Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
What books are you reading?
IainB:
There are members of this forum and other fora who have vision problems. Posting a screenshot of text is really unhelpful. Regular text is nice because it is easy to resize, or recolor (for better contrast, etc.), depending on the needs and wants of the person attempting to read it.
I can't be bothered to do the extra work you are requiring of me to read what you said.
_____________________
-Deozaan (June 18, 2016, 03:39 PM)
--- End quote ---
My apologies, in your initial comment I had thought you were:
* (a) Asking "What was the point in including the screenshot of the review?"
* (b) Commenting that (in your view) "The only part of it that was helped by being an image was the image of the video clip, but even that was too blurry to read who the quote was attributed to."
I thought I had addressed those two points (a) and (b) pretty well, but now you would seem to have deliberately ignored the greater majority of what I wrote ("tl;dr") and nevertheless seem to be saying additionally that:
* as a belated qualification to (a), "There are members of this forum and other fora who have vision problems. Posting a screenshot of text is really unhelpful. Regular text is nice because it is easy to resize, or recolor (for better contrast, etc.), depending on the needs and wants of the person attempting to read it."
* you are intellectually too lazy to even try to understand what it was that I wrote about anyway, as in "I can't be bothered to do the extra work you are requiring of me to read what you said."
As regards point 1:
* If you had initially also mentioned that the legibility or visual perception of print in images was a proven problem for members of forum members generally and that it was "really unhelpful" to post like that, then I would have responded quite differently, I assure you. I do apologise, but I was unaware - until you wrote that - that there was some kind of an implicit rule or guideline, or something, for making posts to this forum and (by implication) other fora :-[ that one had to communicate using the text editing provided, rather than posting an image of the text, so as to avoid unspecified ergonomic problems for readers who had vision problems and/or were unable to zoom their images and/or text. I assure you that I previously had no idea that that was the case.
* I can quite understand what you write there, to some extent, as I have considerable visual problems with text also - whether in plain text or embedded text in images - but I have for a long time had a workaround for that by the use of NoSquint, which - coupled with the duplicated overlapping zoom capability of the browser - enables me to control the colours and the zoom level of text and images, So it is all pretty much variable and controllable by me to meet my peculiar visual needs. I was unaware that other people did not have access to the same functionality. I also personally discern no particular differential difficulty in the perception of plain text versus embedded text in images, though sometimes I would like to be able to control the differential colouring in those images! (For example, my eyes seem to be most comfortable with light green text on a black background - which I can get for plain text, but of course not for embedded text in images.)
As regards point 2:
* I'm not sure what to say about that without it seeming critical - and I do not wish to criticise - but I would say that if I had possessed the same or a similar degree of intellectual laziness over my lifetime, then I would not have read "The Secret" from cover to cover, and of course I would not have even bothered to try to post a potentially helpful/useful review for other readers - the content or relevance of which you would seem to have largely disregarded (well, you make no comment on it, in any event) and instead focused quite negatively on the relative irrelevance of the form of the review.
I was indeed tempted to not read "The Secret" further, mind you. It's not as though I thought it a particularly gripping or enlightening book. However, I certainly would not have picked it up, skimmed the first page, decided not to read the rest of it, and then felt qualified to criticise it's content or form, or something.
* Similarly, I have read and re-read various philosophical, theosophical, theological and legal texts - finding them to be sometimes as dry as dust and the quickest way to overcome sleeplessness - but if I had not read them, and if I had not at least tried to understand what they were trying to tell me, then I would have been denying myself the opportunity to learn and grow, and I wouldn't recommend such a negatory approach for anyone who might wish to continue learning throughout life and avoid intellectual ossification. "We sit on the shoulders of giants".
* Still, as they say, "You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink", with the implication that, at some stage, one has to take responsibility for one's self-motivation and one's self-development through an internal locus of control, and thus not helplessly lay blame for one's laziness on an external locus of control that is "...requiring of me to read what you said". That was (to me) a novel turn of phrase - a new description making the excuse for displacement of responsibility for oneself. I rather liked it! ;D It's going into my collection of quotations. I think I might speak that phrase to (say) Tolstoy's "War and Peace", or Aristotle's "On Interpretation" the next time one of my hands makes a foolishly instinctive move to pick one or the other up from where they lie collecting dust on their dusty bookshelf. Hmm...I wonder what they might say in response? ;D
Deozaan:
Thanks for the response Iain. You were courteous. I was curt. I apologize.
