Рissing & sleet … Social science that reads like science! … ‚Itzt‘ 17th of January, 2007 POST·MERIDIEM 09:08

Complaining about the system over at Metatalk seems to be roughly comparable to рissing into sleet; there’s an initial relief from the act, and then you look like an idiot (whether because you didn’t understand that complaining won’t lead to any useful changes, or because you’re covered in urine) and have to deal with negative long-term consequences (because anything negative you say won’t be taken seriously as a consequence of your earlier misjudgement, or because you’ve come down with pneumonia). So have some patience with me while I vent here for a second:

1. Since the line breaks were removed from this post, I look at its single paragraph, and I say, ‘nope, not going to bother reading that one, too dense to understand.’ And I wrote it.
2. You can add HTML markup to post titles, and they will appear in preview, but not in the final post. This is fuсking elementary web dev—maybe I should find more Usenet groups that interest me instead, since the basics are long worked out there.
3. The RSS feed, here, trashes non-ASCII characters, needlessly, since it declares its encoding to be UTF-8. Including those needed for properly-typeset English. This is fuсking elementary web dev—maybe I should find more Usenet groups that interest me instead, since the basics are long worked out there.

Unrelatedly, one site that I’ve found hugely insightful lately and over the last few years has been that of the Oxford Social Issues Research Centre, an English social-sciences body of which I was reminded by this entry in Danny O’Brien’s wishlist. The article that made me a fan was the Passport to the Pub, in which I saw some things I knew but had never seen articulated anywhere before, and other things I didn’t know at all (one of them being that there’s a vaguely competitive complimenting/self-deprecating circle in female interaction there, which made some previous experience clearer).

Word of the day; itzt is an archaic version of jetzt, the German word for ‘now.’