Fuck You, Safari

This is basically an addendum to my last "Little Things That Bug Me" post because I made a horrible oversight in failing to include it.

In addition to the usual instabilities and bugs (and the fact that it has just disabled Flash Player with no way to reactivate it), I've discovered a problem I find remarkably annoying: Every now and then, I'll try to open a page and Safari will pop up a box saying, essentially, "There was a problem loading new pages. You have to reload every page in every tab you currently have open." Agreeing to this results in a long annoying delay as Safari strains itself trying to reload the twenty-odd pages I had open; refusing to agree renders Safari completely nonfunctional, as attempting to load any page in any tab ever will simply result in the message reappearing.

Seriously, even Internet Exploder doesn't do that (as far as I know). Apple really sucks.

Addendum: Some research has turned up the cause of this annoyance. Apparently, it finally occurred to Apple that Safari tends to crash on ordinary web content. The masterful designers in Cupertino attempted to rectify this problem by splitting Safari into two independent processes— one to manage the application's inner workings and another to handle the web content. The "you must reload all tabs" message appears whenever the "Safari Web Content" process crashes.

So basically, Apple "fixed" the problem of Safari crashing a lot by isolating the part that crashes so that it merely gives an annoying error upon crashing rather than taking down the entire application, and saving me the trouble of having to click once to reload the program before waiting for all of my tabs to come back. Not, you know, by making it not crash simply by trying to display ordinary web content. I stand by my previous snark— somehow, Internet Exploder manages to load web pages without crashing.

At least I got Flash working again.

I Have Outwitted Google.

I checked, and it turns out that Google simply has nothing to say (ie, it returns no search results) if I ask it something absurdly specific. I discovered this when I searched for something I always wanted to know, namely:

What is the sound of a woman in the 95th percentile for lung capacity using a vuvuzela to blow bubbles in a vat of turpentine while traveling at 25 kilometers per hour on the roof of a Ukrainian locomotive in the rain on a Tuesday?

Of course now that I made this blog post, it'll get incorporated into Google's search algorithms and start returning this post to anyone who searches that query. You know, in case anybody else has weird and very specific auditory curiosities.

Tropes I Don't Like (Part 1)— The Power Of Love

Today I'm starting a new recurring feature called Tropes I Don't Like. This is not a list of tropes that are bad, and I'm certainly not saying they can't be done extremely well. This is just a list of tropes I don't like, and therefore will not use in my writings.

Today's trope is The Power Of Love, but more generally, the concept of emotions having physical power.

This trope rubs me the wrong way in much the same way that religion rubs me the wrong way— it makes human experience the centerpiece of existence itself, saying, in essence, I feel it, therefore it must be physically potent. It registers strongly in my subjective experience, therefore its power must be objectively strong. What goes on in my head is perfectly reflective of the universe as a whole, therefore something that matters to me must matter to the universe at large. It privileges humanity to a grotesque level, and reduces everything else to a slightly overcomplicated human support system, which shatters my suspension of disbelief and makes me want to send very strongly worded missives to the responsible writers and their mums.

If a writer can pull off a story wherein humanity is objectively the most important thing in the universe without making me cringe, then this trope may slide but otherwise giving physical potency to human emotions is a trope I hate and will never use.

They Actually Said It

So in previous posts explaining why I don't think marketers are human, I snarked that marketers seem to think people have "emotional connections" with brands. Unfortunately, my satire fell victim to the saddest death that satire can face.

I found this article in the Wall Street Journal about Facebook's intrusive new video ads (and reason #7 why I will never use Facebook). And in that article, I found this quote:

"Video is really powerful," said Shelby Saville, managing director at Spark, a media-buying unit of Publicis Groupe SA "Using sight, sound and motion is a way to get consumers to have an emotional connection to the brand, if it's well done."

Seriously. They literally believe that people have "emotional connections" to small pieces of intellectual property and the legal fictions that own them.

I have no idea what planet marketers originally come from, but I think many of us would prefer it if they could all go back there.

Random Things

Last night, I dreamed I was a werewolf. According to the dream, werewolfness was an autosomal recessive inherited condition, because my dreams like to be specific about those sorts of things. Symptoms typically manifest in mid-teens to mid-20s and include pronounced excitement or anxiety at the prospect of the next full moon followed by turning into a wolf for the duration of any night in which a full moon is in the sky. Exact nature of the symptoms vary, with some werewolves retaining full mental faculties while transforming physically while others act like wolves for the duration of their transformation.

