Rum Doings Episode 113: You Don’t Care About The Nazis
by John Walker on Jul.27, 2012, under Rum Doings, The Rest
Fresh as the morning dew, episode 113 of Rum Doings was recorded only moments ago. John with a cold, Nick with a smoke up his nose, we don’t discuss whether extended Twitter downtime will affect the Olympics. But we do discuss the potential for the opening ceremony, to which Nicholas shall attend. We question whether there should be a paralympics at all, and then move onto the strangeness of Mitt Romney.
Is gaming moving to Linux? We don’t actually discuss that, but Nick does explain just what a disaster Windows 8 is going to be. We wonder how Sorkin’s The Newsroom could be better, and then decide to get rid of wee-wees and poo-poos. Would you jump into a volcano? Would you watch White Collar? Would you be a Scottish Catholic?
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[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/113_rumdoings.mp3]
July 28th, 2012 on 04:59
I’m loath to defend Romney on any level. I don’t like his politics or his platform and I’m not voting for him in November. That having been said, you guy’s have misunderstood the “Anglo-Saxon” thing a little bit. First, and most important, this isn’t something Romney said, it’s something an anonymous advisor said. “Advisor” is a word that has been stretched a little in US politics. Hilary Rosen (she of the “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life” debacle) was identified as an Obama Advisor, and she has never had any connection with Obama other than visiting the White House periodically. It’s possible, if not probable, that this person is not really connected to Romney. If he was, the reporter would have identified them as being more close than advisor status.
Second, this wasn’t a comment on Obama’s race. The exact quote was: “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and [Romney] feels the relationship is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.” This is part of a theory on the right that Obama is breaking from the Anglosphere in order to appease political leaders in the Middle East and Asia. It’s not a theory about his race, but rather that his military and economic politics are appeasement based.
July 28th, 2012 on 14:38
I feel that the first season of How I met Your Mother also had a great real loving relationship between Marshall and Lily.
After seeing the olympic ceremony have to say very impressed!
July 29th, 2012 on 13:58
A lot of subsidary sitcom relationships were quite well realised. I even liked most of Monica and Chandler, although they suffered from the writing hoops that show would leap through.
A very… accurate description of the opening ceremony, which was generally rather fun I thought. Inclusive in quite a good way!
I’d like John to discuss his ultimate opinion on Studio 60 at some point. I read an old blog post the other day absolutely praising it, and I do enjoy it, but find it quite flawed (as is all Sorkin’s work really)
August 2nd, 2012 on 03:21
Hey, Nick, can you not Alt-F4 in Win8? Or hit the Windows/meta-key to bring up a menu? Your complaints about the interface seemed to revolve a lot around mouse-based stuff, which is nearly always less efficient and often less less sensible. If a quick “mouse to the top, click, mouse to the bottom” gesture is ubiquitous across every program to close it, that doesn’t really seem problematic. Would even prevent accidental closure, which is a thing that can happen when you’re drinking and just trying to maximize something. :)
It sounds awful to me, but I wonder if that’s just because I’m so intimately acquainted with the UI that was basically established with Windows 95 and that you’ve been able to make happen with every release since. It was probably 2007 or 2008 when I accepted that having “My Computer” on the Start menu was actually more efficient than having it on the desktop, and even then, I still put it to classic-mode or whatever, so it would be on the desktop, just because that was what I was used to, and not having to remember a new thing was quicker than trying the old thing and then doing the quicker new thing when I realized it was different.
I think “power users” (for want of a better term) are just curmudgeonly about UI. Everyone despises change-for-change’s-sake but people who get really familiar with a system tend to see any change that interrupts the system they’re familiar with to be change-for-change’s-sake even when there are good reasons for it. Not that there necessarily are, for all of the changes made in Win8, but the assumption that Microsoft would totally fuck their interface “just because”, when they have presumably spent millions if not billions on R&D, analysis of data from existing installations, and user testing, flies in the face of reason.