Oh those pet peeves

[beatbandito]

Why this is called "hanging a lampshade" is beyond me.

Based on nothing but my own assumptions, I've always figured the idea was that a narrative lampshade did about as much to cover the plot point(hole) as a physical lampshade does to block a lamp.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, you're basically doing it to diffuse something that would otherwise be glaring.

(yes I mean 'diffuse' and not 'defuse')

[Blossom]

It can be used to explicitly acknowledge an influence, too. Like Future Man throwing out a Back to the Future reference, or the scene in Shazam where they run through a toystore and there's a giant keyboard on the floor. That's lampshade hanging.

Well ... no, those are just making references. Lampshade hanging is making explicit that in a work that you, the creators, know there's a problem with what you're doing as much as the viewers will, but you're doing it anyway. The idea being that if you point out your flaw first, then people can't criticize you for doing the bad thing you're doing.

It's ... Wreck-It Ralph's after-credits scene being the scene from the trailer, and starting with a little girl watching a movie and complaining about how the scene from the trailer wasn't in the movie at all. And then being told by her mom to shut up and play her video game, only whiny children care about things like that.

[mharr]

TV Tropes discussion on the possible etymology of hanging a lampshade on it here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/archived_di ... adeHanging

[Thad]

It can be used to explicitly acknowledge an influence, too. Like Future Man throwing out a Back to the Future reference, or the scene in Shazam where they run through a toystore and there's a giant keyboard on the floor. That's lampshade hanging.

Well ... no, those are just making references. Lampshade hanging is making explicit that in a work that you, the creators, know there's a problem with what you're doing as much as the viewers will, but you're doing it anyway. The idea being that if you point out your flaw first, then people can't criticize you for doing the bad thing you're doing.

Yes, and in this case the bad thing they're doing is flagrantly copying Back to the Future.

Fail to acknowledge how derivative you're being, and the audience will happily acknowledge it for you. Make a joke where you wink to the camera about it, and that makes them likelier to forgive it.

(ETA: tvtropes calls this an Inspiration Nod, and the Lampshade Hanging entry explicitly acknowledges it as a type of lampshading.)

[beatbandito]

One of the most generic complaints faced, but still rubbed me the wrong way to need to deal with it for a solid ten minutes in the literal 11th hour of my work day.

"my internet's not working, help me"
"restart your computer"
"I just did"
"do it again in front of me"
*struggles to find the 'restart' button on the start menu* *struggles to log in to their account after reboot* *problem solved when he logs back in*

[Mongrel]

I placed an order with the local big box pet store and the confirmation email arrived with the preface "Woot woot! We got your order!"

[Friday]

"my internet's not working, help me"
"restart your computer"
"I just did"
"do it again in front of me"
*struggles to find the 'restart' button on the start menu* *struggles to log in to their account after reboot* *problem solved when he logs back in*

just saw this

is your coworker my mom

[Brantly B.]

Everybody is your mom except for those people who are not your mom.

[Mongrel]

Goddammit Mozilla.

Stop. Fucking. Breaking. The. UI. You. Massive. Fuckwads.

[François]

Why is every "to: mom / from: son" Christmas card in this town a variation on the "sorry I'm such a shitty son, I should pay any attention to you at all (but we both know I won't)" theme?

Thank little baby Jesus for text-less cards, is all I'm saying.

[Blossom]

I will never understand the mindset, on learning that a creator you liked is a sexual abuser or racist or transphobe, to begrudge the person who tells you for "ruining them".

[Friday]

It's linked to a concept I call (in my own mind) "sweep it under the rug".

See, believe it or not, what you're talking about is linked to what I consider to be one of the worst human behavior, that of covering for a sexual predator in your own community.

Obviously this can be applied to the Catholics or the Boy Scouts, but I have more personal experience with this.

My parents decided, despite neither being particularly religious, to raise my brother and I up in a church. We went to a non denominational christian church that specifically accepted gays, because even in the 80s, my parents (despite being terrible people in many other ways) were not down with the sickness that was hating the queers.

(Specifically, if you want to know who my dad was, imagine someone who would agree politically with basically everything we say today, 2020, but is a complete asshole in every single other way. Like, being a racist/homophobe bad, hitting his own kids so they don't turn out to be pussies, thumbs up.)

Anyway when I was about 8 or 9 there was a stir in the church because one of the respected and well liked older male members molested a friend of mine, a girl my same age. After it was found out, the church held a meeting about what they should do.

And the number one thing everyone wanted to do?

You guessed it!

If it wasn't for my mom (a trained therapist) standing up and saying "holy shit no, we are calling the police on this fuck, and all of you are fucking insane" that guy probably would have gone on to molest more kids from the church (including me!) as all his friends there scrambled to justify and conceal it.

