Cav's Place

Yes, it’s another personal post thrown here because I’m obviously not writing anything else. Actually, this week began surprisingly well, with me starting to write a non-personal post on Monday and getting some 700 words in before stopping when I realized it was getting away from me and there was no way I could finish it in one day, but then the plan to finish Tuesday fell through when I noticed that the Gendarmerie appealed the ruling on my contestation and, other than to add another paragraph that I came up with while sitting on the toilet, I haven’t touched that post since. Obviously, haven’t touched the review or that other non-personal one I had in mind either, so at this point things aren’t looking good at all for this week and I may just end up with some other quick post tomorrow to say I have two, since our Government sure seems to be giving us reasons to take to the streets around this time of year, so there’s a protest to go to on Sunday.

Back to that appeal, so far I only saw it listed on-line, since I was checking regularly after finally being served the papers confirming the ruling, knowing they must have received them at the same time and had 30 days from that date to appeal. After I’ll be notified of their appeal, I guess I’ll have ten days or so to respond to it, then see when the date will be set and what else can be done about it, depending on the reasons for their appeal. If any of us has or will be able to obtain a final decision from another similar case where even the appeal was rejected, it should be simple, but that may be easier said than done. Still, we should all normally win this as well, so it’s simply a matter of going through the motions, but it does mean I’ll have to go through all of that all over again and it was bad enough the first time…

Otherwise, since I did want to start making some more regular submissions, the situation on MobyGames obviously escalated and that apparently led to a debate and specific new standards for mobyrank abstracts that were supposedly adopted by majority vote on the approvers’ forum, which other users can’t access. The problem is that, while obviously far less anal than what the fucking asshole kept trying to enforce, these detailed standards are also significantly stricter than my interpretation of the old ones, which just about everyone else accepted so far, as I had probably less than ten submissions, so about 0.1% of the total, sent back by anyone else due to the chosen abstract so far, and even a few of those were eventually accepted as they were after some discussions.
The thing is that the moron was rejecting probably up to a quarter or so and everyone strictly adhering to the new standards will probably result in a rejection rate of about half as much. As such, I told them precisely where to shove these new rules and things will get increasingly nastier each time anything’s sent back or rejected for this reason, and if I seem to get back to being motivated enough to put in between a couple of hours per week and even a few hours per day into actual submissions, I will also be motivated enough to leave that aside and instead put that time into making anyone supporting that git or any of the restrictions included in or implied by these new standards curse the day they got involved with that site. As for any direct contact with him, he’ll get nothing but attacks from me and I don’t give a fuck about how that looks; have absolutely no intention to be the slightest bit reasonable about any of it.

But enough about that, and actually this should be quite enough for this post, which wasn’t supposed to be this long in the first place. I’ll just add that I switched to WP-SpamShield for spam protection, because recently I’m getting over 1000 spam comments per day and there was definitely no point to still have something that let them end up in the database before I cleared them. Still not sure what’s up with this huge spike though, seeing as they first ended up hitting a few hundred back in spring, after staying steadily at perhaps a couple dozen per day in all the years until then, the average over these nearly seven and a half years, including this huge recent spike, being just about 50 such comments per day.

