This is just mean

Published on October 30, 2007 in Internet and Rants. 9 Comments

Margot blogsMar­got has been really into blog­ging lately.

I can be very par­tic­u­lar some­times. By “par­tic­u­lar” I mean I can be an ass­hole. There are cer­tain things that bother me to no end. Maybe talk­ing about them will help?

Two Spaces
I really can’t han­dle when peo­ple put two spaces after a period. It frus­trates the crap out of me. YOU AREN’T USING A TYPEWRITER. Wel­come to the 21st cen­tury. We use com­put­ers. We don’t use mono­spaced type any­more. There is no need for the extra space. And it’s not a spe­cific kind of per­son who does this. It’s every­one. I don’t really under­stand. When I have to remove all those extra spaces, oh man! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE remem­ber! Never EVER put two spaces after a period. It’s WRONG.

Excel
I hate excel. I hate hav­ing to take text from excel and bring it into quark. Maybe it’s just not my thing. I’ve never really needed to use it for any­thing. I’m not really even sure what it’s pur­pose is. The only thing I’ve seen them used for is lists. Can’t you use word instead? There is so much less work in for­mat­ting when using word vs. excel.

“Free“
The other thing that has been get­ting to me lately is about cost. Peo­ple for­get that every­thing costs some­thing. Noth­ing is free. The food in the fridge was bought by some­one who car­ried it in their back­pack on their bike in the sun. So when you eat it that really really sucks. Also, web­sites aren’t free. Not only are their hosting/software fees, there is the time it takes to make stuff. I have felt frus­trated at times about EM and PF in regards to this. I’m going to stop here before it goes too far. Also, Mikey really has said it best:

Well, there is still a fee, it’s just invis­i­ble to you. A lot of resources go into cre­at­ing this space (exam­ples: host­ing fees, design work, etc on UHX) and main­tain­ing it.

But we allow cer­tain forms of adver­tis­ing, such as when our friends make things, but we don’t allow other less tar­geted forms (like spam).

There is always a cost to get­ting the word out: pay­ing for posters, send­ing CDs out for review, or just the time it takes… A lot of “fee-for-speech” adver­tis­ing mod­els (news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, etc) is more eth­i­cal because there is a clear line between edi­to­r­ial and adver­tis­ing. On UHX that line is blurred because the edi­to­r­ial is mak­ing the prod­uct and the adver­tise­ments and it’s all blurred together.

How do you pro­mote shows at the DOS w/o adver­tis­ing them?

Is adver­tis­ing okay if it comes from a trusted source?

While some of the ways in which adver­tis­ing hap­pens can be sleazy, is the entire idea of pay­ing for pro­mo­tion evil? And if so, where does that leave “news” and other ad-based media?

How can we know what is hap­pen­ing in far away places unless some­one foots the bill? Remov­ing adver­tis­ing would be worse for the world than remov­ing religion.

(via EMX)

9 Responses to “This is just mean”

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  • Mikey
    October 31, 2007 at 10:57 am

    I agree about the dou­ble space! Steve and I argue about this some­times, but I have to admit it’s just a habit some peo­ple learned and is prob­a­bly so ingrained that a sin­gle space looks ter­ri­ble to them…

  • Steve Schroeder
    October 31, 2007 at 11:00 am

    we had a big debate about the 2 spaces thing a while ago. i do 2 spaces. i can’t stop. that’s the way i was taught. after some deeper research we came to the con­clu­sion that 2 spaces isn’t wrong. 1 space might just be more mod­ern and also slightly more right.

    (i used just one space in this com­ment. for you)

  • Matthew
    October 31, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    From a design per­spec­tive, 2 spaces is wrong. If I don’t remove the extra space my boss would be unhappy or one of the edi­tors would mark it up.

  • Steve Schroeder
    October 31, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    and luck­ily the whole world is not just design. sounds like you are deal­ing with peo­ple who are unfa­mil­iar with the pol­icy that you are deal­ing with.

    insti­tu­tional pol­icy vs. gram­mat­i­cal rule

  • Matthew
    October 31, 2007 at 12:39 pm

    It’s typog­ra­phy. Since for­ever it has been one space after punc­tu­a­tion. Thems the rules. The two spaces method was for mono­spaced type­faces used on type­writ­ers. It’s col­lo­quial. It’s unnecessary.

  • Steve Schroeder
    October 31, 2007 at 12:51 pm

    so are you say­ing i’m wrong if i do it any­where anytime?

  • Steve Schroeder
    October 31, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop

    it really doesn’t seem so black and white to me.

  • Matthew
    October 31, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    Dang :[

    You are free to do as you will. As far as typog­ra­phy it’s wrong, but that doesn’t really mean anything.

    Peo­ple put 2 spaces and it caught on, so in a col­lo­quial sense it’s right.

    It frus­trates me when I have to remove the extra space for work. It frus­trates me that I got marked down on a paper for not have two spaces.

    Peo­ple feel strongly about both.

  • Matthew
    October 31, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    Chicago Man­ual of Style is nicer in say­ing it then I’ve been.

    When I was in 7th grade I put two spaces after every period because my teacher wanted our papers dou­ble spaced.

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