James

Sorry:

Hahaha, I'd somehow managed to completely overlook the "Robowatch" part. Silly me.

That's good, but I think this is still a pretty good prompt to make some sort of backup of anything you'd really hate to lose. Maybe next time there won't be so much warning. It sounds like the Justin.tv thing came and went pretty much unnoticed.

The sign's a bit boisterous, but I don't think it's too uncommon to be public about your surveillance. While cameras can help identify crimes and catch criminals, there are no guarantees. It's much cheaper and more convenient if you can put people off committing the crime in the first place.

If you told me that was a dialectical thing I'd believe you. Except for the "alot" bit. No, I think that's the strictly correct version. "Him fighting..." is very common, though – probably more common. That's the sort of thing that might be worth restructuring, though: "His fight with it was great," or "That he fought it was great," for example. Both of those slightly change the meaning, of course. It all depends on what the context demands. Regarding the speed reading stuff: I'm sure that would be a very useful skill, but I have a mainly irrational aversion to it. For some reason I find it irritating. I'll continue to read slowly like a schoolchild thank you very much.

I hope someone saves the Ruinationcast, in case I ever want to go back and see them getting distracted and not really addressing my question.

That's the only one you're going to pick him up on? I think for me it's pretty much always my own voice, even when I know it should be another accent. If it's not written phonetically like Trainspotting or something, I don't really have the imagination to fill in the blank with anything other than me (or, more accurately, what I imagine I sound like, which, of course, differs from what I actually sound like). I couldn't really tell you what bearing that has on how I feel about people's errors in written English. Perhaps I find it more jarring in my own imagined voice, but I'm not sure.

Hi, I'm James, and I'm a recovering pedant. I feel that my pedantry is pretty much under control, but you can never be truly free of it. I used to be terrible about correcting (or "correcting") people on forums. I wish I could say the impetus for change was realizing what an arsehole I was being, or developing a more kind-hearted and accepting conception of why people might talk and write the way they do, but really it was vanity: I discovered I'd been making a few fairly basic errors, and if there's one thing worse than just being wrong, it's being a hypocrite at the same time. It was pretty freeing to adopt a more laid-back approach to language. Some things do wind me up, though. Every day at work someone has to do a shipping manifest, and unfortunately that person doesn't realise that there's a difference between "manifest" and "manifesto". It doesn't matter in the slightest – everyone understand what's meant, and most people probably don't even notice the error – but it drives me up the fucking wall. And it's doubly frustrating, because I can't actually hold it against my colleague. That would be ridiculous and very mean. Perhaps I should have politely said something at some point, but it's been years now, so that would be pretty weird. Besides, I don't know how you do that without it sounding disparaging, which I wouldn't want at all. Before that I had a German colleague whose English was excellent, but who used "slowly" as an adjective: "why is it so slowly?" was a common outburst. Again, it doesn't matter at all, but eventually it became like nails on a blackboard. I'm probably overstating my irritation a bit, but I probably do need to chill out about that stuff. I feel somewhat more comfortable in my irritation at what Shammack brought up, and with hypercorrection in general. You've still got to be careful about overly judgemental thoughts – after all, someone might just be overcompensating for a previous error that some other pedant lectured them on – but when people start mistakenly attempting to correct others, I think it's fair game. For example, apparently Donald Trump chastised a contestant on that dumb programme for saying "I feel bad" rather than "I feel badly". Not only condescending and shitty, but also 100% wrong. There's something incredibly infuriating about that combination of smugness, ignorance and dissemination of false information (in giving thousands of viewers an incorrect grammar lesson). I hate it. I've seen people do the same with the "x and I" thing and it makes me so angry. Pre-emptive self-directed pedantry: In this post I make inconsistent use of the serial comma. Generally, more important than following particular rules is being consistent with yourself. My possibly rather feeble excuse is that my approach to punctuation is to mirror my internal monologue: if I'd pause before the "and", I include a comma; if I wouldn't, I don't. I'll sometimes adjust that for clarity's sake, but that's pretty much how it works in my head. Speaking of which, does everyone else say everything they write as a voice in their head, or are some of you able to think entirely textually? Is that a dumb question?

Absolutely (like I said, it's my own fault for being so far behind), but if I am going to have things spoiled for me, I'd rather it not be something someone mutters for no apparent reason. Sean had already made the Geoffrey/Joffrey link; mentioning that doesn't really add anything to the joke. I feel like an entitled arse for even mentioning it, and I probably am, but my immediate reaction was "why did he even bother saying that?". Not that I was super crushed or anything – if I cared that much I would have been up to date with at least the TV show if not the books – but in principle it seemed pretty dumb. I don't know, I'm probably awful. Sorry.

