Trumani Box: LOL Dolls, LuLuLemon, LootCrate, & a Dopamine Rush Driving Mystery Boxes
“It’s a box!” If given the choice between a boat or mystery box, we know now we’ll follow in the footsteps of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin and take the box. It could be anything after all, even a boat. “What’s in the...
Gutenberg Reviews Continue to Pour in
A few months ago, WordPress moderators were still replying to even the most yelly one-star Gutenberg reviews with their chipper tone that sometimes bordered on patronizing or pedantic. I’m not saying I could do it better. I probably wouldn’t have replied...
Google Releases a Canvas… People Draw Dicks (Probably)
For having access to all of our data, giant tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google sure don’t know us as well as they think. They may know what we want to search, buy, hate, etc. But they fall laughably short when they try to engage us. Consider the...
Gutenberg “Rave” Reviews Continued
The release of Gutenberg in core has amplified the dissenting voices of the WordPress community. More WordPress developers and site admin are jumping to the Gutenberg plugin page to express their dismay. Sure, you can install the classic editor (yet another plugin?)...
10 Great Gutenberg Reviews
After Aretha Franklin’s passing, one has to wonder…Does a thing exist in this world that isn’t completely divisive? It seems we could all agree the Queen of Soul was a gem, but we’re diametrically opposed on everything else. Look at reviews on...Latest Posts
Do we even deserve privacy? The contract tracing fight looms, and I don’t know what to believe anymore
In the years to come, contact tracing will be our... Read more
In the years to come, contact tracing will be our only savior. "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide." People, mostly those in a position of power, have regurgitated variations of this sentiment for years. It seemed to pick up steam after 9/11 and again after the prevalence of smart phones. Back doors (hehe), industry consolidation, a national legislature with an average age older than time itself...all of these things coalesced to form a perfect storm. Our fourth amendment is deteriorating right before our eyes, and most of us only shrug. "I haven't done anything illegal," we'll say, forgetting that we have all have shit we'd rather not be public knowledge. Maybe it's a dick pick, medical records, an inflammatory opinion made while intoxicated. For years, that I suffer from depression isn't something I felt comfortable being out in the open. I remember as a kid being misdiagnosed with a hairline fracture in my leg and that being reason enough to deny me insurance because that, my friends, is a pre-existing condition.
(Can you believe that Republicans have the audacity to say we wouldn't return to that hellscape if we repeal the ACA? But I digress.)
We also forget that the law is more malleable than ever in the age of the internet because the old farts in charge don't understand basic fundamentals about the digital revolution. Did you know that you can be charged as a sex offender for sharing a naked selfie (of yourself!) if you're underage? Elected individuals have a responsibility to know the bare bones about matters they oversee. If they took that responsibility seriously, I wouldn't have a problem. But the fault doesn't lie squarely with lawmakers. Many technology companies and spy organizations like the NSA enjoy obfuscating as much as they can about how their applications and systems function. The less lawmakers know, the more power these organizations can wield with impunity. Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg have seized on lawmaker ignorance and public apathy to siphon as much of our private lives as they can. And maybe...maybe if we actually cared, we might be deserving of protections similar to our counterparts in the European Union under the GRDP. But a new fight stands to doom any argument that our private information is not our own. We have radically fucked the environment that hosts us. As we develop every last piece of earth on this exhausted planet, we will encounter innumerable pandemics, some worse than COVID 19. And we have to be at peace with the fact that we'll need contact tracing as one of our tools in the toolkit. We could be proactive. We could shut down wet markets in China and the equivalent of wet markets, factory farms, in the United States. But we won't. Humans are shortsighted. We do not have the drive for proactive measures on a global scale. I worked at a radiation factory. We irradiate meat from animals so sick it would be unhealthy to consume the meat without killing everything. Instead of sustainable farming practices, we choose inaction and then scramble to react when the apparent becomes inevitable.
Trumani Box: LOL Dolls, LuLuLemon, LootCrate, & a Dopamine Rush Driving Mystery Boxes
“It’s a box!” If given the choice between a boat... Read more
"It's a box!" If given the choice between a boat or mystery box, we know now we'll follow in the footsteps of Family Guy's Peter Griffin and take the box. It could be anything after all, even a boat.
"What's in the baahx?"
Our corporate overloads know our imagination is much more inspired than whatever trash they sell, so they've taken to not telling you in advance. Pay up first, and let it be a surprise. I fondly remember anxiously waiting for the next time Woot released another grab-bag of tchotchkes, literally called 'Bag of Crap'.
What treasures could be in store?
Who knows, but truthfully, who cares? The box isn't the prize. The prize is dopamine.
In that moment, we'll fill in the gabs and then get that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine whenever we open something new. From LOL Dolls to LuLuLemon, the tactics are simple:- Create an underwhelming product
- Obfuscate it
- Sell it as a subscription
- Profit by banking on a certain percentage of people being some combination of sufficiently wealthy, forgetful, or lazy to sustain the business model long-term
- The product will be easy to dispose of when you crash from that high
- The product comes with that jaded cynicism and fourth-wall breaking you've come to love from the internet
Gutenberg Reviews Continue to Pour in
A few months ago, WordPress moderators were still replying to... Read more
A few months ago, WordPress moderators were still replying to even the most yelly one-star Gutenberg reviews with their chipper tone that sometimes bordered on patronizing or pedantic.
