazon
I even use the Firefox History Box
and this means, a lot of my online surfing is done with the mouse only.
You know, part of this might be desktop versus laptop or those tiny little toy pretend computers kids are carrying. One of the reasons I don't use a laptop much is the tricky handle or ball.
But if I did use a touch screen, I certainly would set up favorites with icons the first hour.
Or this one: For a while, the first hit you got under "Mozilla Firefox" was a virus site. If you weren't smart or quick enough NOT to click on the first search result, hello infected computer.
The first two hits right now are "Ez-download.com" and "Todownload.com". The second of which is definitely a malware site. They both have the very very faint background color indicating that it's sponsored and not a real search result.
I think there is a note of "you're not enjoying it the right way" in my and perhaps others' annoyance at the practice in 21/69. The more objective problem with it is just the needless effort: you (1) go to the search box, (2) type what you're looking for and hit enter, and (3) move the mouse to the first result and click. If you type your URL directly, it only takes (1) and (2); with autocomplete, you don't even need to type in the full site name. But considering how few people learn keyboard shortcuts, my valuation these snippets of time is likely on the high side.
I sometimes use Chrome's search box to do a Bing search (for Unfogged archives).
105: Right, we've all done a version of that. Goofy, but not hard to do when you're thinking about something else or being a bit absentminded. I'm talking about people not being able to conceptually distinguish them.
108: Your annoyance is a mere grain compared to my towering rage and disdain of you fucking judgmental fuckwads. I despise the lot of you. Keep telling me how to use my computer, smart boy, because it makes me want to puke.
Is the idea here that we want you to puke?
Or it may have been a slight re-working of an idiomatic phrase uttered by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Maybe you can put in the right URL and figure it out.
This notion that "millennials" are "net native" and therefore naturally good with computers is bullshit.
Being 'net native' is useless and just exposes you to tentacle porn and fan fiction at an earlier age. But being 'programming / computer-aided algorithm' native is going to be a key 21st century skill. I am definitely going to expose my kid to general programming skills at an early age, just to make him comfortable with the idea of giving an instruction set to a computer. I think we're going to be the last generation where it is routine to be a professional knowledge worker and not know how to fully harness computer power to do your work.
Not I! I discourage puking. My offi-cemate* is apparently something of a puker and I have made it clear that my workspace is a no puking zone.
*corollary to cow-orker, pronounced as a slant rhyme for anti-semite.
115 to 111 or really to anything else because it's not like it makes a lot of sense one way or another.
I guess 114 would not be true if professional programmers stay ahead of user needs in such a way that pre-packaged solutions work right for everyone. Users will never be working down in the deep guts of programming. But I can't imagine a situation where the general ability to customize the application of computer power to your specific task is not going to become more and more valuable.
I wonder if someone will position themselves as the search engine alternative for smart people who know what they're doing and don't want some of their search terms ignored, punctuation dropped, or 20 pages of the same damn news article.
I don't know if the technology is there yet, but I've often thought that a search engine that could do a fairly sophisticated literature review -- e.g. for lawyers seeking relevant cases, or academics starting research projects and curious about related work potentially done in other fields -- would be extraordinarily useful.
110: Can I just say how glad I am to have JP on my side?
115: Any chance he went to see "Grace" recently?
"A drunk guy vomited over the railing onto about a dozen audience members seated in the orchestra, right in the middle of one of Rudd's big monologues on Wednesday,"
Over the years I've noticed a common behavior amongst search-driven visitors to my site. They'll arrive on the strength of some search term that doesn't quite give them the right result. E.g. they are looking for a post called "Pigeon fancying" they know I wrote, but they search for "Gonerill birds post" and end up on a post of mine called "Post Birds Apocalypse". So: right site, wrong item.
My reaction in such circumstances is to look around and see the "Archives" link at the top of the page or click on a category tag or notice the page labeled "All my Bird-related items". But people very often just stop, or repeatedly try via Google with slightly different search terms. Sometimes their variants bring them to the right item, but often not, and they give up.
This situation is partly my fault, because I guess my standards for a clearly laid-out site aren't properly calibrated. But I also find this kind of search behavior a bit strange.
118: It's a deal. I'll rip their heads off if you promise to shit down their necks.
110: my towering rage and disdain of you fucking judgmental fuckwads
Uh-oh. I take it this is not the place, then, to remark upon that mac user friend of mind who keeps telling me with smug satisfaction and glee that he doesn't have to understand what's going on, because the computer already knows it!
