Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

It used to feel like you could kind of get around this stuff by learning advanced stuff and becoming a power user, but now it just seems FUBAR.

As a sharepoint admin/developer i avoid this stuff by avoiding this stuff

Theyll catch me someday boys but pls god not today

Virtualized development environments were the best thing about one of my old jobs because you could clone your machine and run several different scenarios concurrently and you didn’t lose all of your work if your office machine died or waste days getting set back up after a mandatory technology refresh

I acrually miss citrix desktop. Users could at least wrap their heads around the idea of having a virtual desktop that wasn't the actual PC desktop on their machine.

these things still exist though -- Right Networks is the one I'm familiar with -- the janky thing was always moving things from virtual to actual, and the classic "how can I print?"

Honestly, one thing that keeps me sane is the ability to create shortcuts to folders that I think should be in certain directories or subdirectories, but the owner (generally, my co-worker) has put elsewhere, because his organizational schema is different than mine, partly due to working on different parts of projects than I do, and also because his brain is a mystery and he doesn't get enough sleep.

One thing I don't miss, ever, is the old versioning systems where you had to check files in and out -- I think there was one that had some kind of penguin emoticon or something? This was over 15 years ago and I only remember it being annoying

the word “repository” just came back to me in a nightmarish flashback

> some kind of penguin emoticon

was it a tortoise? (windows svn client)

I would argue the online restaurant menus are worse, because you actually need the menu to order food, so you're SOL if your phone doesn't support the technology, or your phone is dead, or you can't get reception, or (shock) you deliberately chose to leave the house without your phone attached to your body. see previous griping starting at this permalink. that was back in march! i think we're all ready to have paper menus back, please.

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was it a tortoise? (windows svn client)

― koogs, Wednesday, October 27, 2021 11:23 AM (eleven hours ago)

it might have been a fish?

The "blurred background" or jokey beach / cityscape backgrounds in video calls are way more distracting than just showing your stupid fucking room.

If you don't know how to point your camera in a direction that doesn't show your sex toys or your ravaged liquor cabinet or your hanging laundry, I can't help you.

You could also do a cityscape with your dildos and pretend they're a piece of Stonehenge

mine shows my dj setup on a costco craft table behind me, with monitors on shoeboxes, and a mostly empty floor-to-ceiling shelf with a couple of random papers on it. i just ... don't fucking care.

some folks though... there's this one guy i see in committee meetings, it's like his ultra relief society mother or wife decorated his office or something. fucking martha stewart shit lmao. the guy is such an egotistical tool as well.

imho it's fine for y'all to not care! but everyone is different. i think it's really understandable to not want your private space to be public, for all kinds of reasons. even just for kind of psychological safety, needing home to be as distinct from work as possible, needing home to be a place that certain people are invited into. like, these spaces blurring together is a really enormous lifestyle change that we did not ask for. i also teach at a school with students from a huge range of socioeconomic backgrounds which can introduce several other challenging dimensions there.

and there's no other good place to put the computer desk in this room, believe me i've tried!

There is an exact right amount of caring. I do try to hide most of the dildos, bongs, empty Thunderbird bottles, and BDSM gear. Usually.

But you can go too far into curation and preciousness where you're just, like, "at what exact jaunty-yet-nonchalant angle should I place my expensive guitar in the hopes that someone will ask, 'oh, do you play the guitar?' and I can say 'yeah, I dabble a bit.'"

Either of those extremes though... in some moods I find them VASTLY preferable to that thing where there's a zone of blur-leading-to-sharpness around your head and behind you it's Cancun or whatever.

Some of those backgrounds make it look like you are in the middle of beaming up

And to Doc - if the blurring weren't so horrid I wouldn't mind blurring. Something about the way it fuzzes and sometimes it tracks badly and, just, gah. Especially when someone has a headset or has an unpredictable hairstyle and it ends up looking unreasonably choppy and sometimes just... GAH.

Hard gasface to the background judgers itt

Worse again for the use of dabble re guitar because now i rly feel judged goddamit

i don't mind blurring, it's the backgrounds that bother me. one coworker in particular likes to use really nerdy starship enterprise or ... harry potter??? ... backgrounds

Oh dear ok im somewhat onside with judging some backgrounds i guess

I am finding that approximately 73.2% of white suburban American middle-aged dads with white-collar knowledge-worker salaries have at least one guitar. And of those, 62.5% find a way to arrange their video-call workspace so that a guitar is visible.

I live in a small house with at least nine guitars. My "office" is also the music room (also the game room, also the storage room, also the exercise room, also the guest room, also the art room). I confess that sometimes guitars have leaked into the background of my video calls but I see some people who I suspect of arranging it so that they do.

