Tag: length

#oneaday Day 62: Too Long, Still Read

I’m almost entirely certain I have ranted on this topic at least once in the past. But, well, it bears repeating, given what I do both here and professionally.

More than one paragraph isn’t bad.

More than 140 characters isn’t bad. (Unless you’re using Twitter, when all the deck.ly and TwitLonger nonsense kind of defeats the object.)

I read an answer to a question on GameFAQs earlier. The original poster had asked something which required quite a detailed answer. One respondee gave a detailed, good answer that was two paragraphs long, probably about 150-200 words or so. He apologised for writing “alot of text” (sic)—and I’ll let the “alot” slide for the minute because there are bigger issues at work here, dammit. (Incidentally, if you’ve never seen this, well, you should.)

No. Stop apologising when you write things. Stop complaining at people in forums if they write detailed thoughts. Stop providing lazy people with “TL;DR” summaries and make them read. No wonder people haven’t got the patience for books any more if they can’t bear to read more than 10 words of someone else’s opinion at a time and inevitably respond with something utterly inane like “lol”. (And I bet they’re not even really laughing out loud either, the bastards.)

Language is an incredibly powerful thing. Look at all the things it’s built over the years. Those things didn’t come about by people worrying about writing an “OMFG WALL OF TEXT” and people ignoring them. Those people had something to say and damn well said it, in detail, and argued their case. Their passion for what they were talking about came through in the power of the words that they chose, their enthusiasm for the topic came across with the depth into which they explored their topics verbally and on paper.

Now granted, there are times when brevity is better than verbosity. Anything from any government agency or law office, for example. I received a letter from the tax office a while back which went on for 3 pages when the single word “no” would have sufficed. These people have nothing to say and ironically spend pages and pages proving how little they have to say. Why? Who knows. To sound “official”, perhaps.

But people with opinions? People debating things? People being—who’d have thought it—helpful? There’s no sin in using a few more words if it might make someone think, discuss or smile.

So stop apologising when you write something, be it a blog post, forum post, Yahoo! Answers answer (well, someone has to write them) or blog comment. If you have something to say, it is absolutely your right to be able to say it without worrying about whether its length is going to put people off (*deftly sidesteps “that’s what she said” gag*). And those who are too lazy to read a couple of paragraphs of comment? Well, they’re probably not the sort of person you’d want to engage in a debate anyway. So F them in the B.

TL;DR: Stop being a dick.

#oneaday, Day 227: How Many Things in a Thing Again?

Measurements can fuck off.

All right, all right, come back. That’s unfair, I know. Measurements in general don’t have to fuck off. It is, upon occasion, quite useful to be able to quantify certain things. Like the amount of flour to put in a cake. How many photos you can fit on a memory card. How long your cock is. Actually, forget I said that last one.

But do we really need quite so many different ways to measure things? And quite so many different ways in which to convert from one to another? And so many with stupid names?

Let’s take length, for example. (Just general length. Not cock length.) There are 100 centimetres in a metre. There are 1000 metres in a kilometre. (Swap the “r” and “e” around if you’re reading in American.) These, to me, are logical. Units of 10s, 100s and 1000s make sense. They’re nice round numbers. I have ten fingers and ten toes. It’s a number that I’m used to dealing with.

Now let’s consider an alternative unit of measurement. Inches. There are twelve inches in a foot. And a foot is roughly 30 centimetres. Okay. Fine. Why “foot”? My foot isn’t twelve inches long. I don’t think. Someone’s might be. Someone’s inhuman cock might be twelve inches long. Does that mean there are twelve inches in a “cock”, too? (Enough with the cock already.) But the thing with feet, they’re not exactly a universally-sized thing. My foot is considerably bigger than that of a 5-year old, for example. So why f— oh, never mind. What comes after foot? A yard? A yard is 3 feet? Okay. Why, again? I hear “yard”, I think “wide open space”. 3 feet isn’t very big. It’s 12 inches times 3, which is… *thinks* 36 inches? Which means it must be about 90 centimetres. So many different numbers.

Then what? A mile? How many yards in a mile? 1760? One thousand seven hundred and sixty? How the hell is anyone supposed to remember that?

The other problem that this causes is that when you go to another country, you often have a whole new measurement system to worry about. And the amounts that these units represent are often inconsistent between different countries, which doesn’t help matters. And don’t even think about trying to cook something.

Yes! Cookery. If you’re American, chances are you deal with an oven that has big numbers on it. Come over to the UK and you might be dealing with an oven with very small numbers on it (like 1-7 small) or an oven with slightly-smaller-than-American numbers on it (like 150-200). If you aren’t aware of the intricacies of conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit and the black magic required to determine what the hell a “Gas Mark” is, then you can forget about cooking something and not burning it to a fine crisp.

So I’m firmly in favour of a globalised system for measurement that is resolutely based in good old base 10. There are 10 things in a bigger thing, 100 things in a much bigger thing and 1000 things in a really big thing. That’ll do me just fine. And it’ll save me running to Google every single time a website asks me my height in centimetres and I only know it in feet and inches.