No, I wouldn't say anything about that.
120: Most sites are better searched through Google than whatever search function they supply, and most sites aren't very usefully organized, so even if yours is better, most users may not expect it to be.
123: Yeah, I know. But sometimes they are looking for my email address or something like that, and they won't even go to the site's front page.
I think we're going to be the last generation where it is routine to be a professional knowledge worker and not know how to fully harness computer power to do your work.
I suppose this really depends on how you define "knowledge worker," but I'm not at all sure it's the case. I definitely don't see white collar workers in general becoming increasingly savvy with programming and such, but you're probably talking about a smaller subset of people.
That's really more a Gen-X emotion, youngster.
I'm ironically reappropriating your ambivalence, old man. I should make a tumblr for it.
Is there any more dishonorable of stupid form of rhetoric than that which uses presumed "generational" characteristics as a starting point?
And don't even think about trying to use use profane mock outrage.
Anyway, yeah, I agree that generational generalizations are way overused and not usually very meaningful. In some contexts there is something to them, though.
Is racism a form of rhetoric?
A question to be addressed at fuckyeahappropriatedambivalence.tumblr.com.
135: I had that question, too, but didn't mention it given how sensitive so many Millennials are.
In some contexts there is something to them, though.
Like pubic hair.
135, 136: Racism may not be a form of rhetoric per se, but I would argue that it at least underlies various forms of rhetoric which are worse than whatever JP was complaining about here. But I'm happy to leave the actual definitions to the rhetoricians and tumblrs.
137: Yes, exactly.
In certain contexts, there is something in pubic hair.
You know, this is all great, but I wish we were over in the other thread talking about how maybe Karl Rove really did try to steal the election.
Speaking of pubic hair, the Accademia currently has an exhibit of modern sculpture intermingled with all the old stuff and it seems a little odd that David's carpet matches the drapes, given that he's blond.
Also, after two weeks here I'm kind of hitting the point where I'm longing to be at home tonight on my couch watching The Good Wife.
Do blond people not usually have matching pubic hair? I wouldn't know, since I've never seen pubic hair or blond people.
143: Ancient Middle Eastern Jewish guy and he's a natural blond? I don't know. It's really a horribly lame attempt to connect a random "hey, look where I went today" comment to the conversation in the thread.
And my wifi will disconnect at any moment so I can't be bothered to think things through.
Ancient Middle Eastern Jewish guy and he's a natural blond?
Well, I mean, the actual historical David (if he existed) presumably didn't look anything like the statue anyway.
Okay, I retract my stupid joke.
The actually awesome thing was a sculpture called "Nel Legno" by Giuseppe Penone.
Eh, I mean, I see what you meant, and it's not like stupid jokes need to meet a high standard to be acceptable here. It's cool that you got to see that stuff.
Which you can see here. It's great: he carved a tree trunk to find the hidden tree limb within. And next to one of Michelangelo's slaves, it's just awesome.
I have VERY high standards for stupid jokes.
" I wish we were over in the other thread"
How do I find that?
Just had a relevant googling experience- I was ordering online from a local restaurant (managed by a restaurant ordering website but linked from restaurantname.com), at checkout there was a place to enter coupon codes, so I did a quick google to see if there were any public ones. A website came of the the local branch of the restaurant, citynamerestaurantname.com, and there were coupon codes on there, so I tried to enter one but it wouldn't work. So I printed it out and brought it in, but at the restaurant they insisted that wasn't their website- they said it's another online ordering site they don't use that issues coupons they don't honor. And it didn't seem like a phishing thing because there wasn't anywhere to enter info, it was pretty much an advertisement for the restaurant. WTF?
157: That's what the hair used to help with. Now who know's where you actually are.
141: but I wish we were over in the other thread talking about how maybe Karl Rove really did try to steal the election.
Eh, life's too short; I'm going to give that one a pass unless they or someone lese put out something more concrete (like they did when they took down that one security consulting firm).
But here's some more background on Project Orca. None of the real money went towards it,
The investment in Orca, however, was a tiny fraction of the campaign's IT spending. Sources tell us the Romney campaign tried systems similar to Orca during the Republican primaries, but on a much smaller scale. To prepare for the general election, the campaign pulled together a makeshift team of IT people and volunteers, and it was this team that built the full version of the Orca Web app and developed the backend systems to power it.A good reminder that a lot of the Romney extended campaign was just Repug fuckpig grifter/consultants raking in the billionaire bucks.
