Too Much Information -- and Not Enough

Ran into a technical writing problem in the wild this morning.

Well, part of it may be a design problem. But I think I can safely shoehorn technical writing into the mix, as we're dealing with a design that's trying to present too much information.

First, a little background.

I play Seaport, a relatively addictive game developed by Pixel Federation on my Kindle. Whether or not this is a game for you isn't part of this blog post, so if that's what you want to talk about, move along.

The designers of the game recently updated a few items, including the screen that shows up when you wish to dispatch one of your ships to a destination to pick up or drop off supplies. Here's the screenshot of the redesign:

I wish I had a before shot to share as an example of how the design used to work compared to the redesign where I feel like they're offering too much information at once. I think I can see the utility of the information they're presenting now, but in my opinion -- and for my old eyes -- they're trying to make this screen do too much.

First, I don't have a screenshot of the Before Times, because I took it for granted. But simply put when you tap on a destination for one of your ships, it displayed the following information based on your goal in going there:

1. If you were going to pick up supplies, it either gave you a short list to scroll through so you could decide what supplies you wanted to pick up, or if it was a one-supply depot, just a display of how much that particular ship could pick up.

2. If you were going to deliver supplies, it gave you a tally of how much of the supply you've already delivered, how much yet to deliver, and how much the current ship you were dispatching could carry. It would also show how much of the supply you had on hand to deliver.

They call it New Ship Flow, and are clearly happy about it. Players -- at least those commenting on the forums -- are not. It appears to be better accepted by those who play on PCs, but for us mobile gamers, the changes are just too much because they reduce the size of everything.

Now it's cluttered up with the scrolling menu of ships. I suppose -- I haven't tried the functionality yet -- that it offers you the choice to dispatch more than one ship without having to exit the screen. It appears you can also cancel a ship voyage if you catch it in time in order to dispatch that ship to a new location.

It's all potentially valuable things to do. But it makes the screen more cluttered. The type and pictures are smaller, harder for my old eyes to see. Thus presenting too much information that's hindering what I want to accomplish on the screen.

The update has introduced other mistakes, but they appear to be mistakes in design, not in writing, or deciding what information to present on the screen. To their credit, the game developers are listening.

This might be a good example of the perils of designing across multiple platforms, but a good technical writing look at this might have identified the problems before they went live.

Vicarious Tinkering

I possess very little mechanical aptitude. I can use tools and such, but if you asked me to put something mechanical together (unless it has specific LEGO-style instructions and all the parts are new and shiny) I will not succeed.

So it boggles the mind that I've spent some quality time watching this guy disassemble and reassemble various parts on various cars.

This all started a few weeks ago when the starter on my Honda Pilot gave up the ghost. I toyed with the idea of replacing the starter myself and found a YouTube video in which some guy from Orem replaced his. I did, in the end, chicken out and after toying with the idea of having my adept nephew come to help me, ended up having the car towed to the mechanic. (Still the best $89 I've spent in the last few months.)

Nevertheless, I continued watching such videos because part of me is intrigued by the skill it takes to disassemble and reassemble something. I certainly don't have the specialist tools, but to watch it is to watch skill and training in action.

Also, this guy has a pretty laid back, easygoing manner that makes his videos well worth watching.

It might have been fun to see my own car being worked on. And I won't take the Honda's starter for granted. At least for a while yet. (Keep wondering what's going to happen next; so far this year we're replaced the starter, alternator, and battery.)

Peter Principle-ing ALL OVER THE PLACE

Every time I have an annual job performance review, I tell a lie.

The question comes: Where do you see yourself in five years? Pat answer: Well, some kind of step-laddering up in the company and you know, maybe managing other people.

Bosses dutifully write that down.

Inside, I'm both laughing and screaming. Laughing that I keep saying that year after year, and screaming that OH MY GOSH THEY MIGHT ACTUALLY DO IT.

Because it's the Peter Principle, folks.

For those unfamiliar with the Peter Principle, it is thus:

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. (Quoted from Wikipedia.)

I have managed people. I am not good at it. When I do it, I enter the level of respective incompetence.

So I am very pleased to remain as a technical writer, rather than an organizer and leader of men. Or women. Because, yuck.

