When Abba pronounces every s in the English writing system as an actual [s], it is at worst a lovable foible. (“Walking through an empty house, tearss in my eyess/Here iss where the story endss. This iss goodbyyye.”) When Filipinos do it (even more consistently and stridently and with different prosody), it elicits rage.

When übermensch Michael Wex waxes Judaically about Yiddish in Born to Kvetch, it is a source of great amusement – and ill-stifled laughter as I listen on my iPod right out in public. When Debbie Millmannn! of Design Maaatters! name-drops herself 13 times an hour on her stultifying design podcast and uses the most atrocious! Jewish American accent since Faith Popcorn’s, I plotz. (Worse, her clumsy script readings sound like they’re recorded from the bottom of a well over an analogue phoneline.)

Now, do you object to that? But you don’t object to the conventional wisdom that Fran Drescher’s voice is unendurable, do you? (Marge’s voice is lovable, but Patty’s and Selma’s are like fingernails on concrete. You agree with that, but you’re listening to the same set of vocal cords from one actress.)

You can spot a gay accent at a distance of 15 feet with your back turned. (You can. And I don’t have one.) All you have to do to indicate that voice to your nearby friends is to whisper “Psss… psss… psss.”

Which accent do you hate more, white Sithifrican or white Zimbebbwean? (Is it a tie?) How much angrier does it make you to be subjected to half-arsed – and, like Millman, overscripted – technical support when it’s delivered in an Indian accent rather than your own? (Does your attitude change if you already speak in an Indian accent?)

If you think that an accent cannot be changed, you must not have watched a British actor at work. (Or The Simpsons.) Accents are intrinsic, but they aren’t immutable. It may be unsporting to resent somebody for being short or crippled, but just how unsporting is it to object to an accent? Is it one step above a pet peeve? Is it the kind of peeve that isn’t a pet, that isn’t a lovable foible?

As linguists, we’re supposed to be descriptivist. Right – and married couples are supposed to be monogamous. Let’s be real here.

Nick Denton (q.v.) has a stunning ability to pack even the simplest sentences with venom and innuendo, making every paragraph sound like the least contemptuous thing he could say.

Gawker Media has a new payment system for its indentured writers. The system was beta-tested on Gawker.com and a couple of other sites, and like all betas, it led to a system crash, with Choire and somebody else finally, at long last, quitting for good. As of yesterday, the new payment system applies to all Gawker sites. And the whole thing reeks of “This is the best you could hope for, you unworthy layabout. And if you don’t like it, walk.” (Careful: The last time that happened, Engadget ate Gizmodo for breakfast.)

So let’s fisk the new system, as published on Valleywag – with, oddly, Noah Robichon as author credit, though that ain’t fooling nobody. (Excerpted.)

It’s only on the Internet that a writer’s contributions can be measured…. [w]hich makes it so bizarre that most writers, on the Internet as in print, are paid for the sheer brute quantity of their output.

Gawker has been equally backward. [I]n the large [sic], writers have been rewarded, at $12 a post, for mind-numbing frequency. When we’ve paid a higher rate (the $200 “feature” rate) we’ve often not been rewarding better pieces [but] merely encouraging the padding of perfectly good short items.

Admission: Some items can be short and good at the same time.

[W]e have repeated the bad habits of traditional media organizations: leaving remuneration to the arbitrary will of upper management; and, by treating words as if they were Soviet steel output targets, encouraging quantity over quality.

Early on in the commercial blog era, frequency was the key to the success of a site…. We learnt [telltale British English] that lesson, and vowed never to be out-produced again. But we now really are reaching the limits of sheer volume. Readers can’t take any more.

Shorter Nick Denton (and/or ghostwriter): Quota systems don’t work. (I’d wager they didn’t work for Soviet steel, either. Perhaps somebody on staff has a master’s in Russian history – where else would they end up working? – and could tell us for sure.)

