parlor game: let's talk about...

[cellio]

This parlor game comes via talvinamarich:

Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

He gave me: Lisp, On the Mark, Accessibility, Books, Role-Playing Games, Filk, Faroe Islands (one of these things is not like the others).

LISP turned out to be a longer story. On the Mark, ditto.

Books

I've been in houses that have no visible books. They're creepy.

I learned to love reading early on. I remember as a child going to the library at least once a week and coming home with my arms full of books. I bought some books through a school program that provided wholesome material at low prices and would let me order from grade levels above mine.

I still enjoy reading, though I've slowed down -- that pesky "job" stuff gets in the way, and is it my imagination or are fonts getting smaller? I received a Kindle as a gift a couple years ago and I love it (and it solves that small-font problem), though I've been slow to invest in purchases for it because when I buy a book I want it to last forever, not just until the DRM stuff breaks. So I've bought some e-books and downloaded more for free, and I read at a slow-enough rate now that that's sustainable. I'm currently reading the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, for which I believe I paid $5, and 1634 (free) is still waiting for me, and the short-story anthology from Apex that includes work by my friend mabfan... I won't run out.

As for the many physical books, I'll just point to this post and mention that last year when we added about 40 shelf-feet of space we mitigated the problem, for now. We like books. :-)

Role-playing games

I learned to play D&D in high school (out of the blue "basic" book). I learned to role-play (instead of roll-play) sometime after college, and that's when it got good. Yes of course I enjoy the fantasy aspect of "being"/playing a character with exotic useful skills, but it turns out what I really enjoy is being part of am extended, collaborative storytelling experience. Hack-and-slash dungeon crawls appealed to me in an earlier time and I still enjoy the occasional one-shot game of that sort, but learning the craft side of these games is the real win for me.

I've also found that writing helps this introvert to process a game and, perhaps, enhance it. Ralph's D&D game led to me writing an in-character journal in ralph_dnd, and sometimes the other players contributed pieces too, and that meant there was a second layer of game experience outside of the gaming sessions. Neat! This is an aspect I want to keep for any future games I play in.

Filk

My first encounter with filk music was the tape Minus Ten and Counting, a collection of songs about space from a variety of performers including Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish. So I was spoiled early. :-)

I enjoy filk, both the simpler parodies that characterize the early genre and the polished renditions with rich accompaniment and original melodies. I tend to drift toward the latter, but there are gems in the former too.

One place I do not want to hear filk, though, is in the main areas of SCA events. Post-revels or bardic circles around the fire in someone's camp, sure. On the performance stage or in the main hall, no. I like filk; I also like modern folk music, but I wouldn't perform Fred Small songs in the SCA either.

Accessibility

It's going to be hard to do this one without ranting.

By any broad measure I am not "handicapped". I'm not blind, all my limbs work, I'm no more easily fatigued than most other people... I should not be bothered by accessibility problems. And, yet, I live in a world full of devices and interfaces that were clearly designed by and for folks with 20/20 vision that just do not degrade well. If this stuff bothers me, I shudder to think what it's doing to people with bigger problems.

You'd think that software interfaces would be some of the easiest to fix. Road signs that are too small or have poor contrast are expensive to fix; software with too-small fonts or bad colors should be easy. So why does so much software disappoint me so badly? Why do so many designers, even now in the 21st century when we should all know better, hard-code their visual designs on the theory that one size fits all? Why is form so much more important than function to so many?

My coping strategy is to use technology to my advantage when I can (e.g. Firefox Stylish, which is forcing me to learn more than I want to about CSS) and to just punt when I can't. Yeah, I miss out on some stuff, but at least where recreational technology is concerned, it's not like I want for ways to spend my time.

Faroe Islands

If the average temperatures were about 10 degrees warmer and if there were a Jewish community there, it sounds like it'd be a pretty nice place to live. I'm assuming that these days everybody has good internet connectivity... The trip to Pennsic would be challenging, though. :-)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I am under the impression that the reason so many websites have a fixed width is because making reasonable dynamic (browser-window-sensitive) arrangements of panels in CSS ranges from difficult to impossible.

Eh. Use percentages. Few backdrop images (they add little anyway). I worked on an app that was supposed to run in 1024x768 but was pretty darn usable and not unstable-looking at a quarter that size.

That said, I've been doing CSS since it came out, so you could be right about it being difficult for most.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Huh. How do you deal with (resizing) images? Speaking as someone who has "OMG why is this font so small I can't read anything" problems on some Japanese sites, images which contain or frame text are irritating because they don't respond to font size changes, and if you magnify them with zoom you sometimes still can't read them because the resolution is too low.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Resizing images is why you try to minimize the number of images. For curved backdrops it isn't bad to scale. For Japanese sites, why wouldn't they use Unicode text or specify the text font in the header? It still might pixellate them if the font is lame, and if the font is not installed you just see boxes, but the latter at least is a user issue that can be resolved. And there's enough power in CSS to make plain text look like a happy button with borders in the right places to make it look 3D.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Resizing images is why you try to minimize the number of images. For curved backdrops it isn't bad to scale. For Japanese sites, why wouldn't they use Unicode text or specify the text font in the header? It still might pixellate them if the font is lame, and if the font is not installed you just see boxes, but the latter at least is a user issue that can be resolved. And there's enough power in CSS to make plain text look like a happy button with borders in the right places to make it look 3D.

Edit: I must admit most of my work since '98 has been on corporate intranet sites where you want functionality over glam.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's particular to Japanese sites, it's just that it's only on Japanese sites where I frequently have to increase the font size in order to allow non-native me to distinguish, eg, 微 from 徴 from 徹. Most of the text _is_ unicode and scales fine, it's just that some is embedded in images.

Anyway, I guess my "CSS makes it impossible" theory is now demolished. I guess it's just a special case of "too lazy/too expensive" as "the dev found it easier to create the fancy text in a graphics program as an image than to figure out the CSS to get it to render how they want in the browser."

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Heh, I was going to reply "hey, CSS really is tricky". Maybe you could do a "#japanese {font-size:200%}". I'm not sure. But some of it could easily be laziness.