I don’t know if it’s providence, algorithm, or confirmation bias, but I just ran into a four-day-old Namexplain video on this exact subject.
TLDR: it used to be the westernmost part of the country, called Northwest Territory, but then we got some more land farther west and changed the name, but then we got more land further further west and didn’t.
“It is called the Midwest because of the location of those states in the 1800s before the U.S. expanded to the Pacific Coast. These states were part of the Northwest Ordinance. This term became obsolete once the U.S. expanded westward, resulting in these states becoming the Midwest.”
Another site defines it as West of the Mississippi River, but between North and South. So I guess it qualifies.
Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.
Yeah adding padding is always harmful. If the aspect ratio doesn’t match it’s not like the video breaks so just let the player deal with it. Anyone who has a problem with vertical videos isn’t going to be any happier that you added bars to it. Who is this solution for?
It’s because the content was likely preprocessed for broadcast news. Which means normal 16:9 landscape format.
Vertical video has done nothing but introduce constant issues. I used to be a guide for Jeep runs, and I was also the video editor for the run videos (just clips from the run with music). And naturally you can’t be everywhere, so 95% of the clips have to be recorded by everyone else. Even though they were told “don’t record vertical video because we can’t use it” they did so anyways, and were upset when we couldn’t use their videos.
And to be clear, this isn’t just a random video. We’re talking about a large organized and legally registered club, so we kept everything to a certain standard of quality. Vertical videos are not suitable for anything except a phone.
Why can’t you use it? Because your web designer isn’t designing for the possibility that people use a phone to access the Web, but it’s not 2004 any more and they’re living in the past.
You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality. It’s only of lower quality if you’ve padded it out and are watching it on a landscape screen!
Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it’s being viewed on. It’s design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don’t force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren’t new and they aren’t going away.
I suspect that the majority of people who spend even a tiny bit more than half of their recreational screen time looking at a fixed landscape screen are well over thirty.
Because TVs are landscape. These videos are shown at club events.
You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality.
I never said it’s lower quality. Not once.
Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it’s being viewed on. It’s design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don’t force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren’t new and they aren’t going away.
we kept everything to a certain standard of quality. Vertical videos are not suitable for anything except a phone.
Totally not lower quality. Definitely not. There’s a full stop and everything. No link whatsoever. My bad.
No one said anything about websites.
Well I think the rest of us are discussing a video on bbc.co.uk, which is a website, and we’re doing it on lemmy.world, which is also a website, and when I complained about people making portrait videos landscape, I suspect most people correctly figured out that I meant on websites, so I really think it’s just you that assumes we’re talking about jeep club.
Watching portrait footage that’s been padded out to landscape on a portrait device is even worse!
I’m proposing that the web designer writes a responsive webpage when they are sent a portrait video to include, so that if it’s viewed on a portrait device it fills the width, and when it’s viewed on a landscape device it fills the height. If it’s actually for telly, there’s usually no harm in cropping a bit at the top and bottom and at that point, feel free to put whatever you like down the sides, but there’s no need to throw away the portrait original for the portrait view of the website.
Like I already said, the technology for writing a webpage that looks different depending on the orientation of the device being used to view it is neither complicated nor new. There’s no need to treat every medium the same in 2023.
Yes, and that’s great, it really is, but when the footage you have is portrait, don’t pad it out to force landscape orientation on it irrespective of the orientation of the viewer’s screen, just let portrait content be full size portrait when viewed on a portrait screen. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of my point. It’s all I’m asking for.
And when anyone films in portrait, make sure to punish anyone trying to watch the footage with a similarly criminal portrait orientation, by putting borders round the side of the portrait content to force it to be landscape, thus shrinking the content to roughly a ninth of their screen, unless they switch to the blessed landscape orientation when it will fill a glorious third of the screen. Let no one watch it full size for the creator thereof has sinned against the gods of landscape.
This is the right and proper punishment for content creators who break the landscape law: let no one see this video fullscreen, for they have sinned against landscape. ibb.co/x2MQQG2 let the borders of landscape wrath descend and pad, and let fullscreen be disabled for all, for if landscape viewers are denied fullscreen EVERYONE MUST SUFFER.
Oh, or you could just skip the fuzzy bars in portrait mode if you’re feeling more accommodating to phone users.