161: You're right, that was a stupid typo.
I search for every site in google before going to it. I just got in the habit. Google also has good spellcheck.
We are probably all united in having at some point been pointed to Ultimate Fight Night.
162: you seem agitated today. Maybe you'd find it soothing to learn more about how to use computers?
166: That's pretty weaksauce right there, mon frere.
But I do find all the misanthropy cylinders firing today*
*But find solace in how truly intolerable things would have been if Romney had won.
how truly intolerable things would have been if Romney had won
I've been giving this a lot of thought myself, Jacques. I wonder how much more miserable I'd be right now if Mitt were president-elect, Prop 30 had failed, and I didn't have such profound disdain for people who misuse google.
Anyway, I'm here for you. (Because, really, where else would I be? That's a limp joke.)
Haven't read the whole thread, but a friend of mine researches this.
169.last: Your pathetic attempts at insults are as music to my ears as they allow me to revel in your demonstrable lack of wit, savoir faire, and whateverness. I am a lowly creature, full of loathing and spite, of use to no one, not even myself. Yet I can face the day knowing that there roams the earth--however gimpily--one who is objectively more pathetic.
But I don't know, maybe with proper counseling we can work this out.
I can't tell if the faux jabs between JP and VW are ha-ha-only-serious or just ha-ha.
I was in a library for ages last week and had to listen to this librarian with a really loud voice having fucking stupid conversations with people. One old bloke came in and asked her if she thought "Google would have any information about laser eye surgery". She expected it did, but failed to find him anything useful.
173: OK. Two objectively more pathetic.
151: If he was exhuming the actual non-epicormic branches, I know someone who's done that as not-art. In fact, last I heard, she had half an illegally logged old-growth Doug fir to work on. (And was going after the epicormic branches, too.)
166: Actually, I had a quite satisfactory weekend but one where the prospect of work tomorrow is turning me sour (despite the short week). In part because I am woefully behind on giving "performance feedback" on a variety of people. And it does not help any of them (or me) even one little bit if I blow it off completely.
And Friday I was in meetings all day on one of those clusterfuckingly clusterfucked projects where I was brought in belatedly in some sort of misguided attempt to have me pull a Winston Wolf. But I think the only possible courses of action are: 1) Kill everyone; or 2) Grab the wheel of the truck with the kerosene-soaked fertilizer and head out of town as fast as I can to reduce casualties. Perhaps I am being overly dramatic.
When I need to find a website I carve away pieces of google until I find it.
Hence the limp.
||
If someone gives you one of those grocery store little flooring plants, does it segue into being an actual houseplant? Or are they built to have finite lifespans?
|>
Green floors are the latest trend in eco-sensitive home design.
We have a green carpet. In the pit.
bookmarking a page pretty much means I'll never read it again, ever
I get a great deal of use out of getpocket.com, especially now that I have a tablet. I like to read slightly-longer-than-computer-friendly articles in bed or at cafes.
Some grocery-store plants will do very well, some stay small, some get enormous. Do you know what it is?
It turns out that it's a purple 6" mum 8pack.
Just to complete the circle, I googled "are mums good houseplants?" and it seems they'll be fine.
Sweet-potatoes will also come apart around their internal structure.
Wikipedia on tablets (pills) is a wonk's delight, but it doesn't go into why that word. OED:
Etymology: Anglo-Norman tablet, tablett, tablette, tabelet, tabillet and Old French, Middle French tablete, Middle French, French tablette small slab or panel, smooth stiff sheet (originally made of wax-covered wood) for writing on (both c1200 or earlier in Anglo-Norman; in later use chiefly in plural (compare sense 1b)), small slab or panel bearing a painting or drawing (early 13th cent.), flat ornament made of precious metal or precious stone (a1376 or earlier in Anglo-Norman), table diamond (mid 15th cent. in tablette de diamant ; also diamant en tablette ), medicine in the form of a small disc or lozenge (1564), food in the form of a small disc or lozenge (1690), horizontal projecting course or moulding (1701)
With the forms in tabul- compare post-classical Latin tabulata thin board, plank, flooring (c800 in a British source), tabulatus tablet (a1100 in a British source), tabuletus flat ornament of precious metal (1376 in a French source), tabuletta , tablettum (golden) tablet (from c1400 in British sources).">
Why are pills called tablets?
