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

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

ahah
During a conference the organizers switched on that transcription thing... but the lecture was in french and the transcription in english.
That provided some awesome surrealist cut-up text !

wrt the blurring thing: it's wild that you can do something complete innocuous and people are sitting there fuming about it apparently, had no idea that would be an issue for anyone

This thread has taught me that some people don't think at all about their zoom backgrounds and some people think way, way too much about other people's zoom backgrounds.

yeah i don't even think about it i just used blurring from the start, no one i work with needs to see my place (not for any big reason i just don't see why they need to so why show it?)

I lucked into setting my desk up in a way that the view was a very bland stretch of wall behind me. So nothing to keep clean or think about, but I absolutely get the blurring thing. I just can't imagine putting that much thought into what someone else has behind them, either way.

seems like people do things differently and have different reactions to the different things other people do

Well, it can be distracting. I had a conference with a very serious public law professor and I must admit I was a bit surprised to see that all the furniture and decoration in her home are pink.
Nothing wrong with that but I don't really want people to see my private space !

huge lols at Kasimir Malevich, thank you for that

also I think about zoom backgrounds a lot because I love seeing the random spaces that everyone had to improvise into wfh setups and what kind of weird shit they choose to surround themselves with, i'm sad when people have fake/blurred backgrounds.

fwiw, you usually can't see the "legendary sightseers" art unless i'm in a sitting position, which is next to never— i stand at my desk about 95% of the time.

trust me, also, when i say that i've checked to make sure that it can't really be seen or deciphered when i am sitting.

you all must think i'm a true idiot.

The only thing I dislike about backgrounds is that sometimes parts of your body fade into them if you sit too far back and then it looks like your missing part of your head.

Fortunately at my company headless employees aren't too unusual

sometimes parts of your body fade into them if you sit too far back and then it looks like your missing part of your head.

Yeah to be quite clear this is what I find distracting about the blur effect - I don't mind people hot wanting to have their rooms public. What I mind is the wonky head-edges that fluctuate when you move.

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.

it's awkward for sure, like a somewhat primitive greenscreen type filter. Though I get judgy about how people install art and decorative objects (as well as what they are) in their homes, and the backgrounds, actually, to be honest, spares me the uncomfortable judging situation. Because if people like the way they decorate their homes and install art in a less than professional way, that is really just fine. If people truly like having a bunch of small pieces clustered together in a way so that each piece isn't really given enough space to be a discrete thing ... then, really, that's fine. If people like their shitty, tacky frames of things that really ... aren't worth being framed tbh ... that's a-ok.

many, many books will be visible behind me stacked in columns from floor to about halfway up the wall.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, October 28, 2021 10:14 AM (yesterday)

this is actually a very good look. Shelves of books are great. Even stacks of books. It contains details that someone can look at if the meeting is boring. Books are aesthetic, and hard to "get wrong" (as opposed to art), and it makes you look like you aren't a bougie robot person.

Yesterday at work, I had a meeting with members of "larger more corporate non-profit" and one of them has the home office set up with a room that looks so minimal and neutral (beige, off-white, very tasteful) that made me think that this person is afraid to have a personality (or lacks genuine interests) as well as being affluent enough to afford so much open space without things in it.

I can’t recall where I read it but there has been a whole cottage industry of hiring people to interior design your background. E.g. selecting books and items to make you look good/convey a certain personality.

perhaps not quite that but related

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/26/books-by-the-foot-washington-dc-covid-books-440347

This thread is bonkers:

So, starting in 2010 Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player, in a classic-toy version that doesn't work like the original. I got one, so I'm gonna take it apart pic.twitter.com/DytUrgzlCj

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

Are ppl thinking too much or not enough or in the wrong way in either extreme about their zoom backgrounds during this global pandemic and remember #bekind

wowwwww at the fisher price exposé, that should become shorthand for an entire category of these things.