Coffee Got Scooped

Full Disclosure: I love Kurzgesagt, and I never heard of the Coffee Break channel before Phil De Franco brought the controversy to my attention. 

Much like James Gunn's tweets from years ago being brought back by alt-right trolls, Coffee Break had to go pretty far back in the Kurzgesagt archives to find a problematic video. Specifically, the video on addiction was published back in 2015, almost 4 years ago. This fact alone doesn't do Coffee Break any favors in his effort to look like some sort of vox populi. To paraphrase Cenk Uygur, if you need to dig that far back into someone's past and that's the worst you can find, any way but straight back up is digging yourself a deeper hole.

Coffee Break is a modestly-sized YouTube channel; its 315K subscriber account is nothing to sneeze at, but it's dwarfed by Kurzgesagt's 8 million and counting. It's easy to play the jealousy card, but it's just as easy to play the David vs. Goliath one as well, and given how Coffee Break paints himself in this story, I'd say this makes us even. The saving grace of the former is that no one suffers the double whammy of a concussion and a sword in the back should the confrontation go south. 

It's absolutely adorable that Coffee Break thinks Kurzgesagt can pump out a fully-scripted and animated video in the course of roughly a month, as if the team was able to drop everything and start work on getting ahead of this controversy. The reason the deck often seems so stacked against animation on YouTube is that whenever it isn't an expensive venture, it's exceedingly time-consuming. Animation software has done wonders for lone wolves, but it's several decades and some serious AI developments away from being set-and-forget. 

Coffee Break still insists the video is a rush job spurred by his digging, and maybe it is, but the quagmire of conspiratorial accusations he attaches to this claim paints a picture of a salty, embittered nonentity's 15 minutes in the spotlight not being on his own terms. At present, the dis/like ratio on his would-be expose is almost 50/50, though slightly more folks in his favor than the factual flock. Maybe that half-and-half would have persisted regardless of Kurzgesagt's transparency, possibly with a dip in the total number of directional thumbs. Maybe Coffee Break's audience would have ruled the roost while the rest of the site continued to trust Kurzgesagt. 

All I want to know is how his coffee smells without his nose. (18/4/19 UPDATE: He gets it)

This story doesn't simply stick out to me because I'm a fan of the factual flock, but also because Coffee Break's situation hits me a little close to home, and I've been given a glimpse into the other side of a coin toss and all that would have emerged from it. This site has fancied itself on reviews, typically of movies, but also of the occasional bit of kit, and even some software here and there. The pattern is typically that an item is released into the public, the public reacts, voices their opinions, and then that's kind of the end of the story. It's a pattern I've been thinking about a lot lately, and over the past year or so I've come to the revelation that this pattern is not only antiquated for reasons I'll get into, but also needlessly divisive and utterly unhelpful to most involved. 

In this age of social media, production and consumption have gone from being acquaintances to practically full-blown marriage. Feedback is immediate, lines of communication are rarely closed, and the initial purchase of said media-to-be-consumed is not the end of the transaction. Those in the PC gaming master race know full well I'm going to bring up patches, a concept that's only gotten more efficient as internet connections get faster and can handle larger files. Release dates suddenly become sliding scales of quality assurance, and for the most part a lot of people don't really mind. There may be some initial grumblings among the eager few when their brand-new lost-weekend-in-a-box can't even get past its opening title screen before taking a sharp right off the road and into the leafy cudgels of a whomping willow, but few problems are so first world as having to wait a few weeks for a video game to become properly playable. The disappointment rarely lingers, and typically it may only do so as some kind of statement about a larger trend. 

I once stood poised to give a company endless grief over a discount code they gave me not working. The week before I was ready to post the review, the app went free. Suddenly, I didn't have a leg to stand on. Was I mad? No, maybe a little frustrated for all of about 30 seconds because those outlining paragraphs I'd spent time filling out being rendered wholly inaccurate. At the end of the day, I got what I truly wanted. I wanted the damn app to work. It's one matter to expose obvious fraud and deception, it's quite another to strongarm someone into a situation where their only recourse towards making the situation right is to lie. 

Get a Room, You Two of Everybody Else!

OR:
Girls, Gyros, and God, what's wrong with me!?

