It's Spelled 'Orgasm'

[strange_aeons]

Tesla is arguing with this guy on rasfc who ... okay, the subject of universal truth came up, and this guy, Richard Brown, who is such an idiot he once managed to misspell 'gesture' twice in a post in which the correct spelling of the word appeared in the quoted material, is attempting to define a universal truth. It's 'All cultures decry murder', with footnotes that modify the definitions of 'culture' and 'murder' in whatever way is necessary to defend his case. He and I have been going back and forth on the subject for a while -- basically, I dispute his definition of 'culture', and to a lesser extent his definition of 'murder', and I consider his attempt to dress a raging tautology up as something deeper and more meaningful than it is dishonest. And he thinks I'm a poopy-head.
Tesla says, "Which should give you a good idea as to how sophisticated his arguments are. It's like holding a philosophical discussion with Alastrann."
Whitney says, "Actually, as someone who's witnessed philosophical discussions with Alastrann, I'll say that Al's spelling is better but his logic is worse."

(If so inclined, you can find the thread in question here, the beginning of the Brown subthread here, and my first contribution to that subthread here, presuming I haven't fucked the URLs up.)

Also, shiny new overrides. I'd appreciate it if those of you who, for whatever reason, actually look at my journal page would nudge me if it looks fucked up (or just annoying) on your browser. This is not an entreaty to everyone to go look at the journal page in question, though I'm not stopping you.

Okay. Time to bathe the hydra that lives on my scalp.

Comments

Re: On those shiny new overrides....

[brooksmoses]

That looks only partly like what I'm seeing -- here's my screen capture:



(Not resized, because it turns out the blurring from the resizing meant that the smaller image took up more bandwidth, oddly enough.)

I debate that those colors ought to be called "blue-green" -- they're only a mere 33% and 24% saturation, so I'd call them cool greys. :)

Anyhow, the fact that they're a bit blue-green explains the weird effects of having them on a red background -- it's significantly weirder than a pure gray would be.

Now, as for why it doesn't show up right? I suspect it's related to the fact that this is Netscape 4.77, and Netscape 4.77 seems to have a badly borken CSS implementation.

I think I will go download 4.79, and see if that helps -- I'm still not sure I trust the 6.0 tree yet.

- Brooks

Re: On those shiny new overrides....

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Oh. Netscape 4.77. Well.

Very most borken: even IE 4.0, the version of IE I keep around for those rare occasions when I need or want it, renders it more accurately. (It's hard to say from one screen capture, but it looks like Netscape 4.77 just doesn't acknowledge CSS at all. Or maybe it's just embedded CSS it has a problem with.) And you know something's wrong when I of all people say 'IE does this better'.

I debate that those colors ought to be called "blue-green" -- they're only a mere 33% and 24% saturation, so I'd call them cool greys. :)

That's weird enough to make me wonder if our color perception isn't different. About 20% saturation isn't into 'strongly colored' territory for me, but it's certainly well out of the grey area¹, even when immediately next to a high-saturation color of the same hue.

¹ Sorry.

Re: On those shiny new overrides....

[brooksmoses]

Netscape 4.77 claims to acknowledge style sheets; there's a little checkbox under the advanced options for such, and I had it checked. On the other hand, unchecking it and reloading your journal produces exactly the same result as before, so clearly it's not happy with yours.

Anyhow, yeah, IE (5.0, on my machine) does it a bit better. Although I think I can claim to like IE a little better now -- the "about" page that I just checked to determine that says that at least version 5.0 is based on NCSA Mosaic, in a way that implies that that means heavily on the source-code level. It's certainly got a better "save this page" capability, when one wants to save the pictures as well, anyhow. (Oddly enough, the only person I know who actually used Mosiac regularly had customized her version of it to do exactly that, back in '96 or so.)

I dunno about the saturation bits ... I suspect some of it may be that it's in thin lines of text, rather than solid color; I might call it something different in a solid. It might also just be definition; I may have a wider range of what I'm willing to call "gray" -- on the white background, it is still a distinctly blue-green shade of gray, at least. Although it could, indeed, be a perception thing -- I've got fairly sharp vision (well, at the retina level; it needs external correction at the lens level), so I wouldn't be surprised if it traded off color sensitivity a little.

- Brooks

Re: On those shiny new overrides....

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I'd love to say something worldly-sounding here about NCSA Mosaic, but I confess I wouldn't know it from Sanskrit. I parted ways with versions of IE above 4.0 a few years ago, after a fiasco I forbid keeps to speak of. Now I use Opera, which has gotten slower and more crashy in recent versions, but is also compliant enough (it doesn't care for user interface CSS, but neither do I, so that's okay) and has sentimental value and a number of features I'm shocked to have never seen in another browser. (Well, I don't browser-shop very much.)

I suspect some of it may be that it's in thin lines of text, rather than solid color; I might call it something different in a solid.

Hmm. Pretty much any cool, dark color against saturated red (and more and more, I'm feeling the urge to apologize for that red ... it matches, damn it ...) just looks like lines of smeary pain to me, but if I squint (I suspect the pressure of my eyelids on my corneas temporarily alleviates some of my raging astigmatism) I can make it out.

I'm willing to accept the definition explanation, if you'd prefer to be a freak by choice rather than a quirk of genetics or development. ;)