Why I Strive To Be A Feminist Ally

I like Twitter. I tweet about a lot of things, both serious and not. If you were to ask my what goal for @jvdgoot is, I’d say that I’d like to make you laugh or think — sometimes both.

I don’t like Google, I’ve tweeted about that. I am obsessed with any Trent Reznor or Josh Homme project, I’ve tweeted about that. I play a lot of video games, I’ve tweeted about that. Not a single negative reaction, if anyone didn’t like what I was doing they’d just unfollow and that’d be that. I identify myself as a feminist ally, I’ve tweeted about that.

When I tweet about sexism, it is “annoying.” When I tweet about sexism, I’m a “white knight trying to get laid.” All these comments are from men exclusively, of course. Why does this particular subject anger them so much? Why when I spam Twitter with a barrage of all caps tweets about cute cats and dogs there’s not a peep?

Is it because they have bought into the narrative that sexism is “over” and being challenged on that is like attacking a core belief? Or is it even an expression of the patriarchy in that I as a cisgendered heterosexual white man should not be talking about these topics? I’m not smart enough to answer those questions.

Why?

The negative comments do make me question myself though, why do I take up this banner? I’ve thought about this a lot, because I couldn’t really answer it. It just seems logical to me, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be shouting from the rooftops. I’ve always had a rather stubborn and naive sense of justice. I get physically angry when things aren’t fair.

And it’s not entirely without self interest. I’m not traditionally attractive (that’s code for fat) and definitely do not fall into a traditional masculine gender role. I have a stake in smashing the patriarchy.

Heh sexism

I did not come by views by magic, of course. I’ve read a couple of books that opened my eyes and I would invite you to take a look at them as well before dismissing the existence of sexism.

• bell hooks - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
• Christopher T. Kilmartin - The Masculine Self
• Jessica Valenti - He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know

Mailbox.ipa

Remember Mailbox? Well if you're like me it was an iOS app you downloaded because you're the kind of nerd that is into "productivity" stuff and downloaded it. Then forget about it and put it in some folder on a secondary page of your homescreen because it had a waiting line. For a productivity app.

The Good

The UX and ideas behind the workflow of the app is smart and works for me. The idea of using the direction and length of sliding an item for different purposes is a brilliant idea and makes the processing of email feel faster. The fetishization of reaching inbox zero (prompting you to tweet about it) aside, it actually realizes it's about taking proper actions on emails rather than about creating guilt for having emails in your inbox.

The Bad

It only works with Gmail. My Gmail is my generic email address, it's the one I use to sign up for services and what I publicly advertise as my contact address for strangers. Consequently, it is the email address I receive the least "real" email on. For that I use my iCloud account. For work I have an Exchange account. Which makes Mailbox a second app I need to use for email rather than my primary one. That doesn't make my email process easier, it complicates it.

The Ugly

The waiting line. If we accept the premise that this was a technical necessity (which I cannot comment on), it was a really lousy way to implement it. Any app I download from the App Store I can start using immediately, Mailbox showed me a queue with such a large number of people waiting it had no meaning to me. As in, I don't know what being 10072 of 16023 people means. I'm not going to check daily to see if I've gone from 10072 to 9034, that is a meaningless distinction to me. And an app I literally cannot use is taking up real estate on my phone.

The Most Important Lesson I Was Ever Taught

I must’ve been about sixteen, about to get our first Geography lesson from Mr. Adams (a fake name, I am embarrassed to say I can’t remember his real name). Talk in the hallways was that he was an incredibly fun teacher. Imagine our surprise when we entered the classroom to find all the desks to be in straight and orderly columns, each separate. Not even the regular one-by-one we were used to.

Mr. Adams had written his name on the blackboard and stood with his hands behind his back at the head of the class. “Be seated,” he commanded. We did as we were told. He told us to open our notebooks and we were told to write down exactly what he lectured.

