Yeah, but no

OK I am all for the fun of makeup, and trying new things. I don’t object to the idea of wanting to temporarily change the way you look, or enhance and/or play with that look. But come on. Temporary lip tattoos? That you need a special video to learn how to apply? And notice how they don’t zoom in too closely, so you can’t see how awful this is up close – and how awkward it is for the girl stage left to even speak with all that crust on her.

Remember Your Priorities, Ladies!

I was just reading an article about a woman who has stomach paralysis – her stomach does not move food down to her intestines, it just sits there fermenting and eventually she vomits it back up. This means that she can’t get any nutrition and she’s slowly dying. Her hair is falling out and she is very weak, and has a hard time working. She’s also lost half her body weight, so she’s extremely thin, and keeps losing about 2lbs per week. They’re fitting her with a pacemaker in her abdomen that they hope will make her stomach contract and send food into her lower digestive tract. She is very ill and very desperate, and hoping that this surgery will let her return to a normal life.

Some guy in the comments: Well she looks amazing anyway!

Because we all know what’s really important.

Oh, and here’s the most recent cover of Vogue Italia, for your viewing pleasure. (and pro-Ana pinup needs)

In Which Popular Media is Bafflingly Popular

So I am totally unmoved by anything I’ve seen about Super 8 so far. It’s all blockbustery, effect, Speilberg, blah, and one expects that one ought to want to see it, or something. And I am sure it’s all thrilling and big budget and whoa. And yet, it makes me frown every time I see  the trailer. Then it suddenly occurred to me why I have no interest in it.

No girls.

Oh hey look, it’s another boys-coming-of-age-amidst-some-giant-catastrophe story. Yawn. Oh look. There’s a token chick to be the object of their adolescent interest. Yay. Some untouchable female ideal to get their chubby little adolescent cocks hard. Whee. Naturally the dudes have the action, and the girl is there to be inscrutable and fascinating, and naturally there are not TWO girls. That would be like, weird. One is plenty to get all our kiddie-cocks hard, dude, for real, we don’t mind sharing.

And thus the basis of my profound disinterest. (Also, go look at the trailer. Srs. It’s like, dude, dude, boy kid, dude, boy kid, dude, dude, dude, lady in the background, boy kid, girl they’re all in love with, dude.)

It’s just all “Stand by Me” and every other boys-grow-up kind of movie all over again, this time with a space alien or some shit.

Additionally, in thinking about other media in which a bunch of boys have an adventure with a token chick, I was thinking about “It.” And seriously it had never occurred to me to question or wonder why the only way that the kids could be saved at the end of it is their sole chick friend pulling a train with all of them down a sewer.

Really, Stephen King?

For a treat, go to Super 8′s photo gallery and try to find any females that aren’t Elle Fanning. I’ll wait here.

Oh, and here’s the movie’s official cast list from that site.

Stretching

You know a fashion place is really stretching when their “Trend Emphasis” for the week is “Necklines!”

Yeah! Trend alert! Necklines! Previous to this new “necklining” trend, there was nowhere for my head to poke through! It just scrabbled fruitlessly at the wad of fabric blocking its path! Now with new Necklines© my head is free to explore the world outside!

It sucks to have to write promo copy for the same thing week after week. I feel you, marketeers. But really, sometimes the ridiculousness is too much.

Fuckwit Hazards Ahead

So I am moving, and I need moving boxes. It’s surprising how many moving boxes a girl can go through when she puts her mind to it, really. And trash bags, but that’s another matter altogether. So I went to check the cost of these at Home Depot, and noticed something odd. (Dim this is especially posted for you, I knew it would delight you to no end.)

So, their moving boxes are pretty reasonable, ranging from $0.67 to $1.37 per, depending on the size. And then I see they have “bundles” you can buy. And in my head bundles = cost savings, so that’s great, right?

