AshPndrs

On Selfishness (excerpts)

The excepts below come from Mike Lee’s sprawling (tl;dr) essay On Selfishness. I invite you to (re)acquaint yourself with the essay in it’s entirety. It does however touch on more than one topic, and so I’ve elected to except a couple bits that, given the last month’s kerfluffles, seem particularly relevant today.

(The italic emphasis in this excerpt are mine. Mike makes liberal use of the italic tag on his page.)

This is my word and my word is law.
I am Delicious Monster’s support staff. Lucas might send off the occasional license, but chances are if you have a problem with Delicious Library, I’m going to be the one who fixes it for you. Therefore, when I have a policy, the company has a policy. Wil can override my policy insofar as he can hire someone else to do the support, but ultimately, it’s my game, if only by default. My policy is this: you get one. That is to say, you get one chance to tell me my product sucks, to call me names, to accuse us of selling an Amazon front-end, to suggest I hate Australians, or to pretend that some petty problem renders my life’s work completely useless.
You get one because you’re frustrated and you assume that your mail is going into the ether and not to actual people. As much as I might bloviate, I am not an unreasonable or unforgiving person. If you punch me in the mouth and I think I deserve it or that it was an honest accident, I probably won’t even be mad. This is not an analogy. Just ask Lucas, who continues to live with all his faculties as a direct result of this reasonableness.
When I respond to an email with a solution or a question, or even an “easy there, buddy,” most people respond enthusiastically. Few people actually apologize, but that’s OK. Forgiveness means not holding a grudge. However, if your tone continues to be abusive, I will tell you in no uncertain terms to fuck yourself. If you think I’m exaggerating, you obviously don’t know me.
Your $40 does not buy you even the smallest right to abuse me. That you get to abuse me at all is simply generosity on my part. I’ll give you your money back, but I will not take your shit.

Let me state this very clearly: We at Delicious Monster are making you the following proposition. We agree to provide you with a piece of software. We will also provide you with support for that software, within our abilities. We do not promise the software is free of bugs, nor do we promise it is suitable for your purpose.
Indeed, I promise you that the program does have bugs and will not meet your exact needs, just like every other program ever written, including software you write yourself to meet your exact needs without bugs.
However, because we are in no way dishonest, we will provide you with a free demo so that you can determine for yourself if the program is good enough to warrant your giving us $40. This deal does not include any additional rights, products, or services, even those implied by us.
The list of things the deal does not include begins with the right to abuse me in your support email, even once.

I could use just a little help.

I’m just tired and bored with myself.

HLVS

Sra. Maria del Socorro Vicente Gonzalez died yesterday.
Her son is a man I have much admired. Though I have met him, I’ve never heard his voice except in my dreams and in my head as read his words.
I don’t pretend to know his pain now. I hope to put off being capable of direct empathy for a long time. But never the less, my heart goes out to him, to his family.
Descanso en Paz, Madre de la verdadera revolución, HLVS.

I'm from California.

inthefade:

doublejack:

We’re, like, scientifically proven to have the least accented English of any region in the world, dude.

Todd has been claiming since I know him that he has no accent because Californians don’t have accents. But he’s been here three years and people say to him all the time “You’re not from here, are you? California?” One guy even pinned it down to Northern California.

Also, the amount of “dudes” in his vocabulary increases as he gets tired. By 11pm his sentences consist of 98% dude. In a California accent.

I don’t think it’s an accent that makes him identifiable so much as a distinct lack thereof.

I can often tell when people are Californian based primarily on their blandness of accent, which really is just a complete lack of one. Furthermore, the NorCal vs. SoCal distinction can be made by paying attention to their sentence structure and individual word choices, though this isn’t always easy (or reliable).

Beyond that, it’s hella easy.

Arizona shares this distinct lack of accent with California, but lack the vernacular that makes SoCal and NorCal ‘accents’ so easy to detect. Any Hellas or Dudes uttered by Arizona folk are apt to be ironic, or at least consciously aping the Cali-vulgarities.