Friday Notes (Jan 19, 2024)

The first Friday Notes of 2024. (The title nicely caps the 2024, 2023, 2024, 2023 series from the titles of the previous four posts.) We’re well past the glut of holidays, and it’s back to business. There is also the fresh-start sense of the new year. I’m already thinking about all the stuff I want to throw away this coming Spring Cleaning.

My various piles of notes grow smaller and smaller! In some cases, because I deleted notes that seemed to have aged beyond their lifetime. But these Notes posts have been instrumental. In some areas, I’m actually scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I still have notes, so here we go again…

I watch a lot of informational YouTube videos, and I’m getting really tired of the use of almost relevant stock footage that vaguely accompanies the spoken text. It’s worse when the same stock footage appears more than once, equally barely relevant in both cases. What, precisely, is the point?

There is what I’ll call a Talking Head Quotient (sometimes a Talking Torso or a Talking Body, but it’s still the Head that does the Talking).

Sometimes the THQ is 1.0 or very close to it — the presenter is always, or nearly always, onscreen. And I know channels with a THQ of 0.0 — the presenter never appears. (Some use an inventive animated avatar of some kind. Not exactly sure how to classify that, but I lean towards including them as a Talking Widget.)

I find I generally tend to favor a higher THQ. I don’t need cutaway clips unless they are fully relevant and necessary visual exposition. In part, it’s because I benefit from a bit of lip reading. I’ve never trained for it, but being hard of hearing all my life, I’ve picked it up enough that it helps to see who’s speaking to me.

The exception is informational videos with a THQ of 0.0 where the image content is the whole point of the video. The 3Blue1Brown math videos are a good example, but the purest expression lies in, for instance, the Mandelbrot zoom videos done by Maths Town. Those don’t have any place for a Talking Head (nor any text, just music).

But if a narrator is speaking to me, high-content information animations aside, I like seeing that narrator.

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Speaking of YouTube, is it me, or are there more commercial interruptions now?

Commercials between videos are bad enough, but something has to pay for a free platform with millions (billions?) of videos. Fine, whatever. But now YouTube interrupts videos to insert commercials, sometimes abruptively in mid-sentence. It’s especially disruptive when watching a music video.

I suppose I’m spoiled a bit. I’ve managed to remove commercials from my life when it comes to anything I watch on TV. Except for YouTube. But I’m not sure I value YouTube enough to pay for premium, and Google is very much on my shit list, and I don’t want to give them anything. Internet search and YouTube are about it for me and Google. The latter is unavoidable, but the former’s value has dropped over the years. Google searches turn up too much garbage these days. That may be due to the interweb being full of garbage, but it still reduces the once-high value of Searching.

Whatever. What reduces YouTube’s value is the commercial interruptions plus that many channels have commercial sponsors, so there’s a built-in commercial interruption somewhere in the video. Fuck. Commercials between, commercial interruptions, and presenters promoting products and also usually begging for money on Patreon. Monetization to the hilt, and I’m so sick of it.

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Speaking of commercials, Amazon Prime pulled an interesting trick recently. They sent an email that says, in part:

Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.

And at that point my heart sank. Damn! Commercials invading! The email goes on to say the monthly price won’t change (which would be adding insult to injury). But the paragraph ends with:

We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.

Ah. An interesting way to impose a hefty price hike. I suppose it’s nice that Amazon offers the option of declining the bump if commercials seem the better option (nope; never). The link in the email (on the word here) leads to an Amazon page where you can pre-order the $2.99 subscription to ensure it kicks in immediately on January 29. Which I did as soon as I finished the email. (The asterisk is for a footnote saying that sports and live events, of course, will continue to have commercials.)

Amazon and Microsoft are the only two tech giants I’m not currently pissed off at, who still provide a service I value well above any complaints or issues I have with them. (I won’t willingly give Apple another dime.) I guess I’m on board with this. In a way, Prime video has been a free benefit of Amazon Prime, so one could see this as a three-dollar subscription to Prime Video. I’m already paying about ten bucks a month for Prime Music, so what the hell.

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It does seem, though, the cost benefit from “cutting the cable” has evaporated.

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Speaking of advertising, apparently Congress passed a law requiring greater compliance with the CAN-SPAM law from 2003. I say “apparently” because after Searching for ten minutes, Google can’t find anything specifically about what might have changed in 2023 (or 2024). All searches ultimately lead to the 2003 law.

But I thought I’d read somewhere that Congress (unbelievably) actually did something useful to society and it involved tightening of spam laws.