I see this in my Scouting career. I loved being Scoutmaster. When we started a girl troop in 2019 because our daughter wanted to earn her Eagle, I got roped into being the committee chair. That put me right into the realm of incompetence.

And there I sit. And sit. And sit.

I want out.

But I don't think anyone else wants the job. I know I don't. I want out. I WANT OUT. But I'm stuck there. Being highly incompetent.

Krusty indeed wants out.

"Ah Shall Now Kiss You, Beatrice. . ."

 

With effortless ease, he pushed the plane along the plank. Curls of wood, matching his blond tresses, spilled onto the floor with each swoop of the tool.

Beatrice, her tea long gone cold, sat at the small café opposite the carpentry shop, transfixed. Despite the cacophony of the early-morning market, she had ears only for the gentle swoop-swoop of the plane and eyes only for the butterflies who settled on his bare back to sip from the beads of sweat that formed on his billowing muscles.

Once she caught his eye as he paused to stretch, sawdust clinging to the hairs on his bare chest. He paused, mid-yawn, and winked, and it was the wink that startled Beatrice and pushed her to pick up the menu to hide her blushing face. He laughed quietly, mopping the sweat from his brow with a red cloth as Beatrice watched him. She longed to be the one to brush the dust from his arms, to feel them around him, to smell the tang of pine and oak and the sweat of honest labor.

“Beatrice, there you are!”

She dropped the menu.

There, in his normal flop-sweat and pudge, stood Sir John Stanford.

“The galley leaves for Jamaica in three hours,” he said stiffly, hat tucked neatly under his arm as if the captain were there watching. “I thought, perhaps, before we left –“

Beatrice’s eyes wandered past him, to the carpenter’s apprentice back to shaving, shaving, shaving the planks that she knew would make a bed.

“—a walk in the garrison yard,” he said. “It may be some time, six months or more, before I return.”

“Oh,” Beatrice said brightly, still looking through him. “Do you think so?”

Sir John looked at Beatrice. So beautiful. So dainty. So . . . rich. A man could not hope to find a more suitable bride. And yet there she is, staring at the carpenter’s apprentice as if he were Adam himself.

He held out his hand to Beatrice and smiled, though the smile did not reach his eyes.

Beatrice took his hand automatically. She still stared past him. As they walked up the busy market street, she could still hear the rhythmic swoop swoop of the plane in the carpenter’s apprentice’s hands.

Sir John frowned. “One moment, dear Beatrice,” he said.

“George! You there, George!”

A young man talking to the daughter of a fruit-seller dropped a banana and looked around. “Ah, Sir John! Depart in three hours we do!”

“Yes,” Sir John said, pulling the youth into a nearby alley. He looked at Beatrice. “Won’t be a moment, my love.”

“We are still short a ship’s carpenter, are we not, George?” Sir John asked, quietly.

“Indeed! Bastian’s still in jail for drunkenness—“ he replied, almost shouting.

Sir John waved a finger in front of his lips. “Discreetly, now, George,” he said. “I know the Captain looks dimly on press-gangs, but to go to sea without a carpenter is folly. Get Burns and Holly to grab the young man at the carpenter’s stall in the market. He’ll do for our voyage.”

George nodded, then glanced back at the fruit stall.

“Go now, George!”

George sighed, but loped off toward the docks.

“I apologize for the delay,” Sir John said to Beatrice as he watched George slowly wander toward the forest of masts. “Much to do in preparation for the voyage.”

“Yes, my love,” she said absently, staring into the marketplace.

She let out a long, low whistle, followed by a blast to rival the best signalers on the Marie Celeste, and a rough burlap bag smelling of rotten potatoes descended quickly over Sir John’s head. Rough hands clasped his arms and a meaty paw clamped over his mouth.

“I have no choice, my dear,” Beatrice said as the hands pulled him into a nearby stable. “Farewell, Sir John.”

“Remember, don’t kill him,” she said coldly to the captors. “Rough him up a bit and put him in the gaol with Bastian. And see that Bastian makes it to his ship on time; he has duties that should not be shirked.”

She grabbed a banana from the fruit-seller and glanced toward the docks, where she saw George still ambling quietly and slowly through the marketplace. She tossed the banana lightly in the air, spinning it, and caught it. “One more to go.”