He began talking about Africa and its inhabitants. How the fact that it was so close to the equator, which meant that the temperatures were really high. This was the reason African people are slow and lazy, he told us. Because of the warm weather. Dutifully we wrote this down, the students that had actually been born in Africa not piping up. Because of the heat agriculture was impossible in Africa, he continued, that’s why their civilizations had not developed until the Europeans had come. This went on for at least 20 minutes.

Then he asked “Why are all of you writing this down? Why is no one questioning me? This is obviously a load of nonsense I am telling you.”

“Just because I am a teacher does not mean I know what I’m talking about. Never unquestioningly follow someone because they have authority,” he added.

Promoting Personal Posts on Facebook

Recently I noticed a new feature on Facebook. I am able to “promote” my own posts on my personal profile. What does this mean? There is no clear explanation given when you click on the action, it merely immediately prompts you to pay.

Pretty much all my posts are for friends only. Does this mean like for Facebook pages that unless I promote not all my friends will see my post? That isn’t true, is it? Because that would be the first thing that Facebook did to me that would feel genuinely malicious.

The most confusing thing about it for me is that it shows up after I place a post, set to friends only. So, that would I mean I would be paying $6 just so my post appears more prominently for my friends? Why would I want to do that? Weird.

Star Wars Episode VII – ∞

A new Star Wars trilogy, not made by Lucas. And a new Star Wars movie every year after that. One could look on in despair because it is no longer under Lucas’s control. I have no problem with that. One could look at this announcement through the glasses of cynicism and see it as nothing more than milking the Star Wars cow harder than before. But, there is a new hope.

Modern Fairy Tales

What does every Star Wars film open with? “A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…”

The way a fairy tale does. What my hope is with this new trilogy and the annualization of the franchise is that Disney takes this approach. Let every film be unique and be written & directed by people with a vision. Let this be modern day fairy tales that are different depending on who tells it.

If whoever is now in creative control of Star Wars can ignore the rabid fanbase and its preference for “cannon,” the Star Wars movies could be a wonderful platform for interesting films for a general audience.

Quick Little Tip: Real Skipping in iTunes

If you’re like me you have an intricate nest of smart playlist constructed in your iTunes Library. Because I have a large library, and I want to a fresh batch of tunes to listen to on shuffle, a lot of filtering happens in my playlists based on “Last Skipped” and “Last Played.”

However, did you know that if you don’t skip a song in the first 2 - 20 seconds of its playtime iTunes doesn’t update the skipped count or skipped date. That is pretty annoying and makes “Last Skipped” a pretty useless metric! Thankfully there’s a little AppleScript over at Doug’s iTunes Scripts that fixes this.

But to have to run that script from the menu every time we want to skip a song would be rather arduous, don’t you think? So I’ve added a keyboard shortcut to Alfred of CTRL+SHIFT+CMD+X that runs that script. Now I can safely skip songs whenever and be ensured that its metadata will be correct.

"Pixel Perfect" Webdesign

A recent tweet by Almog Melamed made me think about the concept of “pixel perfect” webdesign.

Pixels have become meaningless

What people usually mean by pixel perfect webdesign is that a PSD is made in Photoshop and that is translated exactly into HTML & CSS (perhaps some JS for flavor). But the ever changing world of how we access the web is making this a futile pursuit.

Just imagine that someone made a 300px wide header in Photoshop – that is going to look completely different on your 1920x1080 iMac than on your 640x960 (but for the web effectively 320x480) iPhone 4S. We are no longer designing for the average 1024x768 desktop monitor. There is too much variability in the way users might approach our sites.

Now, if you were totally married to your pixel perfect outlook you could go down the route of subdomains and have a separate mobile site, but that approach is not entirely tenable, because what is “mobile?” Is it tablets? Is it phones? And those have wildy varying aspect ratios and resolutions, getting you no closer to pixel perfection.

The future is responsive

Having a single design that adapts itself to the available screensize might be more difficult to design in Photoshop and will never be “pixel perfect,” I do believe it is the future. Not only in the reordering the existing markup elements with certain media queries, but defining a layout by percentages (with perhaps a maximum constraint defined in pixels) instead of by pixels.