Alright, you win, I’ll never use my phone in portrait ever again, especially not to film my dog in a storm. I’ll make sure I turn that baby right to your preferred orientation and I’ll stop complaining about pointless bars at the side of other people’s portrait content.
If you want, I can go back through my canara roll and delete everything that’s in portrait just in case I’m ever tempted to sell it to a news organisation. I’ll make sure to only ever post landscape content to whatsapp, signal and especially tiktok and instagram, because otherwise some relative, friend or random Internet user might share it in portrait.
You’re right. That’s definitely a better solution than not putting annoying fuzzy bars on portrait content.
When I was a kid, the local public library had braille Playboys, which was always a joke, but considering they had amazing fiction and interviews, maybe it shouldn’t have been.
This is what I always wonder when they tell me a plant “tolerates clay soil”. Like does it really? Or does it just avoid it by spreading out all its roots in the thin topsoil? This would seem to be the latter.
I don’t think that’s what this is. How would they graph something on this? It’s not like you could just draw on it. Is the blind person supposed to punch holes in it or something?
I know a dude from Michigan who insists Minnesota is not the Midwest. I won’t show him this map because offering facts and statistics doesn’t change his mind about anything.
Denverites and fort collins are lying to themselves if they think they have more in common with the rest of the mountain west than they have in common with Kansas City.
That’s a slur on Denver that I won’t countenance, and I’ve only ever been through its airport. Omaha is a city that cannot justify its existence. Denver at the very least has outdoor activities nearby.
I believe this is closer to reality. I forgot an east coast subgroup.
edit: It’s called the mid atlantic and people are big mad about its exclusion on a shitty, crude map in context to a discussion about the Midwest. lmao
Maybe an east coast subgroup could contain … OH I DON’T KNOW … MAYBE NEW YORK, NEW JERSEY, and most of PA!!! mfrs are pedantic af over a finger drawn map.
78% of people polled in Ohio believe they are midwestern. People living on that border in Western Pennsylvania might identify geographically or culturally as midwestern, so 9% isn’t that surprising. Now if you broke it down and it showed that people living near Philly thought they were midwestern, that would be laughable.
Have you met anyone from Western Pennsylvania? You’d understand a number of them not knowing where they are on a map!
Lol I kid. Western PA, aka Pennsyltucky, is our Florida Man territory.
Ohio I definitely consider the start of the Midwest.
The others are right though mentioning the obscene number of rebel flags in PA though. My brother was guilty of it for a while in sad to say too. I’m in the Southeast, the most metropolitan part of the state, and they’re all over. They’re usually hung next to the MAGA stuff, which I’m sure comes as little surprise. Honestly I’d probably prefer the stars and bars to the Trump crap because at least the flag is aesthetically less ugly visually, and the person flying it could just be ignorant or is at least being honest about their beliefs instead of the poorly veiled hate the MAGA trash represents.
Arkansas was the surprising state to me. I guess I just don’t ever think about anything related to Arkansas so I lump it in with the Midwest instead of the South, which I think of as the tourist destination states.
I never have figured out how to categorize Oklahoma, but Midwest has never been on my Oklahoma bingo card. It’s more like a less affluent extension of Texas that is full of bogus slot machines and smells like weed everywhere.
There is some surprisingly pretty land up there though. Growing up I always thought of it as a barren dust bowl wasteland. Lots and lots of trees in reality, at least in the eastern half. Don’t know what’s in the panhandle. I’m not sure anybody does.
Edit: Just as I finished typing this, a commercial came on the TV. To quote, and no I’m not kidding, “Live the flyover life. Move to Oklahoma.”
I was born in Southern Arkansas and have lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma for 40 years. I consider myself a Southerner, not a Midwesterner. But that’s self-reported.
The joke here goes “You know why Texas doesn’t slide off into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks so hard.”
But truth be told, Tulsa is a pretty nice place to live. About half a million people and fairly progressive for a “Southern” state. And while many of the the hardcore conservatives moved to Texas, you still see a lot of Trump flags here.
Texan here. Oklahoma definitely has more in common with Kansas than Texas. I’d call it Great Plains, which has a lot of overlap with the midwest but isn’t quite the same thing.
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