I'm not saying I could do it better. I probably wouldn't have replied to anything from the start, so horrified by the pitchfork reaction to my creation, and it seems now WordPress moderators have all but conceded defeat. The outpouring of negative feedback continues to flood the reviews section, but replies to recent posts are curiously in scant supply.
Here's one of my favorite lines:
"This plugin is fucking awesome!"
Wait, sorry that is a review from the Disable Gutenberg plugin. A plugin that disables functionality of WordPress core has inverted ratings from the functionality itself. Amazing! You can see it for yourself by comparing the two screenshots.
Here are the Gutenberg reviews
"Dear lord, how I hate this thing" Altered syntax to get the point across always makes me chuckle. "I am also becoming worried that plugins like WooCommerce is starting to ask for side plugins to talk to Gutenberg in websites that don’t need this resource. Thus, inefficient." Connector plugins to help other plugins talk to a plugin turned core functionality. Clear as mud. "If I could give it zero stars, I would." This comment pervades everywhere. I'm tempted to create a new reviewing system that allows for zero stars. "This garbage is make unusable my whole site!" Words like garbage and trash frequent the reviews threads. "If i downgrade the whole site to an earlyer version, all the other plugins is broken becouse this plugin is edited somehow any plugins….now i and my cliens cannot see a normal website, just a garbage. Just full of garabage." I'm imagining this person, so angry, he's choosing to write in English, furiously tapping away at his phone's screen before hitting the gym and letting out all his/her leftover rage on the spinner. "My life, since 5 launched, is a stream of clients begging me to get rid of 'the awful new thing you cannot call an editor because it is unusable.' Is this the release people will write about in 5 years in 'Remember WordPress?' articles?" Tech moves fast, but 5 years is a little soon to be asking, "Memba' WordPress?" when the application currently has 51% marketshare among content management systems, which translates to 27 million active websites. But if it happens, I will definitely pen such a post from my...Bitrix?...blog site. I don't even know of a serious alternative. We have to remember that many CMS apps can match WordPress in code step for step (I actually prefer Drupal), but none have the massive community behind it. “'Block builder'? The heck is even that? Whole thing is half-baked, unusable, borderline insulting for anyone dabbling with even part-time web developing." "Too much effort to adapt to users who do not know anything." It's abundantly clear to the developer community that WordPress has targeted power users from Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify, and other drag and drop type applications. Will this play out in the "It’s as if the people in charge of creating it never actually used WordPress." A damning critique worse that throwing around four-letter words is to accuse the maintainers of the code are not themselves passionate end-users of the product. "This is obviously the 'New Coke' of WordPress and could be an equally disastrous failure. Full disclosure, I like what eventually became Vanilla Coke. But I would get sick of it all the time. That's why the option to go back to 'Classic' is so important." This metaphor holds up better than most. I love my Vanilla Coke, but it's not taste neutral. It's there for when your taste buds want a little something extra.And Now, for the More Practical Critiques of Gutenberg
"Nothing is intuitive. Even after you get past the learning curve, doing the simplest tasks are impossible. Want to add an image? You have to get your cursor just perfect now instead of the old way of just loading to the media gallery. Want to cut and paste text? Screws up formatting. Want to cut text from WP and paste externally, pastes a tone of garbage commenting/classes." Taking the learning curve out of the equation, Gutenberg's UI really does seem more tedious than it's worth to write simple blog posts. "What really killed it for me was that even after learning my way around Gutenberg like a pro, it was still much slower to write a post than using the Classic Editor...doing a preview on a post in Gutenberg takes at least twice as long to process as with the Classic Editor." Time is money. We don't have the time to disparagingly watch the spinner as the page struggles to load after saving a draft. If you’re a blogger, there’s no way to develop an efficient writing flow with Gutenberg. And if you’re like me where you have non-technical clients writing their own content, you can forget anything but the Classic Editor for them. My selling point with WordPress to my non-technical clients was always, 'If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use WordPress'." Though it does not have all the bells and whistles, a clear consensus has formed from the reviewers that the classic editor is free of distraction and obfuscation. Many users compare the classic editor to Word. It's relatively painless to produce content in Word and copy it into the copy editor. Another reviewer compared Gutenberg to Publisher. Gutenberg is great for certain activities, but forces authors to write in small, confusing bites. Two different tools for two very different applications. "I might still use Gutenberg for static pages because it does have quite a few options that might be worth the headache – but only on pages that I don’t have to change very often." This is the best use case for most visual/block builders. Rarely do I have a blog post built using the Divi builder or a page built using the Classic Editor. "When i edit any post, page or anything in my site, when i begin the save process, this app make double anything..double rows, double chars…" Not terribly efficient frontend interface or backend. What's the highlight again? "...Someone will either fork WordPress and return it to the way it needs to be, or people will leave WP in droves for something more intuitive with less clutter and distraction." There's already a fork of WordPress without Gutenberg. Whether or not it picks up steam remains to be seen. But that's always a possibility when you have open source code. "TL;DR? We tried it, we disliked it. It’s a complete and dismal failure."