All I know is that there is a noticeable drop in robocalls, email spam, and comment spam here on WordPress. In all three cases, there was high volume. I never counted, but I’d guess as many as two dozen robocalls per week, and easily 30+ spam emails per day. The WordPress spam section typically got 10-20 (or more) per day. Volume lately is very low!

Maybe it was the holidays? There has been a slight uptick, but only slight. Most noticeably, here on WordPress. Spam folder was empty for a long time, but recently there have been a few.

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I almost got fooled by a phishing email last week. At first glance (but fortunately not at second) it looked very much like an email from Amazon Prime, and it was very much like the sort of legit email you get from a company that has your credit card number and wants you to update the expire date.

And it was to the email account that Amazon has, so my first impression when I opened it was to believe it. I left it in my inbox to remind me to go to Amazon and update my settings. A good practice is to never use the link in the email but to log onto the site using your own bookmark.

Despite that good advice, when I got around to doing little things like paying bills and such, I did open the email with the intent of conveniently clicking to Amazon that way. It was really more that I opened the email to read it in detail.

And that it was a damn lie was immediately apparent.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it often again: I. Hate! Liars! Especially those who make it a fundament of their existence. It’s evil. Advertising is generally unpleasant, but it has a legitimate place in society. It funds things that would otherwise be expensive, and it lets consumers know about products and services.

That’s all fine. It’s the fucking liars that get to me. And spam is lies from professional dedicated liars. It amazes me sometimes, all the blatant lies that come from email spam. If Congress did finally address this, hooray for them. I’m surprised they aren’t using it to raise campaign funds.

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I accept the probable reality of things that are probably real. The trick is figuring the probabilities.

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Small truths are more likely to be real. The more complex a Truth is, the less likely it is to apply everywhere it needs to.

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“Political Correctness” is a weird concept. “Political” suggests behavior outside one’s normal scope. (As with political lesbianism.) “Correctness” also suggests a special effort.

What about old-fashioned human compassion and sympathy? Or just being aware. The stuff we were supposed to have learned in kindergarten. First comes the self-awareness of one’s own sovereignty. Then comes awareness of the sovereignty of others. This mirrors our infant awareness of self/not-self and then of others similar to, but different from, self (a theory of mind).

The main thing is that it asks everyone to act according to a particular set of values, a set of truths personal to some but not all. What if your truth is different?

“Woke” is another weird concept. Both are good ideas that have evolved into a form of social weaponry. Now we beat each other up with them.

Which demonstrates that we’ve completely forgotten, or possibly repudiated, the original intention behind PC and Wokeness. Miss Manners taught me long ago that the whole point of etiquette is to make everyone feel comfortable and included. It’s not a new concept. But neither is making people feel uncomfortable.

Humanity: a weird blend of bonobo and chimp. Our particular basic Yin-Yang.

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A weird visual perception from my youth, a mild hallucination that distorted my perception of distance.

It usually happened when listening to a speaker, either formally (say, a teacher) or informally (say, at a party). It would seem as if the distance between me and them became extreme — dozens of feet or more (when, in fact, they were within a few feet). It was a sense of distance more than anything specifically visual.

Hasn’t happened since, but for one time in college when I thought I was tiny and looking out my (left?) eyehole, as if in a giant statue. But I was also seriously stoned at the time.

I’ve wondered if it’s somehow related to my poor hearing. Or to a sense of alienation. (The two are probably related.)

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Grammar Rules: They’re there for their purpose.
Grammar: knowing your shit from you’re shit.
Our grammar rules are due this hour.
It’s too bad its two wheels went to pieces.

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The operation of the four-cycle internal combustion engine is famously referred to as: Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow. An interesting violation of the rule of three. The punchline is that I worked for a company that had the informal operation description: Sticky, Scratchy, Tiny, Thin. Their expertise was in chemistry, particularly nano-particles and special coatings (some sticky, some scratchy).

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FTR: Incredibly, P45 is still a thing (and hoping to be P47), so here’s the deal. If someone can blind themselves to Trump’s massive flaws, then — regardless of any positive value perceived — I have to question the intelligence and ethics of supporting him. I can find no values in common with anyone who accepts his values as reasonable. This is not about a difference of opinion. It’s about what an opinion says about you. It says one is okay with stupidity, lies, racism, hatred, selfishness, and violence.

That is not okay.

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Idea: write a post while really hammered. I’ve always wanted to try one of those carefully monitored driving tests were participants drive a set course sober and again after consuming alcohol. Back in the day, I was the one who drove people home, but not because I was the sober one. I’m one of those who can maintain pretty good. Be interesting to see if I can write with a snootful.

It was certainly a thing for some well-known and well-regarded writers.

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Weird: I kinda miss Dark Rabbit. She was interesting. Not something I can say about everyone.

Stay weird, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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