June 2020

your money and your data, please

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If you are ever considering buying cryptocurrency, perhaps because techno-libertarians are always harping on its privacy and superiority to the man's "fiat money," consider this:
In order to make your initial purchase of crypto, you are going to need a place to buy it with your stinkin' fiat money. There are a handful of exchanges that are considered reputable (even considering the small amount of time they've been in existence). They will let you use a bank card or wire transfer but they insist that you give them: (a) scan of photo ID, (b) a "selfie," (c) tax ID, and possibly other onerous requirements. At least one exchange -- Changelly -- uses some hideous product called Google Authenticator to "protect" your account, unless you want to opt out of 2-factor identification.
It's one thing to open a bank account and have them photocopy your ID and put it into a paper file somewhere. Scanning it, however, makes it easily transferable and hack-friendly. Ditto a self-made photo -- more fodder for some government recognition database. Should this even need to be said?
If you have any moolah and/or libertarian inclinations, stick to small banks, put it in a shoebox, become a goldbug -- avoid crypto.

lecturing the help desk (sigh)

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[see update below -- this is still rant-worthy]

Nowadays corporations -- especially tech ones -- don't like to admit they can't do something. Perhaps it was always thus but the snow jobs seem to be getting worse.
Vimeo arranges user uploads in reverse chron order. Fine, it's nice to have an accurate record but what if you had several videos made at the same time and wanted to play around with the order? The support page has no answer. You can create a "profile" which pins several videos to the top of the page, and you can change the order of those, but that's not the same thing.
So here's a classic help desk interaction:

User: I don't want to create a profile. Is it possible to change the order of videos I have previously uploaded or will they always appear in reverse chronological order?

Help: Thank you for reaching out!
You can edit the order in which your videos appear by pinning them to your profile page. Basic accounts can pin up to ten videos, and Plus, PRO, Business, and Premium accounts can pin unlimited videos. You'll be able to pin videos and change their order by clicking the blue "Edit" button at the top right of your profile page, and then choosing "Profile videos." From there, pin videos and drag and drop them to change their order. Any unpinned videos will appear in the order in which they were uploaded, with newest at the top.
By default the first video on your profile page will be a featured video. If you’d like to edit or remove the featured video, visit the “Work” section of your profile settings (link).
Here is another good article that may help you adjust your page: (link)
You can also present and distribute videos in a specific order by adding them to a Showcase. You can learn more about using showcases in our Help Center: (link)
In addition, if you don't want to have certain videos or any videos on your public profile, please check out this article as well: (link)
Let us know if you have any further questions!

User: I'm fine with the way my Vimeo page looks now but I am planning to upload six new videos and might need to change the order. As I said (!), I don't want to create a profile, and I don't want to create a showcase. So, it sounds like the answer to my question is, No, I can't change the order of the videos (if I don't want to use these two features).

Help: Yes, you are correct. Those options in the links I sent are the ways in which you can customize the ordering of your videos.
Otherwise, they will be presented in reverse chronological order, chronological order or by date modified.
You can also choose which video will remain at the top of the page with using those features.
I do apologize for that lack of a feature and I will be happy to pass the feedback along.

User: Yes please pass along the feedback. Also, it would good if your "help" pages just bluntly stated that it's not possible without using these features so people wouldn't be left guessing. I realize it's very "corporate" to always accentuate the positive but sometimes honesty is good, too. People trust you more!

Update: I've been assuming that a "profile" in Vimeospeak means a separate page, a box, or some other graphic means of setting off, or differentiating, the "profiled" videos from the non-profiled ones. I performed an experiment, "pinning" all 29 of my vids to the profile box that is visible in "edit" mode, then saving them in that pinned state in the same order they were before pinning. Turns out the public-facing page of videos still looks exactly as it did before -- that is, without any box, enclosure, or separate page. So I can then drag the pinned vids around behind the scenes to play with the order. Vimeo, instead of just letting me drag icons, creates the extra step of making me a create a profile first, to accomplish exactly what I was asking. This was all clear as mud from the support page and the help desk responses above. Also, someone with 290 videos might not want to use this Rube Goldberg method.

Update 2: Ugh, that doesn't really work. Let's say in your "profile" you order videos 7-6-5-4-3-2-1-10-9-8 (effectively burying 10, 9, and 8, the most recently uploaded vids, at the bottom of the page). When a site visitor clicks one of the videos, a different view appears: a large horizontal black band with the vids arranged left to right. In this view 10, 9, and 8 are still "first" (meaning at the far left). This confuses any attempt to prioritize.

Update 3: Not only that, but "unpinned" vids still appear on profile page, down at the bottom, if anyone actually pages to the end. The only thing "pinning" them does is allow you to play around with the order of the "pinned" videos. If you don't want a video to be seen anywhere you must mark it as private.

the end of a Psycho era

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Alex on Film makes a thorough analysis of Hitchcock's Psycho and lobs some brickbats at the Gus Van Sant remake. A few thoughts on his thoughts. He says "Hitchcock had noticed how lousy, cheaply made exploitation movies were making a lot of money and so wondered what would happen if someone tried to do a B-movie well, if just as inexpensively." And in the Van Sant post he adds "Hitchcock filmed Psycho in black-and-white in part because it was cheap but also because it looked cheap and he was going for a low-budget, exploitation aesthetic." And he quotes David Thomson on the abrasiveness or indifference of the characters and how, metaphorically, "the central killing grows out of the grim unkindness of the world we have seen."

Martin Scorsese, a film critic with an interesting side career as a director, made some recent commentary for the 1957 movie The Brothers Rico that touches on both these points, that is, the low budget filmmaking and the grim unkindness. I transcribed what he said (with a few minor syntax flubs intact):

"Many of the pictures shot in the late '50s had this flatness to them. Maybe it really was the influence of fast-shooting television crews -- television production -- and the idea that some of these films would go to television, and have to have the contrast that way. So the idea of the film noir, the looks of expressionistic shadows, and it'll look better on a TV tube. Ah, but maybe it was something else, too, maybe it was a reflection of a certain unease of everyday life that came out almost unconsciously. I mean, you see it in the late Howard Hawks pictures, in the last few American Fritz Lang movies, in low budget black and white comedies, even in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, you can see this, in this flatness -- and some have reacted against the picture because of that -- and you can even stretch it to the point of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which was shot with his television crew. And it's present in [The Brothers Rico], which takes place in the bright sunshine, and where the Mob runs their business in a kind of button-down, real corporate manner."

Scorsese is compressing forty years of black and white film history here and his conflation of expressionistic shadows and bright sunshine is a little careless (Brothers Rico does in fact have both elements). But black and white moviemaking in the '50s was slowly morphing from German Expressionism (angles and shadows) to television flatness, and the content of a lot of '50s movies is unrelentingly grim. Psycho is in some ways a continuation of all this and also turns up the amplifier to eleven, with more overt horror and psychological nastiness. And it essentially ended the era of that type of black and white filmmaking. You had a few more gasps in the early '60s, mostly on television (The Twilight Zone, Thriller, and Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano's uber-creepy The Outer Limits) and then it was over -- a grisaille style to be recycled for effect by knowing directors in the color era (The Last Picture Show, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Lars Von Trier's Europa etc.)

Of course, as Alex on Film notes, the nastiness didn't go away, it only got worse: "The slasher serial killer didn’t just go on to become acceptable, he became the hero while at the same time becoming less sympathetic, more inhuman." However, I see Psycho as more of an end (apotheosis of '50s melodrama) than a beginning of something. I wouldn't dignify the slasher genre by rooting it in Hitchcock's smart, unruly-yet-disciplined film.