I've made it a personal tradition to refer to the fourteenth of February as Industrialized Exchange of Token Affections Day. I don't pretend this is any sort of subversive social commentary meant to satirize consumerism; I'm a capitalist, of course I want people circulating their money, supporting businesses they like and keeping people employed. The fact is I'm simply bitter because I'm single. It's my own dumbass, manchild fault. I'm bad at flirting, I hate small talk, I'm terrified that the most inconsequential interaction will backfire in the worst way (that one I kind of blame on Tumblr, but that's another story), and no matter what I never end up being realistic about any relationship ever. 
While I like to think I'm far less awkward now than I was in, say, high school, the improvement barely qualifies as "marked". Last Thursday, the 12th, I was at a coffee shop in St. Louis, near Tower Grove Park and nestled between some lovely townhouses. I belong to a "Creative Work Group" that's currently in a state of flux and trying out new locations. We sit around, talking about various writing projects we've got going, and periodically checking in on each other while we work. The night was going well with lots of progress being made despite the group, thanks to a few last minue dropouts, consisting of only myself, our moderator, and her boyfriend. Then, things just started to fall apart for me in the most tedious of ways for the most absurd reasons. 
The short version of how the downward spiral began is that a cute woman sat down at the booth across from us, and I couldn't work up the courage to go talk to her. 
Seems innocent enough, but here's how awkward this got. I went to WikiHow on my phone and legitimately looked up how to approach women. In my defense, I had absolutely no idea what to say beyond "Hi" (apart from the obvious things like, "You're beautiful" or "You have cute hands" but that's not much to build a conversation around, even when you're flirting.) so I don't think looking up icebreaker ideas is all that pathetic. Plus, it's never a bad idea to brush up on warning signs, because some people are just too damn polite to tell you they're not interested, Lords of Light love 'em. After many furtive glances (none of which were returned) while waffling on which approach to take, I resolved instead to take advantage of my phone's position on my keyboard's case/stand and take a clandestine photo before hurriedly leaving. Yeah, I'm just that sad and pitiful... and possibly creepy. I told myself I'd use that "missed connections" section of an ad site, but that never happened because it doesn't help the "approach" problem. 
Capping off the stress of the night was driving down labyrinthine one-way streets to find this Greek place to satisfy a craving for gyros I've had since my trip out to Ohio back in January, only to find out the guys decided to close about twenty minutes early. "That kind of night" eventually turned into "that kind of week" with stresses and frustrations piling up day after day.

In fact, I've been in such a haze since then that I got my days mixed up, and missed the next meetup of my work group. Last night, I texted my work buddy asking if we were still on for tomorrow.

She asked if I was having a rough week.

Yes. Yes, it has been.

Stumblrbum's Photo Finish

Tumblr's attempts to make posting photos via their mobile app have more or less all gone to pot. At least, that's been my experience of late. To be fair, it's good that they're trying to make it so you can post sets of photos instead of one at a time. Unfortunately, this simply doesn't work efficiently enough, and when your update is less efficient than spamming single photo posts, you really need to rethink your design schemes.

Recap: it used to be that after I took a photo, I could go into the "share" menu and select "Tumblr" from a list of sites. This would take me to a menu within Tumblr's mobile app to create a photo post, complete with tags and tweet settings. It was all very handy apart from not being able to post photosets.

Now, it's completely reversed. I have to go into Tumblr, select the photo post option, and then be taken to a menu where I can pick the photo from my gallery via thumbnails (more on that later) or go into my camera and take a new photo then. First problem, apart from this being very tedious and rather greedy on Tumblr's part by making "timed exclusives" of my photos, is that I can't access all of my camera's options, like exposure and effects filters. Couple that with the fact that I now have to open one application and make at least two selections in order to open another app which otherwise can start up almost instantly, and this is a really bad start. Second, I noticed that the photos I posted this way had a kind of checker board artifact pattern over them, like an old TV with the RCA cable coming loose. When your 21st century digital imaging system looks like a CRT monitor with flimsy composite connections by default, something's gone fundamentally wrong somewhere very far back in your process.

When something works just fine before an update, that's not a hardware failure, that's a limitation. What makes it really awful is that my phone is middle-of-the-road as far as tech specs go, so your update has potentially cut off about two-thirds of your users. Hell, I've heard from people with better phones than mine that they can't post photos at all, now or before.

Now, I have a good idea what your two cents on the issue is, "Look, you're overthinking this. Just do what you did before. Take the photo, then go into the app and post it then. You said yourself you can see your gallery as a grid of thumbnails to choose from."

