There was this article in the NYT today about plagiarism and when I emailed it to my friend I wrote the following message:

I don’t get people who are like “um i didnt no u had 2 site sumthing sum1 else had wrote lol im gonna twitter abt my punishment heering LOL”

Really I don’t get those people, their stupidity and failure to communicate is something I just cannot understand; not because I’m too stupid, but because the laziness with which those people engage the English language is staggering.

I’m not sure those people are new, and I’m not sure it’s correct to suggest that the current destruction of proper English is a symptom of a generation that is really any different than those in the past. Honestly, I imagine that today’s tween is producing an exponentially greater amount of text than those even a decade or two ago. I know that I write more now than I did even 10 years ago because I spend so much more time engaging in a medium that is text-based rather than speech based.

If I had a time machine, I’m sure I could go back to the 1950’s and find a similarly fail-imbricated youth that had a tenuous grasp on the correct usage of English. Certainly this pathological stupidity would manifest itself in fundamentally different ways; of course I’m not suggesting that the conditions which define the textual artifacts of today’s idiot-children are the same as previous generations, far from it in fact.

Yeah I think people are stupid today, but the stupidity of their writing is more visible than at any other time in history. I bet if you caught Queen of Internet LOLing at your local Taco Bell and had a conversation with her, it would be in relatively coherent spoken English where the spoken “you” versus “u” is indistinguishable. There have always been stupid, intellectually lazy people out there; but now it’s more likely that we’ll be subjected to their horrific written prose (or poetry, in fact, nothing is worse than bad poetry).

To return to the discussion of plagiarism, I doubt that the Notre Dame Anthropologist’s book cited by the Times is accurate; I think it’s a convenient, retroactive rationalization for a problem that I imagine has been present in universities since the dawn of time. Perhaps, and this is just me talking here, perhaps it’s because we’ve become so concerned with plagiarism and are developing tools that make its detection relatively effortless that we are seeing a rise in cases of plagiarism.

If the police increased the presence of traffic cops by 100%, you would probably expect 100% more traffic tickets to be issued. This doesn’t mean that more people are speeding than before, you’re just now able to catch them.

That’s when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of the beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.

…cata drops last week in September!

Why, you ask, would I give this blog post such a polarizing title? Well, honestly, the anti-fanboys who’ve patched onto the iPad are about 100,000x worse than any fanboy I’ve seen yet. People who know about technology have already weighed in on this subject and results are in: the iPad is awesome.

(more…)

This should come as no shock to anyone that I’m probably done blogging about user interfaces for World of Warcraft. I know I’ve done this like 2100 times in the past, but this time I think it’s forever. Why? Well, for a combination of reasons. I’m most likely done playing Warcraft for the foreseeable future. The game doesn’t hold my interest anymore, and I’ve been playing it since March 2005, and that’s a long time.

Beyond that, I have got too much else to do in my life to be looking at screenshots of terrible UIs all day long. I have school, and now this iPad that I intend to love like a child…speaking of which, this little cutie pie just autocorrected child to hilda. Hm.

Finally, there just isn’t anything really going on in the world of user interfaces these days. Pretty much everything has been done. And short of adding shitty art all over the screen, I can’t imagine any major creative breakthroughs given the current tools that are at the disposal of designers. This isn’t an attack on add-on designers or any thing, just an acknowledgment that the range of tools and their functionality is rather limited.

All of that said, it has been a lot of fun running a blog like this for the past like 3 years. I’ve watched the community grow and change, see people rise up from obscurity to popularity and the reverse. And, with my characteristic humility, I’ve seen my ideas spread and become mainstream. This UI has been a fantastic ego trip for me, and that is mostly thanks to you readers. So, thank you all for giving me justification to continue to make fun of wow.com and terrible user interfaces everywhere.

Sovereignty aka Rob

P.S. The blog is not going anywhere, in fact, I am probably going to start blogging more and more. Most (all) of you are going to lose interest after the very first post, and I expect my readership will decline by the thousands. But, this blog is about me and what I want to do. So everyone else can either learn to like the new content or give me a nice, long, blowie.

Just sayin.

Align is one of those things that separates the men from the boys. If you’re doing anything with a UI and you’re not using align, you’re probably retarded. Well, that’s not fair. You’re either retarded or blind. Blind people might theoretically play Warcraft too…though honestly that might be pretty hard.

Align has been around since the beginning of time, or at least it feels like it. It was necessary during the early days of post-discord fallout, when precise placement of UI elements was impossible because authors didn’t include anchoring or coordinate placement options in their menus. So, anyone who wasn’t in a persistant vegetative state would probably have used it. I remember first using align sometime in 2006, I think. Though at the time the mod had probably undergone several iterations. The reason people use align is because it makes your UI look less like a garbage heap than it would otherwise. But the reason people use Align specifically is because it’s the only mod that does it.

WoWI has found this useful information and put it on the internet. But instead of just saying “This mod puts a grid on your screen so you can line shit up like a first grader” their “blogger” launches into a 900 line diatribe about nothing in particular. The first part talks about how funny it is that he has to “drag out Align again” to tell a whole new generation of fat tea party idiots how to design a UI. We can all agree that the general readership of WoW.com is on the intellectual level of the Tea Party movement right? Just old, fat, white, unemployed southerners who can barely use a computer have come to learn about the game they’re playing with their great grand child on the weekends in the trailer park on their 1996 Compaq with a CRT monitor and two button (no wheel!) mouse.

But I digress.

He uses align incorrectly. The lines themselves should not dictate the size of elements–rather, they should be dictated by a complex chain of reasoning that combines questions of element usability (i.e. can the unit frames do their fucking job) versus screen real estate tradeoff (because your screen space is zero-fucking-sum). You use align to do what the name tells you to do. Align shit. ALIGN!!!!!!!

Align is a popular community pick for one reason: if you’re not a post-modern cocksucker, you’ll use it because you should and more or less have to. Not because it’s easy.

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That said, there has been some question that I should respect other people’s opinions, and perhaps that I’m mean. Honestly I don’t give a shit. I respect good, well-qualified and justified opinions, even when they disagree with what I have to say. It isn’t so much that WoWI says shit that’s straight-up wrong, it’s merely that the people saying have no business being considered “experts” by anyone. I have no interest in reaching their audience, nor am I particularly jealous that someone else got the position (if I had wanted it, I would have applied).

What irritates me is that the standards of the community, and society in general!!, are so low that someone like Matthew McCurley can speak with some level of authority. It irritates me that he’s someone’s gold standard when there are many folks out there that are facially more intelligent and knowledgeable.

When people say that I have to “respect other people’s opinions” it only furthers my belief that the vast majority of people take a second grade-level approach to critical thinking. In other words, they don’t possess or exercise the necessary abilities to critically evaluate a ham-fucking-sandwich, let alone a user interface.

I love irony–in fact, my highly advanced brain can more or less only function on the ironic level or else I’d slip into some sort of Camus fueled existential coma. That said, sometimes irony makes me really fucking mad. Like this week’s wow.com abortion. Here’s a fuckin’ link. Just be clear at the outset: I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the abilities of our new friend, since he and  I play the same class. That’s why I am fairly comfortable saying that there’s a pretty fair chance he’s the stupidest person on the entire fucking internet.

I honestly reserved judgment on our new UI moron, but I can’t believe he’s saying some of this shit after he posted his own garbage dump of a user interface. What’s worse, he somehow thinks that his UI approximates a “good” UI experience and instead of taking his own advice and critically fucking evaluating his own UI, he non-ironically tries to give advice to other people. The uncanny nature of his non-ironic irony is like unfuckingbelievable.

Section One: oPie

Motherfucker is talking about fucking opie when he has his MOTHERFUCKING AURAS ON HIS FUCKING ACTION BAR! What the fuck? You have to be in the 1st percentile on a fucking “living/breathing functionality exam” to not know what fucking aura you have up. You oPie your auras because you don’t need every fucking button on your screen at once you ignorant cocksucker.The fuck gives you the right to tell anyone anything when you obviously don’t understand the implications of what you’re saying. It’s like having the fattest fucking person on the planet scream in your ear because you ate a cheeseburger all while the fat idiot is having lard pumped directly into his veins.

Section Two: Action Bars

Look at his original screenshot. At one point I’d gone through and made a graphic showing every ability that should be hidden, but I closed photoshop before I saved it and then lost interest. Like more than 50% of his visible buttons should either (a) be on hover-over bars or (b) be left in a fucking spell book. Don’t even play around with action bars when you don’t know the first thing about prioritizing spaces on your fucking UI. This mouthbreather probably couldn’t contemplate a world without his cooking button on his action bars! WHY IS HE GIVING ADVICE TO ANYONE ON ANY SUBJECT?!

Section Three: Simpler Unit Frames!

Don’t worry, he has his own name visible on his unit frames and his own level! I don’t think I need to say much more than this. I’ve lost steam and don’t want to comment on the rest because it just makes me shake with anger. I mean it doesn’t really do that, but I just find it offensive. It offends me that someone like him believes that he should tell people anything about anything when he’s clearly an ignorant idiot. It offends me that the people running wow.com are so vapid that they don’t seem to care that their website viciously promotes stupidity by running such unbelievably insipid columns.

I’m offended.

UPDATE:

Let me just give you this gem from the comments. Reading shit like this honestly makes me angry:

Just wanted to give you some positive feedback Matt. This was an excellent article, showed me a few new things (I consider myself a bit of a UI pro), and was extremely useful for everyone to the newbies out there to the old school high end types. I’d seen Opie but did not know that it could be used to hide elements of the UI that you didn’t need at the moment… thanks for the intro to it.

Taeo has started a new website where you can post, view, and rate user interface screenshots. It’s kind of like how Discord was 900 years ago before the dinosaurs raped monkeys into humans or whatever happened back then.

http://www.wowuigallery.com/

The new UI dude at WoW.com posted something. It wasn’t unintelligible garbage, at least it didn’t appear that way at first glance. I’ll read it when I’m not so sleepy tomorrow. http://www.wow.com/2010/02/09/reader-ui-of-the-week-your-addon-ui-columnist/

Is this Caith or NotCaith?