Facebook helpline: war of the trolls

Ah! God. I never learn. I keep on trying to find out things. When one is involved with Facebook, it is better not to know. I have NEVER had a question answered by their help feature, and if I get any answer at all it seems machine-generated and not at all related to my original problem. 

Not having had enough misery today, I did it, I asked Mr. Facebook, please tell me why my news feed never refreshes any more, or gives me "most recent" stories that are nine days old? It used to be I could "go on Facebook" for a couple hours if I had nothing better to do. Now after five minutes or so, I've blown through all the stories and am back to shit I read yesterday. And don't tell me there are no posts to read because I "don't have enough friends". There are five or so that I like, and the rest - I don't know what they're doing there, but they are there and they should be posting! At least some of them. 

Predictably, I found out nothing about this issue, but in finding out nothing, I found this delightful bit of correspondence between Andrew and Stephen. By the end of it, Andy n' Steve are barely being civil. One wonders why such arrogance, such hurt, why everyone takes all this shit so personally. And why do people say women are such bitches??

I used real names and real quotes because these are real people (if assholes) whose comments are really out there, somewhere. Not that anyone cares.

Why does Facebook continue to change my News Feed to 'Top Stories'?

News Feed


This isn't new and there are hundreds of topics in many different sites about this, yet Facebook continue to ignore everyone who complains about it.
I know there is a 3rd party extension to help with this but really, it that the lengths we have to go to? Are Facebook that blind that they don't see how damn annoying this "feature" is?
Made the control sticky and once it's set, leave the damn thing alone until it gets changed .. by the user!

Asked about 7 months ago by Andrew Roob

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Stephen Peters 8,361 answers
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That wasn't really a question was it lol.. But you're right, you're defaulted back to top stories after a certain period of inactivity from you.

Helpful · Not Helpful · 7 comments · Share · Answered about 7 months ago

It doesn't really matter at the end of the day. People who spend all their time on Google posting complaints instead of clicking on "most recent" have far too much time on their hands. Yes. If I leave Facebook for a few hours I am reverted back to top stories. It's the same if I delete my cookies. So putting 2 and 2 together, it's all about the cookies. If you haven't emptied yours in a while, I suggest you do that. Maybe use a different browser, or have a look at your add-ons for anything that looks suspicious. If that doesn't cure your problem, at the end of the day, it's such a minor inconvenience it's hardly worth losing sleep over.

Posted about 7 months ago by Stephen Peters

Thanks for dismissing my post and then suggesting that I have far too much time on my hands (such a lovely community spirit). Obviously if it's something that you don't find painful then there is no issue. I didn't think there would be such a thing as a facebook fanboy but I guess I was mistaken. I can see that with 6 and a half thousand answers, that's why you don't have much time on your hands and can dismiss my issue. Please head back under your bridge and refrain from posting on my ticket.

Posted about 7 months ago by Andrew Roob

A punch in the face is painful. What you're suffering from is a mild inconvenience at best. However, I can see my answer isn't the sweet "oh let me help you" one that you were expecting, or perhaps a cure for your personal problem (which incidentally, everyone using Facebook has to put up with) but there's always one.

Posted about 7 months ago by Stephen Peters

Ketchup Cool Whip and other frozen delights

The more I look at this recipe, the more ill I feel. It appears to be a sort of raw-egg-ridden ketchup Cool Whip that's frozen, then dotted with that formaldehyde delight, maraschino cherries (and let's not forget the chopped almonds!).

So what do you DO with this? How would you eat it, even if you wanted to? It would be hard as a rock. It would be. . . ketchup with whipped cream. And raw egg. A lot of raw egg, and sugar. So. . . sweet ketchup mousse, in individual molds or ice cube trays?

And I can't even begin to fathom Carnival Cream, the name of this thing. A carnival in hell, perhaps.

P. S. and what are those brown things in the background? Meadow muffins?

Just some Bob favorites (that's all)

Bob is 75, and the rest of us, still alive

Bob Dylan today is 75

and the rest of us,

still very much alive.

That's not cricket (or ick-it?)

Horse animation made from seven photos

A dove (or two) for Dave

Cats (and more cats) in motion

I've done this sort of experimentation before, with the Muybridge images. But today I got a little more creative. I wanted to see if I could achieve fluid motion in just a few frames, as Muybridge was able to do. The idea is, your eye sees where things are going and just fills in the missing action.

