My horrid experiences with poor user-interface issues has been caused not by sloppy programmers but by budgets that cut to the bone and don't allow the labor time required to move onward to tweaks that make the thing more easily understood, vs. making it work at all. They also don't allow training time and expect you to figure it out somehow. Fail. And not the fault of the programmers. RE: privilege in reading, genre readers have different base assumptions about what they need to watch for than mainstream fiction readers do, and that's reflected in awkward inexpert reviews by "outsiders". A subgenre SF & F book might either 1) throw around handwavey timey wimey nonsense, don't look at it too closely, or 2) require an unusually high level of understanding of orbital mechanics and other physics. An SF & F reader in the first case will skip merrily over the bafflegab by ignoring it, trusting the writer to hold their hand later on when it matters. (Also ignoring a lot of cultural appropriation issues, in a very privileged sort of way.) In the second case, they'll argue with the writer that he didn't get it right, and send them letters with details proving it. (Golden Age sf magazine readers, case in point.) Whereas, a serious mainstream reader will feel obligated to go investigate the weird place names and figure out what the food referred to might be, and why that food developed right there. Or else whine about being too tired or stressed to bother.
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Date: 11 Jun 2011 11:50 pm (UTC)Fail.
And not the fault of the programmers.
RE: privilege in reading, genre readers have different base assumptions about what they need to watch for than mainstream fiction readers do, and that's reflected in awkward inexpert reviews by "outsiders".
A subgenre SF & F book might either 1) throw around handwavey timey wimey nonsense, don't look at it too closely, or 2) require an unusually high level of understanding of orbital mechanics and other physics.
An SF & F reader in the first case will skip merrily over the bafflegab by ignoring it, trusting the writer to hold their hand later on when it matters. (Also ignoring a lot of cultural appropriation issues, in a very privileged sort of way.) In the second case, they'll argue with the writer that he didn't get it right, and send them letters with details proving it. (Golden Age sf magazine readers, case in point.)
Whereas, a serious mainstream reader will feel obligated to go investigate the weird place names and figure out what the food referred to might be, and why that food developed right there.
Or else whine about being too tired or stressed to bother.