But then I see something strange. The cost of the bundles is much more than if you’d just buy the boxes individually. In every case. But… that can’t be right. So I click on the expanded description, expecting that the bundles include extras like bubble wrap or newsprint for wrapping things in, or tape, or something. Nope, a bundle is just 15 boxes. Nothing extra to it, as far as they say here. Now, being generous of spirit I will allow that perhaps their online description of the bundles is erroneous and accidentally does not include some other items that are in the actual bundle. That would make sense. It would make more sense than them charging extra for a bundle of boxes, certainly. Nevertheless, anyone who orders a bundle here, as described, is pretty much a fuckwit.

Click to embiggen:

Observe my raw naked alien meat-sticks

I am not even going to type up a proper post for this, my level of boggle must be self-explanatory.

I don't think anything means what you think it means.

Today I am offended by:

What the fuck do you know?

I find this entire project so damn offensive and tiresome. As if I am supposed to feel better that someone I don’t know hypothetically finds me beautiful? That should make my day? Conversely, should it ruin my day if someone I don’t know finds me hideous? Of course not. If someone left me a note calling me a hideous hose-beast, then everyone would say “Oh what the fuck do they know!? Don’t listen to them!”

This is the same thing.

The opinions of strangers, people who do not know you (and many times, those of the people who DO know you) are not a thing upon which one should base one’s mood. Positive or negative, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of how I look. This whole thing just perpetuates the stupid notion that people should always be happy that other people find them “attractive.” Oh the random compliment that made my life worth living! Oh joy! Gosh bless the fragile egos that this project caters to, those people are going to have a difficult way in the world.

And even if one bought into beautiful=important so being thought beautiful=happiness, this also smacks of “everyone gets a trophy, so everyone’s trophy is meaningless.” If some random stranger leaves me a note that says I am beautiful, in a random place, without ever having interacted with me, then they must think everyone is beautiful – and that makes their opinion on the topic meaningless.

I think that people should find themselves adequate to the task of living whatever kind of life they want to live, no matter what their appearance. I also know that’s insanely hard. But further externalizing the way we perceive ourselves based on random anonymous compliments is not actually helping.

Why MSD might have issues collecting funds

When I moved into this house four years ago, I set up an auto-pay account with MSD (St. Louis’s Metropolitan Sewer District, for those lucky enough to have never heard of them before.) I have pretty much ignored it ever since. Periodically they take some money out of my account, my sewer continues to work, and that’s about how much thought I want to put into the whole affair.

A few months ago they sent me a letter, saying that all the old recurring bill payments were being discontinued, due to “maintenance.” Which, that’s a pretty shitty maintenance if you ask me. The kind of maintenance you do that means money stops coming at you automatically is stupid fucking “maintenance.”

I noticed lately in my MS Money register that I had a bill coming up from MSD. So I assumed they’d, you know, BILL me, since they’d discontinued the way that I used to send them money. But no. They did not. So now I start to worry that they’re going to try to not bill me, then charge me a late fee. That sounds about their speed, given the level of ineptitude they’ve evinced so far. So I go online and try to log into my old account. No dice – discontinued. I try to set up a new account as they’ve asked me to do. I come up with a new user id (TEN characters? That’s really long. Isn’t the standard six? Perversely, the password only has to be four characters. Don’t ask me, it makes no sense.) and give them my email address. But no, want to set up new online profile, but can’t do it. To set up a new online account, you need your account number. I have no idea what that might be, as I do not have any old bills (do I even GET mailed bills which would have my account number on them? I don’t remember getting them. I would hope I don’t get mailed bills even though I pay online, but who knows.) and naturally they have helpfully NOT INCLUDED MY ACCOUNT NUMBER IN THE LETTER THEY SENT TO MY HOUSE.

