Welcome to Flavor Country

Earth's last, best hope. Follows as ferociousj because Tumblr. (about.me) var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-18833478-2']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[theehorsepusssy]

[randomitemdrop]

Item: Big Gun

[jelloapocalypse]

Someone asked me a while ago if I still had a photo of the worst sink I had ever seen while apartment hunting in Los Angeles. I assumed I deleted it so I didn't answer the ask and now it's gone, but as it turns out, yes, I do still have a photo of it.

[vinceaddams]

It had never occurred to me that bus upholstery fabric is something that an ordinary person can just buy, but I was watching a video that included a trip to a huge fabric store and they just had a whole section of it??!

Including the exact same one my city buses have!!

The fabric store in the video isn't even in the same country as me, but I sat on that very same pattern on the way to work yesterday!

[lucybellwood]

A little treat for the language perverts in the room: the name of this particular type of fabric is moquette

[jenroses]

places like this in my area often also sell huge pieces of foam of many different varieties, so you can go there and give them measurements for like, a bench and they will cut thick foam for you and you can get fabric and then it's just staples or tacks and you can have a newly upholstered bench.

[stevishabitat]

I'll have you know I almost choked on my sandwich over this

[flogisto]

big fan of stories that, while undoubtedly being about the power of friendship, acknowledge that the power of incredible violence is just as important

the love was there. the love changed everything. the crowbar helped also

[baygeethefirst]

[yetanotherdayofdrudgery]

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet." Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution. Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer. The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss. The wool is then: - Naturally flame-retardant - Naturally antibacterial - Moisture-wicking - Biodegradable - Renewable, annually - Carbon-storing while in use The replacement, in performance fabrics: - Polyester - Polyamide - Acrylic - Polypropylene - All petroleum-derived - All shedding microplastics on every wash - All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce - All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals. A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years. The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic. The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer. The polymer also has not been asked. Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made. Brian is selling it at a loss. The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical. Reject plastic. Wear wool. Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

Note: if you're allergic to wool, you might be allergic to the dyes and fine with undyed wool. Maybe not, but it's worth a try.

[captain-price-returns]

oh no they’re going to start calling democrats the same thing they’ve been calling democrats for 20 years now

[hotvampireadjacent]

[thewellofastarael]

"Here’s a trick I learned during the Obama presidency for handling certain types of political labels. Take, as an example, the Tea Party claim that Obama is a Communist. Don’t take the word of the person making the claim (Tea Partiers). Don’t rely on the rebuttal of the target (Obama), because that will just be dismissed. Go to the group itself (Communists) and ask them. Ask an actual Communist if Obama is a comrade and see how they answer. Watch as they laugh at you, then explain in great detail how they wish there was a Communist in the White House, but here’s a long and exhaustive list of why that just isn’t so. Now apply this logic to the claim that Hillary is pretty much the same as a Republican. Ask an actual Republican if they think Hillary Clinton is one of them. Watch them laugh, and then explain in the same exhausting detail why that just isn’t so. Some of them might concede that she’s better than Trump, but that’s not the same thing. Finally, go ask a White Supremacist if Trump is one of them. As they excitedly explain how Trump is the guy they’ve been waiting for all these years, and how he’s really empowered their movement, use this to guide how you will be voting in November."

Source: a 2016 facebook posts by Craig Enan, since then deleted (OG link here)

[enchantedbook]

Art by Shigeru Mizuki

[cassili]

[3liza]

[thememedaddy]

[json-derulo]

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

[vaspider]

"Meet people where they are" is Activism 101, and people seem to be allergic to seeing that this is exactly that.

"Bean Soup Rhetoric" is a very good concept.

[indigosfindings]

relatedly: probably no one has made greater contributions to Posting than dr roberta bobby

[indigosfindings]

with complete sincerity: this might be the best post ever made

[petrow1tch]

some of my faves from personal dr roberta bobby preservation efforts archive:

[witchmarsh]

Some mice, for your consideration.

🐁 Squeaking of which, you can wishlist the game on Steam! 🐁

[wiki-but-made-them-up]

[sunderwight]

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

[adizzyninja]

A humble snubnose eelpout on its way to the whale fall buffet when some nearby humans give it a quick, unintrusive study:

[julianova44]

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!

[mcmansionhell]

mcmodernslopcore

Howdy, howdy, folks.

For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.

This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.

These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.

The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:

Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit. Ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which makes it appear entirely ersatz. Were it not for the interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.

In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.

Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.

By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.

Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.

Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.

Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that they were one of the first iterations of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.

It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!

Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendegrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.

Please, I'm very cold.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am in the process of moving house!)