I was dazzled by the bright colours and lively motion.

Yessssssss

Yep, brilliant.

The psychology of the bookmarks bar is completely different. That's for things you want instant access to at a moment's notice. It's for sites you access frequently, but while it's immediate, there's no urgency to it. If I have a tab open, that page is, in theory, something I intend to eventually deal with, and once I've done so I'll close that tab. Sure, you could use the bookmarks bar like that, but it'd involve deleting bookmarks all the time, and that would be weird. I highly recommend all tab enthusiasts get a session manager extension for their browser that can auto-save their tabs. I also recommend that they periodically manually save because sometimes your browser crashes and when you relaunch it it turns out it hasn't automated for weeks for some reason. Or just learn to let go (in the most pathetically small respect imaginable). (This post is obviously complete nonsense.)

While I'm not invested enough in Game of Thrones to care about it, and even if I were it'd be my own fault for being so far behind, I did think that spoiler was pretty pointless. But whatever, I might never even finish the second book.

I've been cutting back on tabs a bit recently. I'd been using session managers to maintain unread tabs for months, accumulating more and more each day, but eventually I realized I was never going to actually get around to reading them, and I keep having to restart the browser for updates, and the tab buttons were getting really tiny, so now I tend to restrain myself to around ten and not worry too much about keeping things from session to session. I do have the old mega-sessions saved, because my neurosis would give me palpitations if I didn't, but I doubt I'll ever go back and look through them.

I got a telephoto lens so now I can take pictures of people playing cricket from my mum's kitchen window: Not great photos, but I like the crazy arc his leg follows. Forgot to respond to this before: Yeah, Mum's Swedish. My nephew decorated that pepparkaka.

Fantastic photos YTL! If those are terrible, I dread to think what unspeakable dreck most of mine are. ----- Too many words in a thread about photos:

Sorry for resurrecting this thread again, but I happened to look at my previous photo (i.e. the one above) on a different computer, and in Chrome colours of the shadow area on the right of his face are off. They show as nasty mottled greens and browns. The rest of his skin looks a bit blotchier, too, as if the contrast has been turned up too high. Other browsers and image editors seem to render it fine. I've tried fiddling around with colour profiles a bit, but I don't really know much about that, and nothing I do seems to make any difference at all. Does it look OK on other people's screens? Is it just something funny about my PC's set-up? Is it a colour space thing? Does Chrome just up the contrast to give things more "punch" or something? How am I meant to account for this sort of thing when it looks fine in my editors (Lightroom and Photoshop)? Not that I expect you to troubleshoot all my silly novice problems for me, but I really can't work this one out and it's quite frustrating. Anyway, in keeping with the actual subject of the thread, here's another photo I'm quite proud of: It was taken in Östermalm, Stockholm.

Too adorable.

I'm pretty much with you, except I'd like him to be more alarmed or perhaps horrified.

I very much enjoyed the turn that one took in its second half. It took me a moment to work out where he was going with it.

