when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.
it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.
the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.
there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” – he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stageacting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.
now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.
as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:
here, also, is a comedy punch:
the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.
i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)
Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special – just people talking.
AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.
It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,
“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”
“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”
“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”
“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”
All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.
I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.
Same goes for the UK – When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.
Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)
Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common” – check out newsreel footage etc for proof – and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).
There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.”
Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I
t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.
Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.
And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.
Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.
Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.
The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.
Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.
Three things have changed:
1. Cameras have become much smaller.
2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.
3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.
The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.
It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.
Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.
I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.
Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.
The cameras they were using back in the 1940s-1970s were enormous and heavy. Moving them was a chore, and you had to have track built to move a camera that big. Getting the camera in close to the subject was very difficult.
It was the arrival of the Steadicam in the 1970s that started to change everything. You could hook the camera to an individual person using a harness. For the first time the camera was liberated. Think of the walk & talks on “The West Wing” – that would not have been technologically possible in earlier film and television.
Also filming through the 1950s was mostly done on sets. A few directors like John Ford would go shoot on location for parts of their movies, but most films were made on sets because it was cheaper and easier. When the studio system began to break down in the 1960s, and cameras started becoming lighter, you saw a shift to location shooting, which reduced the proscenium staging of older movies.
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#not sure how to fact-check this #history #interesting #long post
yeah, we don’t refrigerate them here. they keep like a month or two, even in summer, just crack it into a cup in case it’s accidentally taken you too long to use those eggs, give it a whiff, if it smells okay you’re good to go even if it’s really old. don’t use the float test — that turns up a lot of false positives and sometimes you end up throwing away perfectly good eggs, which is not cheap. just turn your eggs upside down every now and then to help keep them fresh and yeah.
also chicken eggs do not look anything like those things you see on american tv shows. they have brown shells and the yolks are orange.
we should organise a charity drive to mail european eggs to americans. we can send them uht milk too, i read on the internet that they only have the kind of milk that has to be refrigerated
Canadians refrigerate eggs too. And re: colour, every Canadian grocery store I have ever been in carried multiple brands of eggs, some of which were white and some which were brown. (We usually buy the brown: the last time I bought white it was because we realised at the last moment we were out of eggs and Mom sent me to the white-egg-only convenience store to get a dozen to tide us over.)
Who told you Americans don’t have UHT milk? I don’t know about big ones, but there are definitely single-serving ones that I think are intended for kids’ lunches. I used to go through multiple single-serving boxes* of Parmelat chocolate milk a day when I was a kid.
(Come to think of it, did they say “no room-temperature milk” or “no UHT milk”? Because while I’ve drunk well over a thousand cartons* of milk (all bought in America) that appear to fit with the definition of “UHT milk” I just looked up, I had never heard the term before.)
*The Canadian term for this is the genericised trademark “tetra pak”, but since I’m talking about my experiences as an American in America I figured I ought to use the terminology I would’ve used at the time, despite its relative lack of precision.
P.S. Maybe I should look into the possibility of larger tetras of milk, considering I just had refrigerated milk go lumpy nine days before its sell-by date (beating the previous record of six days). Bagged milksounds like a neat idea, but it’s terrible for preservation, and the manufacturers won’t even admit it.
i don’t remember where i saw it. but it was an article on the internet and someone was saying that for a limited time they had uht milk available in the cardboard box things but it didnt catch on with americans because it was too weird that it could be stored unrefrigerated or something and they didnt sell well so it was taken off the market and it was a shame because they were really useful for people like university students who didnt have a fridge.
actually, i remember reading that they do have uht milk in the us, but they don’t sell it in the cardboard boxes but they sell it in the transparent gallon containers, and part of what gives the milk the shelf life of like a year and the need to not be refrigerated is keeping it from exposure to light, and so even though the milk is treated with an ultra high temperature to pasteurise it, it doesn’t have the 9 months-1 year shelf life because of exposure to light, so they have to keep it refrigerated anyway.
it is possible that the author of the article lived in a specific region of the us and was overgeneralising to the availability in the rest of their country.
do any other americans want to weigh in? can you go to the supermarket and buy a cardboard box of milk that is not in the refrigerated section of the store and it does not need to be refrigerated until opened? maybe i am wrong?
