By sleeping I go elsewhere and somehow I can’t allow myself to go there because it’ll just end up bringing another day which isn’t exactly a rational cycle of swirling pinball thoughts.
Count something. Breath somehow. Do the sleep hygiene and the spoons. How many spoons is it? Or is that not how the spoon thing works.
It’s sideways rain that shifts directions under the bright blue sky but only in my mind and only sometimes – there’s no all. No nothing. Only all the in betweens.
Tricky when counting on things. They go away and haunt or something always past midnight when day is closer again.
Unfold and count the exhale. Forget the numbers and the paint and the holes in the bathroom wall. Fuck why bring up the fucking holes. Just stop.
Wha? Material is now the name of a visual effect. It’s a liquid element for dynamism that allows color to pass through from background to foreground, according to the Liquid Glass guidelines.
Is this coming to my Apple device? Do I have a choice?
not a duck. the donald is a creation of its own making. it called the news and used a fake name to promote itself. it paid for full page newspaper advertisements to promote lies. it believed the hype around it that was made to sell crap to people. the worst of all is that it made for entertaining television at a time when that screen was changing rapidly in size and reach. by the time it landed on fucking jack dorseys twitter doorstep, it was already entrenched in the american psyche by way of media. then all that needed to happen was to keep the media hooked on the mainlining of high ratings and big advertising dollars alongside the continued propping by roger and rupert and here we are heading to where the fuck no one knows.
when the people around you say 2 + 2 = whateverthefuck with the greatest confidence and hubris and you’re the one to say no, 2 + 2 = fucking 4 in front of the liars you will be the one out on your ass. i know from my own personal experience in this warped world of the truth is what I say it is and if I am more powerful or wealthy than you then that as they say is that.
When it’s easier to tap tap tap on a mobile device and buy a car than it is to tap tap tap and find a friend or hire someone to move a couple of chairs that won’t fit in standard sedan seems to be we’ve mediated our way so much closer to robocop than most people can even begin to comprehend.
RoboCop Movie Poster 1987
It’s not bullshit. It’s absolutely true and almost happening like the movie. The cops are still human but their faces are almost always covered, they can and will grab anyone off the street they’ve been told to arrest and if they do their jobs the way they’re supposed to, the person they arrest will be taken into custody immediately.
The Constitution and Amendments and due process don’t seem like they’re for little people at all anymore. Only for the hefty, wealth-laden, gold plated, egotastic mother fuckers like Donald, Zuckerberg, Putin, F’Elon, mother fucking Stephen Killer Miller, Mr. Google and Mrs. Paramount.
Donald may be the president but a fucking disgusting, abusive, trolling, bullying, baby of a human male does not make a president. He’ll have that moniker but he’s nothing but a slumlord from Queens (no offense to the place, my family is from there too but we didn’t abuse anyone, tromp over them, stomp on that last step, and keep going) who has never succeeded on his own in his entire life. The veneer is lab-made, a manufactured image projected onto TV screens for so long that the lies became acceptable and even unquestionable for some. That’s leaning toward cult by anyone’s definition.
No. Nope. No.
Do you know about what happens next? Do you know how bad it can get? Do you understand how much the fake government has stolen in Q1? Do you understand the hell that will be unleashed upon all of us because Donald got 49.9% of the popular vote? Do you know how many people will die?
Do you want to know? No? Didn’t think so. I can’t help anyone who’s not interested in caring beyond our own cults. The families of origin, the circles of old friends, the new friends, the people significantly younger than my 57 years. There are some who are engaged and active.
In the next several months, it’ll become clearer whether enough people act to oppose the darkness with some light and better ideas for a future we’ll have to share whether we want it or not.
be entrepreneurial, they said. have a vision, they said. guide cross-functional teams. make an impact – in 90 days or less, they said. add value, they said. get shit done, they said. make a difference, they said. be dedicated, they said.
how’d that work?
no more job
Why?
I did the things they said they wanted NOT the things they actually reward, recognize, protect, promote.
I also make one other crucial mistake; I attached my whole sense of self to the work, the job, the outcomes in the short mindset that never has room for all those things they said they wanted in the first place.