33 Olly Mosses That Just Don't Know Anymore 29 Mingtons Who Failed So Hard They Won

My anxiety is that I haven't properly examined my own thought and am revealing myself to be monstrous, or worse still saying something hurtful or damaging. Is that paranoid of me? I suppose I'm probably thinking of things too academically, having the luxury of not much experience of how this stuff is in the real world. To be clear about a few things: While I was using legal (ish) terminology, what I was really hoping to address is how people think about rape and sexual assault. For all I know, the law already addresses these distinctions in its own presumably arcane way, as Bjorn wondered and Dewar confirmed. But when people hear "rape", they think of nighttime and kidnapping and all that, as you said. While there are efforts to demystify the idea of what a rapist can be, I don't think people are going to lose the idea of the predatory rapist, not least because they do exist, albeit not necessarily as evidently and cartoonishly evil as you might expect. Furthermore, a man can look at himself and know, "I'm not that monster, I don't stalk and kidnap", and from this conclude: "I could never be involved in sexual assault". Barring cases of severe delusion, people know whether or not they're anthonyRichard's "Person A", but probably don't even consider the possibility of being "Person B". Rather than wanting to muddle thinking on the matter, the idea was that perhaps more nuanced terminology might open men up to the idea that they might have done something terrible without conforming to any of those stereotypes of the "classic rapist", such as they might imagine it. But artificially introducing terminology like that into general discourse (rather than it being specialist jargon) is likely a doomed enterprise, and there's no guarantee it wouldn't get caught up in the "not real rape" mindset, and it's probably just an all-around absurdly naïve notion. But the idea isn't to excuse people; it's to give them a framework in which they can even conceive of their own guilt. For what it's worth. Your mention of the "classic rape" judge definitely gave me pause. I wouldn't for a second want to sleepwalk into making excuses for and even apologising to people guilty of rape and sexual assault, by any definition. And that's a very real risk with making those sorts of distinctions. But another way of looking at it is this: people are already making the distinction, and currently it's between "real rape" and "not really rape", with the latter implicitly not being of real consequence. Perhaps if we had different language for it we could conform better to people's thinking while still being very clear on the severity and impact of the different forms. You are right about where the analogy with murder falls down, though: in almost all cases of murder or manslaughter, it's pretty clear that the victim is dead, and it gets no less clear with the passage of time. With sexual assault, there might never be any evidence beyond testimony, and the nature of the impact it has on the victim is such that a great deal of time may pass before they choose or are able to speak about it.

Before I get too serious, a Cards Against Humanity aside: A problem I have with it is that the options available to the player are limited enough that it doesn't really feel like the players themselves are being funny so much as finding funny things. Perhaps that's the point, but it leaves me feeling a bit awkward about it. Ryan Davis used to say that it was all about playing to the card czar's sense of humour, which is more involved and interesting, but I think I generally prefer verbal comedy to come from creativity than random chance. Now, back to this whole miserable affair. Earlier I was going to respond to the notion that the lawyer segment being a reassurance. I was going to say that a much better way to offer such reassurance would be to be brief and to the point: "I won't be pursuing legal action" (or "have no intention to" if he felt it necessary to leave himself an out, I suppose). Anything more seems like fishing for credit at best, or threatening at worst. Anyway, I'd assumed that I was merely rephrasing what he said minus the bullshit, but when I actually went to check I realized that he doesn't actually make any statement about the likelihood of his pursuing legal action; only how he would feel about it. To cynical eyes, that's Max absolving himself of blame for a court case without actually making any commitment to avoiding one. I wouldn't like to be that cynical, but at the very least it's an extremely poorly-judged way of putting things. Reading what others have posted, and thinking more about this, I'm finding that the simple question of "did this happen or not" is being replaced by the notion that probably neither of them are lying as such, and Max is right about it being a matter of miscommunication, but very wrong in how he's dealing with it. On the one hand, while the outcome for the victim is still devastating and must never be forgotten, this scenario would speak less poorly of Temkin's character – it would be a disastrous mistake that must be atoned for, but better that than a cold-hearted predatory act – but on the other, his response to the situation (one of the few things we have direct access to and aren't relying on anyone else's account) is pretty damning in itself. As has already been said, even given the most charitable reading of his post, he's much more concerned with absolving himself than confronting the possibility that he might have seriously hurt someone without even realizing it. But now I'm just parroting others' posts. My point is that I'm feeling less like I need to know exactly what happened, and more like what I do know (i.e. how he responded to the accusation) will inform how I think of Max in future. That said, my thoughts and feelings on the matter are still in flux and I do hold out some hope for a much more constructive response from him in the coming days. I don't know if it's at all likely; I just hope for it. I was going to say something along those lines; I think you could even carry over the idea of murder in the first and second degrees, too: premeditated and deliberate rape, deliberate but unplanned rape ("the heat of the moment" sort of thing), and rape through negligence (failing to confirm consent, etc.). I'm always cautious to chime in on this sort of thing, and am fully open to the prospect of my being completely wrong about it, but it seems to me to be a reasonable way of thinking about it. Without making any excuses for the perpetrators of any of these acts (following the analogy, manslaughter is a huge deal that people are held accountable for), it makes a meaningful distinction (while the outcome for the victim is the same: murder and manslaughter result in people just as dead, and different forms of rape result in people just as hurt), it matters to society what the circumstance and motive was. The risk is that in making such a distinction an implicit distinction is made between the experiences of the victims, or that people understand one form to be "less real" or "less serious" than the other; it's crucial that this is avoided. (I hope I'm not mansplaining or whatever. I have so much self-doubt whenever I post in this thread.)