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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •





    Continuing




    While virtual racism was hardly ubiquitous, some (mostly European and Midwestern US) users being very friendly and outgoing, it wasn't scarce, either. From the Teutonic surnamed icon whose user seemed to be attempting to physically attack me, oblivious to the fact that I was not my icon and my icon couldn't be physically injured even in the virtual sense by anything another user did, to the multitude of young female icons (many of whom, I had cause to suspect, were being run by lonely men in San Francisco's Castro District) whose owners would type expressions of revulsion and older ones which would act as if I had just tried to panhandle as I approached them, Second Life offered me a rich assortment of users who just, really, really badly needed to get a grip. I wondered how they would have reacted had they known that the "Arab terrorist" who they just cold shouldered away was, in fact, a nice Jewish boy from Chicago.

    How would their perceptions have been affected as those who held them discovered that they mirrored stereotypes for a group to which the object of their supposedly righteous scorn and rage did not actually belong? Would come to see those perceptions as being something that their expectations had imposed on their supposedly fairminded and objective observations this time? Could they be motivated enough to wonder on how many other occasions they had seen the actions of others through such an easily distorted perspective? Might they consider the possibility that their prejudices might need more careful examination, or would they have clung to their delusional worries for dear life, inventing such facts as they needed to keep their fixations from perishing?

    I suspect the latter would have been closer to the truth. Many users seemed to have a real problem in distinguishing between fantasy and reality, actually showing visible signs of feeling threatened by the swarthy giant of a stranger appearing on their screens, and in the process revealed a little more reality than they intended. My personality didn't change just because I created a new cartoon character. I was my usual low key self; their expectations did all of the work for them as they created threatening encounters in their own minds which had never existed in reality.




    Continued