For years now, sites seem to increasingly focus mainly or even exclusively on Facebook to broadcast new content, giving any and all other methods significantly less importance or even ignoring them completely, to the point of even removing options that users had in the past. In addition, Facebook elements are not only integrated into pages more and more, but actually become the primary or even the only way in which users can interact with the content, such as by commenting, making it difficult or even impossible to do so without connecting the action to one’s own Facebook account. And let’s not forget how an increasing number of sites nag users to “like” or otherwise support their Facebook pages, to the point that the behavior goes beyond being annoying and becomes obviously desperate.
There’s clearly absolutely no excuse for this nagging, nor for requiring users to have a Facebook account and connect to it in order to interact with the content found on other sites. On the other hand, considering Facebook’s number of users and the amount of time many spend on the site, seeing it as a particularly important method of broadcasting one’s new content may have made some sense years ago, when posts still reached all those who “liked” a page, but it never made any sense to focus on it at the expense of other methods that do not require one’s audience to also use a specific third party service. More importantly, it’s been years since it stopped making any sense whatsoever to continue focusing on Facebook at all, seeing as it’s no longer even possible to properly use it to broadcast your new content to those who may be interested ever since posts started reaching less and less followers unless the poster pays to change that behavior, and if they do then said posts may show up as being sponsored, which may make users ignore them anyway, considering them to be advertisements.
Sure, a lot of people use Facebook and a lot of people use Facebook a lot, so if you have a site you pretty much need to have an associated Facebook page through which Facebook users will be able to interact with you and your content. You should also make it easy for people to easily share, “like” or recommend your content on Facebook, as well as to have the comments they post shared there as well, whether they perform these actions from your Facebook page or directly from your site. However, you must not make any of these actions require any others, you must not require any user to offer any access to their account in order to perform them, and you most definitely must allow your users to have nothing to do with your Facebook presence and choose to be notified whenever new content appears on your site by other means!

What I’m getting at is that, if people are interested in your site, they may actually want to see the content on and get notifications from your site. Some may prefer other social networks or similar services, which you may or may not choose to maintain a presence on, depending on how the potential benefits compare to the additional amount of work required, but you can never afford to treat your site’s front page and feeds the same way. All users should always be able to quickly find new content if they simply open your site, and those who follow a larger number of sites and want to quickly be able to sift through new posts should have the option to stick to simple feeds, which require little to no maintenance and can be loaded even directly from some browsers, on top of the few remaining decent feed reader services. In addition, if your site’s big enough to be able to handle it, newsletters, possibly personalized ones, may also still be interesting for some users.
These methods worked just fine before Facebook and they actually continue to work just fine now, while Facebook obviously doesn’t work as a method of broadcasting content at all anymore. This is perfectly obvious and it has been for years, but it seems that, instead of showing that they’re aware of this and acting accordingly, by returning to other methods of broadcasting new content, many do the exact opposite and appear to focus on Facebook even more. It’s like some sort of abusive relationship, where content creators cling on to some misguided notion that Facebook will care about them once again if they prove their dedication to it even more whenever it makes it obvious that it doesn’t.

With just over 300 in queue at the moment, I can now actually say that I did get back to submitting mobyranks on MobyGames and would normally intend to continue while I still find myself somewhat motivated to do so. Unfortunately, it seems that the asshole is pretty much the only approver who checks mobyrank submissions anymore, so the English-language Windows ones, which make up the large majority of what I submit, simply sit in queue because he doesn’t look at those, while with the rest I’m facing the same old problems yet again, already having three of them rejected for the same old idiotic reasons. Obviously, I wasn’t going to put up with that.
Actually, since he did first send them back, I sent Sciere a message, asking him to take a look at them, as he said he’ll do if this happens again. That resulted in a brief exchange that didn’t exactly lead anywhere, so I waited for the asshole to reject those three after I sent them back as they were, then simply resubmitted them and announced that shit will start flying if this continues, which interestingly prompted Simon Carless to immediately get involved and ask for my side of the story before saying that the matter will be discussed on the approvers’ forum, which regular users don’t have access to… Which I guess is another sign that the new management pays a whole lot more attention than the previous one, even if actual work on the site has ground to a halt yet again for quite some time now and the direction they chose after initially reverting to the old design is one I firmly oppose.
Of course, I won’t accept any sort of compromise, much less any attempt to enforce the asshole’s rules as they are, and if he didn’t over the past year and a half, I’m definitely not expecting him to budge now either. As such, there’s no reason to hope for any good outcome, the only thing that may perhaps happen being what has been suggested last year as well, namely for him to agree to simply ignore my submissions and let others deal with them. However, as things stand that means nobody’ll look over any of them and they’ll simply be stuck in queue for who knows how long, making it rather pointless to keep submitting them and quite unlikely that I’ll manage to continue doing so for any significant amount of time. After all, mobyranks aren’t particularly useful submissions and only a handful of users care about them at all.