I took it seriously and personally and didn’t fortify myself. Had I known the key is to develop a deeper level of emotional intelligence and detachment, build a network shamelessly, keep my distance and not only save myself but climb the dumb ladder.
Everywhere I look I see how I feel is also how others feel. Bummer. And it’s a huge relief to finally see evidence from others that the crap and the overload is real. I’m not the problem. I’ve been made to be the problem by a system that’s just fucking fallen apart. How’d that happen? Slowly then all of a sudden. Yep, I’m revising too. UX? Feh. What a slap in the face. Yeah it was what I did for a living but I never called it an industry. Skills you can use elsewhere. So that’s what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll use one of this persons tools tips snippets whatever.
The device is called i (phone). That’s a nice marketing ploy but the phone part of the device is the least useful aspect of the thing. The number of phone calls that include a smooth, easy to have, back and forth dialogue are damn near zero in this year of 2025.
The phone is not a phone. It’s a computer with software that simulates phone calls of yesterday.
Does anyone remember full duplexing?
I do. It was what a fucking telephone used to do and it was amazing. I have not done any research but my gut feeling is they it’s as dead as a dinosaur. When was the last time anyone talked to anyone else on this stupid pocket computer and had a real dialogue where both parties – especially if there were only two people talking – could hear all the words spoken?
Maybe it was Y2K. Or thereabouts. Full duplex communication doesn’t exist easily in our wifi world because it’s cheap. Cheap as in it doesn’t include the necessary technical layers to enable full duplex comms. So. We get voip and chop and drop and sure call from anywhere but don’t expect to be able to have a real dialogue.
Well, that’s weird.
No. No it’s not at all weird that the calls drop or sound weird or exclude a packet here and there so you cannot hear properly.
It’s weird that this shit works at all. It’s very rickety and very insecure.
No full duplex. Only half. And no COBOL is not just an ‘archaic programming language’, it’s also extremely hard to break into which is why your bank – yes, bank – has it running in their systems too.
These guys wrecking all the things in the so-called administrative state are the same ones who have funneled money into our payment processing systems so insidiously that there really is no escape and no extraction.
Parents and schools need to be able to connect and communicate with each other. It’s a problem as old as schools and humans. What happens when a government is starved for money because tax breaks go to the super rich guys? An example is a for profit entity funded by the guys who took the tax breaks and then used their money to make more money for themselves while integrating their tech into schools around the world.
I won’t name names for the sake of black listing myself. Who knows at this point maybe I’m already on a list. At this rate it won’t be long since nothing is private and hasn’t been for well over a decade.
It’s too little too late. There is absolutely no one coming to help the people. The overlords have the keys to almost every room of the kingdom with one massive and crucial exception. The hearts, critical thinking and souls of the people who see the truth and will not be told they don’t.
Keep some cash in your fireproof box and fine, you can keep calling me chicken little but you should be calling me Cassandra.
I mindlessly snacked on Honey Nut Cheerios while the end of the world started. I’d already read all the things, understood all the realities, warned and whined, donated and drowned myself in independent media. The end of something should mean the beginning of a new, maybe even hopeful stage but not this ending. The one I watched during the last decade was – and maybe historians one day will deem it so – a brilliant and horrifying convergence of efforts from a few factions who do not believe in the common good or any of the things that help to create a functioning society.
The technofascists. The white supremacists. The christian nationalists. The but-maybes (but maybe it’ll be ok when…). And all the other hangers on who make justifications for their aggrieved state while the system kicks their ass and the other hangers on who have stolen all the wealth from the rest of us. There are no rules they really have to follow even if a judge says what the rules actually are. How do you hold the unaccountable to account when nothing has worked?
So, I watched the music dying and the Senators kibbitzing on the stately, blue carpet feeling both helpless and grateful. The gratitude for my personal world being relatively calm at the moment is real. So many Americans do not understand how bad things can get. I want to rewind but wishing and magical thinking is not my strong suit.
I am desperate in my nightmares to stop the horror from coming but it has been here all along. Now it’s just building up strength like a tsunami powering from one side of the ring of fire to all the other shores. There will be a reckoning. What shape it takes and how or when or if it comes at all is unknowable. Meanwhile, even if Cheerios don’t help, they’re a decent pacifier for this exasperatingly sad day.