No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA) I didn’t even know what uht milk was until I googled it. All the milk I have ever encountered needs to be refrigerated, and I am actually shocked this isn’t a rule. Our milk choices range from non fat, low fat, regular, half and half (ughhhh), and there’s the vegan milk stuff. My dad drinks almond milk, which is an abomination. And I thought bagged milk was weird…
Thank you for weighing in! UHT milk doesn’t have any preservatives in it. The shelf life is due to the combination of: sterile packaging, opaque packaging, and the high temperature at which it is pasteurised. once you open your box of milk, you have to drink it within a few days, and it does have to be refrigerated once opened because the packaging is no longer sealed and germs can get in, but the packages are 1 litre or a half litre, which isn’t all that much milk, so even without refrigeration, you can plan around using the entire thing before it goes bad.
a friend of mine without refrigeration would just reboil it every time she wanted to drink some, but in the summer months i just try to use it all up as soon as i open it, and in winter months it’s easier because i can just leave it outside and use it slowly over the course of a few days.
but the advantages are: not needing to refrigerate the trucks it is shipped in, not needing to refrigerate it at the store, and you can use it as an emergency food. you can stock up on it effectively without worrying about it going bad (within reason, 6-9 month shelf life) because it only starts going bad once opened.
No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA)
You can definitely get shelf-stable milk in the Bay Area! I looked it up, and it says there’s some in stock in stock for every Whole Foods I checked, and at least half of the Safeways and Walmarts, too. And Costco has store brand shelf-stable chocolate milk, at least.
They’ve probably just hidden it away on some obscure back shelf because it’s not a popular product.
Additionally, you can get shelf-stable cream at any Trader Joe’s! (Source: I have one on my shelf right now.)
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I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.
NO.
NO I CANNOT.
I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.
Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).
Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.
Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.
Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.
PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.
Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.
But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.
we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional
How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses? They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money. What the hell is going on with them?
And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks.
They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility”
And here’s the deal: I GET IT.
But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!
But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.
A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.
SHIT IS FUCKED UP.
And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop.
Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer.
The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years.
If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.
God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is.
god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices
so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck
Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so
>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<
…
*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*
?!
(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)
—
>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<
Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)
(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)
Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.
A 7 year old consumer system will cost you approximately $0, so on that count the comparison still stands.
But I feel like the important thing to note is that it’s not like good hardware has gotten expensive, it’s just that consumers can now get by with cheap hardware, which is a big win imo.
Your audacity problem sounds quite strange – do you know if it’s leaving behind an x window or a spare process, or is it an issue with the window manager or something?
Come to think of it, I really have no idea what the built-for-consumer laptop markets are like, and have only the vaguest awareness of their existence. Almost every laptop I’ve ever had, and certainly every laptop I’ve had in the last decade, was a refurbished or straight hand-me-down business laptop. Businesspeople are the larval hosts of the laptop lifecycle.
(FTR, my previous laptop was *also* a 2011 model, but a lower tier: I knew what specs I wanted my next one to have and what my budget was, and it so happened that the laptop that best fit those needs was not ~technically~ any newer. Switching to this one was still a very noticeable upgrade, though.)
I don’t know what’s going on with Audacity, but IIRC it did *used* to work. I just tried re-installing it, and at some point when having to reboot wouldn’t be too inconvenient I’ll give it another shot.
I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.
NO.
NO I CANNOT.
I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.
Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).
Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.
Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.
Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.
PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.
Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.
But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.
we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional
How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses? They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money. What the hell is going on with them?
And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks.
They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility”
And here’s the deal: I GET IT.
But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!
But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.
A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.
SHIT IS FUCKED UP.
And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop.
Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer.
The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years.
If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.
God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is.
god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices
so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck
Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so
>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<
…
*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*
?!
(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)
—
>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<
Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)
(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)
Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.
