Brainwaves of Sken

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This has been a mostly fun and warm weekend, occasionally peppered with shocking experiences of people judging others without a shred of empathy.

I went to a birthday party with people I haven’t seen in years, and it was a good thing, with catching up and the usual comedy.

I also went to a holiday gathering I try to make every year, and it was warm and full of laughter and good food, as always.

Yesterday I had the aforementioned downs, where I was appalled at the kind of statements people make as if they understand anything about where someone else is coming from. It’s precisely why I think outrage on an interpersonal scale is so dangerous – it usually requires a hell of a lot of presumption and is dangerously shy on facts. Rather than dwell on the one thing that can fill me with a deep and abiding anger (the abuse of my friends and family), though, I’d like to talk about my other frustration.

Codecs*.

See, if it weren’t for codecs (not to be confused with the hottie from The Guild, codex), my job as a video editor could almost be considered a normal creativity-based career. Instead, half the time I need to do something new, it is a chaotic mess with thirty tabs open and general pleading with my computer to allow SOMETHING to work right.

Like at work, I’m trying to set up for future high def videos, and saving in the format we need, which should be cake, is looking to be quite difficult in Final Cut Pro.

At home, I spent hours last night (almost the entire night) recovering the video capture I made of our guild doing its first boss kill in Icecrown Citadel (a big deal for us, trust me on this one).

This involved no less than four applications, attempts to re-screencap a video already screencapped and editing the files with a hex editor, comparing FUNCTIONING videos and copying code into the SCREWY one.

Ultimately it’s a little choppy and the first 4/5ths are gone, but damn it, I have the part that counts.

Now I just need to get Premiere to understand it so I can actually edit it.

*sigh*

* CODEC stands for COmpression/DECompression, and it is the standard by which a given video is saved. Multiple companies can create their version of the same codec. To make things more complicated, a given CODEC can live inside a number of wrappers – containers that tell applications how to work with them.

So Quicktime is a wrapper, and Flash is a wrapper, and Windows Movie is a wrapper. All of them can contain H.264 video, as that is the CODEC of the video. I expect 3 people out of my flist to have read this far, and each of them already knows goddamn well what a codec is. For those diligent readers I will mention that I am wearing my santa hat today, and it has kept my head warm, and had the security guard grinning as I drove in to work. Don’t tell those slackers who didn’t read this far!

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An article at boingboing reminded me of a number of games I’ve played with over the past few months, as well as a couple of new ones I’ve never seen before.

http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/mega/

Favorite free sci-fi pick-up-anytime game:

http://www.captainforever.com/captainforever.php

Best exploration game I can’t play ’cause I don’t have an iPhone:

Best “experience” game:

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After a friend posted on FB about “nice guys”, I was going to write a post about what a misnomer it was, and how being self-absorbed, sycophantic and unable to empathize doesn’t make you nice, it makes you an asshole on par with the bad attitude boys… even if you open doors.

However, then I read a link to a “Nice Guys” post, and I wanted to put down my feelings about that.

It starts out really well, pointing out the differences between men who are, in her estimation, genuinely nice and “Nice Guys” as a category – people who use being nice, in their terms, as a badge of entrance to a woman’s naughty bits, and are outraged that someone could use any other factor for dating.

I am totally behind her on the idea that “Nice Guys” like these define their rejection by the “object” of their desire in terms of how messed up the girl/guy is, how they prefer a bad boy who will beat or abuse them vs their “Nice Guy” selves. Missing the point that disrespecting a person’s right to choose their partner is the opposite of nice.

However, it quickly devolves into a rambling 3-page diatribe that I’m pretty uncomfortable with. She uses three pages to lay out the “Nice Guy” in general, with lots of “they tend to not clean themselves, because they think being nice should over-ride being clean” (a very unlikely reason for a person’s hygiene issues).

As she delves into the nitty-gritty of sarcastic responses, inability to pick up socks, and the need for a “sympathy fuck”, I can’t help but think that she’s basing her definition on one person who was particularly terrible to her. And he was clearly a total tool, but I think she’s conflating a few different types of people that (surprise) sometimes Venn diagram together. Not every “Nice Guy” can’t dress themselves or bathe, and they don’t all use the same tactics. Not every “Nice Guy” is directionless.

