I QUIT

Knock Off Nº 2, disquisiting about Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras:

— Yeah, we’ve been recuperating – sort of, you know, rehydrating.

— Plenty of fluids. I mean, you take in plenty of fluids, um, in all sorts of ways, on Mardi Gras night, and afterwards you gotta take in more fluids. But yeah, look, Mardi Gras, I always say it’s a total body workout. A lot of guys – you know, Arnold will say it. Your Starting Strength guy, what’s his name? Duffin? Big thighs. What’s his name?

— Mark Rippetoe?

— Oh, Rippetoe, of course. Those thighs. I just remembered thighs; I don’t remember the name. But, uh, you know, all these guys, well, your Jack Donovans, they’re talking about the total body workout, all that Mardi Gras in –

— Rippetoe in the assless chaps and the cowboy boots. He’s from Texas.

— “It’s not a cameltoe. It’s a Rippetoe.”

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.11.02 13:35. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/11/02/askcameltoe/

☑ Yes 

(UPDATED) Russian-American anarchist Michael Malice offers a rough-around-the-edges/rat-bastard/imperious–resentful–blustery persona. Honed to a brilliant shine, that troll façade is what Japanese car designers called “surface entertainment.” I’m a fan. [continue with: Are Michael Malice better than other people? →]

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.31 14:02. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/31/bettermalice/

I wondered if it were possible to wear a full week’s worth of clothing all of which was made in the U.S. and Canada. (Then vary that for warm‑ and cold-weather conditions.) While Uncle Otis in Yorkville has a good selection, expertly explained to me one Saturday by a brown-haired ginger, I had nothing else in mind except L.L. Bean duckboots, which work year-round and of which you must select the made-in-Maine version. Some outlandishly priced outerwear is still made here.

I discovered that Nick Uhlig maintains a list of Canadian-made apparel, much of it for vertical markets like oil rigs. Uhlig’s list is illegible and unreadable and is pointlessly published as a couple of PDFs; of all things the Reddit version is easier to deal with.

So that addresses less than half of my question.

Uncle Otis shitcans self

Uncle Otis closed.

Empty Uncle Otis store

Except no, it didn’t: It moved to Spadina. But you’d have no way of knowing that by standing in front of the actual store.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.26 13:36. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/26/domesticapparel/

“Tweet” by Mildly_Emo (no realtion): the sad truth is, if you don’t look like either of these, you’re worthless to a majority of the white gay ‘community’ ”

Pictured at left is Mr. JOSHUA BERGIN, an homosexualist who runs his own home-reno business in Calgary. He’s achieved a measure of success.

When a queer, a trans*, or an LGBT caterwauls about body positivity, “they” just mean they hate “themself.” Body positivity just means body resentment. Here failure is weaponized against such success; failure is represented by the twink pictured at right, or by any who popularized this “meme.”

I suppose these two phenotypes are implicitly held up against, say, bears. When it comes to body fascism, it is musclebears who are the problem. Guess who will be last to find out.

Further, queer, trans*, and LGBT are explicitly racist.

In any case, imagine the phenotypes pictured above are your sole choices. Please make your selection now.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.25 17:11. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/25/thesadtruthis/

  1. Gods and Monsters (q.v.), dropping by a Hollywood party:

    Brendan Fraser and Ian McKellen look into the distance

    — Who’s that?

    — [Delighted] David! A friend I thought was in New York.

    — No, I m— the girl.

    Elizabeth Taylor smiles with two friends

    — Oh, that’s Elizabeth Taylor.

  2. Here we have Mr. KIT DALE, a fighter of some kind from Australia, who has Australian bonhomie and a near-ideal body shape, at his brother’s wedding. Mr. DALE is the one bursting out of his shirt (which should be a size larger).

    Smiling dark-haired lads in bow ties

    Now here is Mr. DALE with what I assume is his date.

    Kit Dale with young woman in black cocktail dress and shearling coat

    At first glance, I had no idea she was even in the photo. Even now I don’t notice her at first. Consistent with sculpture, painting, and photography dating back millennia, this young woman presents beautifully. She’s taller than her date (is it the heels?) and is dressed to get noticed. Notice her I did not.

Kinsey’s scale ran from 0 to 6. I’m a 7.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.25 16:56. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/25/kinsey7/


I once wrote a user manual for a handheld engine-diagnostics module for Daewoo cars. I know “hard to use” when I see it. iPhones are hard to use.

  • On two occasions on the same bus route, I couldn’t stand to watch late-middle-aged persons (eyeglasses perched on forehead in one case) struggle to read their iPhones. I took hold of their phones for a moment each (I got permission) and brought up the well-hidden screen for text-size selection. They picked the bigger fonts they’d needed all along. They were so grateful it was embarrassing.

  • The same thing later happened, though not on a bus, with an 85-year-old who was also struggling.

  • Another senior knows he can send a text message to a certain phone number containing the ID number of a bus stop, but had no idea that was the worst possible way to get a transit prediction, nor that transit predictions could work everywhere, nor what to do if he were in an unfamiliar place and/or could not find the number of a bus stop.

    (How did this senior learn to use his iPhone? He asked his wife how to do things. He also thought he had to use the Gmail app to read his Gmail.)

