Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: It all started with Pip and Estella

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Mike Peterson Published: March 30, 2012 1 minute 0 comments

So say we all, Your Highness.

And well-timed, as Facebook today enacts the mandate that a graphic system which worked just fine must now be replaced by one that does not.

One of the challenges in the on-line world is leaving things alone. It was easy in the days of print and other "hard media": The thing was done. Move on. Think of something new.

With the notable, lamentable and frequently-mocked exception of George Lucas, people accepted that what was done was done.

Even earlier in the process, you had to really think over a change.

For instance, if you finally had your finished draft of The Great American Novel ready to go off to the publisher, but decided that "Bob" should probably be "Fred," you'd have to ask yourself if it were really worth re-typing the whole damn thing.

Then, when you finished, you'd read it over and realize that, on page 183, Eleanor still says, "And yet, I never really loved Bob." Which had become a non sequitur.

Today, "search and replace" makes it easy, though you may find that Eleanor's revelation on page 183 was so stunning that Marie could only fred her head in response.

Some writers who first published their fiction in serial form would revise the work before bringing it out in book form, the most obvious example being Dickens, who destroyed the original, bittersweet ending of "Great Expectations" on the advice of Edward Bullwer-Lytton, who is remembered today as the originator of the phrase, "It was a dark and stormy night," and the namesake of a contest to create purposely horrible writing.

And, in smaller circles, as the guy who screwed up "Great Expectations."

Today, fussing with stuff is part of the process. And "development" is fine, if you're talking about taking Madden from an overhead view of colored dots on a grid to a simulated game that is nearly indistinguishable from reality.

But the first computer version of Monopoly featured the standard board view and the big improvement was the automated banker — computerization edited out the dead spots in the game.

Then they "improved" the graphics so that you not only had a street-view but that, for instance, the horse would rear and whinney, run the number of spaces rolled, and then rear and whinney again. And the first time you saw it, it was fun.

But when it happened on every roll of the dice, it was like playing with the most annoying nine-year-olds in the world.

Granted that annoying behavior is a well-established part of Monopoly.

And maybe I'm not typical. I see the "deleted scenes" from films on DVDs and my usual response is "Good call." "Pulp Fiction" was a very tight, well-edited flick in part because they cut out five minutes of pointless conversation between Julia Sweeney and Harvey Keitel. 

Or maybe it was two minutes. Watching it felt like half an hour.

In the case of the Facebook Timeline, the irresistable urge to tinker runs smack into the inability to analyze graphic content, and the result is an irredeemable mess not unlike the Food Pyramid.

The pyramid began like this:

The base of a good diet is carbs, with vegetables and fruit a smaller but still essential element, and dairy and meat an even smaller part, and then fats, oils and sweets being the smallest part and not really "supporting" anything. It's obvious you could remove them without affecting what remains.

But then they improved it to this:

This demonstrates the important principle that you need exercise and that, the more you work out, the less you will eat, until you achieve perfect health and stop eating entirely.

This is where we're at with Facebook: We've taken something that worked and turned it into something more colorful that doesn't work and that, in fact, is gibberish.

And for some reason (which may have to do with someone noting the gibberish factor in the improved pyramid) the USDA has now gone to this:

This continues to downplay the priority of grains and other carbs, adds a lot of vagueness as to what makes up "protein" and eliminates the diverse ways in which dairy products can be consumed.

And someone noted that it suggests a fully loaded plate, which, even with good choices, is not necessarily a laudable goal.

But it's not total nonsense anymore. I'll give'em that.

And it leads to the comforting notion that, as we speak, people at Facebook are thinking, "Okay, we've finished rolling out the Timeline. How can we screw it up?"

Whatever they come up with is bound to be an improvement.