They HAVE included a customer service number, which I call. It has an option for online bill pay setup. It tells me to go online and set that shit up. Helpful! Thanks! The other option is to request a form be mailed to me for online signup. Since I am not my own grandma, I skipped having them mail me the online signup form. Those being the only two options, I tried to back out of that part of their phone system. Helpfully, at this point they disconnected me. Not to be daunted by this, I called them again. This time I pressed the options that would lead me to a customer service worker with whom, it was promised, I could discuss my bill. I thought that I could at least pay by phone this time, and then get the online bill pay set up. Or maybe she could give me my account number. Nope! Their call center is only open from 9-5 on Monday thru Friday! That is SO HELPFUL OH MY HOLY JESUS.

So I give up for today, thinking I will call them on Monday and get this sorted, and that they are assholes. Then five minutes later I get an email from MSD congratulating me on setting up my new online account! :-/

What the fuck MSD, you totally fail at taking my money.

What is there to even debate about online anonymity?

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.  - Oscar Wilde

Ugh. This video is making me want to reach into the screen and throttle someone. Firstly for the way the panel is set up. White male moderator, three white male guests, one non-white male guest. No women.

So their very first unstated message: The internet is a fundamentally male experience—OR—there are no significant differences in the ways that women and men experience the internet. NOPE. WRONG TOTALLY WRONG. Not only are women who are merely known to be women online subject to oddball, oafish behavior from men (and other women) they are also subject to things like being told they should be raped to death when they disagree with people. This recent charming surge of “Tits or GTFO” statements and “make me a sandwich” jokes (Har har HAR, fellas) are employed to derail even the most serious commentary by women. Throw in the experience of female gamers, harassed in-game by all sorts of trolls, and really the experience of any woman anywhere who’s been online for more than 15 minutes*, and we can tell you that it’s different to do everything when you’re a woman, especially be online and EVEN when you’re anonymous and merely known to have girl parts down there. So constructing a panel without a woman’s voice on it (or even two! We are pretty much half of everything, you know!) ignores the experience of half your audience.

The we have the British guy: Who makes remarks about how online anonymity is ruining everything, apparently, and then goes on to make some profoundly ignorant, privileged statements about how of course he means there should be no anonymity - but only over here in the West! Not in those other (Iran, China) countries where they will jail you for speaking your mind and stuff. Because that would never happen here in the civilized West! You can speak your mind around here with no repercussions apparently! And so our responsibility is to reveal who we are! And then he wonders aloud why in the world African-American political bloggers right here in America might fear death threats for airing their views. The exchange between him and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia on this topic was quite precious actually – with Wales patiently pointing out “This is America, and we have racism here.” Even his opening remark was quite Sarah Palinish, I thought, where he called Wales out for using the term “social mechanism” by going for yucks and saying that he didn’t know what it was, but it sounded very painful. Hardee har har, that’s hilarious!? Got a mild chuckle out of the crowd, but that “I don’t understand your highfalutin ideas and language over there, son.” shtick is incredibly tired. I had not realized the Brits had adopted aggressive ignorance as a debate tactic.

He also claims that Facebook and Twitter are a) non-anonymous and b) because of this, the level of civility on those sites is “much higher.” Better check your facts there, dude. Facebook has its fair share of “anonymous” (non-real-name)  users, and Twitter has tons more. Sure, some people on Twitter choose to use their real names, but many people do not. In addition, I’ve seen plenty of incivility on both sites from people using constructed and “real” identities, and the lack of anonymity on Facebook has led to actual violence and serious repercussions offline for its users, showing they’d have been better off keeping their shit quiet. Where is this magical world this guy waxes poetically about, where people who can look each other in the eye are suddenly very respectful of each other? It’s not my experience that this is the case. Perhaps in a moderated, safe environment people are respectful, but in moderated, safe online environments (where they’re forced into it) people are respectful as well. Safety and civility has much more to do with the way the environment (on or offline) is constructed and maintained, and the people you’re dealing with in the first place, than it does whether you know those people’s “real” names and faces.