It’s fine to pen the occasional self-indulgent or self-referential item. But we’re not going to waste the editorial budget on them when we’re investing so heavily in the sites.

The implication here is that self-indulgent or -referential items carry a marginal cost. They don’t. These items would tend to be shorter, and we already know short can be just fine.

For several months now, we’ve displayed the number of views each item receives. It’s not a perfect measure. The view count does not reflect attention paid to the posts on the front page[,]

If people can read your entire item, or all they need to read of it, from the “front” page (actually any omnibus page), then you don’t get paid for it even though it is child’s play to calculate its pageviews.

The obvious solution for the writer eager not to be cheated in yet another way is to write half a sentence and break it up with that notorious Gawker “innovation,” MORE AFTER THE JUMP. But we had already been told that short items were of worth.

nor photo galleries (which are usually junk views anyhow);

Unless you’re the photographer. Now would be a good time to abandon ship, since Denton thinks your work is junk. (Remember: Contempt is his middle name.)

You will be expected to contribute a set number of posts each month in exchange for your monthly base pay.

The quota system, an admitted failure, is still in place.

On top of your monthly base pay, you will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month.

By implication, Denton can ignore the pageviews of all your posts that meet the quota and pay you only for posts exceeding your quota.

This total includes any pageview on any story with your byline that was read during the month, even if the story is months or years old.

Denton fails to point out that many items, especially links with no commentary, carry no bylines, yet somebody put effort into them and most of them attract comments. Who gets paid?

Your site lead

Apparently Gawker sites no longer have editors.

will be able to tell you the pageview rate for your site, and give you a chart like this one to for calculating [your] bonus.

For the majority of sites, there is no cap on the amount of bonus you can earn each month.

Which sites do have a cap?

In other news, young Noel Jackson is back working for Denton. I put in a word on both sides. Of course I counsel caution, but only to one side.

I have only a slight interest in product design or industrial design – just enough to read every book on the subject at the library. I am resolutely anti-twee in assessing this field, which is as you’d expect. A really nice chair/lamp/rug is less than useless as far as I’m concerned. That shit is for decorators.

Nevertheless, like other educated people, I love certain objets. But I have to admit I don’t have a use for some of them anymore.

IBM Selectric

A manual typewriter camouflaged my age during my teen years and allowed me to correspond, as if authoritatively or genuinely, with grownups around the world – often on the same topics that interest me today. I adored the Selectric (preferably the II, with its correcting ribbon) years before I actually touched one.

I distinctly recall an old Selectric brochure featuring a beautful blonde secretary photographed in soft focus as she effortlessly employed her dusty-rose-coloured IBM Selectric. (You could also get an Eldo convertible in that same shade.) I dearly miss my old specimen book of IBM typewriter typefaces. Along with a certain Citroën SM brochure (ironically featuring a similar bint applying her makeup in the passenger seat), that brochure constitutes a sort of lodestone of my youth, the Bobo teddy bear I keep trying to recover.

Everything you’ve heard is true: They are a dream to type on. But we have no need to “type” anymore, except in Third World countries and except on carbonless forms, two inapplicable edge cases. Selectrics are titanically heavy, you can barely find them anymore (least of all in dusty rose), and the power cord was more like an undersea telephone cable. They hummed, they clattered, they were monospaced.

Betamaxen

The two real reasons VHS displaced Beta were as follows: Sony was too slow to license the format to other manufacturers and it was difficult to fit a two-hour movie onto a standard cassette. (Long-enough tapes used thinner substrates and jammed.) Every other reason you have heard is false.

How do I know? I own two of them, and, circa 2002, had I had more cash on hand, I would have bought two more.

Sony Betamaxen were renowned for their jewel-like motors (I seem to be the source of that locution, but I borrowed it), pinpoint start/stop/pause/insert/edit, and logical controls (Play took you off pause). I have an SL-HF750, whose cassette tray pops out and up in a delightful way that is no longer jewel-like, as it and my other machine are both broken several times over. It borders on impossible to get a Beta machine repaired.

