Not techie enough, not mundane enough

I have issues with the current websites out there it seems. While I'm in no way fluent in HTML, apparently I can't be given even the option of looking into that or working through my own if registering to free website domain services. All I get are the same templates with all the unnecessarily width-eating sidebars you get on blogging sites as well.

There are reasons why I considered some of the sites mentioned below, by the way, so nothing is set in stone or me being entirely ignorant of some past failings. I detested Angelfire's pop-ups years ago already, for example, but had a reason to look into it now.

My HTML skills stem back to 1995, so I know they are outdated. The last time I fiddled about with any of that was around 2003, so that's seven years in the past as well. I do however know enough to be able to look at the existing code on sites where I want to pick a piece from here, another bit from there, and to combine them into something that hopefully works. Basic, cleaner, simple, and no sidebar frills beyond a basic navigational menu.

I however seem to fall in between categories as a user, since I am unwilling to pay for services when I don't know the quality of them and what is available to me as a user before signing up and trying them out. As a free one, you no longer get access even to something like Angelfire's web shell management system. Or so I found out today when writing this, on Monday.

I haven't looked into CSS thus far despite having moved on sites that use it for some of their content. Apparently I now need to if want more control over what my content will look like. Even if it's simply to slash additional and unnecessary things from whatever I have to initially choose to use. Depending on what Topcities.com currently offers for their free users, I may still be able to modify things to pure basics even without CSS. I don't know, since I ran out of time to look into it.

With only an hour or two per day to shift through any of that, I'm at a disadvantage to even have any time to sort it out. I just dislike the current need for everything to look the same. The templates don't vary in what they offer greatly enough and none offer me anything close enough to the basic clean style I'd have in mind.

I realize that "mundanes" these days may like their content out there as well, with easy to use options, but when the main thing that is on offer when you first register is only catering to the lowest common denominator, I feel excluded and less pleased with the service I am offered.

If someone seriously wants to start their own social networking site they should presumably have enough knowledge about the technical issues and questions to know how to do it, too. Today I found out that's not at all necessary and that there are templates to do that as well.

Seriously? You're offering that to people who can't do a thing technically? Why? I cannot quite fathom the logic of letting people who have no idea what they're doing simply run around running something for the sake of it, because whee, it's fun. It must make someone some money somewhere or it wouldn't be an option, but it still seems bizarre.

I also have issues with limiting widths of text to 500 pixels or whatever as with the blogging templates. It narrows things unnecessarily and makes the text look longer than it actually is. I also find it more difficult to read through than wider options. If and when I ever get the time, the options for the blog will get modified as well, it's just to find the time.

I am likewise not entirely pleased with Zymic.com not offering a chance to register using Yahoo accounts, since I want to focus all my activities with this around what I have now. I distrust some of the few other accounts I'd have in use to not go bust entirely if I fail to register in for a month, or more so, for the year it takes to re-allow old account names into use on some other services heard about.

Looking through a "Using the Media Manager for File Downloads" run-through help page I also start missing the times when I could just type in the html and URL for where I want to pick something up from once it's in the folder I want it in. All the jumping between menus and things just to get something to show up? I'd forgotten how time consuming the different menus were in the old days as well, let alone now that they've added several layers on top of it.

I don't want your Rich Text editors or other nonsense to edit in links. I know how. You're confusing people by making it look more complicated than it is and keeping others from doing it more simply or by hand. Inept as I may be with it all, I can tell I'd prefer more basics. I'm having to learn a more graphics based way to do mere links it seems, if at all want my very modest pages anywhere. I learned how to read things without pictures next to them early on in school. Why should I want them in what I do online?

The same goes to sites first offering me twelve or more boxes of text or images to view when I enter. I don't have ADD. I don't need everything thrown at me to try and wow me with all your fanciness when I first enter. You can grab me more easily by having what I need there, easily found and navigable without extra fuss on top.

The templates also finally tell me why these days I can never any more tell if a site I'm taken to is something more legitimate or simply a blog. If everything including blogs looks the same, it takes away from your air of legitimacy or professional tone. Should such things be what you're after, instead of a clean and simple look like me here. No, I don't think I'm entirely pleased here.

Women. Shockingly, possibly not just about looks

As shallow as all my talk about fancying this or that person was in the Age, Diversity + More post, I still have a problem with running into reviews that only ever bring up a woman's beauty if something more is to be said of them.

I understand that whatever you prefer, you prefer, but while reading through someone's reviews of an older series with several different actors in each episode, I was forced to take notice of their only ever bringing up the women's looks. Whoever was beautiful and what other woman gorgeous, stunning or some other thing. Actresses are often reduced to their looks, and I'm not sure I'm any less guilty of it if looked at over a longer period of time. After all, women are apparently only to be looked at and need to be desirable to men, and that's their worth and value all too often.

