12th February 2017, 11:57 AM
I share your pain. Autoplaying videos embedded in pages of all stripes should go away. Chrome does let you "mute" individual tabs, but seriously, I often read news on my phone these days and I REALLY don't need extra bandwidth eaten up when I didn't ask for it.
As for those "one weird trick" ads... they seem to be badly drawn, as if to say "Hey, don't worry, Don Draper isn't manipulating you, this was made by amateurs like you! Trust us, because we're you!". The ones that really annoy me are the ones with those ultra fast animations of someone like... twisting some sort of engine part. It does something weird to me mentally and I suddenly feel like everything's going WAY too fast in my reality and I gotta calm down. I have no idea what that's about. It's the mundanity of those weird motions that get me. They aren't actually doing anything, they're just like... handling something... Also, there's those ads with the "you won't believe this trick" and then they show some normal photo with some arbitrary part circled and a finger pointing to it. Like, those ones that say "an amazing trick to speed up your computer" and it shows someone picking at the Z key on their laptop keyboard, as though engineers put a "go faster" button under that key to hide it. (And... users are going around plucking keys off their laptop keyboards now, which usually breaks it due to how laptop keys work.)
As for those "one weird trick" ads... they seem to be badly drawn, as if to say "Hey, don't worry, Don Draper isn't manipulating you, this was made by amateurs like you! Trust us, because we're you!". The ones that really annoy me are the ones with those ultra fast animations of someone like... twisting some sort of engine part. It does something weird to me mentally and I suddenly feel like everything's going WAY too fast in my reality and I gotta calm down. I have no idea what that's about. It's the mundanity of those weird motions that get me. They aren't actually doing anything, they're just like... handling something... Also, there's those ads with the "you won't believe this trick" and then they show some normal photo with some arbitrary part circled and a finger pointing to it. Like, those ones that say "an amazing trick to speed up your computer" and it shows someone picking at the Z key on their laptop keyboard, as though engineers put a "go faster" button under that key to hide it. (And... users are going around plucking keys off their laptop keyboards now, which usually breaks it due to how laptop keys work.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)