I have boxes of recorded tapes in a format I cannot now use. But I have so little call to record a television program, or play one back, that my two VHS decks and my huge collection of ready-to-reuse tapes more than suffice. (I am unconvinced by the technology of the home DVD recorder.)

Girl Power iMac

I wrote my first book on this beautiful, pleasing, now surprisingly rare art object. It was a stark contrast to the other designer iMac de l’époque, which looked like a manufacturing error. Commentators noted the Flower Power’s pink Apple logo at bottom rear, never quite noticing the blue one staring them in the face at front top. Far from being feminine, the finishes were soft. Perhaps the design was androgynous and not on the masculine side. The effect is sublimated, like the prints on the case, but I had no hesitation at all in naming my machine Girl Power.

It died once, at the worst possible moment, and now it spends its days in OS 9 hibernation under a towel. I am not entirely sure I have managed to move all necessary files off its hard drive.

Like my other piles of expensive old Macs, it is a comforting reminder of beautiful design for which I have no use at all.

Not in my experience.

I suppose it beats Arnie and Maria asking us “When can you start?”

One admits to dissatisfaction with 2007. An example will suffice: Of my last three public presentations, two received unfavourable audience responses. I am pretty much at the end of my tether with playing nice, so my initial reaction was YOU UNGRATEFUL BASTARDS. That was also my intermediate reaction, my final one, and every reaction in between. Let me get this right: You people like Jared Spool better? He’s more turkey than Christmas and you know it. I apologize for working at a higher level than you and failing to give you news you can use.

I haven’t completely run out of Plans B through Z (maybe I’m down to W), but if you’re the kind of person who reads my blog and also harbours misgivings about me, guess what: You were right all along, just as you knew you were. You also have a livelihood and I don’t, and never really have since leaving home. You win again. But don’t get all smug.

I’ve come within a hair’s breadth of desubscribing from every Web-development blog in Tarnation, though that might be ironic given my dwindling options.

I am also within hair’s breadth of having the rights to my first book returned to me. (Nouveaux Riders, never one to get it right the first time, are taking months to mail me an agreement that actually spells my name right. And there is no way to communicate with them, at all, but postal mail.) It’ll be rereleased with outdated 2001-era nonsense (tables for layout, tabindex, skip links) removed. You should know me better than to expect anything but full copyright protection, but, if I can figure out how, I might put the whole thing on Bittorrent as an exercise. (I remain the only person interested in copyright reform who does not believe in Creative Commons. That doesn’t mean I am not contributing in my own way.)

Another book was pretty much stopped in its tracks by an author’s refusal to license a title, though he did play dirty by suggesting I reword the title and run with it anyway. (This author refused money to license his own work but counseled me to write a knockoff.) A different book has been stuck in gestation too long but should come out for my birthday, and it too will be one of those new kinds of experiments in book form and distribution. (The difference is I know what I’m doing.) Yet another book is merely an idea, but unfortunately a potentially saleable one. If I got a contract for it I’d be stuck interviewing bobsledders, kayakers, and gay wrestlers for the next two years. That may be structurally inappropriate or unseemly given my age. A fifth book would pretty much have to be printed on acetate, would need to retail for a hundred bucks, and would have to be written without an advance. That’s five uncompleted books, and it isn’t even the full list.

I do, however, have great ideas for the Open & Closed Project. You will learn of them in January. Having a fusillade of opponents is helping no end, actually. And I have a brilliant plan for Toronto typography. Make sure to set aside one evening a month until this group, like every one I’ve ever formed, also implodes. The difference is we’ll have a great time at zero cost along the way.

Every seven years, like clockwork, my “career” collapses and reveals it was never anything but a shell in the first place. 2008 would be right on cue. It will be the year I do a lot more asking for help. You’ll be seeing a whole page on that topic, in fact.