Prince of Queens (no relation) and his Gaytriarchy “podcast,” which, like everything on YouTube, is not a podcast (and I told him so).

[One would listen to these via Snarfed (see updated instructions [my RSS]).]

Update

(2018.06.05) I created a Huffduffère podcast feed for the so-called Gaytriarchy Podcast, which now really is one.

See also: GGTOW.

Windows users:

1. cannot be made to understand what a text file is

2. think the only option to “edit” a text file, if you can overcome the first point, is Notepad

3. sit there struggling with Notepad’s godawful default typography (assuming the previous points were overcome), meaning they are permanently deterred from ever producing a text file, not that they understood the need for same

4. are rightfully afraid their computers are out to hurt them and cannot be taught anything

5. react with anger if you attempt to teach even the simplest concepts

33 years later (not “Thirty-three years later”), Microsoft enabled Notepad to properly display line endings. You couldn’t explain that to a Windoid either.

Bonus fun fact

This level of technical ignorance and flippantly expressed resentment is also universally found among journalists, who typically use Macintosh but have no skills in that respect.

(When I wrote about such technical ignorance, Bill Doskoch told me to cut that section, then blocked me on Twitter. Journalists will never learn because, like Windoids, they angrily deny there is anything to learn and lash out like slow children.)

• Internet of Shit now has a Web site (but cf. “Well, the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we’re eating dinner in dark while [the] lights download a firmware update”; floppy discs in animé)

• Screenshots of Despair

  • Best:

    1. ①

    2. ②

  • needed.

  • fascism
    now

• Glitchr (but Smooth Unicode)

(UPDATED) Aaand I see the right-wing assholes are still the only ones who can make a joke, or take one.

• A generally nasty podcast whose title alone puts the shiv into any number of President’s Choice Memories of Yucatán diversity piñatas, This Hour Has 88 Minutes, features “The Rice Report,” produced by what is obviously a Chinese-Canadian himself. (Am I to believe his Twitter account was suspended?) Only one “Rice Report” segment out of five was actually funny, and the podcast hosts now record their sniggering on top of new segments as if in a MST3K reboot renumbered as MST88K.

  But! Episode 84 (or YouTube at ≈44:00) is a scream, and as offensive as Monty Python (not – just funny).

  

• Why are Islamic countries homophobic? Many such cases.

  So before you decide to drown a perfectly good bowl of vanilla ice cream in hot fudge, you might want to spare a thought for those rainbow sprinkles.

• An enjoyably snide critic of right-wing assholes (of “Der Movement”) is himself a right-wing asshole. Nasty, obviously, but fun to read. “That pug looks brachycephalic and thus not a true Nordic. To the ovens with you!”

• Canadian English progressive neologism: racialized. (Indeed pace Monty Python: “Are you racialised? Have you been racialised recently?”)

  American English right-wing-asshole neologism: raced. (Many such cases.)

I uphold a Žižekian/sociolinguistic imperative that we need to bust each other’s balls as often and as scabrously as possible. Charlie don’t surf and antifa don’t joke.

Esteemed colleague Ethan Marcotte attended yet another design conference. I don’t know why one would bother.

Mina Markham gave an excellent, important talk on creating a design system for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She shared what she’d learned from working in an incredibly fast-moving environment,

where all her work was for nought because her guy lost. (I told the beloved Mr. MICHAEL BIERUT, who designed the Hillary logo, the same thing.)

and she also shared a small slice of the harassment she’d received because of who she worked for – as well as the harassment she received for being a black woman in tech.

It’s almost like the harassment received for being a gay conservative, or a gay black conservative, or a black conservative, or a conservative “in tech” (or “design”).

No design conference anywhere would feature a speaker documenting his or her work on a conservative’s campaign. Conservative design is almost invariably appalling, meaning the few unicorns who pop their tusks up ought to get featured. It’s just easier to have a black woman lecture attendees on how to design a losing campaign.

On the other hand, indeed why go to design conferences? The man who unfucked Donald Trump’s campaign graphics, Brad Parscale, is now running his reëlection campaign. Mina Markham talks to roomfuls of already-sold Democrats.

26-odd years online and many more years engaged in typography later, the single quote that’s been hardest for me to locate is as follows – and required about a year of searching despite telling myself I keep a copy of everything. Apparently not. (Emphasis added.)

In my train book, for example, after a few pages discussing the fate of Italian railways under Nazi occupation, I begin a new paragraph

2,104 railwaymen died in the war.

and find this changed to

A total of 2,104 railwaymen died in the Second World War.

What is the sense of “A total of”? Surely it’s not a requirement of Americanization. What does it add? The idea of my counting up the dead? To my ear the bare number has exactly the brutal eloquence that such statements demand. And how could the reader get his war wrong when we’d just been talking Mussolini and Hitler? When I cut “A total of” I find the sentence reappearing in the proofs thus:

In the Second World War, 2,104 railwaymen died[..]

One hardly needs to go to a creative-writing class to appreciate that this formulation has less rhetorical force than “2,104 railwaymen died in the Second World War.”

Seeing this second rejection of my version, and since I can’t imagine the poor copy editor (who is actually a very fine editor, I think) deliberately making his job longer than it need be,

The surprise here is that the editor was male. It is copy-editrixen who try to impose the dumbest rules.

I have to presume that some house style forbids me from opening a paragraph with a number. Why? This whole question may seem a quite different matter from the contrast between Americans Americanizing and Europeans accepting Americanisms, but the truth is that house style is a much more common occurrence in the US and more aggressively enforced, to the point that when one rereads work one has written for the New Yorker it no longer seems like your voice at all. I can think of no similar experience with English or European magazines,

because you haven’t written for the Economist (I have).

And yes, you can begin a sentence with a number, a conjunction, a minuscule, nested quotation marks with thin spaces between them, nested brackets and parentheses (maybe also followed by quotes), an ellipsis, an em dash (not en; indicates interruption), and, self-evidently, an emoji.