Tags:
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but me and my sister both live in yorkshire (I live in North and she lives in South) and she has to talk slowly when she comes to the north because no-one can understand a word she says, so there’s deviations of accents within accents.
Spread out all over the fucking place but more prevalent in the South: RP (which is what Murricans think of as a “British Accent” even though it’s a minority of the English that have it let alone the British)
I’ve lived in the UK for more than half my life, certainly my entire adult life, and I still can’t successfully ID all the accents there are here. I’m sometimes mortifyingly wrong, but less so now.
There’s way more than two Welsh accents. How can you categorize it as ‘Welsh’ or ‘Cardiff’? The accent in Caernarfon is completely different to the accent in Wrexham, so that’s at least four. Then the accent of Ceredigion is different again. Five. The Welsh hill farming accent is different to the Welsh mining accent (North/South divide.) People in Penmaenmawr sound different to people in Llanfairfechan and there’s a 7 minute drive between them.
Are there actually people who honestly believe there is only one British accent, or is that a myth? Whenever I see people claim Americans think there’s only one, they always use the existence of the phrase “British accent” as their evidence.
Yes, I say “British accent”. Thing is, it’s not that I don’t know there are a zillion different accents in Britain. It’s that I don’t know what they’re called, and so am forced to use “British accent” as an umbrella term because I don’t have the words to describe them more specifically except perhaps by comparison (“it was a Dave-Lister-y sort of voice*”).
*And even having heard that this is a Liverpool accent, I would still describe it by comparison if I could possibly get away with it. I don’t entirely trust my source on where Lister’s accent is from, nor do I trust Liverpool to have only one accent.
I think it’s less that people really don’t know that there’s more than one British accent, and more that very often “British Accent” is used to mean Received Pronunciation (in my TV and real-life experience that’s what a majority of people will do when required to fake a British accent), which is kind of a sore point anyway because in some British circles RP is still considered “better” than other accents and people with regional accents already feel marginalised?
And yup, Lister definitely has a Scouse (Liverpool) accent, although you’re right that Liverpool accents can vary a bit!
“My character had had his larynx ripped out by this wolf man, and so I made the slightly bold choice—which I thought was right—of talking like this,” Redmayne says, putting on the breathy, choked affectation he uses throughout the film. He adds that at the time he thought the voice suited the costume and elaborate sci-fi world of the film, but in retrospect can see that it may have been a bit much. “I won a prize for it for the worst performance of the year,” Redmayne adds, referring to his 2016 Razzie award for Worst Supporting Actor. “So, yeah, it was a pretty bad performance by all accounts.”
Eddie, sweetie – you’re breaking my heart. You’ve got to ignore the basics. You’ve got to know that you gave a tremendously OTT and dialled up performance in a tremendously OTT and dialled up film (which I continue to love from the depths of my being). You gave no fucks and threw yourself into it, and because of that people love your performance. I can confidently guarantee that you gave the best performance as a vocally impaired intergalactic overlord with monumental mother issues and stomping lizard servants ever committed to film. Own it!
okay but we’re ignoring the most important part of this interview
“My character had had his larynx ripped out by this wolf man, and so I made the slightly bold choice—which I thought was right—of talking like this,” Redmayne says, putting on the breathy, choked affectation he uses throughout the film.
THE ENTITLED WHOSE THROAT CAINE RIPPED OUT WAS BALEM THE WHOLE TIME
okay so you’ve unlocked one of my top five special interests just be aware
so jupiter ascending actually goes hard on the infodumping (which is why I get really annoyed by criticism that it’s hard to follow – if anything, the criticism should be that too much is explained and not enough is left to the audience), but there is one thing that’s never fully resolved (but it’s not plot relevant so it’s not the biggest deal)
anyway, this is what we know about caine:
he was born genetically defective and was sold to the Skyjackers (like, Space Air Force? with rocket boots and angel wings?) by his creator for cheap
he managed to rise to be a great Skyjacker anyway, despite his genetic deficiency
~something~ happened where he ripped the throat out of an Entitled. WHY he did it or WHO the Entitled was is never explained in canon.