(yes that is judgy, feel free to judge my judginess in a downward-spiraling cycle of judgementality)

Still I also don't love the effect of "blur my background" when it makes it look like you have several strips of scotch tape awkwardly arranged around your head. THAT judgment is not aimed at the people who want to enforce privacy or assert a work-life balance, but rather at how the software has failed to give us a less-harsh way of doing so.

my Slayer flag has appeared in a few trainings

not judging that one bit

my work mac isn't up to replacing my shitty flat with a video of the cgi backdrops from Max Headroom, but i think that'd be quite cool.

Yeah, I really don't like my professional contacts to access my home and it's difficult to find a right angle to have NOTHING but a white wall in the background... but the various other solutions (blurring, background pictures...) are not satisfying either.
I remember during a group meeting I noticed something strange with the cam of a guy in suit/tie at his desk with the logo of his company as a background. Then I found out he had put a picture of himself at his desk with the logo in the background AS A BACKGROUND and every now and then you could see him coming in and out of the picture of him.
I thought that was both ridiculous AND genius !

there's this bootlicker dude i work with who had a fucking momfluencer style letterboard for a while, with shit like "EMPOWERMENT" and "IT GETS BETTER" on it, every time i saw it i felt such profound secondhand embarrassment, absolute misery

yeppers

TS: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE vs. LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE SLAYER

next week I'm going to bring my heavy metal actio nfigures into the training. i have a King Diamond, a Rob Halford, a goat from Venom, so many delightful choices.

when i turn on the web cam, I will duck behind the desk so it will appear that the action figure is talking. this is a stitch at the office, that's why they call me "Cutup Carl" even though my name isn't Carl and nobody thinks I'm actually funny

I blur. Otherwise I’d have to make my bed.

blurring would allow people to attend meetings from the can. afraid to point that out because then the company will mandate it

"bathroom breaks are no excuse for non-attendance! you have a mute and a blur button!"

I put a lot of effort into decor but rarely have visitors so goddammit I'm going to absolutely show it off in the backdrop of a meeting.

I'm either sitting on my couch (blank white wall behind, maybe a corner of a painting visible above my head) or sitting in my "office," in which case many, many books will be visible behind me stacked in columns from floor to about halfway up the wall.

my guitars have been on the wall of our home office space since long before covid when it suddenly became the background to all of her zoom meetings.

when guys (it's always only guys who say anything) with like joe bonamassa / blues laywer vibes ask if she plays and she deadpans 'no' and never follows up, or if they ask about a particular one and she'll say shit like 'yeah that one's red' or 'well that one has got a strap'.

her = my spouse that is

My office is set up so that the wall behind me is all poetry broadsides or fliers or weird pieces of art that my friends made. There's one that has a photograph of a very phallic crystal on it that has received some raised eyebrows, and there's a piece of art that is actually a drawing of the grim reaper fucking a woman from behind, but it's too weird for people to make out the specific of it lol

the grim reaper one also has the words "LEGENDARY SIGHTSEERS" on it.

I'm weirdly self-conscious about making sure my guitars *don't* show in my work photos, like probably overly paranoid that people would (correctly) assume that I'm sometimes noodling on the guitar in my office on less busy WFH days.

work zooms sry

people are thinking a lot about backgrounds is what I hear

Someone once spotted my bass in the background and asked if I'd entertain them with a number.

I replied, man, who do I look like, Jeffrey Toobin?

there's a piece of art that is actually a drawing of the grim reaper fucking a woman from behind

it might be that people find this uncomfortable and unpleasant but don't want to seem prudish about saying something. It wouldn't bother me personally, but I've been in workplaces where people have had unnecessarily sexualised conversations etc and I've seen people squirm but feel too uncomfortable to say anything, and unable to leave the situation otherwise.

yeah tbqh i would seriously reconsider this choice table. displaying sexually explicit materials in a work setting can very definitely rise to sexual harassment or related catgeories of bad behavior, and even if not, have a good chance of creating an uncomfortable work environment which i imagine you don't want to do! i am not a lawyer or an HR person, i've just taken the annual trainings and it seems dicey. i get that it's your home office, but ppl on a zoom call are forced to see what's behind you...

It's a metaphor for what capitalism is doing to all of us

(but I agree with the Doc)

not related but on the topic of Zoom, i would just like to complain about the transcription feature in recordings, which is absolutely awful speech-to-text stuff and should not be on by default. really didn't appreciate my lecture comments about Kasimir Malevich turning into "mounting a bitch." like maybe there should at least be a thing that alerts you when they think they're going to insert swear words?!

lol!

hahahaha

Maybe it was the grim reaper