More Reasons to Become God

Part One

There's a photograph, of a particular woman, sitting on a cold beach in an oversized sweater (hugging her knees, I think), and she has this really lovely melancholy smile. 

The last time I went to look at it, someone had switched it with another.

I haven't had cause to feel that emotion myself in a very long time - which is good - but in no longer having access to that image, my life is made a little smaller, and a little stupider.

...

There's more to be said about curation, creation, balancing reliability with variety, infinite galleries, and sooner or later attaining access to the full archive, but whatever governs my brain on this is resisting, so it will wait.

Comments

• Still unable to comment on my own posts. Verification appears bugged. 
• Your comments are up now. That's on me. I will probably continue to be slow on that. 
• Browsing to your blogs, my browser seems  confused about which version (desktop or mobile) is being displayed. 

[Update, June 19: attempting to comment on my own blog, failing, and then following a link in my post takes me not to the linked page but to the HTML of the linked page. /Update]

• Fun(?) Fact: Google's product landing page does not link to its products on the first screen. Zipping halfway down the page doesn't reach a product list either. 
• I use youtube help pages to reach my youtube comment history because the normal links are broken or bugged and my comment history is literally inaccessible any other way. 

[Mal] Was It Monkeys? [/Mal]

[As always, inactivity on my blog is consequent to inactivity in the rest of my life. Can't do anything in depth right now. Instead: UI complaints!]

Personal Update

I don't mean to be uncommunicative. A malfunction over the winter holidays has limited my productivity. In theory I'm better off now, but in practice it's a side grade which doesn't address the root problems.

I regret if anyone's been put out. 

Immediate upshots:

• I remain unlikely to record video in my current environs.
• Twitch remains unfeasible for me. 

I appreciate that YouTube allows double-speed playback but I wish it wouldn't keep bumping the quality up to where the video starts getting choppy. I notice the updated Terms of Service include an item about not using third party services to evade YouTube's controls - I assume that's directed at Facebook and the like, yet I can't help thinking how useful it would have been to have a service which allows playback at triple and quadruple speed.

Turkey Day (cont'd)

Did you see there's a 13 Dead End Drive movie? Loved that game as a kid. Concealing which pawns each player owns is a neat idea, if a little transparent as an adult. I've heard the movie compared to the ol' Clue adaptation, and Chris Evans seems to think it's Robot Chicken.

Rest of this post is gonna mostly talk about YouTube.

Have a 'Mech, Frankie Valli

I don't generally bother writing up 'Mech stats anymore unless I have a good bit of fluff in mind to go with them. But last January, apparently I had a craving to make a heavy cannon and two heavy lasers go 80kph with as little tech as possible, and I had a song stuck in my head.

I was pretty proud of that "Meacham / each won" rhyme.

The tune is a brassy, energetic variation on Mack The Knife. The CD jacket claims it's performed by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, but it's a cheap CD compilation, and I don't really trust their fact checking.

The full lyrics are unGoogleable, so I've put them [with some guesses] below the cut.

a work in progress (as viewed through Google services)

If Google loves images why is it so bad about displaying them? Let me show the different options:

• as viewed through Google Photo (best zoom)
• as viewed through Google Drive (limited zoom, different frame)
• as viewed through Google Blogger (worst)

Since these Google services don't import media from each other, I have to upload it three times, taking up three times the space on their server. (Google Picasa does share with Blogger, but Picasa is going away.)

As a precaution, I've also uploaded it to DeviantArt (here's a direct link which DA may or may not block).

The file is 1.2MB, so it might take a minute to load.

Of course, when I've completed my work on the document, I'll also post the actual text and spreadsheet files, which will be easier for people to read and use.

360p Is The Only Choice

YouTube has apparently decided that I should only watch videos in 360p. Luckily, I've discovered that changing the URL from something like this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USkEzLuzmZ4
...to something like this...
https://www.youtube.com/v/USkEzLuzmZ4
...gives me all the old options back.

Edit September 23rd: Unless the video is a vevo music video, in which case I need to find my way around regional restrictions. /Edit

GODDAMNIT GOOGLE

Today, I walked into a computer lab, opened a Chrome browser window, and logged into my email. I happened to look at the bookmark toolbar, and what do I see? Bookmarks I'd used at my old job. Bookmarks which represent proprietary information that I'm no longer privileged to - not so serious for my old employer, but this is could be a dangerous breach for other enterprises. (Nevermind political scandal from public officials leaking private habits into their workplaces.)

So I look at the browser's "sync" settings, and everything is synced by default.

Including autofill. 

Y'know, the thing that records everything you type into a browser? How did the fine lads at google look at this and say "yes, let's share everything by default! This does NOT risk the leaking of privileged information!"

This may be actually, actionably, criminally illegal.

What the hell guys.

Obstacles to Designing This Blog

I have been using xanga for my blogging (I dislike how it displays my archives) and my browser's "open all in tabs" bookmark function to check other blogs for updates -- Blogspot gadgets handle these things much better. So I'm trying to design a blog here, but I've hit some problems, and blogger's help guides are shockingly unhelpful.

1. The sidebars waste so much space with their giant margins. I zeroed out every value that the "edit HTML" page let me zero out and the margin still didn't go away. The sidebar text is so stupidly cramped! I can't sacrifice one column to give the other room because I need both the "Blog List" and "Archive" to be visible without scrolling.
2. Need a color scheme, once I figure out where all the page elements are hidden.
3. Need to find how the "Recent Comments" gadget limits the size of each snippet, and splice that code into the "Blogs List" gadget.
4. Need to find a version of the twitter gadgets that (like the "Blogs List" gadget) compiles tweets from several different twitter feeds, and then figure out where I can put it that has enough room. An extra column running off the right side of the screen, maybe.
5. The mandatory "Attribution" is superfluous. (Hell, it even duplicates a link from the toolbar up top.) Since users can't drag-and-drop rows and columns like they do gadgets, or adjust margins/padding/spacing/shadows on a similar easy diagram (ie, can't create new templates), there simply aren't enough to warrant "Attributions." I've tried moving the gadget somewhere less wasteful, but then a new one spawns and adds extra fields to the foot of the layout.
6. The default "Profile" gadget has two separate links with the exact same URL, neither of which occupies the box's title ("About User")? Assuming I can uncramp the sidebar, definitely sticking my bio inside a simple text box instead.
7. The point of the "Followers" gadget is to help people who like your blog find other people who like your blog? Blogger keeps telling me that it adds to my "Reading list," but half the reason I'm trying Blogspot at all is to track people's updates from my public front page.
8. Why can't I "configure blog posts" to have the hour (or other mobile items) alongside the date (or other immobile items)? How come "Day, Month Date, Year" is listed twice -- shouldn't one entry reverse the order?
9. The editor has options and effects I can't get to or see without posting at least one entry.
   

If I do adopt Blogspot, I am really going to miss the ability to indent text inside a post.