I Am Lucifer, the Devil, AMA

"Which of your many accomplishments are you most proud of?"

The idea that once your body is done growing, so is your mind.

"Wait, when is our minds done growing?"

You were never meant to be done growing, learning, examining. But you could be persuaded to give it up.

#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

My stance on the current trend of using The Lesser Key of Solomon at work and in one's personal life:

1. There's no evidence these evil spirits really are the 72 princes mentioned in The Lesser Key (and their innumerable minions). They only started telling us their "names" after someone incorporated the text of Ars Goetia in a (poorly-worded) binding ritual.

2. There's also no evidence that anyone's binding rituals actually work. It's always the same thing: Belial is asked to clean someone's house but burns it down instead and then everyone blames the binding ritual, summoning circle, wand, chalice, etc.

3. While most wizards report that making dark pacts with imps improves their spell-casting ability there are plenty of other familiars that are safer and more trustworthy.

4. There's a trend of reassuring people about this by asking spirits like Asmodeus the Prince of Lies if they are being truthful. This feels naive at best and actively malicious at worst.

5. It's not clear to me that risking your immortal soul to make your boss a bit richer is a good idea, to say nothing of risking your immortal soul to do a better job keeping up with email.

6. Just because everyone else has already torn innumerable holes in reality and brought forth legions of demons into our universe does not change my own feelings about it, though it certainly motivates a heightened level of interest in exorcisms and abjuration magic.

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer