xkcd – Dan Q

Please Fix This Site? Okay!

This week, digital agency Humidity Studios launched PleaseFixThisSite.com, a website with a deliberately awful design aesthetic.

Screenshot of PleaseFixThisSite.com, featuring all of the design sins described below. — Honestly, I’ve seen worse.

Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.

Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.

XKCD comic. Transcript: [A single panel containing a large, elevated sign with Ponytail standing in front of it.] [Title, slightly off horizontal, more to the right than central and the character spacing is not entirely consistent/aesthetic:] Doanate[sic] to fix this sign! [To the left of the lower part of the sign there is an 'QR code', tilted slightly with a plaintext link beneath it:] https://[illegible].com [To the right are several dollar values, in one column, and 'fixes', in a second, some of which have their own self-demonstrating quirks.] [The letters "R" and "N" may be too close together:] $10 fix kerning [Both dollar value and fix text are shifted left of their respective columns:] $20 align columns [This line is in a smaller font:] $20 fix text size $50 fix typo $50 fix centering $100 fix rotation [Ponytail stands looking at the sign, apparently in the process of using a smartphone:] Grrr... [Caption below panel:] My new company's business model is based on extorting graphic designers. — I can’t criticise Humidity Studios for taking a stupid idea from XKCD and taking it way too far, because, well, there’s *this* site that I run…

That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!

A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration, I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to install my (open source) script.

I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.

Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.

Note #20099

Almost nerdsniped myself when I discovered several #WordPress plugins that didn’t quite do what I needed. Considered writing an overarching one to “solve” the problem. Then I remembered @xkcd comic 927…

It’s 2020 and you’re in the future

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…

West Germany’s 1974 World Cup victory happened closer to the first World Cup in 1930 than to today.

The Wonder Years aired from 1988 and 1993 and depicted the years between 1968 and 1973. When I watched the show, it felt like it was set in a time long ago. If a new Wonder Years premiered today, it would cover the years between 2000 and 2005.

Also, remember when Jurassic Park, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump came out in theaters? Closer to the moon landing than today.

…

Wait But Why

These things come around now and again, but I’m not sure of the universal validity of observing that a memorable event is now closer to another memorable event than it is to the present day. I don’t think that the relevance of events is as linear as that. Instead, perhaps, it looks something like this:

Graph showing that recent events matter a lot, but rapidly tail off for a while before levelling out again as they become long-ago events. — Recent events matter more than ancient events to the popular consciousness, all other things being equal, but *relative to one another* the ancient ones are less-relevant and there’s a steep drop-off somewhere between the two.

Where the drop-off in relevance occurs is hard to pinpoint and it probably varies a lot by the type of event that’s being remembered: nobody seems to care about what damn terrible thing Trump did last month or the month before when there’s some new terrible thing he did just this morning, for example (I haven’t looked at the news yet this morning, but honestly whenever you read this post he’ll probably have done something awful).

Nonetheless, this post on Wait But Why was a fun distraction, even if it’s been done before. Maybe the last time it happened was so long ago it’s irrelevant now?

XKCD 1393: Timeghost - 'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo' — Of course, there’s a relevant XKCD. And it was published closer to the theatrical releases of *Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs* and *Paranormal Activity* than it was to today. OoooOOoooOOoh.

Relevant XKCD

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Thomas Park

The most-relevant relevant XKCD ever. Click through for the full awesome.

Particle Properties

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XKCD

Random Obsessions

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XKCD

Earth Temperature Timeline

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XKCD

Satisfied

I saw XKCD #584 – “Unsatisfied” – this morning. In the comic (in a slightly Sliding Doors way), a man chooses between one of two lovers, and spends the rest of his life thinking about the other one in a “what if” kind-of way, leaving him ultimately unsatisfied with his life, regardless of which he chooses.

Go read the comic if you haven’t yet.

I had a slightly smug moment, and ‘shopped this together:

An XKCD Moment

As a song came on the radio (well, Club 977 – The 80s Channel), Ruth laughed. “What?” I asked.

“This song just reminded me of a webcomic I read today about song mash-ups,” she replied.

“Oh yeah. I read that one. Which webcomic was it?”

“I don’t remember.”

It was only when we started thinking in terms of Venn diagrams that we realised which webcomic we’d seen this particular joke in.

It was XKCD #575. By the time we were finding set intersections, we should have guessed that it would have been XKCD.

In other news, my leg is still sore, but people keep giving me cake, so that’s good. I went back to work today, on my crutches, and it was completely exhausting. On the other hand, it’s probably giving my arms some good exercise, which might just make up for not going to circuit training this week (I’ve been forbidden from doing so on account of my injuries, despite my protests that I’d be perfectly capable of doing shuttle runs and squats and exercise bikes like this, right?).