The first word my son read out of context was when he was about 4, at some village hall type place. He looked up at the sign over the door, and asked, puzzled, "How do you exit from a room?"
This was a while after he'd peered at my mum's dashboard and told her her health was low.
179.latter sounds really upsetting. I have had dark feelings about work like this, and hereby commiserate.
My own life is so perfect right now that during the week, I look forward eagerly to the weekend, and after a good weekend, I eagerly look forward to the coming week. I say this not to be insufferable, but to recognize that not all the passing years of my too-brief life have been a total hellscape. Yay for right now.
"Like the sands of time through a burning hour glass, such are the days of our lives."
199 is about climate change, right?
I thought ORCA was the thing in Archer. It was a real thing? (I have been watching a lot of Archer lately. I saw the James Bond movie yesterday and it was a lot like Archer.)
179 really does sounds awful and has added another items to the list of things that mitigate my personal misery: 1) Mitt Romney is not president-elect 2) Prop 30 passed by a good margin* 3) I am terrible at computers but better than some people in the world 4) I like many parts of my job, though I can't really do any of those parts at the moment.
I'd say that you should cheer up, but it sounds like you're beyond reach of such bromides. I could offer you some limp-related perspective, but who the fuck really cares, right? Maybe just drive the truck into the center of town and let the whole motherfucker burn.
* Though we'll soon stab the students and young parents, who carried it across the line, in the back.
196 brings an actual smile, with creases and everything, to my face.
I have been watching a lot of Archer lately.
Excellent.
202: did you like the James Bond movie? I went to it recently to kill time, and it made almost no impression on me at all. I do like Daniel Craig -- though I laugh whenever I recall him cast as a Jew -- and I usually think Javier Bardem is good, but the film didn't leave any marks, I don't think.
Daniel Craig was/is delightful (he's not really my type, but my god he is pleasant to look at), and the first half of the movie had more than enough amusements. The second half was alright. I liked that they put in lots of self-referential Bond bits, which made it all the more Archer-y.
Archer is available on demand from Netflix! You, sir, have saved me from another week of cursing my blurry and double vision.
206: my thoughts here.
In brief:
1. way too Batmanny. (hello, Wayne Manor shootout, plus general whysoglumchum)
2. strange how SPOILER ALERT they didn't really stop the villain from doing just about everything he wanted to do.
196, 203: Thanks. it is actually not that bad given 1) my late appearance on the scene of the project*, and 2) the fact that I sort of kind of could retire although it would be financially sub-optimal. Fact #2 has slowly been improving** some aspects of my attitude towards work.
*At one point I found myself saying on a conference call with a dozen or so folks, "Perhaps I did not make myself clear, when I said that [a customer's estimate of a particular state of affairs] was 'aspirational at best' I meant that it was total bullshit."
**The folks whose job it is to steer me in particular directions and encourage me to produce specified results and artifacts might quibble with this characterization.
210.last: But they know where they can put the cork meathook.
Have we talked about living unironically yet?
Oh god. I may actually have another Tuesday Hatred in me, just on the basis of that article. THE 90S WERE SO SINCERE
Based on this primer, you mean? Do let's!
Yes but let's talk about living unironically unironically.
214: aka "How to sound as out of touch and as full of it as John McCain as a young adult".
Maybe she meant the whole thing ironically.
I tried to live unironically but all my clothes were so wrinkly.
The 90s were so sincere. Wes Anderson is so sincere. Dissidents are never ironic. Handicapped people and small children don't understand jokes. I have a tenure track job. QED.
"Irony Dan", now there was a sincere group.
The problem with living unironically is that there are some things for which bronze is just not a very useful material.
What was the name of that developmentally disabled band that used to open for everybody?
Have we talked about living unironically yet?
That thing is all over my fb feedwall because the author received her graduate degree from the same place I did.
For a while I wanted to make activist-style bumper stickers, white block text on black, very exhortative, "DESTROY THE NEW EARNESTNESS". But then I put away childish... uh... whatever she was talking about.
Did people really read that whole article it's horrible
222: It's like ra-ay-ay-ain on your Facebook Page.
|| Von Wafer, I hope your blurry vision is just a temporary side effect of drugs you'll stop taking soon?|
222: And was in a group "Glass Wave" formed as part of an English course.
That group is headed up by the same person who hosts a radio show with a name a lot like "Entittied Opinions".