The platitude ‘time heals all wounds’ doesn’t work for me and never has. It’s been five years since CT’s been gone and it still hurts like it did before. Maybe it kinda feels even worse because others have gone more recently. I don’t know how grief works but I feel like it’s been intertwined in me since before I was double digits years old.
There is rain today / I really don’t mind at all / The sun is still there
Observe. Do the pros and cons lists. (Things within reach with lower overhead. Managing environments.) All the things. Write it all down.
Orient. Using all the observations👆🏻get comfortable with what it’s saying. Be both as objective as possible and use the emotions to inform by observing intentionally.
Decide. Feel what has the biggest influences and then…decide. Once a decision is made, move on.
Act. There’s a lot to this part and it boils down to making real whatever’s been decided upon.
Rinse. Retro. Repeat. Remember. (OODALoop is not something I invented, I did add the R’s)
Having the time for making things – that might even someday be sellable – is in the ‘feels good’ category
One of the biggest ways to get a software development project to go sideways — or off the rails south bad to Hell to shit or however you describe it when something falls apart and absolutely does not go as planned — is by not solidifying the scope of the work and sticking to that scope.
The two other key areas that will send your shit into oblivion is to assume someone is an expert in their field by way of association with others without getting first-hand evidence. If the so-called expert resource is not able to deliver on their part of the work, you’ve wasted the last area that’ll make you want to fire yourself and that is time.
Time. Resources. Scope.
Manage all three or mediocrity is the best result you can hope for.
For the second time in a month, I’m stuck in a plane that cannot let passengers off because of equipment -and my gut feeling- human malfunction.
The jet bridge thing is 10 feet away, but whoever is driving it cannot get it to the plane so the planes door can open all the way and let us the fuck out. They made three attempts.
So close and yet so far that we can’t get out
We’re already almost 3 hours late so driving around the fucking airport trying to find a place to park where the jet bridge can get to the plane is the plan.
How will this plan play out? Well. It’s 11:29pm and we landed almost a half hour ago. Looks to me like it’s not working so well. The pilot and copilot have to negotiate for another gate which means we’re here for at least another hour.
The domino effect continues. Late flights late crews lost crew rest late flights and over and over.
In Donald’s America, these kinds of things will only continue to get more frequent and more intense. You cannot have a functioning society while shredding the federal government. It’s just not possible.
I don’t know how long it’ll take but it will happen. Both the complete destruction of anything decent in the US and getting off this fucking plane.
I’ve driven across this big country several times, in both directions. I’ve done it with other humans in the vehicle and I’ve done it alone. I’ve also had the unpleasant experience of attempting to make the drive from Santa Barbara to Connecticut, with two cats.
One cat was a good rider, she always had been. The other; not a good traveler. At. All. He peed on me the first time he was ever in a car when we brought him home after he was found near a dumpster at a Motel 6 in Escondido, CA. Why my ex-husband thought a significantly longer trip would work is still beyond comprehension. (It literally breaks my fucking heart that later on in that poor cats life that same guy decided it would be ok to drive from San Francisco to Massachusetts after he’d left the poor cat mostly alone in a SF apartment for a couple of months.
Anyway. The earlier drive, the one where we were moving because I got a job that paid for our move, was the first time Al was made to suffer in the car as a big kitty.
We made it from SB to Ontario, CA. Stayed overnight then made it to Flagstaff, AZ before we couldn’t (I couldn’t) take the cat stress any longer. Al was so fucking stressed out that he smelled bad. It wasn’t cat pee, it was stress emanating from him. At that point, the easy going kitty, Kahuna, started getting extremely antsy and vocal. She was worried because he was so stressed and so, we ended up in a hotel with cats trying to figure out what the fuck to do.
Fortunately, the company I was working for was generous, took care of its employees at that time – what a novel concept – and made it fairly straightforward for us to shift our plans (what am I saying, I made it possible for us to shift our plans).
We staying a night or two at that hotel then traveled south by car to Phoenix where we were able to leave the vehicle to be picked up for shipping to our final destination. After that, we took the two cats, got a taxi to the airport and because it was before 9/11/2001, we made our way through security, to the gate and eventually, onto a plane.
