General Politics Discussion (VI) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1485

Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging

On August 16, in a dusty corner of the Internet, a 15-year-old blog coughed out one final post and went defunct. That post, the resignation of the founder and self-described “blogmistress” Melissa McEwan of the website Shakesville, came after a month-long hiatus and years-long decline.

If you recognize McEwan’s name, it’s probably because of her impressive ability to get roasted on Twitter, often by people who have been making fun of her since the Internet was only on computers. Maybe she counted every word in the Captain Marvel trailer, concluded that Samuel L. Jackson had more lines than Brie Larson, and charged it with sexism. Or she saw Bernie Sanders’ phrase “person of color or working-class person” as evidence that he believes those groups are mutually exclusive. No matter the day’s offense, the discussion inevitably turned to Shakesville: a PC nightmare, a cult, a joke.

No idea if anyone else here read this website back in the day, but this essay on its history and it ending is a very strange time capsule of blogging and the internet and woah is it a lot.

 

Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech

Finally had time to read this monster of an article. Holy shit.

 

I disagree pretty strongly. Would you listen to music at 1.5 times speed? Films and television are paced purposefully.

 

What's wrong with having accessibility features that would help people with disabilities? All because some pretentious director gets offended about the pacing of their film/TV show even though it wouldn't even be a default setting anyway and has been around on other platforms for years anyways?

 

Genuinely asking, what disability is aided by playing a movie faster than normal?

 

Watching movies and television at something other than the intended speed harms literally no one.

The sounds films and televisions use are specifically chosen. But a features that modify those sounds to verbally narrate what is going on to make them more accessibility for vision impaired users is a good thing.

The colors films and televisions use are specifically chosen. But a feature to allow you to automatically change certain colors on your shows to make them more accessibility for color blind users would be a good thing.

Saying "This is the only way this piece of content can be consumed and if you're unable to consume it this way then you're SOL" is an ablest, asshole move.

 

I’m trying to understand. In what way does playing a film at a higher speed aid accessibility? While I don’t believe accessibility is the motivation for Netflix’s experimenting with this feature, I’m for benefits in that space.

 

cant wait for the GOP politicians and Fox to start attacking him as a fake soldier or something

 

any sort of attention related disorder can be benefited from being able to just speed stuff up

also doesn't even have to be a disability.

Say you're swamped with other stuff and only have a limited about of time per week to watch TV and lots of shows you want to stay up on.

or you're rewatching a show to catch up on what happened before the new season starts.

or you just disagree with the directors pacing and want to go faster (a lot of network television is intentionally slowly paced counting on the fact that oftentimes when watching television people aren't entirely focused on the show. so if you are just watching the show, speeding things up can help). there are a myriad of reasons why enabling users to update playback speed is a good thing.

If you don't want to use the feature cool, no one should force you to do so. This isn't like how cable stations would sometimes slightly speed up shows in syndication to squeeze in a couple more minutes of ads. But there are lots of reasons why people would want to use such a feature and "bUt ThE dIrEcToRs iNtEnSiOnS" is not a good reason not to

 

I mean, speeding through something in the name of #morecontent isn’t really a great reason for something either IMO, our brains are already melting from over stimulation.

But I’ve seen a lot of kids with adhd and I’m trying to figure out how going faster would help them. Usually their accommodations call for chunking of information which, by nature, slows things down a bit for them.

 

music playback platforms have the option to change the equalization of the songs you're playing. essentially the same concept. could be beneficial to tweak depending on your speaker system or the environment youre listening in, etc. can see the same case made for tv/film playback. reminds me a lot of the video game difficulty arugment when people complain about easy modes. if you wanna speed up playback and speed through shows/movies go for it. you wanna play a game on e z and button mash your way through a narrative go for it. who gives a shit.

 

I don’t care that it exists but I do think it’s kinda bizarre and I’m more interested in what actually prompted Netflix to do it

 

experimenting with more options for users to fuck with during playback. youtube allows you to alter the speed of videos so its not unheard of.

 

I have to think it’s so they can encourage people to binge more / faster.

 

People with attention disorders could benefit from speeding up playback so they are less likely to shift their focus during what they perceive to be slower parts, for one example

I've seen people with hearing loss say slowing playback helps so they can read subtitles at a more reasonable pace without missing something happening on the screen because they are busy reading as fast as possible

 

Streaming platforms following YouTube’s lead on absolutely anything is a pretty terrifying concept.

 

They've basically already said as much and walked it back when directors said "uh, we'll need new contracts then."