he himself has no idea why he randomly went berserk and tried to kill someone, but everyone blamed it on his genetic defects and he believes them
his belief in his own inferiority and inherently violent nature is why he tries to avoid a relationship with jupiter. this is the context for the “I have more in common with a dog than I do with you”/ “I love dogs, I’ve always loved dogs” scene and THAT’S WHY IT ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE IN THE TEXT, FOLKS
also there’s that whole romantic scene after jupiter becomes an entitled where she’s like “so I’m an entitled now, does that mean you want to bite me?” and caine’s like “uhhh no? ….actually maybe” and she’s like “go ahead ;) ;) ;)”
for this he was stripped of his angel wings and exiled to a hostile prison colony planet until the events of the movie
so the fan theory for a long time was that balem was the entitled who caine attacked, and there’s an extension of that fan theory where one of his siblings – either kalique or titus, probably kalique because she’s way smarter – somehow mind-controlled or otherwise forced caine to attack balem as an assassination attempt, which is why he doesn’t remember why he did it
but ultimately it doesn’t actually matter to the plot? so it’s not a bad thing that it’s never resolved. but FAN THEORY #CONFIRMED.
I’m reblogging this since @bemusedlybespectacledprovides an A+ summary of the known facts surrounding Caine’s history and his attack on the no-longer-so-mysterious Entitled.
Cannot believe we are being gifted with new Jupiter Ascending canon in this godless year.
Tags:
#I have no strong feelings about Jupiter Ascending and was not actually paying all that much attention while Mom was watching it #but I think some of my followers will appreciate this #Jupiter Ascending #long post #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
too lumpy and solid to combine and homogenise? or it combined and then separated due to different densities and varying levels of heat? I have no idea where planets came from, I only live on one.
!!!!!!!!!! is excite
So, first things first is deciding what ‘disordered’ means in this context. After all, there’s one very primordial sorting that any planetary body goes through- a density gradient by depth. You get your core, your mantle, your atmosphere, heavy iron and nickel falling and light volatiles rising. So we already have some order for free, although the various compounds within each layer are still a jumbled mess.
Now, naturally, your interior heats up, partly because of that pressure and partly because it tends to be super radioactive. And as we all know from grade school, thermal expansion is a thing- hot substances get larger, and less dense. But it was their high density that put them that far down in the first place! So in larger terrestrial bodies like Earth, this means that they float back up to the top again before cooling and falling, like a lava lamp (on smaller bodies like Mars heat conducts out too fast for any bulk overturn to happen). In the softer areas like the atmosphere and the mantle, the Earth is constantly being ‘stirred’, homogenizing those layers. Like the atmosphere, the mantle is mostly-but-not-entirely uniform because shit’s complicated, but that’s what your high-entropy baseline is as well as the lion’s share of Earth’s mass.
That ‘baseline’ is a muddle of mineral types we call peridotite. It has a lot of silicon and oxygen as you might expect, as well as a number of metals and other bits, particularly magnesium, iron, and calcium. It wouldn’t survive long at the surface; water etches it away quite quickly, but of course it’s protected from the nastier reactions through the expedient of being really far away from the surface where all the volatiles went. Still, it’s been changing a bit over time. A primordial and molten planet’s mantle wouldn’t be quite the same as the one we have now, because we’ve spent several billion years drawing elements out of it, cooling them at the surface, and then occasionally injecting new compounds back in.
And this process doesn’t quite happen randomly. There’s a particular class of elements we call ‘lithophiles’ (no relation to the bacteria), mostly because they react well with oxygen, and correspondingly they’re the first ones to jump ship during mantle cooling and float up to the surface, staying there more or less permanently. That’s your crust, and it’s why continents and oceans floors don’t look much like the mantle proper- there’s a self-selection going on among the elements. Once you run the high-entropy mulch through this selection process, what cools out is an old friend- the familiar igneous rocks. When they’re extruded in to the air or water by volcanoes, they look like basalt, when they just moosh up against the bottom of the existing crust without ever touching air, they look more like granite. So that’s a further source of differentiation and order, but those differences are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things- mostly having to do with how many metals are mixed in, and the corresponding differences in density.
