Sunday Hangover: Untrasparency

It’s time for a return of the light-hearted, so put your hands together for the return of the inevitably sober Sunday Hangover!

Thank you, thank you.

As I try to find out when exactly I’m going to get the results for my university course this year it’s striking me that it’s really hard to find anything on the NTU site that’s not there for purposes of marketing. I’m sure it’s not just my university, I’ve had trouble with quite a few websites in this category trying to find out a specific piece of information and only coming up with smiling interracial groups having the time of their lives and hoping that I will too.

Well that’s all well and good, but when do I find out if I passed or not? Surely that should be the question you’re answering, seeing as it’s part of your schedule and it’s buried so deeply into your shockwave-infested site that it’s about as easy to dig up as the centre of the earth.

Perhaps if these websites were to actually answer the questions all its visitors wanted it would get the students and therefore money that it so shamelessly begs for; because to be honest, nobody really falls for those images, we all know that humanity’s a mixture of likable people, bearable people and utter arseholes, and until you’ve met every one of them you have no idea what category these international strangers are going to fit into.

Because no matter how many different races you proudly display, they are all still equally likely to be tossers, although probably 99% of all the people I’ve ever disliked have been white people. It might be because there are just more of us around in this country, or it might be because the European gene pool carries the molecular coding for penises to end up on peoples’ foreheads instead of their crotches.

ht(f)ml

So I was going to build on a useful comment someone sent me today, not one that I am inclined to go through and point out where they’re wrong, one that pointed me to a quite interesting website actually.

However, I sense this one will take a lot more time and effort than I am willing to give while still technically on holiday, however, something I did notice about this website as I scrolled through it, is that its website design is the kind of work that makes you cringe at the genericness and the obvious lack of photoshop/fireworks etc. skills that the team behind it obviously had.

And when I made this observation I realised I was already judging the website based on this fact, rather than the fact that it’s claims are close to criminal in their scope, something was wrong.

We in the age of the internet seem to have come to what I’d like to start referring to as the ‘time cube guy assumption’.

Take for example… I don’t know, time cube guy.

The time cube website (I’m sure everyone and their mother has seen it) was an atrocity. If you don’t believe me, , it’s pretty appalling.

This is probably the most extreme example of what a psychopath can do when presented with a beginners guide to html, and the claims that this guy makes are hilarious, it’s almost hard to imagine someone taking this seriously, and yet it happens.

But this does not mean all websites that do not use some sort of attractive template are akin to this.

In fact in my time I’ve come across many very useful websites that have been poorly set up attractiveness wise.

Others, such as Mike Adams’ natural news, are really nicely designed and the most atrocious abusers of the internet to date.

There’s just no real correlation, and yet he is here with me.

Confirmation bias, my old friend.

Why do you continue to pursue me and force me to make a hypocrite of myself.

Never make assumptions, think for yourself, don’t judge before you’ve seen the crap, judge when you see the crap, be smarter than me.