Did people really read that whole article it's horrible
Initially, no--a quick WTFfy looking over. But then it started being all over Twitter and I read it properly and jeez it's horrible.
I skipped around and got to the line about four-year-olds having failed to take on the veil of irony. What the fuck veils have they taken on? The veil of snacks?
The veil of the veil I found in the dress-up box.
Hmm...
If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we've made a collective misstep.
What if we had a competition to see who can care the least about that article? We can do it right now!
Also who is she talking to? All you trombone-playing home-brewers are ruining America!
who is she talking to?
Her tenure committee, possibly.
I only skimmed it and it seemed like Warmed-Over Off-the-Shelf Hipster Critique #4.
In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.
Sweet living christ. And this woman is younger than me!
Her tenure committee, possibly.
Surely none exists yet.
Several Facebook people have approvingly shared that article. That's about as bad as my Facebook feed gets. That, and the fucking 30 Days of Gratitude thing.
And this woman is younger than me!
My little brother dismissed it as having been written by an out-of-touch 35-year-old. I resent it when people younger than me make me look out of touch! I am really good at using computers, after all.
LMGTFM: The Kids of Widney High.
226: me too! Of all my infirmities -- laydeez! -- this one is the most troubling. It's probably just a side effect of the Vicodin and whatnot, but here's the weird thing: my vision actually clears somewhat when I remove my glasses. Now, I haven't been able to see anything without glasses for decades. I'm fiercely astigmatic, so this is very odd indeed. Alas, my vision clouds and/or doubles again pretty quickly even without glasses, so no sustained reading for me. Fortunately, the deadline I thought was looming in the near future has receded into the distance a good ways, so I've got time to figure out what's what.
That's about as bad as my Facebook feed gets.
No, it's really not. I will gladly trade you some Gaza posters -- pro and con -- for your twee anti-ironists.
the fucking 30 Days of Gratitude thing
Oh god, yes. The smugness is strong.
241 got me worried so I checked around but, no approving mentions of it that I can find yet.
My facebook feed has been completely taken over by plugs for an internet radio telethon that my friends are putting together for some reason.
Israel's iron first absorbed by the sincere depths of an anti-ironist.
No, it's really not. I will gladly trade you some Gaza posters -- pro and con -- for your twee anti-ironists.
Bave was only talking about his feed.
251: you must have missed the part where I said I can't read very well. Still, fair point.
My wife and I both raised our eyebrows sharply at the mention of homebrewing in that article. While my hobby may have been swept up in the local-artisinal-handmade fashion that is sweeping some subcultures, it seems unlikely that the 50-year-old midwestern men who make up the bulk of the organized and active homebrewers are doing it for the irony.
I also have no idea what it means to play the trombone ironically.
Taking 250 more seriously than it deserves, I believe there to exist in Platonic Heaven a non-facile, actually good version of something not entirely unlike this column. But that doesn't make the column good.
Anyhow has anybody seen this movie? It seems like maybe it goes after some of the same things this woman thinks she is chasing but lacks the mile-deep chasm full of platitudinous horseshit.
Addressing 250 more directly than I should, ironically, I mostly find DFW terrible.
Oh my word, that article is just an unending parade of horribleness. I have rarely seen such a uniting of bad writing, muddled thinking, and unpleasant personality.
The part where she says people who have suffered are sincere is the part where my "glued to a trainwreck" reaction turned to outright pity. Does she seriously think that only a select group of humans have suffered? I feel as though one of the defining experiences of my life has been learning that every single person -- yea, even that webinar dude I was griping about upthread -- has a backstory.
The comments are somewhat reassuring/redeeming, though. I liked this one especially:
"For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s..particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt."
Really? Which Americans? The author continues: "Here is a start: Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd?"
"Your" living space? Um, my house is in danger of foreclosure. My adult kids & their friends share hole-in-the-wall apartments with others. If they're lucky.
Who is the audience here? Everyone I know of this age (my own children & their friends/colleagues, my own students) -- everyone I know is passionate & quite serious. But maybe that's because by 'Middle class" the author actually means 'wealthy.' Actual middle class young people I know are very worried about getting jobs, keeping jobs, what to do in a career. They are highly passionate about politics, the arts, the future of our nation. They are also worried--about loans, debt, health insurance, the wars that go on. All races.
It seems to me that we are actually discussing an extremely small percentage of Americans -privileged young white people, less than 5% of our population. Whether they are ironic or not--who cares? Why is this important enough to warrant a long article?