So, is this kind of behavior rare?

(insert 10,000 years of nonstop laughtrack)

No, the exact opposite! It's what literally everyone does when confronted with child rape! You might think "wow, if there's one thing you could count on humans to stop, it'd be child rape" but in reality they instead love child rape and enable it as much as they possibly can, endlessly!

Is this proof that humans are worthless garbage fires and we should just vote Trump in in order to expedite the nukes coming down? Well, no, but if anything would be, it'd be this!

Anyway, my theory is this: Confronting how absolutely shitty and worthless people are, especially those in your "in-group" which can include family, church members, friends, creators you like, etc, is just TOO MUCH for people's fragile little lizard minds. The world sucks enough already! Stop telling me my friend is a rapist or whatever! Grrrr! I just want to watch Big Bang Theory!

I mean, there's also other motivators, like the Catholics or SANDUSKY FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL, JOHN MADDEN, W W W DOT N F L DOT COM not wanting their rep tarnished or what the fuck ever. These people, these "normal" people, will make a series of choices, repeatedly, endlessly, for decades, to conceal and enable child rape because "if it got out, what would people think?" That's a factor.

But the biggest factor, in my opinion? People just fucking hate looking into the void. They want to pretend it's not there. They desperately do not want to face the truth of what humans are. Or what they're capable of.

I don't approve, of course, but I get it. I have battled depression my entire life, and it's never about my own life situation. That's what everyone always goes to, when I tell them I'm depressed, they ask how I can improve my life. But that's not the problem. My life is fine, mostly. I'm depressed because because while the room I'm in is fine, the view from the window is hell.

[Brantly B.]

People are also rapidly running out of figures they can trust and grasping as hard as they can to the ones they have left because living every day with the certainty that nobody will ever not let you down if you rely on them is an unfulfilling existence, trust me.

Fucking Bill Huxtable will drug and rape you, like, come on.

[Mongrel]

Fucking Bill Huxtable will drug and rape you, like, come on.

Man, up here we just found out that arguably the most saintly (like, was being considered for actual sainthood) public figure of recent memory (Jean Vanier, a man who founded an org (L'Arche) to allow the mentally disabled to live in dignity by volunteering to live alongside them every day and whom nearly everyone remembered as an utterly selfless and humble individual), turned out to have spent decades having weird manipulative crypto-religious mentally and sexually abusive relationships with any number of emotionally vulnerable church and org volunteers.

Although, to L'arche's credit the first thing they did when there was a rumour about this shit was to pay for a 3rd party corporate investigation to reveal it instead of bury it.

[Thad]

I think what Friday and Brent said is true, but that selfishness and lack of perspective play a role too. I mean yeah it kinda sucks that I'll never enjoy Fat Albert or Bananas again and I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with this signed copy of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, but...I mean really I kind of understand it's not about me? Some people have a hard time with that.

We internalize the things we love. When something happens that prevents us from enjoying them, that can hurt, and people can take that personally, as if you've taken something away from them. There's probably pretty significant overlap with the defensiveness that GooberGoats types lash out with when someone criticizes their games, comics, whatever media it is they enjoy. A whole lot of entitlement going on.

[Thad]

After spending four days fixing a website outage that should not have taken four days to fix (short version: some SSL certificates expired, and this took much longer to diagnose and fix than it should have), there are a number of things I am vexed by.

But just to pick one:

The ssh command uses the -p flag to set a port.

The sftp command uses the -P flag. Uppercase.

ssh -P [port] does not work. It has to be -p.

sftp -p [port] does not work. It has to be -P.

They're part of the same fucking package. They use the same fucking protocol. And they use the same fucking letter as their flag to set a port, but with different case.

[Friday]

So, I'll admit that my eyes glaze over whenever you guys go writing tech posts. That's not any of your fault, it's just that I'm a very not-tech/computer person and I don't understand the behind the scenes stuff and probably never will. So when you complain about website or programming stuff a lot of it simply goes over my head.

But not that time. That's really fucking dumb. This is the kind of thing I want to have time travel for. Not to kill Hitler, but just to go back and find out the reason why dumb shit like that exists.

[mharr]

It's basically because this giant pile of tech we're all using aggregated at random with no central plan and no-one wants to be Michael Palin in Jabberwocky moving the jar of bolts to this obviously better position while the smithy is running at full speed.

... actually we have a friend who works in the archeotech basement of the Swiss banking network. I'll suggest fixing this obvious bug and see what colours she turns.

[Brantly B.]

I guarantee that somewhere in the bowels of Usenet there are more bytes dedicated to storing holy war posts between the original devs about this sort of thing than there are in Project Gutenberg.