Sure, it sucks that people can go around saying hurtful things to me and each other. And the fact that they can do that is part of why I choose to be as anonymous as I can online. But I would also not take that right away from anyone. I prefer not to engage in a lot of communities online because they are not moderated in a way that makes me comfortable, and so I restrict myself from them. That’s OK because it’s my choice. A few years ago, only a handful of people knew me both on and offline. Now a lot of people do. I’ve become comfortable with that, but there have been trade-offs involved in combining the two sides of how I express myself. I am different online because of my offline life, and I different offline because of the things I do online. I’ve mostly made peace with it, but at my own pace, in my own time, at my own discretion. At no point was I thrown in front of everyone I knew and forced to own every single thought I’d ever expressed online. I chose to do that, and have made allowances in both my worlds to allow that to happen. Having a choice to be anonymous was essential to that process. It was crucial in my ever beginning to express myself publicly at all. I would never have begun to share my voice with anyone if I’d had to own it publicly from the outset.

Allowing for online anonymity does not build a perfect world, but it does paint us the picture of a the real world. It allows us to see the ugly and the beautiful in the ways that other human beings really think and feel without their filters. While I choose to spend most of my time in places where people are forced to adhere to some rules and treat me with respect, I will never advocate that every space should be that space. If we don’t allow people to show their true, sometimes ugly, feelings – how will we know what those feelings really are, and what we as a society can do to change them?  If I didn’t read hateful, anti-woman screeds and casual nasty comments all over the place I wouldn’t know that some of my friends have internalized and agree with those exact statements. I probably wouldn’t be as impassioned about women’s causes if I didn’t see the naked misogyny that people display when they have the opportunity. I am sure that people who advocate for other causes feel the same. At least with anonymity you can take an honest pulse. Some of my most telling conversations with people have sprung from “Can you believe so and so said such and such online, and other people agree?” If everyone were forced into totally public online civility, they’d just do a better job hiding their prejudices, and wait for the privacy they needed to express them in a peer group with which they could find social approbation. In other words – dude, at least now we can see what we’re up against.

Our society has rules about places where the right to privacy is almost absolute. We recognize that in some situations, truth cannot happen in the open. When we talk to lawyers, medical doctors, psychiatrists, priests, our society has made allowances with the understanding that privacy is necessary so that we can tell the whole truth and get the help we need. And now the internet has become many people’s only source of information that they can access in privacy and safety. It’s their shrink, their doctor, their priest. It’s a gay teen’s source for information and community. It’s a young girl’s source of birth control and sexual health information. It’s where abused women can find the shelter and assistance they need to flee their situations. It is the meeting hall for every underprivileged and abused group, for all the “others” to band together. It’s where people can go do a normalcy check, when there’s no one in their world that they can trust. In a society that is, for whatever reason, increasingly fragmented and isolating, it can help people find the other people like them. But first they have to be free to admit who they are, or find who they are without repercussions.

Thinking that some people believe this should be taken away to force people into “civility” is quite chilling. It also smacks so much of butt-hurt that it’s laughable. “I want to know who that person is so they can no longer say things that I don’t like!” is simultaneously the cry of the infant and the bully. It says “I can’t debate what you SAID, so I want to debate who you ARE.” It’s the wish of a person who wants to use knowing more about a person in order to defeat their arguments, instead of just, you know, defeating the arguments on their own merit. (Naturally this is only in cases that have not escalated to the point of credible threats of physical violence. But I believe there are channels in place to unmask people for those reasons. And yes, crowdsourcing is a channel.)

If you want to be public online, do so. Throw your name, face, street address out there. Own all your opinions openly, with every audience you encounter. If you have the safety and autonomy and position of personal power from which to do that shit, no one is stopping you. But accept that it’s not safe or pleasant or possible for everyone to do the same. Let everyone choose how much they’re comfortable sharing, and stop trying to force people into a public “civil” mold. You’re shooting for some online utopia that will never, and should never, exist.