And to the first order, that’s pretty much what the crust is. The question was why you see so much order in the Earth’s crust, but honestly it’s like 90% granite and basalt, which are pretty close to being a random homogeneous-if-you-squint mix of the lithophilic fraction of Earth’s bulk mantle composition. What’s tricking you is those volatiles again, because even though the Earth’s crust is almost entirely igneous, the visible land surface is almost entirely not. Sedimentary rocks are only IIRC 5% of the volume of the crust, but they’re a solid majority of what you see when you’re clambering around in the air.
The ocean floor is maybe a good way to start thinking about this. At the mid-ocean ridges, which are giant lines of volcanoes injecting new crust all the time, it’s basically just pure basalt. As you walk in a straight line along the ocean floor from those volcanoes towards a continent, you’ll notice little bits of debris start accumulating, mostly dead organisms and excrement and so on. The farther you walk, the more you see, because the basalt is acting like a conveyor belt moving between your two landmarks, and the farther you get from the volcano the older it is and the more time it’s had to pick up random bits of detritus. Eventually you’re wading through it, and by the time you get to the edge of the ocean it’s hundreds or thousands of meters thick, with nary a hint of exposed basalt. But it’s still under there, much thicker than the layer of goo on top of it. So there’s this patina of order laid across the igneous crust, with linearly increasing mud thickness. One of the more reliable geological gradients in the solar system, as it happens.
The continents are trickier because they don’t die of old age. That granite is much less dense than the basalt you get in oceans, so it floats for basically forever without getting injected back inside the planet. Sediments accumulate and get remixed over billions of years instead of millions, and a diversity of forms proliferates because you can have second-order, third-order, fourth-order weathering, weathering of metamorphic rocks, biological chemistry, on and on and on. Around the edges, you get the scraping weirdness of plate subduction, every now and then you even get weird things happening when some vast object bumps the continent from underneath. But because a plate itself is so large, most of the interesting and dynamic activity is all happening at the edges, leaving the bulk granite more or less inert for billions and billions of years. Everything that you’re calling ordered happens in a narrow film on the outer edge of a narrow film.
But that surface environment, narrow as it may be, is quite intense and destructive. So for any given patch of continent, at any given time, the surface is in flux- if it’s not actively being buried, it’s actively being eroded. So any sedimentary rocks that you see come from these areas where the surface was preserved through rapid accumulation, shattered fragments of the erosional areas finally being blasted to a place where they’re buried too quickly to be destroyed before finding protective sequestration away from the surface. We call them ‘basins’. Often but not always underwater- like river deltas at shorelines, that kind of thing. But there’s plenty of examples of preserved deserts and rivers as well, anywhere that wind and water could bring a lot of random bits of stuff in and leave them there.
The conditions in any given basin are going to depend on a lot of environmental factors- biological activity, atmospheric and environmental conditions, the power of the force that brings sediments in, how old the rocks are, an endless list really. Basins themselves can be quite large, many miles across, and the depositional conditions within any given moment will usually be pretty similar because entropy. So you’ll see similar ‘packets’ of debris fragments landing all over the basin at about the same period of time. But as we all know, the atmosphere is a fickle bitch. So as time passes, so do those conditions, and so these basins produce distinct layers that vary in fragment size, color, chemistry, and so on. And there are so many different options for basin conditions that you get a rich taxonomy of different sedimentary rock types. Then they’re all buried, later exhumed, and outcroups have taken on that ‘order’ that you noticed.
Another major source of order comes from the fact that the crust is so brittle. At the planetary scale, the crust has a tensile strength of basically zero, so every time something happens tectonically it shatters. Uplift, load deposition, torque, you name it and there’s probably a patch of Earth’s crust losing its shit about it. These cracks, which you know as fault lines, are therefore ubiquitous, most of them not really representing a whole lot of motion, most of them again near the surface because that’s where force imbalances have to happen.