The audience here clearly excludes me, my children & their friends-- it makes me feel invisible. Not ironic.
Amen.
Wait what? There's no way I'm reading that article, but the thesis is really that the 90s weren't a time of irony? I mean there was literally a book....
Also, don't over- ironic hipsters not really exist anymore, or at least not dominate?
This one's not bad either:
Something I do think is a historically significant development that shows are society is driving itself off a cliff, and which this column illustrates very well, is intolerance and social prejudices. For example:
"Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places"
The word "models" here really means "stereotypes".
262: you should read it. The author teaches at Princeton.
It works like multiplication by negative one. Elderly people who are deeply religious are ironic, unless they have suffered or have a disability.
raised our eyebrows sharply at the mention of homebrewing in that article
It's hardly worth analyzing, but that one particularly got to me as well. Yes, there is nothing more ironic than engaging in an activity that is time consuming and requires that you control lots of variables and for which you end up buying specialized equipment. That is pretty much the picture of pure flippancy.
It's hardly worth analyzing, but that one particularly got to me as well. Yes, there is nothing more ironic than engaging in an activity that is time consuming and requires that you control lots of variables and for which you end up buying specialized equipment. That is pretty much the picture of pure flippancy.
One is reminded of the idiocy perpetrated by N+1 on this theme.
265-- nope, just tried, couldn't do it. Honestly that seems too stupid to get worked up about, like complaining about some babbling letter to the editor from an 80 year old with dementia that gets printed in the Dubuque Press-Herald.
I finally broke down and read the fucking irony thing, and holy shit that is dumb. It abuses every rhetorical strategy I work on. (By "observe," she means "hold on while I describe a fictional character who embodies my thesis.")
214 is why we can't have nice public intellectuals in this country.
But instead it's a lengthy thing published in what is still referred to as the paper of record by someone with a Ph.D. who teaches at Princeton, and is not all that much older than I am. Like she got her degree the same year I did, I think.
What percentage of my speech is meaningful?
Eat shit.
Blackadder: Tell me, Baldrick, do you have any idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Sure! It's like goldy or bronzey, except it's made of iron.
272 -- Well, if she's keeping the next generation of douchebags at douchebag university ignorant and ineffectual, that's probably a net positive for the world. And I mean that sincerely.
It does not salve the wound of being told I don't have a tenure-track job because, sorry honey, you just weren't good enough again this year.
Irony, as I observed on alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe many years ago, feeling rather clever as I did so, is the practice of removing wrinkles from clothes.
Were you aware that advertisement just became self-conscious and ironic like five years ago? Before that, advertisements were a sincere and earnest urging from one heart straight to another to find out if a product had the power to turn one's life around in a meaningful and positive way.
272, 276: It's hard to figure out what is more galling, that valuable screen real estate that could have been used for something important and meaningful got used up with this dreck, or that someone who thinks and writes this awkwardly has a job that is more or less entirely about thinking and writing.
This part seems especially awful:
For example, I find it difficult to give sincere gifts. Instead, I often give what in the past would have been accepted only at a White Elephant gift exchange: a kitschy painting from a thrift store, a coffee mug with flashy images of "Texas, the Lone Star State," plastic Mexican wrestler figures. Good for a chuckle in the moment, but worth little in the long term. Something about the responsibility of choosing a personal, meaningful gift for a friend feels too intimate, too momentous. I somehow cannot bear the thought of a friend disliking a gift I'd chosen with sincerity.
Either this is true, in which case it's really, really sad. Or it's not true, in which case it's really pathetic.
Argh. I need to go to bed.
Fuck off, read. Go peddle suicide to some other community; we're full up here.
280: The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
Horsey Surprise is a terrific chaser for that irony essay.
Currently on my Facebook feed: not only that article about irony, but someone quoting Golda Meir on how sad it is that Arabs hate Israel more than they love their children.
I was slightly depressed at work when looking at our traffic and seeing that most visits come from people googling "Tropical Fish Monthly", which is the name of the magazine, but the second highest number come from people googling "www.tropicalfishmonthly.com".
Guys! You already know the address! Just type it in! There, at the top of the screen!
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
A good revolutionary wife is a dove in the bedroom, a tiger in the tank and a giant in the toilet bowl.
No, wait.
I refute the article with this Simpson's clip from 1998.
someone quoting Golda Meir on how sad it is that Arabs hate Israel more than they love their children.