A Delightful bit of Pedantry

 ‘Fill the cup, and fill the can:

    Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

    Every moment one is born.

Thus wrote the poet Tennyson in his poem "The Vision of Sin."

Enter, the pedant:

In this case, Charles Babbage, who wrote the following to the poet:

Source here.

So add this to the tiny thimble of knowledge I have about Tennyson.

And this ranks as one of the most delightful bits of pedantry ever recorded.

Truth Demands Vigilance. And Life is A Highway.

Truth is messy.

Actually, what Alexandr Solzhenitsyn says is “[T]ruth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”

Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist, dissident, and political philosopher most known for “The Gulag Archipelago,” in which he describes the prison system of the former Soviet Union through the experiences of others and his own time spent in the gulags, spoke these words – translated from Russian – in June 1976 as he delivered a graduation address at Harvard University in the United States.

He called the speech “A World Split Apart,” in which he outlines what he perceived as the “truth” of the West, which welcomed him from exile from an oppressive regime that censored and imprisoned him, but also a West in which he sees increasing weakness and loss of resolve as it faces the unpleasant, bitter truths he believes to be increasingly coming to light. He cautioned his listeners that “[T]ruth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings.” In other words, even those who think they know the truth had better constantly check themselves, lest their grasp on truth loosen without them realizing.

The aim of his speech was to caution those in the West to avoid not only resting on the laurels of openness and freedom but also to recognize, as Thomas Jefferson once said, that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” 

He went on to provide what he regarded as evidence that the West has failings that could lead to places as unpleasant as he experienced in the East, cautioning his listeners that the need to reassess and occasionally recalibrate their grasp on truth is essential to preserving their way of life.

This may sound familiar: The prophet Nephi, as recorded in the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 28:24-25), offered this warning: “Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion! Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well.” God, through Nephi, warned his people about the dangers of complacency – which often led to pride, the pursuit of riches over helping others, and eventual downfall. Solzhenitsyn echoes this religious allusion by reminding his Harvard listeners “This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom – in this case, our Earth – divided against itself cannot stand.”

Solzhenitsyn outlines a series of general and specific malaises he saw in Western society. While it’s difficult to know what specific events might have triggered his thoughts, it’s important to recognize that the 1970s were a period of increased societal and political turmoil in the West and in the United States, where he spoke these words.

The nation had ended the Vietnam War in defeat. Richard Nixon, a towering political figure in the early 1970s, had resigned the presidency in late 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate, leaving significant distrust of government in his wake. Terrorism, civil rights marches, hostage-takings, military coups, and other events rattled the free world.

And the free world, Solzhenitsyn believed, was increasingly paralyzed in knowing how to react.

 “The Western world has lost its civil courage,” he said, “both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. . . Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”

Solzhenitsyn also saw increasing weakness in Western society in general. “[T]he constant desire to have still more things,” he said, “and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.”

This lack of civil courage and the turning in of governments and individuals, he cautioned, was leading to increased proclivity to protecting a sentiment of “what’s mine is mine, and I don’t care if you have what you need.”

He said: “The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It’s time in the West – it is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”

That is the most famous line from his speech: “It’s time in the West – It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” Rights and obligations often intertwine, but in a society in which he warned against passive and cowardly politicians, clever interpreters of the law, and increased worldliness and selfishness among the general population, the right to do what one individual seems fit can often trump and trample the obligations human beings owe their fellow man.

This we have heard before: Amulek and Alma fought against those who used their education in law to eventually put the followers of God to death: (Alma 10, 15, 17) “Now these lawyers were learned in all the arts and cunning of the people; and this was to enable them that they might be skillful in their profession. Now they knew not that Amulek could know of their designs. But it came to pass as they began to question him, he perceived their thoughts, and said unto them: O ye wicked and perverse generation, ye lawyers and hypocrites, for ye are laying the foundations of the devil; for ye are laying traps and snares to catch the holy ones of God.”

Solzhenitsyn urged those listening to him at Harvard to consider a truth: “On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. IN the West, commercial interests suffocate it. This is the real crisis: The split in the world is less terrible – the split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

In other words, both East and West have lost, or are losing their way when it comes to respecting human obligations over human rights.