And when water is flowing through the near-surface, it will tend preferentially to flow along these fault lines, because they’re the weak points and pre-drilled tunnels. And when that flow takes the water from one place to another, with a different temperature and pressure and lithological environment, the chemical equilibrium of impurities in that water changes. It leeches certain ions from the surrounding rock, and precipitates others out. And this is a great way to collect large masses of very specific elements in one place- gold, for instance. Most mining for precious metals is about finding such places. That’s why you tend to find precious ores in ‘veins’; they fill the original fault lines that the water was flowing through, long and thin and twisty. (Iron is an exception, it’s a whole other thing.)
Anyway I uh, seem to have written a fairly long essay. But yeah! Rocks.
i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use
(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)
i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work
A General Rule
on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this
that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’
Tumblr
just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags
i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss
now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest
Dreamwidth
use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
WordPress
if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url
if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url
i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed
ArtStation
use username.artstation.com/rss
i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss
Mastodon
just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url
i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss
deviantART
use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername
i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis
YouTube
this one’sa goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first
in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit
you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit
i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w
Tapas
this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.
the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed
LINE Webtoons
ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button
the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed
Twitter & Instagram
these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason
twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.
right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username
i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne
… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg
This is extremely overkill. Every RSS reader I know of is capable of finding an RSS link from a regular URL.
So, like, if you wanted to follow someone on YouTube, you could put in the feed URL:
And your RSS reader will give you a list of what feeds it has:
(pictured: Feedly, the RSS reader recommended by the OP, subscribing to a YouTube feed)
This also works for any other RSS reader and any other service (Tumblr, Dreamwidth, Twitter, anything):
(pictured: Inoreader, subscribing to a Tumblr feed)
Here’s Feedly, the RSS reader recommended by the OP, working on YouTube:
So yeah, there’s never any reason to dig up a channel ID and manually construct an RSS feed URL.
I’ve definitely had issues with the automatic finders in the past, mostly things like giving you the feed for an entire site when you asked for a particular subdomain. Though it’s been a while since I had such troubles: I’d figured it was just because I haven’t followed a lot of new RSS feeds lately, but possibly they’ve improved over the past 3 – 5 years.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #discourse cw? #long post
My wife and I were were talking the other day and, I don’t remember what we were even talking about, but the idea came up that we would need an oreo for. I joked about getting one from my secret stash. This is where she made her mistake. She said “oh right, like you could have an Oreo stash without me knowing about it.”
I’m sorry?
That’s a challenge.
Oreos aquired.
I’m going to hide them in a super simple place at first
But be sure to follow this post while I chronicle all the ways and places I hide them and also how I plan on taunting her with cookies while she can’t find the package
Time to up the stakes. It was fun having em here and hiding them around her while she didn’t know what was happening. Bit now it’s time for her to be in on the game she is playing
If you two weren’t already married I’d beg you to marry her because you two are obviously perfect for each other and I love this post with all my heart
You like that eh? Well you are going to love today’s installment
Look at that. So sad. So few Oreos left
Guess I’ll just pin em right to the middle of the wall in the middle of the living room. She’ll never find em there
Oh, guess I should put this back up
Bwa ha ha ha! You guys! You guys don’t understand! I was planning on doing this and when I got home and looked at it I was like “aww, it’s too thin. They won’t fit.” I even TOLD my wife this and how I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to hide them back there.
But then I looked again. They dooooo
Thank you all so much for the love. I knew y’all would like this, but I had no idea you would like it THIS MUCH. People calling us “goals” and stuff… Man…. It’s kinda hard to take in ya know? Anyways: if this post gets Over 9000™ before I get off work today I will pick up Halloween Oreos on my way home and this will not stop
Ohmygosh oh. my. gosh. You guys. Near disaster. Check this shiz out:
Wife and I were sewing Elly’s Halloween costume up
Yea, she is going to be a spider and it’s super cute and all but. But. Loooook
Holy actual shit the Oreos fell out from the table literally next to her.
