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

On those shiny new overrides....

[brooksmoses]

The color scheme looks disturbingly familiar, actually. See the screencapture (with apologies for the horrid quality) below:



That's from a day some time ago when LiveJournal was having significant server issues, and was occasionally returning "blank" journals. (And, no, that's not intenselaura's journal style; it's one that somehow got attached to the blank journals.

Anyhow, beyond that, the spiffy overrides seem to work fine. Except for the fact that gray text on red background works badly on my monitor -- it causes the different alignment between the red, green, and blue dots to be really really apparent, and the text thus looks unreadably weird.

- Brooks

Re: On those shiny new overrides....

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

You just revealed a problem the existence of which I was completely unaware: it shouldn't be grey text on red background. Since an attempt on my part to describe what it /should/ look like is liable to descend into handflapping, here's a screen capture (the very faint checkerboarding [one unit = one pixel] in the background is just my video card sucking, pay it no mind):



And here's a chopped up but unresized capture of what the quote and normal text (top and bottom respectively) look like on my screen:



Does that look even remotely like what you're getting? Obviously there are red values defined in my style and in the overrides, but no grays unless you count white: could what you're seeing as grey be one of the shades of blue-green (in which case there's just the question of why the hell the colors are scrambled to answer, and not the question of where the hell the grey comes from in the first place)?

[kiya]

Hum. After reading your friends page, I note that the white on red is slightly too . . . thin? Something. Problem with white text, often. I'd suggest putting the fonts in section headings in one tic larger font, which is how I deal with that sort of thing.

Also, the link on where I said 'I got it from [picture] elynne' looks a little washed out, but that's sufficiently not frequent that I don't think I'd be arsed doing anything about it if I were you.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Also, the link on where I said 'I got it from [picture] elynne' looks a little washed out, but that's sufficiently not frequent that I don't think I'd be arsed doing anything about it if I were you.

I noticed that too, and it bugged me -- it's really hard on my eyes, at least -- and I tried to fix it, and it didn't work ... except I tried again just now, and it worked perfectly. Color me mystified.

The white-on-red looking too thin is something I'd noticed too, though for some reason it hadn't occurred to me to try to do something about it. This might be just as well, because I just tried and it had no apparent effect at all. This may be an argument for 'get another color scheme'.

[kiya]

That seems quite rude of it.

I suspect if you could tic up the font size by one it would address Brooks's concern, too. But if it's going to be rude at you about it. . . .

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

Oh, and one more thing...

[brooksmoses]

The checkerboarding looks to me more like JPEG artifacts than video-card suckage. For things like this with broad single-color expanses, I recommend GIF. Or PNG.

- Brooks

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

It was present before I compressed the image, so the .jpg artefacts probably just enhanced it. Actually, it was present before I resized it, so it probably wasn't checkerboarding as such before I compressed it. (I haven't looked at it closely since, so I couldn't say what it is exactly now.)

Ordinarily I would use .gif or .png, but the file kept coming out too large (.gif doesn't do lots of text well, and I'm not familiar enough with .png to say anything concrete about why it wasn't cooperating, but it wasn't).

[brooksmoses]

I dunno, then. It could be video-card issues. I suppose it could be a lot of things.

It might also be related to why the GIF file was too large; storing all the checkerboarding exactly takes a lot of data. Of course, at this point, my technical expertise gives out completely, and I'm reduced to saying "my screen-capture is 32kb and yours is 64kb, neener neener." (Conventiently ignoring the first one I posted, which is horrid, of course.)

On a different note, neener neener to me -- turns out that, although I downloaded Netscape 4.79 a week ago and never got around to installing it, they've done 4.8 now, and apparently ended the line there. And they're at 7.0 rather than 6.x on the Mozilla-based branch, and 7.0 has hardware requirements past what my machine can do. Sigh.

Go, speed racer modem, go.

- Brooks, 20 minutes of download down, 58:07 to go.

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.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Amazing how I manage to remember the problem .gif has with lots of fine text when I'm explaining why I didn't use .gif, but the checkerboarding I was talking about in the previous paragraph completely slips my mind. Truly, I am a wonder.

Remember, my video card refuses to do better than sixteen-bit color at this resolution, so I get dithering and weird colors. And I can't lower my resolution because my screen is enormous. I can acclimate to things being slightly too small (as is the case for me now), but not to them being significantly too large. It's not as bad as it could be: the dithering is relatively innocuous because of the size of the pixels. Still, digital artist + bad video card is not a happy combination.

20 minutes of download down, 58:07 to go.

Yeah, that's a lovely feeling.

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. ;)

[brooksmoses]

I'd forgotten that your video card only does 16-bit color. Ugh! (What resolution are you using, incidentally?)

Meanwhile, 58:07 later, one observes that Netscape 4.8 has exactly the same css issues.

Sigh.

- Brooks

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

(What resolution are you using, incidentally?)

1280x1024. Anything smaller feels like Fisher Price's My First Computer. (Actually, it feels a lot like the computer, basically a primitive Game Boy, I had when I was ... I don't know, six? ... which may or may not have been made by Fisher Price.)

Meanwhile, 58:07 later, one observes that Netscape 4.8 has exactly the same css issues.

Whee!

[brooksmoses]

On the other hand, Mozilla 1.1 seems to mostly work ok even though this computer is a bit below its "box" requirements. (200 Mhz CPU, it claims to need a 233.)

Well, ok, I thought it was mostly working ok. Except that it seems that typing at a reasonable speed in a form is sufficient to completely peg the CPU time and then some. This is distressing, as the result is substantially worse than most server lag over a half-bad modem connection.

I think that that may be sufficient annoyance to say that it's not worth the bother. Sigh. It seems a pretty good browser otherwise.

- Brooks

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

...

Okay, I'm going to have to ask you why you're using a 200Mhz CPU.

...

Why are you using a 200Mhz CPU?

[brooksmoses]

It's very simple: the world has simply not yet produced a desktop application that can usefully use more than 200MHz.

The world, as best I can tell, has not usefully tried to produce a desktop application that can usefully use more than 200MHz. Instead, it's produced the capability to put colored squiggles underneath words as you type when they twig some brain-dead grammar checker.

No, wait, even this computer doesn't have any problem doing that at fast typing speeds.

I have a little green box in the corner of my screen which monitors the CPU usage. It pegs when programs go runaway, and it pegs when Netscape hits one of its few really inefficient algorithms that were clearly programmed by particularly incompetent monkeys. (For instance, the algorithm to display a really really large table seems to take a few seconds or so.) Were I to use IE, I wouldn't have that problem. The rest of the time, it mostly sits below 10%.

Ergo, I conclude that an infinitely fast computer would save me maybe a couple of minutes per day. Lesser finite computers are therefore certainly not worth the money.

On the other hand, doubling the memory (64mb for $50) and putting in a far better video card ($39.95, does 1800x1440 at 32-bit color, and 1600x1200 at 85Hz) have been significantly worthy upgrades. (And, back when I bought this computer five years ago, it was a worthy upgrade, too -- memory bus speeds on a 486 computer are pretty lame.)

Of course, were I to do 3D renders on a regular basis, I'd buy a new computer. In particular, I'd buy a second computer specifically to crunch renders on, and still use this one for everything else.

- Brooks