This requires a rethinking of the visual design from the ground up and lose the pre-occupation with precise placement of elements that designers might be familiar with from print, but it will ultimately lead to a better web. Or so I think.

Boxee Box Remote

I have a Boxee Box and while at times it feels like the Android equivalent of the Apple TV, it does allow me to watch all my TV shows I am forced to illegally download with a nice interface. But its remote, dear god, its remote.

In The Dark

You know what the most probable lighting conditions are in the room wherever you install anything for a “home theater?” Probably somewhere dark. The Boxee Box remote’s designers did not thing of this however. As not only is the front symmetrical to the touch (meaning you have 50% chance of hitting the “exit” button when you meant to hit the “pause” button), but the keyboard on the back has dark blue and dark gray lettering on black buttons. Yep, super readable that.

Multiple accidental clicking

Because of poor design and manufacturing on D-Link’s part it is a known issue that the remote sometimes does multiple clicks. Try entering a password or URL with that little issue. I was able to temporarily relieve this issue by shoving a small piece of paper in the battery compartment.

Yes, that’s right, I had to jury-rig my own remote to make it work as intended, an absolutely shining example of engineering and manufacturing excellence. Kudos to all involved!

That said

If you don’t live in the promised land of online media (the United States) and therefore are forced to illegally download content because media companies are a bunch of assholes, you could do far worse than a Boxee Box. Otherwise just get an Apple TV. But don’t buy an Apple TV and jailbreak it. Jailbreaking, much like anime, is for jerks.

Quick Little Tip: youtube-dl

Ever wanted to download a YouTube video for offline viewing and are bit reticent to use one of the sketchy looking website? Well, have I got a nice little tidbit for you.

Do you have a Mac (of course you do!), have Homebrew installed (of course you do!) and not afraid of getting your hands dirty in the terminal (of course you aren’t!)?

brew install youtube-dl

And now you are able to download videos from YouTube and a bunch of other sites. Also, I’d recommend using the -t switch to give your files readable and understandable file names. And if you have ffmpeg installed via brew you are also able to automatically convert any Flash files you download into actual usable MP4 files.

Ads

I hate ads, I really do. I can’t stand them. And they still seem to be the go-to monetization method of anything internet-related, which I frankly don’t understand. The only reason would be that they work and I can’t understand a person who finds ads anything but intrusive.

On Ads

Weirdly, to me it depends on the medium though. Television is probably where ads annoy me the most. Not only are you already demanding I adjust my viewing habits to your schedule, content provider, but then you proceed to interrupt whatever I’m watching with the most inane, crass commercials. No, thank you. I literally cannot watched broadcast television anymore thanks to this.

Second worst are internet ads. Distracting animated, poorly compressed banners that disrupt a page’s design peddling products I am not remotely interested it. Or those generic Google Ads that seem to lead to the sleaziest, backwater sites on the internet.

Ads that I can stand however, seem to be those in physical newspapers & magazines. Either because I am accustomed to them and they are easier to ignore? I don’t know.

No Ads

I run adblockers wherever I can. I recently reinstalled my MacBook Pro and ran Safari without an adblocker for a while and I was appalled how some of the sites I normally frequent were plastered over with ugly ads (MacRumors, Last.FM and Giant Bomb come to mind) totally ruining their design.

Even worse are places where you pay a subscription and you still get ads! The Xbox Dashboard being the prime example in my mind, where 75% of most any top level screen is filled with ads instead of my own content. Or the huge distracting ads in the NYTimes app on the iPad (which has the added insult of having separate subscriptions for tablets and phones).

Go Premium

If you’re a content-driven business I heavily suggest you go for a subscription model. If you create unique, interesting content I truly believe that people will be ready to pay a premium for it. Now this won’t work for a content-mill like The Next Web or something, but then again we were talking about creating unique, interesting content.