Google Releases a Canvas… People Draw Dicks (Probably)
For having access to all of our data, giant tech... Read more
For having access to all of our data, giant tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google sure don't know us as well as they think. They may know what we want to search, buy, hate, etc. But they fall laughably short when they try to engage us. Consider the Microsoft AI that was trolled into Tweeting anti-semitic nonsense within hours of going live. Now Google is giving the internet a literal blank canvas that will inevitably be used for drawing phallic symbols, Nazi flags, and other unsavory imagery in the name of childish fun. And because it's Google, we know they'll be watching us. Palms firmly affixed to their heads.
What's Wrong with a Blank Canvas?
Google just wanted to engage us. Yet the move is reminiscent of such stunts like Microsoft's ill-fated AI Twitter bot and Mountain Dew's Dub the Dew campaign that rose to internet infamy by asking for public opinion for a new flavor name online and getting wildly inappropriate responses like "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong," "Fapple," and many variations of "Gushin' Granny." Internet users rightfully dismiss these engaging activities as naked PR stunts or something even shadier. Google's nakedness comes in the form of yet another power grab in its effort to assert dominance in the browser wars. Chrome's dominance may have killed Microsoft Edge, some say by continually adjusting code on its popular websites like YouTube. And the canvas app appears to be another ploy to get you to exclusively use Chrome. The application, which is native to Google's browser, Chrome, cannot be enjoyed by the likes of me, a lowly FireFox user. These devious deeds by corporate monopolies are why the internet community is full of jaded assholes. Instead of being engaged, we'll act on our most immature impulses to prove yet again why we can't have nice things and why corporate giants shouldn't bother.
Gutenberg “Rave” Reviews Continued
The release of Gutenberg in core has amplified the dissenting... Read more
The release of Gutenberg in core has amplified the dissenting voices of the WordPress community. More WordPress developers and site admin are jumping to the Gutenberg plugin page to express their dismay.
Sure, you can install the classic editor (yet another plugin?) to override Gutenberg. But we learned it will only be supported by the WordPress crew until 2021. Of course, the community will step in. We have the best community on the web. There were also several recommendations to switch to a fork of WordPress called ClassicPress.
It stinks like rotten eggs that WordPress refuses to allow two permanent paths for the editing experience. It’s such a crucial aspect of our sites, but in the darkness came the light of creative and very entertaining reviews.
Here are some great pull quotes from the Gutenberg reviews page combined into a letter that should be sent care of everyone at WordPress:
“Dear Automattic, you’ve fucked up.”
Starting strong.
“Whoever designed this, he deserves to work for Microsoft”
Let's demote this person to Facebook. Facebook can eat shit.
“Install the classic plugin to remove Gutenbug, sorry Gutenberg”
Puns are a great way of getting the message across.
“It’s like to bullying people who make them great! they should know they are great because we want to! not aliens!”
I'm not sure what's going on here, but memes decided the 2016 U.S. election so maybe they can convince Automattic to right the ship and restore the classic editor in core.
“Noob webmasters use DIVI? Well, whats the problem? Let them use this crap. Why include a facsimile DIVI into WP?”
Dammit, I hate being collateral damage. I don't use the Divi builder to write posts! Excuse me while I go eat a tub of ice cream.
"Gutenberg’s big name is destroyed by WordPress"
I feel worse for Bebo Valdés. As far as I can tell, this new version of WordPress doesn't have any groove.
"Why don't you have zero stars? Because that is what this Gutenberg deserves." And “I’ve registered here just for write about this piece of stupidness. Awful, awful, awful. Turn it off immediately.”
You see these two reviews littering the reviews section. Why not go even further and ask for negative stars? As for registering just to leave a poor review, you're not alone. I'd venture to say that most of us registered to leave a review, whether good, bad, or ugly. It can probably go without saying, but it does help it get the point across.
"I think they want to have alternative against some online web builders like wix, but they forgot that huge number of their users are writers, bloggers and journalists."
Yes, WordPress needs to be everything for everyone. Sitting at 59.7% marketshare, the folks at Automattic won't be content until every last website that uses a CMS is WordPress. The irony is they inspired a fork called ClassicPress with this update, which may end up taking marketshare from WordPress.
"WordPress will be like hotmail, yahoo, windows, explorer, nokia in future!"
Let's hope not. There's a reason the next most prevalent CMS, Joomla, has a dismal 6.7% marketshare. WordPress is the best CMS for so many different situations. But it will never be best for all of them. I feel Gutenberg was inspired by goals of global domination but may instead prelude the fall of an empire.
Check out more fun reviews in the first of the series.