———————————-

*and I refuse to touch with a bargepole the topic of women who are non-anonymous online while SIMULTANEOUSLY committing the most egregious sin of them all – not giving straight guys they encounter a boner. Boner-provision is, of course, the woman’s primary purpose in any scenario, and failure to provide a boner to any man who is desirous of one is the cause of many a swift and brutal take-down. In other words, interneting with a vagina is sometimes permitted, but interneting while having a vagina and not being “attractive” is a grave offense indeed. Unattractive RIGHT IN THEIR FACES! Holy Jesus, I am covered in flop-sweat just thinking about the boner-shriveling horrors out there for the unwary man.

————————————————–

Also, I really highly recommend this piece by Kate Harding, who writes about the challenges of women who blog under their real names.

And I also recommend this piece at Jezebel about a (St. Louis) blogger who was fired for her sex blog, which she meant to keep anonymous, but she was accidentally unmasked by a technical glitch, resulting in the loss of both the job AND (temporarily) the blog. Everybody loses.

Here’s an interesting TED talk from moot from 4chan, where he does not specifically outline the case for online anonymity, but one can infer why it’s important by what he does talk about.

Here’s Something Baffling

I am trying to picture this scenario: You’re getting intimate with someone, and you’re all up in your underpants, and then said person decides they’re NOT going to go for it after all (Which, you’d think they’d have known before everyone got unclothed and stuff.) But then they accidentally catch a whiff of your pheromone-laced underdrawers, and then the game’s back on?

What?

SO many questions.

1. So why did everyone take off their clothes if they weren’t already pretty sure they were going there? Did everyone’s clothes accidentally fall off? Does that happen a lot? If it does, can someone let me know? I would not want to be startled if such a thing were to occur.
2. If everyone’s derobing and a decision is made not to go where one thought things were going, what precipitated this mind-change? I would hold that there would have to be a pretty good reason.
3. Would you really want to override that reason with pheromones? Is this a legitimate thing? Like, “Oh no on third thought I don’t want to have intimate relations with… *sniff sniff* well hang ON a minute!”
4. If this is meant to be inhaled/ingested/experienced with clothes ON, well, that’s a different thing. But if it IS meant to be inhaled/ingested/experienced with clothes on, then why is it an underpants dip? Why can’t you just spray it on your jeans or your shirt or something?
5. Once the clothes are off and everyone is in an amorous mood, aren’t there supposed to be actual self-made pheromones at work? You can’t tell me that if everyone’s in their underpants and turned on, the primary thing people will be smelling is this panty spray. People have, you know, natural scents when they’re turned on, yo.

I just… I am having a hard time picturing a scene where a person is within underpants-clad, crotch-sniffing range of me and this pheromone spray would be what it took to seal the deal. And if it WAS, then possibly there are larger issues at hand. I am pretty sure my reaction in such a scenario would be way more along the lines of “Hit the fucking road, asshole.” than “Holy shit, wish I had wet my crotch down with pheromones, this may have given me the edge I needed! Damn my own eyes!”

So I don’t really get it. But hey, here’s an idea. Perhaps this is just some random crap someone thought up to sell to women who are made to feel insecure about their sex appeal and natural body odors…? And the thinking is that one can make that pink and pretty and then capitalize on that pretty pink insecurity and make some money with this worthless product? Just a thought.

Perky Panties (link may be NSFW)

Gang Rape of 15-year-old girl while her schoolmates take pictures

You know this shit is on YouTube. To kids of this age, this is just replicating what they see online, in movies, what they think girls want or deserve or are asking for. I think our culture sucks.

Authorities said people took photos,laughed and some joined in as the girl was repeatedly assaulted. The victim, a student, remained hospitalized Monday with injuries that were not life-threatening.”She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” said Lt. Mark Gagan, a patrol supervisor in the city’s Northern Policing District. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening, and failed to report it.”

via Police arrest second teen in connection with vicious assault on 15-year-old girl – San Jose Mercury News.

