(Brandan Gillogly)

Some kinds of garish are the right kinds.

Nº 1 with a bullet: Not to top-post. Then there’s everything else.

1. How to touch-type. If you’re a hunt-and-peck typist, you are a slave to your machine. What I would not have imagined 20 years ago, when I first started using onscreen keyboards, was the way a 90 wpm typist like me would also have to hunt-and-peck on tiny screens. (Fraser Shein’s WiViK [a predictive onscreen keyboard] on a Grid Convertible that was all screen was the most futuristic thing I had ever seen at that same point 20 years ago. I feel that was the true origin of onscreen hunt-and-peck.)

2. That it must be possible to change text size, and that you should always do it.

   • I constantly see people editing Microsoft Word documents in teeny tiny type, unaware that the zoom level can and must be changed (without affecting the underlying type size).

   • On two occasions on the bus I have helped middle-aged people resize text on their iPhones; if Apple were truly committed to accessibility as is repeatedly claimed, choosing a text size would be part of the setup process.

3. How to select text, and move the cursor, and both, using only the keyboard. I can select only a filename, add a space and a number to the end, select and copy everything before what I just added, and move to the next filename as fast as I can type. I can move to the beginning or end of a line (“line” includes filenames and dialogue boxes) at like speed.

4. Tabbing between fields. I understand nobody’s stupider than a Windows user, but even and especially there, the Tab key moves from field to field essentially everywhere (Shift-Tab goes backwards). Nothing’s more painful than watching some twit pick up the mouse and click into the First Name field when she just finished typing in the Last Name field.

   Corollary: You have to know what a field is.

5. Multiple selection. You need to know how to select everything, everything from point A to point B, or variable numbers of items inside a set.

Never heard of any of those? Too afraid to find out? Again, you’ll be a slave to your machine forever, and again, that just makes you a typical Windows user.

(Insurmountable complication: To teach a key combination requires spoken and/or written words or symbols. But you don’t type that key combination from a starting point of language; it’s sensorimotor. The only way to learn to dance is to dance; the only way to learn to type is to type, not have shit explained to you like you were even stupider than a Windoid.)

(Degrassi Panthers)

Toronto Star scooped everyone six years ago (1 ¶ 2).

Not quite “just tall and handsome enough, just manly enough, good with his hands, nonjudgemental, with intelligent eyes and a rich sonorous voice, shivering, cold, vulnerable, needy, beaten to shit and crying,” but also not quite sacrificed by diversity, rather by aliens.

(A Quiet Place is essentially Mars Attacks, if not so anti-life. Deaf daughter is a horrendous gimmick. Even more horrendous was the budget audio description by some guy named Beaner at some third-rate house, namely VSI.)

(An uncopyrightable U.S. government offical photo, not a creation by James Bridle.)

(Via. And actually it’s a 993. One recalls a letter to the editor of Car & and Driver [perverse official abbreviation: C/D] circa 1979 angrily insisting that some Alaskans drive their Corvettes year-round. And actually that was in 1976, and yes, I actually remember that.)

In one sense of the term, podcasts are censored from the only directory most people will ever use, iTunes. Some of the same podcasts don’t show up in the indexes that podcast applications like Overcast (q.v.) maintain.

Not by any coïncidence whatsoever, all the affected podcasts are by conservatives.

Right-wing assholes are finally using adequate graphic design to parody themselves.

Meanwhile, the man who designed Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo will sell you an IMPEACHIM (sic) T‑shirt. My beloved Mr. BIERUT backs the wrong horse well after she got sent to the glue factory (or vegan substitute thereof).