binding affinity

social media is inherently stressful for me regardless of the platform.*

I’m not deleting but I’m hiding my blog. And I won’t be reading anyone’s blog on here** either unless you specifically ask me to check something you wrote.

Feel free to message me on here (asks and submissions will be easier for me to find out about than fanmail, given I intend to log in approximately never) if you want to talk outside of social media. I’ll give you my email address and we can chat. If you already have my email address, then feel free to talk to me. If it seems like I’ve been ignoring you, it’s almost certainly due to anxiety rather than me not caring or not wanting to talk to you.

(EDIT: occurs to me you might not be able to send me an ask! I have a mailbox for spam at (this blog title) at aol dot com; you can use that and I’ll give you my real one.)

I might start a blog outside of Tumblr for linguistics or computer or math stuff, if I can build a backlog of posts (lack of backlog plus anxiety every time I thought about tumblr killed conlangaffinity, sadly). In which case I’ll tell y’all about it.

But my anxiety just won’t let me do the social media thing anymore.

*- this may be a slight exaggeration. Having a LinkedIn account seems to be okay. Same with GitHub although I only ever use my Enterprise GitHub account and not my public one (public repos are for people who don’t have to deal with HIPAA). But Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit? A thousand times no.

Official Map: Chicago Regional Transportation Authority “Rail Connections” Map, 2015

Submitted by Michael Whalen (amongst others), who says:

I just stumbled upon this map showing all CTA/Metra/SouthShore train connections in Chicago. There’s a lot going on, but I like how its much more diagrammatic than the regular map. I see several things that they’ve done with this map that I know you will hate, but I thought I’d leave it here for your critique anyway.

There may be a few small things about this map that I’m not totally wild about, but I do think it’s both more useful and more attractive than the official CTA “L” map, which has barely changed since I first reviewed it (October 2011, 3 stars).

Integrated rail transit maps are awesome – they’re produced with the end user in mind (showing all available services, regardless of the operating transit agency) and give a much better idea of the full extent of rail options in the area than separately produced maps. 

This one does a pretty good job of laying out the complex network in and around Chicago, showing the “L” in its familiar colours, while bringing Metra and South Shore services down in the visual hierarchy by showing them in grey/light brown: effectively implying their less frequent service in a subtle visual way. 

Unlike the standard “L” map, this one manages to show The Loop without an inset, although it has to stretch it horizontally quite a lot to do so. I still prefer this approach, because it eliminates the need to look elsewhere on the map for this commonly used information. I also really appreciate the little walking icons for stations that are located close to each other. Despite the apparent length of some of the dotted walking lines on this (not-to-scale) diagram, they’re all within a quarter-mile or two blocks of each other. The differently shaped interchange symbols for the different systems is also a nice little visual cue – an in-system transfer between two icons of the same shape (circle–circle, square–square); an out-of-system transfer between different symbols (circle–square). Immediately obvious and very useful.

What I don’t like mainly falls down to one element, but it’s a big one: the labelling of the branch lines! The type is enormous, clumsy and intrusive, especially when light colours like pink and yellow are keylined in black. This could all be handled with a much more delicate touch, and I’m not even sure why the Metra lines need to have their labels colour-coded in the context of this map. While we’re at it, the South Shore information box and label would look much better shunted down to the empty bottom right of the map, which would give the Metra Electric South Chicago Branch label a lot more room to breathe. The comprehensive station index isn’t especially attractive, but works well enough given the space limitations of the map. What else are you going to do with Lake Michigan?

Our rating: A comprehensive and useful integrated map of rail transit options in Greater Chicago, let down somewhat by some ham-fisted typography for the branch lines. Three-and-a-half stars.

Seeing as we’re almost an ENTIRE MONTH INTO HALLOWEEN right now here’s your yearly reminder to play Don’t Get Spooked, an illustrated twine game in which I make fun of creepypastas (sometimes affectionately, sometimes not really) and hide a bunch of original monsters to boot.

Is it just me or are Foo Fighters the worst band of all time. They are basically Nickelback - nauseatingly radio friendly, bafflingly a-melodic, tuneless moaning and groaning for vocals, formulaic and stale - except Nickelback at least feels earnestly lowbrow in some way, and also I feel bad for them because they get so much hate. Foo Fighters is the most generic, bland, featureless version of “rock music” possible, as if you took all existing rock bands and blended them together with some water into a lumpy gray paste. Or perhaps as if two hundred years from now a b-movie film composer was asked to create a soundtrack for a period piece which took place in some unspecified time in the 2nd half of the 20th century. 

What makes it even worse is how Dave Grohl is constantly on some sort of high horse about “REAL MUSIC”, and “rock and roll, man” e.g. 

[snipped grohl’s ugly face]

Shut the fuck up Dave Grohl. Literally the only reason you wiggled your way into being a frontman is you were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and become the drummer for the most overrated band of the century. The majority of music made on a computer is far more passionate, creative, and full of life than anything you could hope to create. The reason your genre is dying is because of people like you. 

I thought to myself, “Hey, I like dumb pop/rock music – shouldn’t I like the Foo Fighters?” 

But I couldn’t call to mind any of their songs, and I couldn’t recognize any of their singles. So I listened to a Greatest Hits …

and it was awful

The only moment I thought I might recognize a song was during the intro to “Walk.” And that was only because I’d mistaken it for “If You’re Gone.”

guys, guys

Because words are for communicating, not signaling what side you’re on. And I think it’s better to aim for clarity. And it’s a *problem* when there’s no non-insulting way to refer to a group.

i was doing some twitter searches about pinball which lead to stumbling onto an article about the Pinball Hall Of Fame in Las Vegas which i thought “oh, cool, that sounds rad” but

your fave is problematic: adjectives

cannot be characterized in terms of a prototype

not a semantically definable class of concepts