Rape prevention tip that works: When you see a 15 year-old girl lying comatose on a park bench – don’t rape her! Even if your friends are! Instead, you could perhaps offer her some assistance, or tell your rapist friends that they are not behaving appropriately. Something like that.

and more from CNN

Investigators said as many as 15 people, all males, stood around watching the assault, but did not call police or help the victim, a 15-year-old student at Richmond High School in suburban San Francisco.

“As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated,” Gagan said.

Authorities had interviewed the victim, and the search for other attackers and bystanders who watched and did not report the rape was in “full-court press,” according to Gagan.

“We have checked Facebook and YouTube to try to find any revealing evidence,” he said. “We’re looking in particular to see if anyone posted any video of the incident.”

Several other individuals were detained at the scene but not arrested, Simon said.

The attack occurred on school grounds as the annual homecoming dance was under way inside the school Saturday night, authorities said.

…

“This just gets worse and worse the more you dig into it,” [Police Lt.] Gagan said. “It was like a horror movie after looking at the evidence. I can’t believe not one person felt compelled to help her.”

Rape is a pre-existing condition?

Here’s your daily dose of gigantic incredulous WTF? (Emphasis added by me.) Apparently, according to Blue Cross, once you’ve been raped you get kind of used to it? So next time it’s really not a big deal. After that your vagina is pretty much open for anyone’s business, and the aftermath of people forcefully inserting their body parts into you requires neither medical attention nor mental health assistance.

Rape Victim’s Choice: Risk AIDS or Health Insurance?

A 38-year-old woman in Ithaca, N.Y., said she was raped last year and then penalized by insurers because in giving her medical history she mentioned an assault she suffered in college 17 years earlier. The woman, Kimberly Fallon, told a nurse about the previous attack and months later, her doctor’s office sent her a bill for treatment. She said she was informed by a nurse and, later, the hospital’s billing department that her health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, not only had declined payment for the rape exam, but also would not pay for therapy or medication for trauma because she “had been raped before.”

via Rape Victim’s Choice: Risk AIDS or Health Insurance?.

Why Twitter is Wrong about @replies

Recently Twitter made an announcement that they were changing the way our tweetstreams worked. They say it’s because the old way was too confusing. It wasn’t all that confusing to me, or to anyone with half a brain and an attention span surpassing that of a 6 week old puppy.

Here’s what happened:

When you sign up for twitter you are (or, you WERE) given an option with regard to reading the messages of the people you chose to follow. You could either:

• read everything they wrote (including messages to people you don’t follow)
• read only the messages they send to the general public and those directed specifically to you (called @replies in twitter-speak.)

The first option works like this: I follow  my friend “Joe” but I don’t follow “Jane.” because I don’t know her. Joe says to Jane “@Jane hey what’s going on tonight? Did you want to go see this show? <insert link to show>.” I can see this message, and I realize that Jane’s a big fan of my favorite band. I can reply to Joe that I am already going to that show, and I will meet him there, and I can check out Jane’s tweet and maybe choose to follow Jane too, since we seem to have something in common. Connections formed. Social networking just happened. Hooray.

The second option means that I would have never seen the conversation at all and may have skipped the show because no one I knew was going. Boo. Maybe I stay at home and slice my wrists open in the tub because no one understands me. You never know.

Now Twitter has removed the ability for us to choose the first option, meaning that I can no longer see conversations that are happening unless I already follow both of the parties involved. Those conversations are invisible to me, as if they aren’t taking place. Since Twitter is ostensibly a service dedicated to networking and building connections between people, this makes absolutely no sense. Especially as what they took away was not mandatory before, but something people could easily turn off for themselves.