So this was the first step. I found this drawing of a guy walking, then cut the image up into three frames and put it through my photo-to-gif program. Et voila - 

In two speeds! I will admit it's not the smoothest, but for three images it ain't bad. For some reason, Makeagif won't allow you to remove the watermark for photo-to-gif, which mars the thing pretty badly, especially with the white background. I am not sure why this is, as you always have the option of removing it on gifs, so long as you are signed in. But never mind, try not to look at it. The miracle is that it's WORKING today, at least so far!

Now this is my masterpiece, or at least so far. I took this, divided it into twelve images (there was a thirteenth image thrown in for "bad luck" that had to be removed, because it made the motion jerky), photoshopped them onto white squares, and did the photo-to-gif thing. First I want to post those images (because damn, I worked hard on them!)

Well, sort of. I may have left out a frame. But the result, except for the damned watermark, looked pretty good:

I especially like the action of the hind end, how it kind of flexes and stretches, and the tail which has a natural sort of flapping motion. The head isn't up to much, and is too big for the body and has a silly cartoonish expression - why, I do not know, because the rest of it is fairly realistic. Try covering the cat's head with your thumb, and the whole thing will look a whole lot better. Go on, now - try it.

I'm going to go lie down now.

Pooh gif. . . ts

   

While playing around with WTP/Ernest Shepard images, I decided to try to make a Pooh animation out of still pictures. Not such an easy thing to do when you have to find compatible images, then get size, colour, etc. to match. Well, it sort of worked, though it would have been nice to have more frames. Shepherd's watercolours had two styles: they could be quite detailed, but they could also be mere suggestions of animals, just shapes, and each of these pictures represents a type. 

And look at this!! I spent quite a while on this one, and had to fool around quite a bit with things like perspective. Ernest Shepard was really a lousy artist by technical standards. In one of these two pictures, Piglet was approximately twice the size shown here. I had to tinker around to get him to look OK in relation to Pooh. Perspective changes alarmingly, as do the size and shape of the animals which seem almost carelessly drawn. Was it a style of the times, I wonder? Whatever it was, it sucks to make gifs out of these. Even though they turned out pretty damn good.

Poohandpiglet: forget the Disney version!

A long time ago, before there was this, before there was that, before there was Anything, there was this book. Well-used by the time I got it, it was passed down from kid to kid in our family, until it came to me.

It has no back cover, and the blanks on the backs of the glorious colour illustrations are scrawled and scribbled with attempts at printing and cursive. Some of them might be mine.

Somebody coloured this! It could have been any one of the four of us, but because it doesn't stay within the lines, I think it was likely me.

Today I got thinking about this book for some reason. It's a big thick book called World of Pooh and encompasses the Compleat Pooh: Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

Were there only two Pooh books? Apparently. How many Disney versions? Erg. Let's not go there.

The best part of Pooh isn't A. A. Milne's tricksy language - which, to be honest, is a bit precious to my ears - but these wonderful illustrations by Ernest Shepard. This is the part that Disney screwed up so badly. I won't go into it, it's too painful. But look on these! These are scans, believe it or not, from my original book. Scans are always dodgy because they can come out grainy or covered with a hatchwork of lines like a screen door. The colours were a bit "off" on these until I clicked "colour correction" on my old Adobe program, et voila! Bright as new.

I liked Tigger as a character, until I heard that dreadful voice by Paul Winchell - damn. I wasn't going to even THINK about the Disney version! We did have a 78 rpm record with a book you followed (with original drawings) which was narrated by Jimmy Stewart. A lot of celebrities narrated childrens' records in those days. When you got to the point of turning the record over, Pooh said, "Rum-tum-tiddle-iddle-um-tum-tum". I'm wondering now, given that I found so many Children's Record Guild recordings on YouTube, if this one might be there too. 

Ah, remember this one, where Tigger and Roo bounce up into a tree? How do they get down? Hell if I know, I haven't read the story in years. My kids and grandkids didn't go for the original Pooh, though I did buy Caitlin this same book, a much later edition but exact in every detail, including all the same Shepard colour and pen-and-ink illustrations. I think her mother gave it away. 

I remember something about throwing sticks into the river and watching them come out the other side of the bridge. But Eeyore? Not sure about that. It looks disturbingly as if he's dead. I do remember him losing his tail and Christopher Robin nailing it on again.

I did have a stuffed Pooh-bear, a very gritchy old thing. Stuffies weren't so elegant back then, and soon looked moth-eaten. My favorite was Piglet - no, actually, I WAS Piglet, the littlest and most hapless in the family, always getting into some sort of scrape. 

