This post contains scenes that may disturb some viewers.

[active_apathy]

"You've hidden me several times now. Would you like to turn me off?"

Yes. Yes, yes! Oh god, yes. Yes, I would. Now, I'm not saying it won't be hard; rather, it'll be incredibly easy. Incredibly, incredibly easy.

I am, of course, talking for the moment about the hideously annoying paperclip found in MS Office. For many, many months now, I haven't had to even touch that particular assortment of poorly-written features and soul-devouring bugs, so it's been a special experience to have to start submitting essays and reports electronically as MS Word files.

I just thought it was worth mentioning that, just once, the paperclip offered to do something useful.

From there, we move on to the spectacularly brilliant ratings advice for the Ice Age sequel. What ratings advice? The advice that parental guidance is recommended on account of a mild sense of menace.

Now, I could write something mildly menacing, or I could rant endlessly about there even being a tickybox on their classification forms for mild senses of menace, but that's not where my mind wants to take this one.

Oh, no. Not at all. It makes me want to find out what exactly appears on the Office of Film and Literature Classification Menace Scorecard. Are there set criteria for mild menace? Is there medium menace? Hot and spicy menace? Original recipe menace (which involves unusual colours and varying levels of stellar rightness)? If you're accompanied by a puppy, does that help offset the level of menace?

And could I get these answers, and more, by mildly menacing those in the know?

Possibly even by use of murderous stick figures:



Alas, their menace is dangerously easy to undermine with Photoshop.



And that's about it for this post. Remember, you can still go and add questions.

Comments

[eighthcloud.livejournal.com]

You MUST make an icon of the photoshopped pic!

Also: ::squish::

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Yay squishes. *squish!*

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Also,

[photosinensis.livejournal.com]

Why don't you just save the document as a Rich Text Format file, just to spite the idiots using MS Office? It's what I do. Well, between that and using export filters, which aren't the best option, but as what I do is plain text, it doesn't really matter much anyway.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

I'd most like to use OpenOffice and send in my assignments in a crunchy .pdf coating, but I don't think that's likely to happen. Plus, the assignment sheets specifically say .doc, so no .rtf for me. Woe.

[matgb]

Problem with RTF is it takes up so much more filespace at random times, never understood it.

AA: pretty sure you'd get away with sending rtfs, as they open with Word as default anyway, odds are most won't notice, those that do will probably not mind anyway. PDFs probably not accepted because you can't edit them easily, and depending on what's going on they may want to add commentary, etc.

But, more to the point, did that damn clip actually offer to turn itself off? I've never got that far with it, first time it comes up on a new install, it gets beaten with a big stick, annoys me that it's the default for grammar checking as well these days.

Ah well. Last I looked, EU was going for OpenDocument as the standard required format and insisting that proprietary standards can't be insisted on, but not sure where that directive got to...

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but it's best not to try to sneak around things that pop up in the assignment.

And, yes! It did! So now the paperclip is turned off, and I no longer need to individually reject its inappropriate advances.

[shaysdays.livejournal.com]

Are there set criteria for mild menace?

Generally if the menace is to children, it's worth mentioning.

And we all know the puppy never dies- it would break the law of moviedom. Remember Independence Day? Thousands of people being vaporized, drowned, or just plain ol' blown up, and everyone in the theatre cheers when the dog makes it to a hiding place. Presumably we were also happy Vivica A Fox was safe, too, but really she was just there to show the puppy The Way.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Children need a little bit of menace. Why, back in my day there were forest fires and wolves that eat characters, and we liked it.

And it's good that the puppy never dies (except where the filmmaker is evil and doesn't like puppies, and there will be much stabbity death for them). The Survival Of The Puppy is one of the very few things I liked about Independence Day.

[shaysdays.livejournal.com]

I agree- which is why anything by Tim Burton gets automatic tickets at our house- Neener loves scary stuff.

Which reminds me, I have to rent Labyrinth for her. (And possibly the Fifth Element, she likes movies about kick-ass girls. Hurrah! Two more to add to the list.)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Yay for the automatic Leeloo Dallas Multipasses. :)

[leila82.livejournal.com]

Doesn't OpenOffice let you save your documents in various .doc formats? That's usually what I end up doing, saving it as an MS Office file, if I'm emailing it to someone else (or to one of the school computers).

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

They do have export filters, but they're not the best things ever.

[fluffworld.livejournal.com]

*waves*
Here courtesy of an incredibly long and boring day at work and metaquotes. Mind if I friend you?
Your LJ is making me giggle, which was beating my other plan of seeing if they'd fire me for surfing lego porn.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Lego p- wait. No. I'd rather not know.

Freindings are all manner of allowed - all my entries are public anyway, so if you want to read them you might as well do it in a way that's easy and convenient. :)

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

I saw that ad! I did a double take too. I also saw a children's crossing sign in the middle of a freeway. It makes me wonder if there are, in fact, ever, children crossing said freeway, or if maybe someone got drunk and stole a roadsing one day, and then got drunk again the next day because he had such a headache and decided to take it back. It's either that or bait to convince children that it's safe to cross the road there, luring them into the mouth of carwrecthulu, all hail.