In regards to (a) and (b), that does seem to be an accurate summary of the events. Just for clarity, I read your review of The Secret in its entirety. But yes, I did deliberately ignore almost everything you wrote in response to my initial question--not actually because it was too long (as implied by the tl;dr), but rather because I was annoyed by another screenshot response with the "proper text" hidden behind a spoiler. I fully admit that that mindset (being annoyed with the image and being too annoyed/lazy to open the spoiler to read your response) is a fault of my own. Making me scroll past a large image to find the spoiler box, then having to click the spoiler box to show the text was, to me, just unneeded extra work. In my mind, it wasn't worth the time and effort. Again, I suppose that says a lot more about me than anything else.
Anyway, there is no rule or guideline about having to post via text instead of image(s) of text. Go ahead and continue posting images. I'm not your boss, nor do I have any authority to make rules here.
It just seems to me--and this is just my opinion--to be inefficient and a total waste of time for yourself and anyone else trying to communicate with you. I see it as a waste of your time because not only do you have to take the time to take a screenshot and upload/attach it, but then you also have to copy and paste the text anyway and hide it behind a spoiler. Why not just copy/paste the text to begin with and be done with it?
I see it as a waste of everyone else's time because, depending on the circumstances, they have a fairly large image they have to work around (which, as previously mentioned, can cause issues for the visually impaired, but also for people browsing on non-standard devices, such as mobile devices with a small screen, or text-only browsers, etc.). They also have to do more work (opening the spoiler box) to get your message to appear as text if they want just the text version of it. The nice thing about HTML is that the text can easily be modified to display at different sizes, in different color schemes, in different fonts, at different widths, etc., all dynamically and according to the needs/wants of the person reading the text. Images don't work that way. They have preset fonts, colors, formatting, and sizes. Though you may be able to zoom in on an image if you need it larger to see, this can lead to blurring. And you may not be able to zoom out if the image is too large (e.g., viewing the site on a smartphone) requiring the hassle of having to scroll horizontally and vertically multiple times to be able to read each line in its entirety. In my opinion, it's just inconsiderate to include large bodies of text in image format on a (text-based) forum, and is only "acceptable" or "tolerable" or "enjoyable" for bite sized consumption, such as memes. There may be a time and a place for using an image instead of dynamic text (such as when dealing with printers), but online discussion boards are not the time and place. Again, that's just my opinion.
And finally, do you even know for sure if text hidden in spoilers is available to be found by the forum's search function? It used to be that "spoilered" text wasn't even included in quoted text when making a reply to someone else, so it wouldn't surprise me if the SMF software's search function completely ignored spoiler text altogether.
To reiterate: This is all just my opinion. You do what works for you. I'm not trying to start an argument/debate on the topic, nor am I trying to insist that you change your behavior to what I think is best. I apologize for my earlier rudeness. I appreciate your measured and thought out response.
And to everyone else reading this: Sorry for derailing this thread and wasting your time.
rjbull:
The citizens under his control wear a "torc" which is an explosive necklace [...] I seem to remember some SciFi movie or series that used the idea. But I cannot recall the name.-MilesAhead (June 18, 2016, 07:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
Probably the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.
There's also a "faceless man" in Ben Aaronovich's "Peter Grant" series, but he's attempting to become an evil overlord.
MilesAhead:
The citizens under his control wear a "torc" which is an explosive necklace [...] I seem to remember some SciFi movie or series that used the idea. But I cannot recall the name.-MilesAhead (June 18, 2016, 07:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
Probably the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.
There's also a "faceless man" in Ben Aaronovich's "Peter Grant" series, but he's attempting to become an evil overlord.
-rjbull (June 29, 2016, 09:11 AM)
--- End quote ---
I can recommend this trilogy. For one thing The Faceless Man aspect does not occupy the entire story. I won't go into detail so as not to spoil things. Suffice it to say the plot is not one dimensional.
MilesAhead:
I am approaching the climax of yet another Jack Vance SciFi novel:
This one is a lot of fun. The protagonist is from an elite family. But the dominant elites in the culture look down on those from his country or province or whatever it is, no matter how elite the individual. The same person paradoxically alternately insists on the privileges due his caste and complains about the lack of egalitarianism in the society.
At the same time he has an obstinate personality that is somehow ingratiating. A fun read to pass the time. I wish I was set up to be able to look up words in the dictionary as I come upon them in the Vance books. I thought William F. Buckley had vocabulary. Perhaps Buckley has greater command of terms that express philosophical abstractions. But Vance has mastery when it comes to describing particular things that may be common place or unique to a region or planet.
I already have my next Vance novel on hold request. I guess I like to reserve Jack Vance in adVance. :)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version