The moment she got up I threw them into the closet
Also:shout out to whoever it was that lost a follower for this post
Sry bout that eh.
Tags:
#food #long post #this reminds me of multiple parts of my childhood simultaneously #(1: afikomen hunts) #(2: when I was two my parents tested my reading comprehension by) #(hiding a package of Oreos under the bed‚ giving me a note reading ”the cookies are under the bed”‚ and seeing if I could find the cookies #) #((at age two I was at the stage (which non-hyperlexics generally do at around 4 or 5) where you can do text-to-speech but)) #((it takes so much brainpower you don’t have any leftover to *understand* what you’re reciting)) #((so tiny!me could not find the cookies))
I am confused to say the least. My post doesn’t have anything to do with violence? Or exploiting other people? Or taking advantage of other people’s unwillingness to push back against assholes?
(Unless you consider applying to lots of jobs even if they aren’t your ideal to be assholish behaviour? But that would be odd and surprising? Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.)
My post is about why people should be willing to take actions that are low cost even if they’re unlikely to succeed in full. But, like, I’m kind of a utilitarian – if I’m counting how costly something is, I’m definitely counting how costly it is to /everyone/.
Putting one’s sketches online isn’t hurting you /or/ bystanders, so it counts as taking a low-cost opportunity. Shoplifting may not hurt you (depending on the consequences of being caught), but it’s still taking money out of someone else’s pocket, so it’s still A Bad.
If cowardice is the only lever you have to avoid acting on impulses to hurt others, then OK, in your specific case I endorse cowardice. But almost no one I know works like this? Generally, a lot of factors go into decisions about whether to engage in violence, and they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.
If you have only one inhibitory mechanism, it makes sense to keep it at the level that helps you interface with society, but most people are using several different kinds of inhibitory signals. I just want them to put less stock in the “People will ignore/reject/laugh at me and then I will DIE” one.
Basically, for the vast majority of people my post is directed at, the negative outcome you describe just isn’t related to the thing my post is about. The fear of embarrassment stops people from dancing in public, but I don’t think it’s a major factor in stopping people from punching each other. In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.
But I still think people shouldn’t do that because 1) hurting others is bad, and 2) whether something is embarrassing is a crappy way to judge if it’s a good idea.
I think I draw the boundary lines in different places than you do.
—
>>In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.<<
Bullying people and embarrassing yourself in front of them are both members of the category “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future”. They increase it by different *amounts*–and I’ll accept that for many cases of embarrassment the increase is negligible–but I don’t know that I’d say they’re different in *kind*.
(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)
—
>>they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.<<
This, on the other hand, I *would* say is different in kind. Is it at all common for people to get annoyed with someone for trying a new food?
—
I’m not sure how to tell how many inhibitory mechanisms I have except by removing one and seeing if things still work, and I think it’s pretty clear that that’s *not* an area where failure is cheap. And while I’ve occasionally caught glimpses of a conscience around here somewhere, I’ve never caught one while angry (even when I wasn’t as good at cowardice as I am now), so I doubt that’s one of the mechanisms for this.
There is a distinct possibility that I don’t have insight into what’s actually going on here, but from the inside it feels like the thing that caused a shift to being consistently non-violent was spending a couple years on the Internet practising my flight response on bits of Discourse, until eventually I could run away from infuriating things offline too. Here, I learned how to grovel, how to phrase things carefully so as to minimise the chances of sparking a fight with anyone, how to keep my mouth shut entirely and quietly slip out. (not doing too well at that last bit tonight, but nobody’s perfect)
In an environment of *relative* safety and much more time to think than IRL, I could have the lesson hammered home that I’m almost always better off reacting to an argument or provocation by surrendering or (if available) pretending not to have noticed, rather than prolonging the pain by trying to fight.
—
>>Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.<<
Eh, I’ve definitely encountered people with hiring responsibilities complaining about completely unsuitable people wasting their time. I guess bigger companies can probably arrange better filters that put less stress on the employees involved?