All that said, I did enjoy her list of suggestions for people who think they might fall into that “Nice Guy” category. Most of them boil down to this: Stop assuming another person doesn’t have a perfectly valid and just right to their own opinions. This was particularly good:

“Don’t for the love of pete be Mr. Bad Touch. If she just squirmed over a few inches, it’s not because she wants you to close the distance.

Flirting without expecting a return on investment is ok. Active seduction when there are clear signs that it is welcome is ok. Trying to constantly slip in “innocent” gropes, innuendo, kisses, or anything else when she’s not interested is the adult equivalent of “are we there yet? are we there yet? how about now? how about now?””

When she said “You might think she was oversensitive, but you have no idea what it is like to be a woman in a world where we have to deal with unwelcome aggressive attention all the time” I wanted to say back, “That’s totally true, but even moreso, you just plain don’t know what it is like to be that person. Even if you somehow grok the former, a person’s life is way complicated – don’t assume you know how they should react to you.”

The most useful part of her post for all people, Nice Guy or not, was this:

Bring something to the table besides basic human decency. I’m not talking about money. Be responsible for yourself, your life, and your happiness. Have good things in your life that you want to share with a wonderful woman, rather than expecting her to fill the holes in your life.

EDIT: Pleased to see that in her redux (seriously, is the word that common?) she said exactly that, that it was a rant that came from a particularly bad experience. It’s better for that context.

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For one, do you take measures to protect it?

Some people I know ask people not to use their last name online. Other people guard their web servers from being trolled or scanned. Some people use different names at all of their social media sites.

Personally, I turned off search engine access to my LJ and I don’t usually post my full name and my most common user ID together. Otherwise, I do nothing.

Second, how effective do you think you are at maintaining the privacy online that you are comfortable with?

As a favor to my more private friends, even though my picasa gallery conveniently recognizes the faces of the hundreds of people in my gallery, I do not allow it to make that public. I do not expect other people to do the same for me.

Partly, I am protected by my rather common name. When you go to IMDB, you have to hit the sixth or seventh iteration before you find me, and that’s just my field. Now that the Ved Bok film company site doesn’t exist online (which I worked so hard to make popular on google), you can’t find me in google, under my name, for multiple pages, which I think is sufficient. Frankly, I think what privacy I have is solely related to my irrelevancy for most people.

I’m not particularly worried about it. I treasure the ability (such as we have) to make some things private if I want, but I also enjoy not needing it.

I am resting on the comfort of who I am. As a reasonably liberal-minded person in a creative industry, I have some flexibility. I don’t make public incriminating photos (except in the embarrassingly geeky way), and my online persona, in my belief, is identical to who I am in real life. Perhaps slightly more pedantic. I’m a white male nigh-married professional with no major disabilities, unsurprising hobbies and political beliefs for my career – I have the luxury of being myself and not worrying too much about what a future employer might find.

Of course I’m also idealistic enough to believe that ANY job in which I have to completely bury who I am in an utter falseness will A) totally suck, and B) never work out. I don’t need to chat about who I am to the people I work for, but I don’t hide it, either, and I’m not very good at lying anymore.

Ultimately, I think that everything is available to anyone willing to search long enough or pay enough for it. I think any actual privacy we have is the illusion afforded to us by our irrelevancy to the vast majority of the population, which is why we know every tiny little detail about famous people. They’ve lost the only real protection we have.

How is it with you?

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Who in the world is taking their kid to Buffalo Wild Wings to see santa?

“If you’re a good girl, I’ll leave drumsticks in your stocking!”

(Don’t make that weird. …weirder.)

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Definitely a mesmerizing machine. It’s amazing to see what we humans dream up from whole cloth.

Other hilarious videos found today!

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… I mean, I definitely see the flaws in some of the sparse code and in keeping all my data in one place… but generally speaking, I don’t care. It’s too useful for me to care. Having data that cross-relates is too cool for me to worry about my privacy, which I think is an illusion anyway.

I have to laugh at my reactions when I ask someone for their email address and they give me a different web-based email. My first reaction is to think, “Haven’t they used gmail? Clearly they’ve just been holding onto this yahoo account for years.”

*laugh* It honestly doesn’t occur to me (at first) that they might have partaken from the google spread, found it wanting, and returned to something they like better.

Mmmm, delicious kool-aid.

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