  • My almost-blind friend upgraded from an iTouch to an iPhone 8, then couldn’t check his voicemail for weeks because iPhone keyboards and keypads randomly change or invert their colours and he simply could not see or locate the number buttons.

    Light keypad, then dark keypad with Voicemail title

    Before and after calling voicemail

  • What was obviously an itinerant Filipina nanny or maid on the way to a temp gig stopped me to ask where a well-hidden street with a hard-to-pronounce name was. “Huh?” I said. She opened her iPhone X (which had then just been released) and showed me its map. She had no idea she could ask the phone for directions. (And only after I saw the map did I understand the name she mispronounced.)

    (UPDATE) A full day after publishing this posting, I remembered that even as it was happening I forgot one could ask the iPhone for directions. People just blank on things.

  • I had to tell someone who uses his Apple Watch for notifications and daily fitness tracking that his watch could give him directions and that his phone had a Health app. I had to explain to him how to search for it.


Very tuned-in people learn how to use new Apple features by watching them being demonstrated onstage during Apple keynote events. Then there’s everybody else. [continue with: iPhones are hard to use →]

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.22 14:10. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/hardtouse/

…where I mentioned that iPhone keyboards and keypads randomly change foreground and background colours (photos).

Here’s what my blind friend gave me to submit as a bug to Apple (radar 45620925).

To whom it may concern at the Mother Pod –

I recently purchased a beautiful, beautiful red iPhone 8. I bought this phone (and all previous Apple products) owing to my increasing comfort with iOS and, generally, its consideration of and utility for visually-impaired or low-vision people… of which I am one.

The unboxing was glorious and the setup was no more arduous than I had expected, with one very significant exception, which may have been my fault… though I honestly cannot imagine how (as such I will deal with as Nº 3).

I am contacting you to let you know about three points of dissatisfaction:

  1. I noticed when I toggle between the two keypads (phone and voicemail) there was an inverse contrast. No matter what combination of brightness or Smart or Classic Invert I tried, I could see only one keypad easily. I had to use my phone, then pause to clumsily change the colour inversion in order to then check my voicemail. After a week of trying to figure it out myself as well as speaking to friends who are “super-users” I had given up and accepted this extraordinarily inconvenient reality as a sad fact, when out of simple D-F luck I stumbled across two buttons under General Settings → Accessibility → Increase Contrast → Darken Colours and Reduce Transparency, the second of which was what I seemed to be looking for… or at least, I suspect, resulted in a viable workaround.

    There is absolutely no way I or anyone else I spoke to could reasonably be expected to know that reducing the transparency button would achieve the goal of having two separate contrast fields on those two keypads. This should be seen to. Why ever would the keypads be inverted in the first place? Senseless, confusing and extremely inconvenient.

  2. Siri cannot access voicemail. I am told that it has to do with an inability to access specific carrier service, which is ball-wash to me. If she can access one keypad why not the other?? When I ask Siri if I have voicemail she says “You have no voicemails,” whether I do or not. What’s up with that? Am I doing something wrong in the setup or is that simply an annoying irregularity that you need to fix? Is there any way that I can actually have her check my voicemail?

  3. When I plugged in my new phone to begin the initial setup the “Hello” screen was of an adequate brightness. Everything subsequent to that was so damn dark I was actually only able to stumble through it in VoiceOver. This is my third Apple setup and the first time that’s ever happened.

(Published 2018.10.28, but backdated so this posting would appear in readable sequence.)

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.22 14:07. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/keyboardcontrast/

I use all the following on iOS, and I contend turning them all on seriously reduces annoyances of many kinds:

  • 24-hour clock, as God intended.

  • AssistiveTouch with 5 buttons (over rendering of this Weblog)AssistiveTouch (Lock Screen; Shake; Accessibility Shortcut; Screenshot; Home).

  • Text size third from largest. Always select text size with your glasses off – it’s for worst-case scenarios.

  • Bold type.

    The exact need for “bold font” is hard to pin down. I think it began with the first Kindles’ atrocious screens and, before that, CRTs without nice smooth fonts. The actual issue is single-pixel stems and the difficulty of distinguishing those. (You can’t explain the concept of single-pixel stems to civilians who demand “bold font.” I’ve tried.)

    But we don’t have screens like that anymore. The last time I saw one was an embedded Windows installation at a self-checkout machine.

    Some theories are being developed about a sweet spot for a specific person using a specific device at a specific distance and what that person might prefer for stroke thickness and character width. Apparently at small viewing angles (up close looking at tiny fonts equates to a small viewing angle), thicker stroke width is more recognizable. (Video from ATypI 2018.)

  • Button shapes and on/off labels both turned on. You really want those, despite unintended consequences like lots of things suddenly becoming underlined.

  • Increase contrast on. Reduce transparency and reduce motion on. You will never go back to wildly animating home screens.

  • Vibration (also haptics) on but no sounds at all otherwise except for certain phone calls. I use a custom silent ringtone for all callers save for a select few.

  • Phone noise cancellation on.

See also: Evolution of homosexualist lock screens.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2018.10.22 14:05. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/mysetup/

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