Miscellaneous Rants

It is so typical that when anyone expresses a desire for privacy, the listener jumps to the conclusion that the speaker has 'something to hide'.¹  Get over it  Not all of us, believe it or not, are after fame and glory!  Some of us just don't think our private affairs, no matter how benign or non-existent, should be in the public domain.

When I was first convinced by Puppet that I ought to have a web-page, I believe we were on about HTML(1.1).  I loaded the page with images, sound, doodads and experimentation.  However, frankly I'm fed up with pages suffused with QuickTime, Flash, and other resource-hogging gimmicks to provide me with moving pictures, ear-splitting music and four links.  It's most especially irritating when the page won't even allow itself to be viewed unless you enable javascript for it and six other sites.

When you create a site/page with a chosen background color or image, please chose a text color that goes reasonably well and is visible to those of us with bad eyesight.  And don't forget table backgrounds and the like.  Thank you.

I'm so sick of pages that refuse to function unless I condescend to use IE (which I almost never do).  If I were to design a page with a certain browser in mind (or out of it, rather), I'd design a page which was absolutely impossible for anyone using IE to see.  And if, perchance, any page I write accidentally foobars IE because it's looking for misconstructed links (for example), good.  Perhaps the user will get fed up and go looking for a decent browser.  Here's one hint, I'm sure there are more.²

Dear Webmaster, what is the use in designing a website to defeat adblockers by not functioning properly with one or more running?  I'm not about to click on any of your spam, so why do I need to be bombarded with them?  Yahoo!?  Are you listening?

Gene Wolfe—fabulous writer, The Book of the New Sun, yet even he must interrupt my zombified reading with the the highly annoying 'try and'.  Case in point: "I'd try and say yes, but I'm afraid the effort would kill me."   Please people, you do not try and do something, especially when you are going to do neither.  You either try to do it and succeed, or try to do it and fail.

The ammendment in our (US) constitution allowing us to own guns is not there to protect us from common criminals, but from the government.  It is there because it is the duty of every U.S. citizen to revolt when the government becomes corrupted, or tyrannical (the very way our nation was born).  It is a duty that for eight years we, as a whole, badly neglected.

When men greet each other they will normally share a good, firm (not brutal—unless they're being idiots) handshake.  This is the way they have been taught since childhood.  So why is it that when a man greets a woman, he will invariably offer this wimpy little half-hearted thing?  We're not that breakable, you know.

"Prologue" is synonomous with "preface", and "pre" is a prefix meaning before, not after.  When you write a prologue, please don't use the climactic ending of your piece as subject material.

Daniel Tenner Poste this comment on April 8, 2010 5:36 AM³:
"...if you take away the correct, exact meaning of words, if you take away their preciseness, then you take away much of the power of language.  [...]You can't chisel Michelangelo's David with a sledgehammer, no matter how functional and easy to use others find it as a way to break rocks."

Hear, hear!

When I first started using this nick (Lythande) back in 1995, I was pretty much the only one around.  I never had trouble getting on IRC because of a nick dupe.  You could google Lythande (or whatever search engine we were using then, but when google came out it was the same) and my name and current web site was right at the top of the list.  A few years ago I noticed that there were beginning to be an influx of other Lythandes, so I added "BlueStar" as a last name.  Now there are even people using that (at least one on facebook)!  They're all imposters, I tell you!