No cats were harmed in that journey from California to Connecticut. Only some bruised human egos and one pissed off woman.
Finding Ed Zitron. He writes the words and says the things I’ve been saying and screaming about (in my own mind) for a long time. The techigarchy has created so much friction, and I use that word deliberately, that not a day goes by that I don’t run into so many screens, clicks, popups, chatbots not to mention all the basics of getting real work done. Seriously, we have to live with things like Microsoft fucking (insert the thing you struggled to use efficiently recently)? Unbelievable.
Friction is something most designers – myself included – look to remove from the digital world. Where it creates confusion, frustration, or just stops users from getting things done easily, remove friction. In other places, mindful designers – myself included – look to add small points of friction. To stop a user from doing something they might not want to do or give users a way to address errors easily, add friction.
Friction starts fires, friction is frustrating, friction is confusing at best, infuriating at the mid end of the scale and way over on the other end, it’s pure hell that makes some of us want to live off the grid completely. (Kinda, I’m not a great camper).
Anyway. That’s it. I hate 2024 for taking one of my favorite people but I’m grateful for finding Ed.
I’ve been involved with a field of work called user experience design for about 25 years. It is a discipline, or a domain, much like software development or business management or leadership or legal or sales. What it is not is an industry. An industry, put simply, is a bunch of businesses or organizations that function within the same sphere of an economy like healthcare or automotive or higher education or financial services or technology or energy. If what we really mean is the digital industry, then we should say that. But user experience design is not only applicable to the world of tech that is coded by a software developer who makes the design of the thing come to life on a screen.
When did the field of user experience design (UX) become referred to as an industry? It is not a business that generates revenue unto itself so how can it be an industry? When did the title or moniker UXer come to life? It doesn’t mean anything except maybe user experience designer but then if we have that, what is a product designer? It seems all of these titles are meant to indicate work in a digital sector so we should say that.
The misunderstanding of user experience design will continue as long as we keep attaching the wrong phrases and words to them. It is sad that it’s about to turn over to 2025 and we’re in worse shape as a discipline, a domain that can apply to a lot of different industries. How hard is that to comprehend? It seems straightforward to me but that’s because I have a business background first, design is just a part of that 👿
Forget UX and all the bullshit surrounding it. Go back to usability everyone. That’s where UX was supposed to have its core and now it’s just a couple of letters that was misunderstood to begin with but now? Holy shit. Here’s a simple example of where UX is NOT happening. Anywhere on a browser that uses multi factor authentication and doesn’t tend to the interaction details that make it easiest on users. Here is what I mean:
User goes to [insert app here – like DoorDash or Instacart or some other horrible company] and signs in using whatever username.
App send user a verification code.
User goes back to screen to insert a 4 or 6 digit code.
If the cursor is NOT in the input box where the numeric code needs to be inserted, you are NOT doing UX (or product design whatever the fuck you call it when you fuck around in Figma, export to send to dev ticket).
Does it work? Yes, it will pass your unit test. Is it useable? Yes, I can get logged in. Is it user friendly or user center4ed or any of those things? NOT AT ALL. Why? Because there is unnecessary friction between me and the thing I’m trying to log into. It’s like anything where there is a number entry field and my keyboard is still showing me all the fucking letters. NO. You are not a UX person or UXer 😡 (I hate that one almost as much as UX/UI and UI/UX🤢at this point) if you do not eat your own dogfood.
Get out of Figma. Get into the mode of delivery for your design ASAFP. If you don’t, you’re doing it fucking wrong 😈
Yes, Steve Schmidt, you got that right, it’s fucking disgraceful. Donald is, among many other ugly things, absolutely disgraceful and so is everything that comes along with him.
I’ll never understand how average people don’t see the con. Never. Exactly never will I be able to wrap my head around it. Cult? Sure. But come on not in 2024. People can get the truth if they really want it, it does exist. There are no alternative facts, only facts, fictions and a lot of complex things that can’t be boiled down to bumper sticker length.
But when he and his crew are stealing from us, that’s when I lose all ability to comprehend how people not only buy into his bullshit but act like rabid sports fans flying his flag and doing his jerkoff dance. What the actual fuck has happened. (Fully rhetorical question, nnta).