[Drug Dart Meant for Rhino]

Tuesday's primary elections brought some interesting results here in Idaho: Bad news for incumbents, and bad news for the right wing of the Republican Party.

This is, generally, good news for the state.

Before I begin: Yes, I am a RINO. Proud of it. Ronald Reagan -- remember him -- probably would have called me a "big tent" Republican. Though I am Republican under protest because that's where the majority of our competitive races are.

I prefer to think of myself as a love RINO, however:

With only one exception in the races I was watching, the right wing lost. Their winning race -- for state attorney general -- is a bit concerning, but with the likes of Ron Nate and Chad Christensen losing their races, maybe the swap is worth it.

Brad Little won the primary for governor, pulling in votes at almost a 2:1 margin compared to Janice McGeachin, wannabe white-supremacist sympathizer and activator of the Idaho National Guard for duty at the Mexican border when Governor Little left her in charge for a day (to the ING's credit, the man in charge, point blank, told McGeachin to stuff it. (McGeachin lost her home county of Bonneville by a wide margin; even the hippies in Latah County voted more for her than the conservative stiffs locally.)

He does have to face Ammon "Can My Electioneering Count Toward my Court-Ordered Community Service" Bundy in November, but that's a race that's concluded before it's begun.

Oh, and some Democrat. But this is Idaho.

The state GOP was on the steps of the state capitol this week, calling for unity. Something the local GOP doesn't really want, as they're being sued by the state GOP for electoral malfeasance. To be fair, the local GOP committee isn't all that well-liked.

Gen X, Still Forgotten

One of the best descriptions of current-day Gen Xers came in a review of "Bill and Ted Face the Music" at Slate, and I think it fits generally how our generation is still forgotten:

"In its way, this closing chapter of the Bill & Ted trilogy is an allegory for the status of Gen Xers in the dystopic landscape of 2020. They—for some of us, we—are now middle-aged slackers still waiting for our one grand moment of apotheosis, convinced the song we were put on Earth to write is yet to come even as the culture around us moves on."

In a way, though, we're used to it. We were pretty much forgotten as a generation as we grew up, in the shadow of the Baby Boomers, who still dominate the landscape like skulking dinosaurs today.

This is typical of how we're seen today:

And I'm good with it. Let the Boomers and Millennials fight it out. I'm too busy with my head down, getting things done.

We weren't ready as youngsters to lead. Too callow. And now, too forgotten. handing things over to even younger ones, well, just to do that without thinking of finding people up to the job, that seems stupid. But we live in Stupid Times.

Plagiarist, Heal Thyself

So this happened.

For those unwilling to click on links:

A young author -- they're almost always young authors -- wrote an essay explaining why she'd plagiarized bits (not sure how many) in her debut novel, which was cancelled when the plagiarism was revealed.

A few hours after the essay was published, it, too, was cancelled because parts of it were plagiarized.

Being outed as a plagiarist isn't self-healing, by the sounds of it.

And by the sounds of it (I haven't read the essay, nor heard of the author, nor was aware of her upcoming book) she took the typical outed plagiarist track: I was under SO MUCH PRESSURE to write this novel and I had no applicable life experience for what I was writing I had to go to other sources for inspiration and I PROMISED myself I'd go back and fix things but one thing led to another and now my hubris-laced apology is no more because I stole that too.

Have I ever plagiarized, I can hear you asking. Yes, I have. But that got pounded out of me very early on because I have a highly-developed guilt complex. Also, no pressure to perform at a young age.

My reaction to the news, posted on a Facebook post by a friend who shared the news: [Laughs and sobs in Gen X, because even if I won't amount to anything, at least *all this* is my own work.]

It all comes back to what Chuck Jones says: If you want to write well, you have to fill your head. In some ways I'm still filling my head. And not letting hubris get in the way of me writing a mediocre story.

Also:

Jonathan Bailey, writing about the situation at Plagiarism Today (in part about this author's plagiarizing of something he'd written about plagiarism) hits on something revelatory (emphasis mine):

"But the issue with her plagiarism isn’t her mental health. It’s how she writes. An author should never paste the works of another into their paper without immediately citing it. Notes need to be kept in a separate location. Furthermore, citation should never be left for the editing process and, instead, be part of the original writing process.

