Complex Numbers

Portrait of a Rant

The final prompt from this round of "JAFBG"  [XGC]...

What current topic/craze are you sick of hearing about?

Well, I'm old enough to say "All of them."

But I suppose that at the top of the list sits TikTok.

"Oh, is it because the government is trying to ban it?"

No. I don't care.

"Because China uses it to spy on us?"

Nope.

"Because it's what kids these days like?"

Whatever. Kids have always liked, will always like stupid things. I did, when I was a kid.

No, the reason I wish TikTok would go away (though I don't agree with a government ban) can be summed up in one alliterative, two-word phrase:

Vertical video.

Vertical video is, in 99.9 percent of cases, an abomination against everything that is good and right.

Let me provide a bit of background.

One of the earliest computers I played on was back in the 70s. It barely even qualified as a computer, being dedicated to word processing—a typewriter with a floppy disk drive. Not one of those solid-case tiny plastic disks, either, oh no. Nor one of the larger, but still below-average, 5-1/4". No, this word processor took massive, throbbing 8" disks.

But the other "feature" of this glorified typewriter was its screen. We're used to looking at paper—typewriter paper, e.g.— in vertical orientation. So the makers of this early word processor (I think it was Wang) oriented their green CRT monitor in a vertical orientation to emulate a typewritten page. And no, it didn't have a preview function; all your codes (think early versions of {i} and {b} and {indent} here on WDC) were visible on the screen but not in the printout, so you had to print a test copy.

Anyway, the point is, this seemed weird to me even then. Paper is paper, but screens, monitors, and TVs were, by that point, standardized in a horizontal format. Mostly something like 3V:4H.

Through time, I've had several different computers, and their screen evolution went something like this: CRTs with 4:3 ratios, monitors with even more horizontal exaggeration, actual widescreen monitors. Movies released in widescreen format often had to be edited or letterboxed to fit a 4:3 monitor. Anyway, point is, I think we finally settled on an ideal ratio, whatever it is, but it's horizontal. This conforms with human vision, which has a much greater range side-to-side than it does up-to-down.

Which is one reason that the inability of some mobile phone video makers to turn the fucking phone sideways enrages me to the point of apoplexy.

One of the earliest examples I saw was some dude trying to capture the aftermath of, I don't know, a car and truck accident or something. Holding his goddamn phone vertically, he had to frantically pan side-to-side in order to catch all the carnage (not literal carnage; I don't recall there being bodies or anything). If he'd only turned the assmunching phone sideways, he could have captured the entire scene.

Since then, I have refused to watch any video in vertical format, on my phone or on the laptop. Well, with two exceptions:

1. Explosions. I don't really care about format if I'm watching shit blow up.

2. Rocket launches (with or without explosions). These are the only events that demand vertical format, because, well, everything important happens vertically.

As an aside, I don't have the same issues with still photographs or paintings. When I did photography, I'd orient the camera as appropriate: vertical for portraits (hence "portrait" mode) and horizontal for groups or landscapes (hence "landscape" mode). But videos are different.

As I blame TikTok for the appalling rise (pun intended) in vertical video, I choose to rant about TikTok in general.

So that's it. Tired of hearing about it, so writing about it. Paradox!