Otherwise, I obviously didn’t get around to writing that review for Blades of Heaven and I’m quite sure I won’t be trying to do that this weekend either, especially since I have ideas for both a shorter and a longer post, depending on how much I’ll manage to push myself. Of course, the shorter rant is the one likely to get written, while the longer one may well get delayed until I’ll completely give up on the thought of writing it, as is happens most of the time, but an ideal scenario where it and the review will be next week’s two posts isn’t exactly impossible… But it definitely is highly improbable.

Initially meant to write something else today, but the direction a thread on the MobyGames forums ended up taking made me think about these issues yet again and, considering how hard it is to get myself to write non-personal posts anyway, I couldn’t miss the opportunity. Seriously, why do people believe they’re entitled to special treatment if they’re offended by something, which only means they can neither control their reaction nor mentally block the issue that bothers them, or if they have children they want to impose their own views on by preventing them from being exposed to any opposing or otherwise inconvenient ones?

One problem here is that modern society selected certain issues that one is expected to be offended by, perhaps even pressured into it, which definitely leads to this sense of entitlement for those who actually have a negative reaction they’re unwilling or unable to control when exposed to them. Worse, these issues have not been selected in any rational manner, so completely natural and, if done right, beneficial things like sex and nudity are hidden away and seen as far more offensive than undeniably harmful behaviors like, for example, smoking. Not to mention that those who claim to enforce this state of affairs supposedly for the benefit of children choose to ignore the fact that anything becomes more interesting if it’s forbidden and children and teenagers experimenting on their own, be it with sex, alcohol, drugs or any other such things, in an environment that attempts to prevent them from accessing appropriate information and obtaining proper guidance only serves to increase the risks.
As such, I tend to reply to any so-called arguments from the “think of the children” series by saying that, oddly enough, I actually do. Those who don’t are specifically those making such accusations while in fact thinking mainly, if not solely, of themselves. They project their own discomfort and inability to deal with or even properly comprehend certain issues and views upon children who, in most cases, do not inherently have such limitations and have perhaps not yet been conditioned by society to develop them, they demand full support for their desire to enforce their views upon the potentially impressionable from everyone else, they shamelessly request that others make up for their lack of parenting skills, which would require them to be there and properly explain, in an age-appropriate manner, anything their children may experience or otherwise come into any sort of contact with, by blocking as many potential sources of information as possible, and then they still have the audacity to claim that those who try to break this vicious circle are the ones causing harm!

The best approach, whether we’re talking of children, teenagers or adults, would be to expose everyone to as many things as possible, as early as possible. It should obviously be done in a safe manner, alongside accurate and age-appropriate information presented in a manner that’s easy to understand, and in case of children and anyone else who’s not sufficiently developed mentally to take care of themselves, also under the supervision of responsible and knowledgeable adults, but everyone should go through this step and understand what something entails before deciding whether or not they want to continue exposing themselves to it, or what amount of exposure is appropriate for them. Obviously, this decision should be taken only by the person in question and can also be changed by them whenever they see fit, without society determining general censorship rules, though of course individual ones may be necessary on a case-by-case basis, if and when it can be proven that specific individuals cause harm to others as a result of such exposure.