There really was a Christopher Robin Milne, and he had a very hard life because his father made him world-famous without his permission. Funny, all that is coming around again with social media. Some parents are frankly astonished that their children don't appreciate being utterly humilated on YouTube, screaming with terror and grief, tears pouring down their faces as their parents chuckle sadistically in the background. "This'll go viral for sure!" And it does, and it's shown on the news worldwide, and while everyone around me screams with laughter, my heart is breaking for the miserable little tyke being cruelly tricked for the sake of "views". Not only that: a couple of years later, such humiliation is not going to go down well when the kid is in middle school and wants to impress a girl. "Jesus! Did you see that video of Kyle on YouTube? What a dork!" There goes THAT romance.

POSTSCRIPT: I just looked it up, and yes, you can still get this book! It looks to be the same in every detail, that is, if they haven't cut corners in its production. I just ordered a used-in-very-good-condition one from Amazon, because it'd be nice to have a pristine copy to sit on the shelf alongside this well-used one. And the whole thing (including shipping and handling) cost seven dollars.

http://redmp3.su/13485198/james-stewart-winnie-the-pooh-and-the-heffalump.html

(This is a link to that old record - haven't heard all of it yet, but it's definitely the same. Like an embarrassing old video, nothing ever dies on the internet.)

SPECIAL BONUS MAP! I have this map in my old Pooh book - sort of - but it just wasn't in good enough shape to scan. Half of it was missing, for one thing.

But here's a pretty darn good version of it:

And half by half.

(and I finally got this to work)

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Pretty bird

Cold sweat and confusion

Cold Sweat

April 20, 2010

Band: Cold Sweat
Year: 1968
Genre: R&B group
Home: Chatham
Leroy Hurst (from Windsor formerly with Little Leroy And The Citations) on lead vocals
Fred Stubbs – guitar
Jim Cooke – Bass
Al Nichols – drums
Dan Bullard – Keyboards
Gerry Nagle – saxophone
George Wilson – trumpet
Bob Sass – Flugel Horn, French Horn, Trombone, saxophone, etc.

Bruce Robertson took over on vocals for the last 3 or four months. In September of 1968 the groups van hit a steer on the highway near Lucan on the way home from a gig in Wingham. Bruce Robertson was killed and three other members of the band were hospitalized. The band never re-formed.
Chatham’s Fred Stubbs, was a local guitar teacher.
___________________________

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The picture at the top of this post isn't of Cold Sweat. I'm not sure who it's of. I got it off of a very detailed website called Chatham Music Archives which I have visited before. It has information on seemingly hundreds of bands from the '60s, including this one.

I knew nothing about Cold Sweat, didn't know it existed or what happened to it back in 1968, but the weird thing is, I dated Bob Sass, the last guy mentioned (he of the Flugel Horn, French Horn, Trombone, saxophone, etc.) in 1969. I was fifteen years old, and he was nineteen, the first boy who ever kissed me.

Why did I not know anything about this accident? Did they get the dates mixed up, did it happen later? For a while, I was convinced Bob was the one who died. Why didn't my brother Arthur know anything about it? The two were almost like brothers. It makes no sense, no sense at all.

It's one of those weird things. I was part of this in some way, yet not part of it. I listened to Bob play French horn at a school assembly. I knew he was a real musician and more serious about it than most of his garage-band-level cohorts.

The name Ray Violot keeps coming up in this archive. He's in 6 or 7 of the groups mentioned. I remember Ray sitting on our living room couch, looking like he wasn't sure what he was doing there. My brother Arthur called him Ultimate Off-Purple Ray.

In fact, Arthur is the whole reason I got together with Bob. Bob and Arthur being musicians, they hung out together constantly. I was the tag-along, as usual. One day when I wasn't there, he said to Arthur, "To me, she's beautiful."

That was before I knew anything.

So what about all this, about hitting the steer on the way back from the gig in Wingham (where, coincidentally, my family lived before I was born), and Bruce Robertson being killed? What sort of experience was it for Bob? Was it before or after he was my boyfriend? And, given the incredibly inbred nature of Chatham and its interconnected family names, was Bruce Robertson related to Mr. Robertson, principal of McKeough School which I attended in the early '60s?

Just last night I came across a photo of a heritage house owned by the Sunnens, and I remember going to school with Paul Sunnen. Going to KINDERGARTEN with Paul Sunnen. I remember him from the first day: he sat across from me on the floor in the big circle we sat in while we drank our milk. I had an awful crush on him.

(Ray is on the left, he of the intense gaze and elegant shoulder-length hair. He was always a young man of great self-possession. Whatever happened to him?)

UPDATE! I just found some more info on the music career of Ray Violot. This ad is from 1983:

After this gig at The Kingsway, the trail goes cold.

Reminds me of a friendly little place in Melonville.

Ryan pitches for the first time: a historic gif!