As said, we are geared toward beauty by nature. I remain a hypocrite in having criticized the super-skinny and the incomprehensible fad of the silicone plumped lips, as well as having taken note of men's physical features or attributes, and liking whatever it is that I do like. I just find it limited and limiting to always to keep going on and on about the beauty or (relative) ugliness of whatever actress or any other female figure.

Female politicians are either lookers or frumpy nobodies that are probably battle-axes and difficult, right? You have one doing a stately visit and their clothes and hairstyle will be the things talked about. Sportswomen these days are criticized if they don't appear in makeup and try to conform to beauty standards. However ill-advised it might have been on all fronts to go the route East Germany did with their women athletes as well (or so they say), I'm also sure it wasn't any better to make fun of their looks back in the day either.

Likewise, I found it very jarring to see a comment on that rather well-known video clip site along the lines of "God, what happened to him? I used to have such a crush on him" about a person who'd simply hit their 50s and looked... normal. Or quite lovely, if you were to ask me, but no longer how they did in their thirties.

Age happened. The world happened. Shallow happened in your case, and given that you'd apparently fancied the actor when he was younger, you should possibly have matured some by now as well. Possibly. One can never tell.

I knew someone in the UK who said that while growing up with the Carry On movies, they were more inclined to want to be the Hattie Jacques and woshername wifely or matronly figures than the giggling Barbara Windsor bimbettes. She was also aware of the fact that she was quite likely in the small minority with her opinion.

What she said was that the others seemed to get to do better things, which is also true. There can be some independent power in being the battle-axe, whether you get ridiculed for it or not. You are a threat to supposed ways of How Things Are Supposed to Go and thus to be put down any chance there is, but you may accomplish more in any case. There is the saying about well-behaved women rarely making history.

However, given that when I broke my arm at the age of six, my laconic and resigned commentary on it was that I would thus never be able to take part in Miss World type contests, something is wrong in what is sold to girls and women. If a six-year-old already some thirty years ago was acutely aware that any flaws in beauty would cut you out of the "competition" and make you a lesser thing, the world might need an unladylike punch or two.

Age, diversity and more

There's a potential post or three in the 1980s still having had most of any series leads be at least in their thirties, and more likely older, in contrast to today's "Let's cast 16-year-olds, that'll sell the best" TV and movies where a 20-year-old is old. Lauren Bacall started at age 19 I'm told, but she managed to look a little older in the movies, which was a good thing. These days it's supposedly required to go the other way. To look much younger and that for as long as you can, and then hit the Botox or knives after it.

In the 80s it was a token young character as a sidekick or on the side in general, and that someone in their twenties maybe, not mere series with ten 18-year-olds and then the token parents on the side. Series where there is nothing to watch unless you happen to like one of the token adults. I apologize for any further shallowness in the post in advance.

While I realize that the opposite might have been true back in the day, too, and that, say, David Hasselhoff was only around 33 when playing Michael Knight, looking very adult to my ten year old eyes, well. It's possible that my perspective is skewed and others didn't see it like that, but it seemed to be a bit of a trend among those known that whoever was the lead in whatever series was liked or fancied. You were supposed to, after all, their being the lead for that.



For example, that Jake & The Fatman had the younger assistant Derek in a sidekick role was not who you were supposed to fancy. That was the older Jake, whatever age the actor Joe Penny was back in the late 80s. I was in the minority for liking Alan Campbell's blond Derek, and that wasn't about age in my case either, as opposed to personality or character and looks or whatever.

In checking later, I see Penny's only a year older than Campbell, but Derek was sold as being the young one in the series. Perceptions.

So I can imagine that teenagers are all agog over having younger stars to fancy to their heart's desire, but if all there was around was the older cast, you still appreciated them in any case. I preferred Dick Turpin to young "woobie" Swift-Nick in that series for another example. While it's probably not even arguable that TV series can have more going for them these days, plots and other developments having (at least theoretically and hopefully) become more complex over time, it seems the ages of people cast haven't done the same.

I think the argument is that youth sells, but then what does it sell? Advertising time? What are teenagers these days supposedly buying in such numbers that selling to them is more beneficial than selling to people in their forties, say? The people providing their children most of whatever money they see, or otherwise established and perhaps even in an age where they'll want to keep doing things or seek out new things, branch out to what is being sold to them?

If you've seen pictures from your great-grandparents' generation or time, there may (depending on where you live and fashions) be a stark contrast in what people aged 40-50 looked like back then compared to how they look and dress now. Heck, I recently saw a picture of my great-grandmother who died at age 28, looking at least twice the age by more modern standards. Based on the change in appearances and finances, it would still make more sense to try and lure slightly older people in. "Set in their ways" or whatever other excuses or not.

I don't know how it goes in general, but since even I found shows like Smallville slightly empty, being too old for what they were trying to sell in my late twenties, somebody missed several memos or twisted their message big time. John Glover's Lionel Luthor was the only reason I started watching, their having the token adult I happened to like there.