"Vote for us! We'll fire occasional rockets at the Israelis, achieving nothing except provoking them!" does seem to be a winning manifesto promise in Gaza, though. Much as "vote for us, we'll blow up Arabs on a semi-regular basis" is over the border.
In Chrome, I have the default search engine set to DuckDuckGo and use their syntax thingy to make it search Wikipedia or IMDb directly if I want those. I use the Chrome "search keywords" function to make the bar search google, google maps, etc when I want those specifically. It's about the only part of Chrome I have set up that works4 better for my browser habits than Firefox, which I still prefer by a huge margin.
So when I type in the search box:
[some name] - searches duckduckgo for [some name]
[some name !imdb] - searches imdb for [some name]
type "ggl", press tab, type [some name] - searches google for [some name]
290: the Halima Skud party, a pioneering Arab-Israeli collaboration dedicated to staying in power and pursuing its own interests, by ripping the faces off little girls at intervals. Vote Halima Skud, for things that explode falling from the sky!
Wow, the numbering is really off.
That NY Times article was so bad that I am tempted to think it is an ironic intervention in the discourse of sincerity. If it's a spoof it immediately becomes rather brilliant.
One question re the author: is her band ironic or sincere? (She's the lead singer on this song).
You know, once one accepts that one is Not The Target Audience for features in this particular publication -- and surely one must come to that conclusion sooner rather than later -- those features become no more irritating that whatever is being written today in Tiger Beat.
But who among us is not in the target group for real estate pron.
I am pretty sure I am of the target audience, sadly, just a very very cranky and put out member of it. (Also, there can be a difference between target and where the arrow lands.)
AWB will/will not enjoy the conversation Snark and I had last night:
"That's just an appallingly lazy thing for a serious academic to have written."
"She's not a serious academic!"
"She teaches at Princeton!!"
"RIGHT."
||
I was just emailed a pdf of a court order from the Appellate Division (intermediate state appeals court in NY). The heading is in a font that's not Comic Sans, but some slightly wackier version of something like it. I don't understand, and I'm frightened.
|>
Somebody needs to train the new admin assistant a little better.
One question re the author: is her band ironic or sincere?
Sincere!
The only real test for sincerity is capacity to attract the Great Pumpkin.
Most objectionable font exchange:
http://www.kevinandamanda.com/fonts/freescrapbookfonts/firefly-castle/
http://www.dafont.com/riesling.font
291: Also, there can be a difference between target and where the arrow lands.
Zen and the Art of Targeted Media.
294: True fact. Last night I sent Von Wafer an email in Comic Sans just to fuck with him in the hope his blurry vision would reverse correct it.
The part about the gifts baffled me the most, too. Stop with the damn twee kitsch gifts the moment you realize they're not charming and cute to the person you're giving them to. Feel free to give them a gift certificate to a restaurant if you can't think of anything more personal.
301 - way to violate the motherfucking sanctity of off blog communication, motherfucker.
I made fun of someone once for giving a talk in Comic Sans and he explained to me that it wasn't Comic Sans, it was Chalkduster. I guess I should be able to tell the difference.
Last week I saw a talk that used some kind of handwriting-style font that looked surprisingly nice.
I want to see court documents in Berliner or Pastor of Muppets.
But any generally used metal font would be acceptable.
303: it's a motherfucking guideline not a motherfucking rule, caveboy.
OMG. A former student just wrote on FB that the reason the Palestinian death toll is so high is that Israelis are just super-smart and successful at everything so it's not their fault they're better at bombing people.
I swear to God, this Gaza thing is making me hate a bunch of people I used to like.
304: There should be an Aaron Cometbus font if there isn't already. I was hoping I might get to meet him on Saturday night, but I guess he didn't come to town.
Oh good! It looks like there are a couple. People should use that instead of Comic Sans.
Comic Sans is the socialism of fools.
I feel like that irony article is copied, not word-for-word but in concept, something else, but I don't know what. It's so bad it shouldn't be original to someone.
I'm flummoxed by the "We didn't have this out of control irony stuff back in the 90s" bit.
The article sounds like exactly the sort of thing that was being written about my cohort circa 1994.
yes, fa, DWF said it all in his novel , i am sure you read it in its prime time in book clubs and reading groups since i believe you are whiter than the whitest of awbs and sifus to follow their customs and understand irony unironically
no offense, are you going to commemorate the native americans' genocide by your artisanal turkey too?
that's pure irony i hope i used it right and you understand it
