Tag Archives: semi-haunted public restroom nightmare scenario

a little pissed

i am so angry right now

a fairly lengthy post i was just working on just totally slipped away and is lost in the ether thanks to posterous

at a point where i was almost entirely done with a new post about the web design class i’m teaching out at Brookline Adult and Community Education posterous suddenly refreshed and brought me out to the sign in screen, asking me to sign into the site as if i were never in the Create a Post screen

only an hour wasted, but it just feels futile and empty, really ridiculous that in the year 2012 posterous { or at this point now, Twitter } can’t figure this simple shit out

its totally annoying

and from Day 1 of getting involved in this more digital aspect of visual expression i think i’ve realized the rather robotic limitations of these mediatypes — the rather purely mathematical and super uncool potential of the technologies we trust to help us articulate and express ourselves in a more efficient and empowering way

at moments like this i retrospectively reflect and think its all bullshit

why isn’t this stuff as cool as Star Trek yet? 

its 2012 people

why can’t posterous just save a fucking draft before totally shitting my time away?

is that really too much to ask? 

i should’ve thought ahead and copy-pasted all my hard work and typings into a Pages file or something, i’m sure, because even in 2012 we need to compensate for our lameass technologies and pretend like it all hangs together in a smooth and accommodating manner — but let’s face it folks:

its not true

we PRETEND like this shit works so nicely — people constantly work these systems in total denial that we’re all fumbling and live-testing every single technology we’ve invented on a daily basis

here’s what i’m asking you to do for me as a reader of these posterous passages here — put on a little play-pretend persona hat for me, suddenly become acutely aware of every microinteraction you have with your devices and the web and just be happily observant of everything you do on a daily basis to get everything to work correctly:

  • watch how you need to repeat swipes on your phone before the follow-up animation indicates you’re onto the next step;
  • see how long you’re standing there, waiting for the supposedly automagic liquidfoam soap-squirter to actually moneyshot deliver a blast of bubbly whiteness into the palm of your hand in one of these semi-haunted public restroom nightmare scenarios;
  • create a post here on posterous and watch as all your hard work and minutes dematerialize into nothingness when the system autorefreshes without even giving you the courtesy to copy-paste your thoughts prior to this systems-based power of deletion

i know its not intentional, these little faux pas of user experience — but jeez, add ’em all up at the end of the day and its a fucking miracle any of the stuff we do during the day happens at all — and in fact, on certain days it can feel like some sort of cyberSurreal and fully automated magical self-terroristic attack of our machines to the very psyche and general health of humankind

its machine-on-man violence, i tellya

forget about this HCI stuff, this Human Computer Interaction — the whole system is still inconveniently reversed in 2012 and we have a flip paradigm existence of machine-driven processes { still }

its a little different than systems-centered design, i think { although that’s what’s secretly underneath it all }

the technology becomes our special new pair of red shoes, and now its up to us to just keep dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing

its all good though

i got this one

we’ll fix this shit

here’s the first step, the whole ‘when posterous hands you lemons …’ kinda bullshit

i just squeezed this post out of my own unfortunate circumstances

my original post is lost

here’s the beginning of something bigger

welcome to 2012, the day we really dig in and start to make the world a LOT more user-centered using cyberSurreal forensic investigation of these ‘machines gone wild’ as the very backbone to sticking it back to The Man — or no, wait a minute, not back to The Man, sticking it back to The Machine