The problem there is that, while people should be able to limit or completely prevent their exposure to certain issues, they will also need to understand that there’s no way for others to guarantee this. If we actually want to be fair for a change, the surroundings can’t conform to the will of anyone who has such a desire, if only because everyone is different and some may well have a far better claim than them anyway. For example, recovering addicts who fear a relapse and survivors of any sort of traumatic experience who can’t deal with being reminded of it have valid and serious reasons to want to avoid exposure to certain issues, far more so than, say, prudes who want to avoid sex, nudity or “bad” words, yet instead of accepting, as a society, that we can’t do this, that we can’t and shouldn’t block anything because some people, with or without a valid reason, don’t want to see or hear it, we just keep choosing to cater to a few while ignoring all the rest.
I mean, if we open that can of worms, why not also give diehard animal rights activists and vegans the right to avoid exposure to animal products or products tested on animals? Immigrants, to any nationalist propaganda? Nationalists, to anything positive about immigrants or other nationalities? Misogynists, to anything positive or empowering about women? Female supremacists, since the term feminist would be a bit misused for that breed, to anything positive or empowering about men? Traditionalists, to anything non-traditional, and there’s a lot that would fit under that description? Very strictly gay people, to any straight displays of affection? (What? Don’t think that some of them may be as bothered by those as certain people seem to be by theirs?) Fundamentalist members of any religion, to anything about any other religion? Diehard supporters of any political ideology, to anything about any other ideology contradicting theirs? Hell, if I’m infuriated by those who aggravate the world’s worst problem by having children and frightened by illness and medical stuff, why shouldn’t I be able to block anything related to that as well? And so on and so forth, taking into account each thing that any person, for whatever reason, may find offensive, inconvenient or, far more importantly, a trigger.

Well, unless every single person will end up living in their own personal and completely customized virtual reality, that’s perfectly impossible. As such, any censorship should be done individually, people wishing to reduce their exposure to one thing or another learning to avoid activities or locations that make such exposure likely and simply block, mentally, anything they won’t be able to avoid in such a manner, learning to deal with the situation without demanding that the environment and everyone else conform to their inability, be it justified or not, to properly control their reaction to something that, in the end, is simply information perceived through their senses in order to be processed by their brains.

Just managed to finish Blades of Heaven, so I guess it’s a good time for this week’s personal post and then I’ll have three days to figure out something else to write about. Or to see if I want to figure out something else, that is, because I wanted to start a rant last night and tomorrow may be an even better opportunity for it, so I might just do that and get it out of the way, then think about the review and start trying to convince myself to write it next week, because I certainly won’t try any sooner.

Thankfully, the computer cleaning truly was effective, so everything seems perfectly fine despite the current heat wave. In fact, right now I’m looking at 67°C for each core and CPU cooler at around 2300 rpm, while the most I saw were some brief moments when temperatures reached 69°C but cooler was still below 2400 rpm, so quite some way away from the 70°C and 2700 rpm I was seeing before, when the weather was slightly less hot.
Otherwise, not counting the recent Windows Update oddity, didn’t notice any more real reasons for concern, whether we’re talking of hardware or software, and even my UPS got tested again by some recent power failures, so the computer may just make it till next spring or so without needing anything replaced. Not that I imagine I’ll be any more keen to upgrade then, of course, as I highly doubt software developers will suddenly decide to turn back from their current chosen path over the next few months, but I know I’ll need to do something, because six years is already a lot and seven will be a terribly long amount of time to largely stick to the same computer.

This will probably be too much information for anyone somehow stumbling into this post, but I’ll also add that I wasn’t able to do much about the infected patch of skin on my head, but the sickly greenish-yellow stuff that’s there at least seems to have hardened and the red area around it isn’t expanding, so my body probably started doing something about it. Granted, after initially struggling to keep it clean with alcohol and then rubbing some calendula cream, I stuck to soaking something in chamomile tea and keeping it there most of the time, which probably helped, but at the same time I’m noticing largely the same thing happening with the smaller spot on my left arm which seems affected by the same problem, even though I did far less for that.
Now infected patches of skin aren’t new and in fact it was to be expected when adding heat and sweat to the atopic dermatitis I know I have, but we’re talking about by far the biggest area affected by anything of the sort so far and it’s on my head, so I’m still quite worried about it and will continue to be until I’ll be sure it healed. Still, today it didn’t really sting anymore, while the one on my arm seemed to have mostly stopped burning, which should probably be good enough developments to mean that I’m not about to panic again quite yet.