Sadly, just deleted Ars Technica from my bookmarks. Add that to the other 70-80 sites I’ve deleted in the last few years as they are simply unreadable and unusable.

I might link to Ars content if I see it on another site, but won’t visit there by going to their homepage again.

It used to be one of the very best tech/science sites out there. Now it’s just another boring content farm with a terrible, eye-shattering design.

The stupidest, most fucking worthless, most asinine, most half-baked, most oafish, doltish and barmy response when someone complains about a bad design is to say, “Everyone always complains about a new design, so this means nothing, durrr.”

I’m thinking now of Ars Technica, but it happens every time there’s a new destructive design. Some Ars-employed moron observed that every new design they’d ever done had elicited massive complaints but that’s because every design for the last 15 years has been worse and more unreadable than the last.

Getting away from a moment from ranting rage, what is the sociology of this tendency? Why (or is there) an entire user-hostile and sense-hostile culture of design? How does something like that even develop?

Because that site doesn’t look good on a tablet, phone or desktop machine. So what the heck is it designed for? What is its purpose other than funding some design firm?

The sociology of this sort of thing is really interesting to me, though I have I fear little insight into it. That’s probably why it’s interesting. If I were a managing editor of a site like Ars, I’d fire every damn person who had anything at all to do with such a design atrocity.

What’s also mysterious is when traffic falls and the most devoted readers scamper away madly, no one ever questions the design as a cause — or they do only in a case like Digg, where the design caused such a precipitous decline in traffic that it was not possible to ignore as it literally drove the site out of business.

So, what gives? How has destructive and bad design overtaken all sense? Will we ever return to a relatively-sane design period that held from roughly 1998 to 2005 or so?

For some reason I have the Snoop Dogg song “Drop It Like It’s Hot” playing on repeat in my auditory cortex.

Don’t even like the song, but it is a strange one.

Lisa Mitchell, you’re my only hope.

I wish sf felt more foreign. I wish it felt more like my attempt at learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics did.

I know this isn’t practical. But at least steps in that direction could be.

Just watched the Star Wars: Rogue One trailer. First, I think it’s great that two Star Wars movies in a row have had female protagonists. It’s weird that some people see this as a “stunt” when they don’t say the same thing about a male protagonist in any film.

But back to the main point — the trailer didn’t at all feel like it was from a galaxy long ago or far away. Even accepting the humanoid morphology of the main characters, they felt culturally American/British. A Western in space — again. (Don’t get me wrong. I like Westerns in space. Firefly, the paragon of the genre, anyone? But we need more than that.)

Strange how nearly all sf contains characters with our mores, or even worse the mores of the 1950s, with similar clothes and hairstyles and ontological outlooks as contemporaneous people. I know why it is this way, philosophically speaking. But it no longer pleases me. It’s no longer enough for me.

I don’t think anyone makes the sf I’d most want to read or to watch. Maybe I’ll have to do it myself.