I can see you’ve played Knifey-Spoony before

In which our Hero has the right to shave the right right

I can’t really provide a solid reason, but I shave weird. Was taught what I think was a pretty standard way to do it, but at some point, I deviated from the norm.

To start with, for some reason, I didn’t really have much interest in standing in front of a mirror. I’ve gone for walks while shaving, or watched TV in hotels. It’s not even especially difficult, you just have to keep a general sense of what parts of your beard has been painted by the razor, and use your fingers when you’re not absolutely sure.

Then, out of curiousity, I switched to old-school DE safety razors, shaving with a single blade. And then I skipped the shaving cream/foam for soap and a brush.

The latest development has been a fascination with straight razors.

Well, not the fascination. I’ve been intrigued by them since I first saw them in cartoons as a kid, but after I my switch to the DE razors, suddenly a straight razor seemed like the only option to level up. The catch is that a good straight razor takes actual maintenance, and also is pretty expensive. So nothing ever happened.

Until circumstances exposed me to the existence of the disposable blade straight-razor. It’s basically a SE razor blade (or a DE blade broken in half, turns out they are built for that snap) holder in a straight razor format. And suddenly this is a practical matter to explore.

Whereupon I discovered that straight-razors kind of scare me, and I have no real clue about how to shave with one.  I’ve seen actors pushing soap around their faces in small mirrors, and I’m out of practice shaving in a mirror and sharp knife, no guard and…  So I procrastinated.  And then started using it to shave my neck.  Including the back.    Carefully.

Still have a (tiny) scar.

But then the other day, feeling weirdly bold, I searched online and found a video, and feeling emboldened by the illusory apocrypha of the internet, I lathered up my brush, painted one cheek with soap, and shaved a side of my face.    Just one side.  Part of one side, really.  That was as far as my courage carried me.  A prototype shaving experience.

This is what I learned:

• I don’t know if I can name an instance where I saw someone with glasses shave with a straight-razor.  You’re holding the blade parallel to the arm of the glasses, so the glasses are in the way. But I’m a little obsessive about trying to trim my sideburns to reasonably parallel my glasses.
• My shaving soap smells so crazy good. I usually shave while I shower and I guess the extra humidity was denying some of the experience.  This time I could catch a hint of sandalwood for what felt like hours.
• I don’t see a reliable way to use a straight-razor without a mirror.  Without the “safety” bits of the safety razor, it’s not really a great time to be working by touch.  Okay, that’s an ear.. and that’s the edge… and that’s blood… and oh that’s more blood…

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The notification thing is kind of a fun-and-twisted boundary condition. Mentions and Replies are the only ones where the rules overlap. The Reply flag dominates. But we only care when both flags are true which makes for some ugly Karnaugh maps. If there’s a reply, that’s more important than the mention, the mention is a factor of the reply.

• if Flag(Reply) && ThisIsAReply => Notify (Reply)
• if Flag(Mention) && ThisIsAMention && ( (Flag(Reply) && !ThisIsAReply ) || !Flag(Reply) ) -> Notify(Mention)

The only other option I see would be to split the flags, but that becomes really hard to explain to the users.

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Ooh look, the right click menu works in the editor again. And the list bullets aren’t boldly going. Bravo team!

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There is a tremendous reliance on iconography on this site, and while they are learnable, they are not as intuitive to someone new.  Or to someone curmudgeonly like me. For example, the menu icons up top. I think that tiny icon is a quill in a box like “write a new entry” and the bell is notify (which gets numbers so safe bet) and the last one is my profile pic. But it’d be nice to have a mouseover title to confirm the option. The “Draft” icon has one of those, so I know it’s possible.

On the other hand, mouse-overs aren’t an option for mobile users. So maybe more standard icons? A document or document-plus is a more traditional new-thing icon. Frankly the head silhouette seems more suited for the personal profile menu, too, but that might just be my own icon that looks like another twotonething.

And grumping onward, I saved this entry as a draft earlier and then went looking to pick it up.  Tried the quill-in-a-box, in case it knew where my entry in progress was, but no joy there.  Then I tried the “Saved” option in my profile, but that is something else and not drafts.  And it was only when I’d given up and decided to look up my last entry that I found the draft.   I’m not a big wordpress user so that was unintuitive for me, but I have seen that before.  I think that confusion is learnable, but if it was me, I’d be looking for a menu option that said drafts.

Last point, and I can’t remember if I’ve suggested this in my head or in another entry, but I used to go to opendiary.com/notelist.asp?authorcode=C100185 (scary that’s from memory) and that was the “communications hub” for my diary.  Here the notes are a subset of an entry.

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Okay, this should cover the “I’m not dead” flag for a day or two.  Ciao.

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One more note.  I started this two weeks ago, saved it as a draft (Nov 2), and finished it today (or maybe late yesterday).  Whereupon I published it.    What I expected was a publication date of today Nov 15.  What I got was a pub date of Nov 2.    I’d make the case that unticking a saved draft should at least prompt about the date.  Seems better than having an entry disappear into the past without expectation.   But I’d also accept a tickler to just point out that the Publication date has been set rather than left blank.  Which is hidden right now in the options dropdown.

Eh?