Lost is one example from recent years where the cast seems diverse in any way, but somehow all too many shows (since Beverly Hills 90210? Even if you still had a 30-year-old playing a teenager back then) just go for young for the sake of it.

No, it's not tied to my age.

It's tied to "I want to see diversity in modeling, in advertising. I want to see the biggest woman you can imagine in a sexy perfume ad and the oldest woman you can imagine in a flirty make-up ad, and on and on," style comments at Fashion's diversity problem still a problem.

It's tied to things like Peter deLuise probably not having been at all "fat" or chubby or anything in his role as Dagwood in SeaQuest, but since he was the only bigger guy seen anywhere on TV back whenever it was in the 90s, your feeling it was highly unacceptable in any way to supposedly fancy him. Your youth as an excuse or not (and your having fancied him in any case). It's probably tied to Matt Parkman from Heroes and the like, too, there being several posts in whatever it all actually is in the end, it being difficult to articulate when everything connects to everything and it's more about diversity or acceptance of the supposedly ugly, which older people these days supposedly then end up as more than in the 80s, for example.

You look at half the cast from back then and their being presented as fanciable enough (usually to skinnier or younger women, that never changing, or being another issue entirely) and you see more normal looking people compared to now. Heaven forbid looking at things like On the Buses and those two male leads and their pulling power. Okay as they might look otherwise, just not to such Always Pull levels.

Beauty standards change and that goes for faces as well. Have you seen footage from 1950s beauty pageants? I'm not talking about the bodies now, I'm talking about the faces that were considered beautiful back then. You wouldn't look twice at half of that these days, fine enough as they look. And you know that there must have been just as beautiful people back then as these days, what with genes and all, looks passing in lines. It's just "What the hell?" to today's standards. Ugly swollen (upper) lips and more or less alien features on half the women? Looking near skeletal, instead of some better looking slightly curvy things? What happened, and when?

There's also the old US-UK divide, of there still being more normal looking people on British screens. Plus the other side, that people like Marina Sirtis from Star Trek- The Next Generation fame had to specifically head to the States because she wasn't cast as anything other than a good-looking gangster's girlfriend or whatever in the UK. I don't know much about her career post TNG, but doubt she fared that much better in Hollywood either, if talking character diversity.

Women's lot and all that, when you start getting cast as a mother instead of the girlfriend. I think she skipped some Mother of Young Kids stage and ended up straight as Mother of Teenager after whenever, slightly putting her at unease at some stage from what I recall of interviews somewhere over time.

And what was it about Sally Field playing Tom Hanks's girlfriend six years before playing his mother in wositsname, women ageing differently?

Several posts' worth of material, like I said. Age and size acceptance or diversity or reality nominally, but probably about "diversity" or that reality more so in general. Beautiful as we like our people from fairytales on, the trope saying Beauty equals Good, or studies on symmetrical faces being more beautiful and pleasing even babies more, apparently there's still a fight or several in not narrowing the supposedly acceptable more as time goes on.

There was a Dutch documentary about some 30-something woman looking into beauty industry selling you being old by 30, and plastic surgery so rampant all around her, whatever it was. Plastic surgery in particular of the genital regions as well, based on what girls apparently saw in porn or the Net or something. That you're supposed to have non-visible and neat folds or be considered ugly, whether everything's photoshopped or not. The comparison to magazines from the 80s having real women with folds galore and everything showing was rather obvious when shown, and again, the 80s looks seemed better. It was like something sewn up or porcelain dolled with airbrushing on top for what supposedly passed for today.

I think I'm not going to go into male members here, since they can look extremely ugly, yes. Colours and shapes and where there's hair, really not what you want to look at for any sort of aesthetical reasons more often than not. I don't like the look of some of the things seen in porn over the past two decades either, with the lack of hair or ew looks of some of them, long and supposedly it or not.

Bad as it is to say "It's a question of taste" after the previous paragraph, people like different-looking people based on whatever quirks of their past or natural tendencies, whatever it all comes down to in the end. Some people even *gasp* claim to ignore looks and simply choose partners based on personality and other factors. Whichever way, you get riddled with whatever else the person comes with, whether body or health related or an intolerable family or eating in bed so there's f'n crumbs all over, ngh. No, I never had that, but I can imagine well.

People get chubbier or go bald, and you're still supposed to want that despite media claiming people who look like you or are your age don't even exist to begin with, let alone as sexual or desirable entities. That without going into the continuing fight to bring some minorities into the playing field for such things in the first place. All sorts of issues, as said.

I doubt I'm actually saying anything in any of the above, it being more of a "Here's what, now you tell me what you think or what actually happens with it all" thing as often with me. To sum up badly, could we please have more different-looking people from different age groups back on our screens? Without going back to it being only the men who are allowed to look a bit dodgy or older, the women still needing to be 20. Or the Sirtises of the world having a chance to play past their looks when young, too.

Not to mention people not spreading nasty things via someone googling for pictures to go with their posts. I very specifically do this from public computers, I can change which one I use and call in tech support, but still.