Where did this idea come from that every device and computer must have the same interface?

That sounds like prima facie a bad idea. Actually thinking about it deeply only makes it fare worse.

I know! I want to fly a 747 with the interface of a Yugo. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Why would I ever want to use a 27-inch monitor with a phone interface? It amazes me what some people think is tranformative that is really just fucking stupid.

Someone at work was listening to the radio today. I could barely hear it but an ad mentioned that they had an “authentic impersonator” of Michael Jackson.

Ah, Baudrillard, you should have been there.

What would be the difference, one wonders, between an authentic impersonator and an inauthentic one? And what then if the inauthentic one were closer in manner and affect to the real person but the public image as with Elvis had skewed so much that the mimic who was a veritable doppelgänger came to be perceived as inferior and bearing no likeness? (Yes, I know the story about Hemingway entering the Hemingway lookalike contest and losing.)

Anyway, I don’t know how to tell an inauthentic impersonator from an authentic one, that’s certain.

NSFW if you click the link below.

Never in all my days have I found the desire to lick a wall.

I think they have special schools for people who do that sort of thing.

Is that supposed to be sexy? All I can imagine is how bad it would taste and the 37 kinds of ebola I’d die from.

Still, you could say she’s wall-mounted.

If you don’t want the built-in webcam to ever be activated, use the linked file below.

My previous method of disabling it completely doesn’t work any longer in El Capitan without turning off SIP, but this does.

Note: no security method is foolproof but this requires quite a few steps to get around.

disableCamera.mobileconfig

It’ll add a Device Profile that prevents the camera from turning on no matter what application — like FaceTime — attempts to activate it.

Of course you can put black electrical tape over it but I’d prefer to not get the resulting goop on my iMac.

I don’t really give a crap who wins the caucuses or the election, but I really want to watch this film.

The Polish director’s debut feature-length film is like Cronenberg at Disneyland, a Grand Guignol musical fairy tale of two mermaid sisters who are quite literally fish out of water. We first meet Golden and Silver as they are trying to lure a family of musicians to a watery death, only to strike a deal with them that leads to the mermaids joining their band.

It’s the anti-Splash.  And don’t misread me — I like Splash. It has crazy charm and energy and some great lines, mostly from John Candy. And it’s the closest thing there is to a romance novel aimed at men*. But recognizing it proffers a certain worldview, I also enjoy seeing things that disclose another.

And now I will write an aside that’s longer than the main post. Watch this trick y’all.

*The “misogyny” explanations for why men like Madison from Splash don’t hold water (see what I did there). It’s not her naïveté (which actually she is not except about human customs). The actual reason is that she’s completely guileless — something that is beaten out of both women and men by the barbarity of our world. That is the point of the movie, and if you missed that point you should really reconsider criticism altogether.

Madison represents the ideal lover who glimpses and even reveals to you your model self — the coin of the realm of all romance novels. Every person alive knows that most dating is deception, and Splash explodes that and examines it. It also cheerily but quite subversively for an 80s movie skewers social conventions and what we are expected to want vs. what we actually desire and what would make us happy.

It also helps that it’s probably Ron Howard’s most nuanced and darkest movie. Seriously, watch it again. The scenes where the scientist is discussing dissecting Madison to study her are harrowing in a way that few movies achieve because the character investment is so high and the characters as drawn seem so present. They also seem to be in real danger, unlike most fairy stories where the ending is assured.

It’s also Howard’s best-shot movie; the cinematography is superior to that of Apollo 13 and even the quotidian cityscapes seem enchanted which befits the tone of the movie. And the camera more than in any of her other films just loves Daryl Hannah — she doesn’t look human (in the best of ways) even when she lacks a caudal fin. It is also her finest performance — when she realizes the pain, the avarice, the cruelty, the woe and the misery ineluctably at the very heart of the human world, the emotion of that realization just radiates palpably from her like some malignant steam escaping:

But back to the darkness — Madison’s tale (see what I also did there) is the story of how the world as we humans make it suppresses and impedes our best intentions, hardens us, jades us, gives us armor but also its inevitable distance, and the film compresses all that for Madison into weeks of hard lessons and for us movie-goers into a few hours of recapitulation of that baneful edification.

Splash is a tragedy masquerading as a fairy tale. Sure, Madison escapes and Allen her paramour elopes with her — but the world that nearly vivisected Madison, that also nearly killed Allen for loving her, that sent Marines to capture or kill a harmless wonder that in a saner world would’ve been recognized as fully human right away — is still there, just as it was, unchanged, its evil unaltered.

That is the tragedy. And that is not indeliberate in how the film’s story is spun.

Now some trivia. “Madison” was a really uncommon name before Splash; the film popularized it. I remember how unusual and ridiculous it sounded when I watched the movie some time in the 80s. It was chosen specifically because it sounded absurd. Now it doesn’t.

Daryl Hannah’s mermaid tail took eight hours to put on.

I know I go on about this, but was thinking about Twitter and how we’ve replaced RSS with Twitter — which is far worse. Proprietary, difficult to search, nearly impossible to parse and character-limited. Twitter is inferior in every way one cares to name to a blog.

We seem to be doing this everywhere. For instance instead of an actually-useful OS, we’ve now gotten random spy-tiles flying around the screen with eye-shattering fonts, unusable UIs and more padding than a undergrad’s English paper.

I call it sometimes “The Triumph of the Morons” but “moron” is a nebulous term that I use in the same sense that Republicans use the word “terrorist” — it just means something that they and I do not like. Because really many of the people promulgating and supporting these bad and harmful ideas in user interface design are high-IQ people who do believe in their mission.

Are they right that democratizing something requires that you completely abandon a large portion of your users as the product becomes so simple a two-year-old could use it (and alas, no one else)? Or is that just an artifact of ravening capitalism as currently practiced?

My contention is that it is even deeper than that.

I’ve strayed far from the topic and it’s admittedly not well-developed even in my own mind, but what I’m arguing is that the reasons cited for poor and non-customizable user interfaces are spurious, not justified by the usually-cited pseudo-capitalist reasoning of lack of resources or money. These justifications fail because in most cases, it requires more resources — both developer time and company money — to jerk out features and to suppress discussion of this decision than it does just to leave them in.

Second, as features are removed in most cases the project declines or is rejected (see Windows 8 and Mozilla Firefox for recent examples). So the “reasons” for making user-harmful changes are transparent and phony even by the transgressors’ own standards of evidence.

So just capitalism and the desire for profit cannot explain it. One must look deeper. And that’s what I’m attempting to do.

If there is not a sociology of failure, I intend to start one.