If Bello had done that, her pressures and issues may have hampered the book, but would never have led to plagiarism.

However, it’s pretty clear that this is simply how she writes. We know this because of what happened in her essay. That style of writing bears all the hallmarks of “paste and rewrite” plagiarism that she described in the essay itself."

Heady stuff, worth thinking about for writers of any age.

The Worry Box

So Saturday was to see me remove the last item from my Worry Box.

A Worry Box, of course, is where you put your worries, ostensibly so you can forget about them until they have to be dealt with, but as I use Worry boxes, it's where I store my worries when I'm not sorting through them on an hourly basis.

But as with all Worry Boxes, trouble lay ahead.

The worry in the box was the "last" day for our Scout fundraiser, selling cookie dough at Cabela's in Ammon. I dutifully collected the cookie dough from Michelle's folks' house that morning, but when I went to leave my own house after stopping there briefly, another worry: My car wouldn't start. Plenty of battery, but just nothing when the key turned.

So add that to the Worry Box.

Michelle got me to Cabela's. It was really windy. We sold only 20 tubs of dough, so I had to take the rest back to Grampa's freezer and then stack the task into my Worry Box, right next to the broken paperweight of a car sitting in the driveway.

Uncharacteristically, I may have found a way to fix the car -- my nephew Nich knows his way around cars, works at an auto parts store, and is willing to come help me noodle through getting the starter replaced, which, we think, is the reason the car's not starting at the moment.

But the worries in the Worry Box multiply. Still have to sell that cookie dough. Still have to get the starter replaced and hope that actually fixes the problem. Still have to think about getting the car to the mechanic anyway just in case that isn't the problem and maybe there are other problems.

The Worry Box never really empties out. Dammit.

"It Was Pity That Stayed Bilbo's Hand"

So, things have happened.

Late last night, someone working for the Supreme Court leaked a draft majority opinion in a case pending before the court, essentially throwing out the landmark Roe v. Wade case, which legalized abortion nationwide in the 1970s.

There has been much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth -- and much joy -- on the decision, thought it's far from official though likely to be true.

Also yesterday, prosecutors announced their decision to seek the death penalty for Lori Vallow Daybell, accused of killing her two children in Rexburg several years ago.

Locally, much joy there.

All I see is a conundrum.

Foes of abortion preach the sanctity of life. And practically in the same breath, they applaud the death penalty for Vallow if found guilty. Of course they can hide their hypocrisy behind her alleged involvement in her childrens' deaths. But to preach for sanctity of life in one corner and cheer for death in another sounds hollow.

Of course, both sides are guilty; many of those who want unrestricted abortion also abhor the death penalty.

I take the Gandalf Defense:

The best lines come before the best lines. It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand; and we should all hesitate to take life -- or have doctors or the state take it for us -- in our righteous indignation, no matter the circumstances. Because we cannot grant life to those who did not deserve death. No crime -- nor condition as being described as a clump of cells -- should alter that agreement.

The Terrible Pun

Gavin quietly sipped his lemonade. Mine, I was saving it. To drink it here as we sat on the wall, looking over the pasture, meant with my super-sniffer the lemonade would have a tinge of manure to it.

"Looking at this makes me sleepy," he said, taking another sip. He waved his hand expansively toward the field, sloping down to the river. A few cows stared at us from far off, alternating between watching and nibbling. They seemed undisturbed by the smell.

Movement caught my eye. In the grass, not far from where we sat, a rabbit.

Gavin saw it too. He sat his lemonade down on a smooth stone, dropped off the wall and crouched.

The rabbit looked at him, but didn't stop its chewing.

Gavin moved slowly through the grass. The rabbit kept an eye on him, chewing, chewing.

Gavin reached out, grabbed the rabbit by the scruff of its neck, and pulled to to his face. Then slumped over, releasing the rabbit, which tore off.

I leapt off the wall and crouched next to him. He groaned.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

Gavin yawned. "Oh, I'm fine." He sat up. "But now I know why I was so sleepy."

I looked at him.

"That was the Ether Bunny," he said.

I shoved him over into a cowpie. Why are we friends? I'll never know.