I was experiencing some slight hearing loss because of a noisy environment at work. The audiologist looked in my ears and said she was worried that I might have done compacted earwax and asked if I used Q-tips. I sometimes did. She told me to stop and to clean them out by putting olive oil in each one, holding it for a while then letting it run out into tissue paper. I can’t remember how much or for how long, but it definitely did the trick.

I can relate to the picture, very much, even though I don’t use Q-tips any more.

I use drummer’s ear buds now and they’re great because my hearing recovered quite a lot, the tinnitus went away entirely and I can hear what people are saying when I’m wearing them.

Because Donald J Trump is their guy. He might well win.

I’m confused. The Mrs was clearly not ovulating, so I checked out pretty much all the homies for the rest of the month, but it didn’t seem to me like any of them were either, which seems statistically unlikely. Does this mean I’m the one on heat? Do I switch from pitcher to catcher on months like these? Is that why Alex… well, Alex, you know what you did, and that’s not what we agreed, was it, and and I think you know full well I couldn’t say the safe word at that point and I think you deliberately misinterpreted me slapping your admittedly cute butt dimple.

The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.

Exactly. Unfortunately “move fast and break things” has some disadvantages when it comes to driving in traffic.

At first I read that as an old printer from a school, and thought that was a very weird thing to want, but then I realised you meant a printer that was old school, and it all suddenly made sense to me!

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.)

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.

Well, perhaps it might be possible to catch some tummy bug from someone else, I don’t know, but you inhale the fecal particles when you flush anyway I suppose.

The lid stays down all the time (well, in between use) at our house, with the idea that you minimise the amount of fecal particles floating around your room. I know it doesn’t eliminate it, but I want to flush as much as possible of the poo and not inhale it, so I insist on the lid being closed.

I’m not claiming danger, I just don’t like the thought.

I wouldn’t put toilet paper up my nose - I don’t trust other toilet users to not touch the toilet roll and I don’t trust the room to not have fecal particles from lidless flushing on things. I don’t want tu put someone else’s poo up my nose.

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.

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. https://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.

Many of the references are 404, and the key papers according to the article are by completely different authors than claimed with different titles than claimed, and nothing to do with “information thermodynamics”. I suspect that this is AI generated nonsense.

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.

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.

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.

I am British and I love this.

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.

I know Trump massively overstated his wealth, but fining him $5000 is like fining me £10. He won’t even notice it’s gone at the end of the month. $5,000, 000 or prison time would be a meaningful punishment.

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.