In the dream, I secluded myself in a construction site for my first transformation, and discovered that I transformed physically while remaining mentally human. Except the next morning, I discovered that I'd killed four people who were trespassing in the construction site. After reverting to human the following morning, I was captured and imprisoned by an organisation that hunts werewolves but sued for my freedom on the grounds that being a werewolf isn't actually a criminal offence.

I was actually surprised to discover my subconscious wrote what sounds like a passable story. I don't think I'm actually going to write it though.

Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 5— Facebook

So Facebook is now totally a thing and marketers are all over it because it lets them invade the privacy of average consumers that much more and because it gives them an objective, but thoroughly meaningless, number that they can pretend represents their "popularity" or summat.

Facebook does a lot of things for marketers— it somehow manages to convince people to dump their private lives and private information into the clutches of a company that explicitly exists to abuse it, creating a vast wealth of information about who's interested in what, and allowing marketers to attempt a form of ad targeting that's less bullshit than the normal cookie-based educated guesses— to target ads based on the kinds of products people express interest in and therefore might be in the market to buy. You'll notice I said "attempt," not "succeed" in that sentence. That's because, while Facebook has been quite successful in getting people to disregard all notions of privacy with respect to their lives, they haven't solved the fundamental problem that computers simply can't derive someone's interests from their activities with any level of precision. Sure, you can try keyword matching and various tricks like that, but it's still just educated guesses— the same kind of "targeting" you get from a tracking cookie. They have all the data, but no way to interpret it.

Facebook tries to work around this problem by implementing the "like" button. They figure, "people are willing to make us privy to all of their private information, maybe we can make them do the work for us by explicitly telling us what their interests are in a manner we can readily interpret. So, we give each company that wants to market through us a big fancy "like" button, and allow the users that like them to register this approval!"

The first problem with this is that real humans do not genuinely like companies, so the entire concept makes no sense outside of the marketers' fantasy world where people emotionally connect with legal fictions and small pieces of intellectual property.

The second problem is that even if there are a few subhumans out there who define themselves by what brand of crisps they buy, Facebook has transformed the "like" into a supposed measure of popularity. Companies are desperate to be more popular than their competitors, and therefore desperate to get more "likes." This leads them to pursue more effective ways of gaining "likes," namely by paying money for them. Most companies will, at minimum, offer a discount in exchange for your willingness to click the "like" button, with some paying cashy money to buy bulk "likes" from dummy accounts, thus completely defeating the supposed purpose of the "like" button and turning it into a measurement of how much money you have invested in purchasing "likes."

But the "like" system resonates with marketers in no small part because it reinforces one of their prime delusions— namely, that people can genuinely like a company and thus hold loyalty to it and its products, and especially its brands. Accordingly, marketers become quite invested in the whole Facebook thing.

And so, a recent market research survey asked: "What percentage of your Facebook friends have you met in real life?"

That I wasn't on Facebook never even occurred to them.

Little Things That BUG Me #10

Complaining about Internet Exploder has already been done to death, and the only people who still use it are old people who don't know what Firefox is and need their grandsons to install it anyway. That said, I'm a Mac user, so I get to complain about Safari instead.

It's rubbish. There. Got that out of the way. Version 4 had a remarkable tendency to crash every time I visited certain websites which is not a very good feature in a browser by and large. Version 4 was the version I had because I hadn't bothered to install system updates— it's a Mac so (a) there's no malware that needs to be patched against and (b) if there were, there would be no patch released because Apple dropped support in 1987.

Well I finally got around to installing the system updates and Safari 5.0.6 came with them. This version no longer crashes, but it's extremely slow and tends to go unresponsive for a minute or two whenever I try to load most web pages, and unlike the earlier version, it is not capable of playing netflix videos without dropping frames. So yeah, not a very good browser. But then, it makes sense that Safari would be crap— it's made by Apple.

Besides, I expect Mac users, as a group, contain a much higher percentage of old people who would need their granddaughters to install Firefox for them, given that Apple products have this bizarre reputation of "user-friendliness" (which ten minutes of using an iPhone would trivially disprove). Personally, I use Apple products because I'm allergic to paying money for things and I keep finding Macs for free in various bins.