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Entry tags:
UX ranting and dorks with another dork
(Fellow dork hands me a fake "keynote" presentation done by two organizers of a live show where the audience watches a handful of people play a table-top RPG for many hours.)
Me: Wow. I forgot that this stuff goes on. And right in the middle of Boston! If anywhere, I figured this would be in Seattle or Portland.
Fellow dork: They cycle multiple venues. Primary one is Seattle. They added Boston, Austin, and Sydney over the years as more nerds flocked.
Me: I guess if I were 20 years younger, I would be all over this? Maybe?? I'm amazed the video has over 70k views. I feel like the DM is nothing special, and the crew is only mildly funny. Maybe this is like a "listen in the background" thing?
Fellow dork: This is the age we live in. The age of the nerd flock.
Me: NERDFLOCK! DOT COM! There's danger in groups though. Aren't they worried that they will crash the economy if the building collapses? Such a disturbance in the coding force, of all those voices crying out at once...
Fellow dork: Wait, would nerdflock.com be crowdsourced debugging? Or porn? Both maybe?
Me: One financed by the other, no doubt. I'm tempted to park the name, but, what chances does it have if there's no Dorknozzle any more?
Fellow dork: See, that one is clearly porn.
Me: Code quality definitely took a collective hit when that site disappeared. Take this, for example:
(I hand him a vacation photo of a cliff by the seaside. A mesh retaining wall has been pulled across the base of the cliff, to prevent rocks from rolling onto the road.)
Me: This is just lazy. You know you've reached the low-rent edge of the map when the terrain LOD pager completely craps out, leaving huge chunks of untextured base mesh clipping through the shrubbery.
Fellow dork: Yep. The devs were like "There's no loot there anyway, and we're way behind schedule. Ship it. We'll fix it in the DLC." 4.5 billion years later, still not fixed.
Me: Similar thing happened on my last bike ride. The woods kept wrapping. Lazy artists trying to rubber-stamp geometry with some bloated algorithm, no doubt.
Fellow dork: That might just be coffee.
Me: Oh no, I never drink coffee on a bike tour. Not unless I'm experimenting with jet propulsion.
Fellow dork: So where you at now, anyway?
Me: Hang on, I gotta rant about UX. So, this morning I had to fill out a form asking me to describe a piece of delayed baggage I wanted routed to my house. The field was a single-line text box. When you entered something invalid, it turned red, and displayed the helpful alert "PLEASE ENTER A VALID DESCRIPTION". No clues as to what "valid" means.
Fellow dork: I shake my fist.
Me: Through trial and error I determined that your description cannot be more than about 80 characters long, cannot contain any numbers, and cannot contain any commas. Because, why?
Fellow dork: Web design by Bobby Tables?
Me: My best theory: The form contents are routed to a CSV file somewhere that gets dumped into a spreadsheet that's printed out for baggage handler jerks to use, and commas break the column alignment. That's a normal problem. How do we fix it? We make commas illegal! Clearly! And then we don't tell anyone we've done so!
Fellow dork: Mmmyeah. It's no better here. I'm filling out a form to rent a car. Much less painful just talking to a human.
Me: Hoo man is too busy doomscrolling on phone.
Fellow dork: You need to twitch a tok to kick a fund to crowd rush big foam rubber bats to knock phones out of hands. ... Wait; first you have to "X" it I guess??
Me: Arrrgh. Sure, call the company "X", because "X" totally conveys a point of view. If a guy has that much money, I guess he really can do whatever he wants, including shoveling it into a furnace.
Fellow dork: Branding! Ta-daaa! Hey, check out this demon programming tidbit I found amusing while drunk and grumpy from a cancelled flight.
Me: Wow. I forgot that this stuff goes on. And right in the middle of Boston! If anywhere, I figured this would be in Seattle or Portland.
Fellow dork: They cycle multiple venues. Primary one is Seattle. They added Boston, Austin, and Sydney over the years as more nerds flocked.
Me: I guess if I were 20 years younger, I would be all over this? Maybe?? I'm amazed the video has over 70k views. I feel like the DM is nothing special, and the crew is only mildly funny. Maybe this is like a "listen in the background" thing?
Fellow dork: This is the age we live in. The age of the nerd flock.Me: NERDFLOCK! DOT COM! There's danger in groups though. Aren't they worried that they will crash the economy if the building collapses? Such a disturbance in the coding force, of all those voices crying out at once...
Fellow dork: Wait, would nerdflock.com be crowdsourced debugging? Or porn? Both maybe?
Me: One financed by the other, no doubt. I'm tempted to park the name, but, what chances does it have if there's no Dorknozzle any more?
Fellow dork: See, that one is clearly porn.
Me: Code quality definitely took a collective hit when that site disappeared. Take this, for example:
(I hand him a vacation photo of a cliff by the seaside. A mesh retaining wall has been pulled across the base of the cliff, to prevent rocks from rolling onto the road.)
Me: This is just lazy. You know you've reached the low-rent edge of the map when the terrain LOD pager completely craps out, leaving huge chunks of untextured base mesh clipping through the shrubbery.
Fellow dork: Yep. The devs were like "There's no loot there anyway, and we're way behind schedule. Ship it. We'll fix it in the DLC." 4.5 billion years later, still not fixed.
Me: Similar thing happened on my last bike ride. The woods kept wrapping. Lazy artists trying to rubber-stamp geometry with some bloated algorithm, no doubt.
Fellow dork: That might just be coffee.
Me: Oh no, I never drink coffee on a bike tour. Not unless I'm experimenting with jet propulsion.
Fellow dork: So where you at now, anyway?
Me: Hang on, I gotta rant about UX. So, this morning I had to fill out a form asking me to describe a piece of delayed baggage I wanted routed to my house. The field was a single-line text box. When you entered something invalid, it turned red, and displayed the helpful alert "PLEASE ENTER A VALID DESCRIPTION". No clues as to what "valid" means.
Fellow dork: I shake my fist.
Me: Through trial and error I determined that your description cannot be more than about 80 characters long, cannot contain any numbers, and cannot contain any commas. Because, why?
Fellow dork: Web design by Bobby Tables?
Me: My best theory: The form contents are routed to a CSV file somewhere that gets dumped into a spreadsheet that's printed out for baggage handler jerks to use, and commas break the column alignment. That's a normal problem. How do we fix it? We make commas illegal! Clearly! And then we don't tell anyone we've done so!
Fellow dork: Mmmyeah. It's no better here. I'm filling out a form to rent a car. Much less painful just talking to a human.
Me: Hoo man is too busy doomscrolling on phone.
Fellow dork: You need to twitch a tok to kick a fund to crowd rush big foam rubber bats to knock phones out of hands. ... Wait; first you have to "X" it I guess??
Me: Arrrgh. Sure, call the company "X", because "X" totally conveys a point of view. If a guy has that much money, I guess he really can do whatever he wants, including shoveling it into a furnace.
Fellow dork: Branding! Ta-daaa! Hey, check out this demon programming tidbit I found amusing while drunk and grumpy from a cancelled flight.