Twitter needs open @replies for two reasons:

1. Reading one side of a conversation between someone you know and someone you don’t know is a good way to get to know new people. Taking this feature away prevents new connections forming spontaneously. Consistently seeing what looked like funny/interesting messages directed at one person would make me interested in following them. It’s probably how I also gained most of my followers too, since they saw their friends talking to me. If you think about this in meatspace terms, it’s like being out at the bar and seeing your friend having an animated discussion with someone you don’t know. If that looks good enough you’d probably want to walk up and join them, and be introduced to the new person, right? Well, the way Twitter has now configured things, it’s like every time your friend walks away from you at the bar to talk to someone else, they become invisible – as does the person they’re talking to. So you’re left standing on your own with a watered-down drink in your hands, wondering why there’s no one cool to meet in this place. Wow, that’s really sociable of you, Twitter. Now, I could make periodic visits to my friends’ pages, checking who they’re following, clicking each person’s avatar to read their recent tweets (if their stream is even public) and deciding whether to follow them or not. But realistically, I won’t do that. And I could wait for people I follow to tell me specifically to follow other users – but many times they won’t do that. I certainly never pimp out any of my friends or tell other people to follow them.
2. Some of Twitter’s most-followed members converse with a larger audience via @replies directed to people that the rest of their followers don’t already follow. Taking this feature away breaks the communication model for those users. Take @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman) for instance. He is a big Twitter user at the moment, and has more than 300k followers. People ask him lots of questions, and he is kind enough to reply to many of them. Of course he doesn’t want to reply to the same question over and over, but it was easy enough to follow his stream and see that he tweeted @ someone else about the book signing you were interested in, or why he didn’t get a haircut, or whatever. If you have a look at his tweetstream, it’s 90% @replies to his followers. Yeah, that means he tweets a lot, and I have to filter out a lot of noise. But at the same time, I also learn the answers to questions I didn’t even know I wanted to ask. It’s impractical for Twitter to assume that all of us will start to follow all 300k followers of his, just in case he answers a question, posts a great link or recommends a book or a song or a site  in a reply directed to someone else.

What they should have done.

What Twitter SHOULD have done is implement selective open replies. Let users choose how much they want to read from each of the people they follow. I have been craving this feature for a long time, because people use Twitter in different ways, some of which are interesting to me, and some of which aren’t.

• There are some people I follow who use Twitter mostly as a broadcast medium. They post interesting observations and cool links, and they have some limited back and forth discussions with other interesting people. I want to continue to read their all of their tweets, so that I can eavesdrop on these interesting conversations and find new people to follow.
• There are other people I follow who use Twitter more as an IM client, constantly @replying everyone in the universe, and seemingly about the dullest things in the world. There are people whose individual tweets I like, but I have nevertheless unfollowed because they @replied too many people that I didn’t know or want to know. For those people I would like to turn off following @replies unless I follow both parties already.

I am not a programmer, I don’t know what offering these options would take to implement. But I do know that dumbing things down is only going to piss people off and cause extra problems when users try to circumvent the system. Right now you can get around the @replies thing by adding some extra characters in front of the person’s name.

For instance: if you don’t follow @superbadgirl, and I start out a tweet with “@superbadgirl” the system recognizes that as an @reply and you won’t see it. However if I say “To: @superbadgirl” or “Dear @superbadgirl” or even “: @superbadgirl” then it WILL show up in your stream, because the system just sees that as a normal tweet of mine, in which I mention another person. While this is helpful to ME, because I like to see @replies, it’s going to piss off some people who follow me, and had purposely turned off @replies. Now they have no way to turn this off, because I am doing it manually. They don’t want their streams clogged up with my tweets, and I understand that. But I am nevertheless angry because I can’t read what I want to read. And aggravating your users by preventing some of them reading what they want to read, causing them to force other people to read  a bunch of shit they don’t want to read is FAIL, Twitter – big time FAIL.

This is poorly thought out, poorly communicated and very, very aggravating. I expected better of the people at Twitter, and I am shocked that they did not better assess their members usage patterns before implementing this change. A 10-person focus group would have raised all the same concerns I just expressed here, and taken maybe an hour out of someone’s day.