I think the largest disagreement here is that I don’t think “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future” is a meaningful category in the first place.
I think there are lots of inputs into the specific way people will treat you, but that none of these look like increasing a “bad treatment” variable, or anything that could be a proxy for such. I think things might influence how deferent or hostile or helpful or avoidant people are in interacting with you, but that any presentation style you choose will pull on a bunch of these, and whether the end result looks like being treated well or poorly just depends on what you as a person want out of interactions.
For example, being more agreeable will tend to make people less hostile, avoidant, and/or argumentative toward you – but will increase their willingness to push your boundaries and ignore your opinions. Which direction looks more like bad treatment? This entirely depends on your priorities! I recently intentionally lowered my agreeableness because, to me, getting more confrontations was worth getting less casual boundary-crossing. Meanwhile, past!me would have put more emphasis on not having to confront people.
And neither of these poles at all looks like people deciding they want to treat you worse. Instead, it’s them shifting their interaction pattern into the path of least resistance. For conflict-averse people, conflict is high-resistance, so they avoid disagreeable people. Meanwhile, if you’re unwilling to cuss out the asshole who touches you inappropriately, they’ll go ahead and do it again, because it’s low-resistance. Is being avoided bad treatment? Is being touched inappropriately bad treatment? Quite possibly both are, but the tradeoffs are built into the interaction style.
(Of course, there are ways to avoid having either of these outcomes by seeming approachable but also like you don’t take shit. Currently, my reduction in agreeableness doesn’t seem to be scaring people off, because I still try to be approachable. But, like, there are other tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs.)
A behavioral pattern – and all the different personality traits that influence it – sets you up as a person that it’s most convenient to interact with in some ways vs others. And everyone is going about trying to pursue their own social goals while moving through a landscape where some things are easy and some are hard. The key to getting good treatment is making sure other people believe that the best way to get what they want is to treat you the way you most want to be treated. (Where the way you most want to be treated will vary a lot by person.)
And this is why I wouldn’t put embarrassment and bullying in the same category. Even if they both lead to things you don’t want, they do so through completely different avenues. At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost. Being high cost and being low value are really different social tags, and treating them as interchangeable will make it v v difficult to reason about the social landscape.
Again, if you happen to only have one lever to work with, by all means set it to the position that best helps you navigate the world. But you’ll still be operating at a massive handicap, because your single variable will miss almost everything that determines how interactions can go. If there were anything I could point at as the ultimate “get treated badly” variable, I would say it’s not having options.
>>At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost.<<
Thing is, I contested this in my previous post:
“(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)“
Embarrassing yourself in front of people causes them pain (in the form of negative affective empathy), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return. Punching people causes them pain (in the form of physical damage), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return.
And yes, this is in large part projection. Other people almost never act in ways that would make sense if they considered “inducing negative affective empathy” to be a hostile act, and mostly don’t even act in ways that would make sense if they were inclined to see it that way but consciously overriding that. But you can’t have projection without proof of concept: it’s empirically untrue that the worst thing someone will do to you if you embarrass yourself in front of them is work less hard to gain your favour.
(Although I tend to react a lot worse to people telling me explicitly-labelled embarrassing *stories* about themselves than to them actually *doing* embarrassing things, I think because with the stories it’s very clear that they could have easily chosen to not do this to me. Accidents I can forgive relatively easily, even tradeoffs; signposting “I’m going to do something embarrassing now, specifically for the purpose of having you witness how embarrassing it is”, though, not so much.)
P.P.S. Apparently I got ninja’d by @kit-peddler. I’m glad to see someone else picking up on my quoted paragraph.
Looking at the notifications continuing to come in as I write this, it looks like now would probably also be a good time to emphasise the very first sentence (not counting “so, about that post”) of my first post:
“I suspect we’re both projecting our own selves onto the rest of society and ending up skewed.“
Tags:
#reply via reblog #discourse cw #violence cw #scrupulosity cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post
Brinens and Things 
