david

@david@feddit.uk

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david,

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.

david,

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.

david,

I never said it’s lower quality. Not once.

No? This you?

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.

david, (edited )

But the fuzzy bars on the side make it great?!?

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.

david,

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.

david,

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.

david,

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.

david,

See, this is what’s wrong with society today.

david, (edited )

It’s symptomatic. Symptomatic of the abandonment of all that is proper and decent. Would our great grandparents have eaten candy like this? Would they have celebrated their rebellious ways so boldly? No, they’d have been ashamed. Ashamed of their wicked rule breaking. Rule breaking just for the sake of it. Rule breaking, not for mercy, not in exceptional circumstances, not out of desperation or having no other options, but role breaking just to show off how little respect they have in their hearts.

So yes, yes, people are eating bad candy so incorrectly that you can TELL society is on the point OF COLLAPSE.

This is indicative of a terrible malaise in education, in parenting, in intergenerational transfer of values, in respect and in good manners. No wonder the far right are on the rise, that Naziism is again celebrated. These edgelords will be the first to join the SS, just to shamelessly show off how wicked they are. Have we learned nothing? Are we so quick to repeat history’s darkest mistakes?

david,

You say that because you commit crimes of indecency against confectionary and you like to think of yourself as immune to radicalisation. Don’t kid yourself. Come back to all that is right and good before it’s too late for you.

david,

Well, nothing we didn’t already know and fail to apply, anyway.

david,

But if prices don’t go up, the profits won’t increase! Why doesn’t anybody think of the poor shareholders, trying to barely eke out an income from their holdings?

david,

When you find out about Dunning-Kruger and realise that that’s why everyone else in the world is so stupid apart from you.

david,

The pedantic nerd in me wants to compare half of the building with the woman, or just the bit right next to the heart to the bit right next to the cabinet.

david, (edited )

I feel I can explain this discrepancy with a bit of history.

TL;DR in the last paragraph.

The EU has a numbering system for additives, preservatives, colourings etc that have been tested and approved for human consumption, so instead of putting Sodium Sulphite, you can put E221. They used to be very very commonly listed in ingredients in the UK. The difference between Sodium Sulphite (E221) and Sodium Hydrogen Sulphite (E222) is unclear and unimportant to most consumers, so manufacturers just listed the “E numbers” instead.

In the UK, when it was discovered that certain food additives can trigger conditions such as ADHD, instead of naming the specific chemicals that were causing the problem, the British media just called them E numbers.

Cue a fair bit of hysteria about how E numbers are harmful and some legitimate concerns, and suddenly the public start checking their food to see if it has any of those nasty E numbers, and they find to their horror that a lot of processed food contains a lot of E numbers, because preservatives, flavour enhancers, food colourings, sweeteners make food more appealing, and people re-buy appealing food. Suddenly it’s very much in the manufacturers’ interests to name the chemicals instead of the shorter E number so even today in the UK it’s more common to name the chemical than the E number, which was never required anyway. To prevent hysteria over “chemicals” in food and to inform, it’s become common to label then with their purposes - flavour enhancers, colours, preservatives etc.

There’s still some really quite noxious chemicals that are perfectly legal to put in food. My son’s A-level chemistry teacher saw him drinking the same brand of squash every day and commented “You drink a lot of that. Are you sure there’s no aspartame in it? There’s no way I would deliberately put aspartame inside my body.” Make of that what you will.

Anyway, the media storm around E numbers dies down because the manufacturers largely just avoid naming them that way, and carry on pretty much as before. Some kids have had reactions and occasionally news stories come out, but the media persist in avoiding using chemical names.

There’s some perfectly sensible advice that says that it you eat less processed food, and especially less “hyper-processed” food, and instead eat more food made from more natural ingredients, you get a more balanced diet with better vitamin and mineral intake, thus feeling feeling fuller for longer. (If the food is designed, with proper experimental testing, to get you to buy it more, it is inevitably also designed to get you to eat it more than you need to.)

But how can you tell if the food is processed or not? What’s the difference between me spending half an hour mixing the ingredients and then mixing them for me and precooking it so I just bung it in the pan? Well, a random member of the public almost certainly has salt and pepper, maybe even a few herbs and spices, but probably not any L-alanine. Look out for ingredients that you wouldn’t use at home, they’re probably a sign that it’s highly processed.

Hence the nearly good information that there aren’t any artificial flavours or colours. Nearly good, because it doesn’t mention preservatives and nearly good because it is definitely and certainly processed food designed to maximise profits rather than health.

So the UK food processing industries continue to aim naturally for maximising re-buying which includes reassuring the consumers that this is the healthiest (pre-prepared, highly processed, addictively tasty) low-priced convenience food they can, whilst being attractive to supermarket profits with longer shelf lives. If the bacteria and mold-killing preservatives aren’t as kind to human biology as just making it yourself and eating it sooner, and a few people have had reactions, it’s just not obviously bad enough for it to be something people will do anything about.

**TL;DR ** So, my understanding is that the hysteria about artifical flavours and colours was highest in the UK and the folks from the other countries aren’t looking for technicalities to reassure them about the ingredients because they were never trained by their media to hunt for nasties in the small print - those that care can see straight away this is very firmly in the processed food category, and those that don’t, don’t.

david,

That was good information, thank you.

david,

I know three.

In fact, come to think of it, I only know two trans women, so I know more trans men than trans women.

david,

You have the right to be an asshole. Mods have the right to ban you for being an asshole.

Making out that they’re nasty for having some standards of behaviour in their area is calling good bad and bad good.

(Censorship is when local or national government put you in prison for protesting or ban your book or ban your ideas. That’s when your free speech rights are being infringed.)

david,

I can’t answer that! The shame is too strong! I still have a guilty listen every so often on YouTube though.

david,

It’s my go-to for random lemmy browsing. If I want to read interesting and/or thoughtful stuff I log in to my home instance where I’m subscribed to all my favourite content, but if I feel like mindlessly scrolling some memes and go where the internet mainstream goes, I use liftoff. Good interface, good speed.

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