Problem the third: Not every photo shows up in that grid, and which ones do and don't at any time is completely random.

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Burns and Smithers walk through layer-upon-layer of security checks to get to a master kill switch for the power plant, only to find that said room has a rickety screen door that's nearly fallen off its hinges as another entrance? At least there you get to the same room and everything is there that should be because the console is bolted to the floor. There are more reliable ways to get to Narnia than my own damn photos. I'm really not kidding when I say that certain photos I take will not show up in this menu until days later, if at all. This app is in my phone. It literally has access to all my files on that device. I have to give it permission to do this when first installed. It's designed to be invasive, and it can't even do that. When FOX NEWS has a more complete picture of a story than you, it's time to rethink every decision in your life, ever, and when you've reduced me to making FOX NEWS jokes to analogize your incompetence, then you've really screwed up.

Speaking of grabbing at straws and not getting the full picture, today was kinda the last straw. I'm sitting in a Steak 'n' Shake, drinking coffee, eating a cinnamon roll, and making sketches in a notebook, as I'm wont to do at least once a week. Another part of this ritual is taking a photo of my setup, a spontaneous still life. Think of it as a kind of creative litmus test; if I can make coffee and pastry look interesting, I must be doing something right. Anyway, I go into Tumblr to post the photo, going through the menu to get to the camera app that otherwise starts up instantly and taking the photo. Normally, after all that, I get the menu where I can add a caption, tags, and all that other stuff before posting fairly quickly to my dashboard. This time, however, I get an error message that it could not save my photo and to try again later.

This is the equivalent of taking the photo out of my hands, throwing it in the cluttered mess of other photos which haven't simply gone missing, and saying, "Maybe it'll show up later."

The sole redeeming factor in this debacle is that while Tumblr lost my photo, my phone didn't. I could see it in my gallery right away (my gallery, not Tumblr's slapdash interpretation of it) and now, several hours later and using the full version of Tumblr, I can post it here by way of my DropBox, which the photo was auto-saved to within minutes of being taken.



And here's another I took without using Tumblr's increasingly lackluster interface (notice the effects filter):



So, what does this mean? Well, it simply means that my more spontaneous uploads of photos will be posted to Twitter instead of Tumblr (and then Twitter because of auto-share). If I end up taking a lot of photos of something, like stages of a cooking project or something, I'll post them here as a set. Granted, it's entirely possible Tumblr will fix this issue in future updates. However, given that it's made two since I started having this problem, I'm not optimistic anymore. At least now, though, it doesn't crash when I try to read notes on posts. 

eBay deBacle (Prologue)

Saturday was awful. It had already been a rough couple of days, so I upgraded my pastry that morning. I added Kahlua to my coffee that night, but that's not exactly an upgrade. The issues with a so-called buyer on eBay had escalated to a breaking point. I wrote of most of it on Tumblr, but I hadn't kept up on it here on Blogger, so this will be a somewhat condensed update. Then, that will be the end of it. I have a case pending, but for all intents and purposes, it's all done and I have to relist an item. 

READY

So, on my Tumblr (and to a lesser extent on my Flickr) I've started this thing of taking pictures of cups of coffee I have when I go out. Sometimes there's an accompanying pastry, but I'm a bit strapped for cash, so only coffee this time. Originally, I was going to post the one photo (on the left), and then later post the other with some comment like, "recharged." That's when I started thinking about the Mega Man games with "Ready" at the start of each level. I don't do as much game-themed artwork as I'd like to, and this seemed like a fun little gag to throw out there, get used to more complex layouts (compared to my normal stuff). 
ENMAX is a reference to Thexder, a really neat old-school platformer from back in the days of Tandy (Radioshack's old internal brand of personal computers). It was developed by Game Arts, best known for the Grandia series of RPGs. Thexder NEO is a remake released on the Playstation Network and what I've been playing more recently to get me in the right mindset for another somewhat gaming-themed work I'll hopefully have up in the next day or two. 

Note: The coffee didn't cost 0.50USD, that's only the tip.

Sunday

This photo was the only time I took out my phone the entire time I sat at the booth. I had my notebook, and sketched out a little stick figure comic I'll clean up later as I waited for my coffee and cinnamon roll. I shouldn't have to fight for moments of peace like this the way it feels like I have been lately.
Gratitude is something I think about a lot and wonder how much thought others give it. There may not be a right or wrong way to think of it, but I wonder what kind of values those people have when they think about it.