WTPF Twitter? Get your shit together.

I feel excessively secure

So this morning I am running a bit early to work, and decide to stop off at the coffee shop on the way for a chai tea and a smoothie. Something somewhat healthier than biscuits or an egg sandwich from the cafeteria. Now, you know I don’t like people in general, and I don’t like interacting with people who work at places, they’re always weird and awkward and asking me stupid questions and doing things I don’t anticipate and I basically wish the whole world were drive-thru or self-serve. But it’s not. So I park and go in, place my order, and whip out my debit card to pay. I use my debit card for even minor purchases like this so at the end of the month I can lambaste myself with “Really? $47 worth of chai tea? Seriously?” rather than just going “WhereTF did all my farking money go?” which is what I usually say on Saturday mornings after spending cash at the bar. (BTW the answer to that question usually is “You drunkenly stuffed it into various nooks and crannies of your purse and/or clothing, you vacant whore.”)

So anyway, the guy runs my card, then says it didn’t go through, and wants the card back. I make to hand it over and then he tells me it’s declined. I get the “WTF?” face and say “De-CLINED?” all incredulously. He says “Yes, declined.” Of course there’s got to be other customers standing there overhearing this shit, so I just hastily gave him cash. So as I was waiting for my smoothie I called the bank’s info line, which told me I had enough money in my account to buy everyone in the fucking place breakfast, lunch and dinner. This pisses me off, so I tell him his machine is fucked up, and he gives met the “Uh-huh, whatever, you broke-ass.”

So I get to work and figure that I’d better call my bank to see if there’s a problem, or if it’s really his machine. They transfer me to security, who have placed a hold on my account for suspicious activity. Now I am worried. Has someone accessed my account? What the hell is going on? I get some chick from security, and she tells me that yes indeed, there’s some suspicious activity on my account. Particularly this charge from DAZ3D in Utah. For $9.43.

Seriously? An under-$10 charge from a company I have been buying shit from on a monthly basis since 2004? That made your flags raise? Oh yes, she says, there’s another charge that’s suspicious. This one’s $52.80 from my web hosting company. Which also charges me monthly, and has been for the last 3-4 years. Why was that one suspicious? It came from “out of the country”  – specifically from oh-so-nefarious hotbed of scamitude… CANADA!

So I confirm that those charges are legitimate, and they (supposedly) release the hold on my account and we’re done. But this whole thing rankles me.

For one thing, it’s really embarrassing to be declined when you’re trying to buy something for which you have plenty of money. Luckily I was at the coffee shop and had cash to cover my purchases, but tonight I am planning to go to the grocery store. If I had been standing in Dierberg’s with $100 worth of perishables, I would not have been so calm, nor (since I don’t use credit cards at all and don’t carry more than $50 of cash, usually.) would I have had another way to pay for my purchases.

For another thing – check your fucking algorithm, yo. I am no banking security expert, but I would think that if a purchase flags as “suspicious” the computer would be able to cross-reference to see if the account holder had purchased in similar amounts from that same merchant in the past. If so – auto-clear that hold, motherfucker. I mean, Microsoft Money even flags monthly transactions automatically, asking me if I want to add them to my recurring bills list. (Which is sometimes eye-opening ["It seems you've made similar purchases in the past. Would you like to add 'TJMaxx, $150, shoes' to your recurring transactions list?"] Umm… no.)

Anyway, years of history of purchases of a similar amount from the same merchant would seem to allay any suspicions that the bank might have, so the whole thing is pretty ridiculous. And now I am going to be holding my breath every time someone runs my card for the next month. Like I need more anxiety when dealing with people who work places? No I do not. Whatever.

Electricity is Dangerous

From and old German book which is apparently warning of the dangers of letting your baby suck on an electric vibrator unattended.