Although we’re officially into the new year, and the time for countdowns is behind us, there was one last Top 5 list that I wanted to share.
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And–spoiler alert–that is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
J.K. Kidding! Before I present it to you, further ado is in order.
I promise that this is indeed a Top 5 list. However, since apparently I have zero ability to keep things short and simple, I decided to break it up into two posts out of respect for the Dear Reader’s time.
This week I present to you The Evens (#4 & #2)–be looking for The Odds (#5, #3, & #1) next week!
#4. That time I pretended I could time-travel.
No, I’m not talking about the time I took artistic liberties with a personal narrative in A Degenerate Family Christmas. This really happened–sadly much more boring, though.
You may have noticed at the end of many of my posts a time-stamp indicating when I actually created the content. For example:
Content created on: 23 October 2019 (Wednesday)
WordPress has many handy bits of code to make it much easier to efficiently build websites, one of them being “Reusable” blocks as seen here:
So of course I thought this would be perfect for always dropping the content’s creation date at the end of my blog, with the same formatting, etc. and only changing the date(s) as appropriate.
Every time I created a new post, I would add the “Content_creation_tag” block at the end and change the dates. Easy-peasy, done and done! Right?
It wasn’t until late October and after publishing 4 months worth of posts that I noticed something odd in an older post:
So…I guess a future me somehow wrote the post on the 23rd and sent it 3 days back in time to be published on the 20th? Wow. Sometimes I even impress myself.
But it turns out that’s only the beginning of my time-travel skillz:
BOOM! I can send information back at least 10 days in time. Ironclad proof, right here, ladies & gentlemen!
Upon closer inspection, it appears this is a skill I only developed exclusively for the month of October:
Poop. I really thought I had something special going there.
I’m J.K. Kidding of course–I don’t really believe I was able to manipulate the laws of physics so stupendously.
What it looks like is that my usage of the Reusable block–and ergo, these shenanigans–only started in the beginning of October. Though I could have sworn that I had been using them much longer than that…I’m starting to feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Obviously what was happening was that every time I updated that block with the creation date of a new post, it would retroactively update the older instances in the previous posts with that same date.
The bad news is the original dates were lost in the process (not that it matters that much), and I’ve been way to swamped with more important things to try to go back and correct this one stupid little detail.
The good news is that in putting together this post I discovered that Google’s all-seeing eye still remembers those posts as they were in their heydays:
But wait…
Arrrgggg. ----- this shit. I know for a fact that that is not accurate information for that post (which when visited, of course, says 23 October).
For the record, I’m basically live-blogging my research here, so you’re getting to see my sanity ----- with by technology in real time–again.
I give up.
This whole “content created” baloney is soooo asinine. I’m done wasting your time and mine on it.
Moving on, then…
#2: That time I tried to censor the contracted form of the F-bomb.
All y’all long-time readers of the Point know that swearing and the self-censoring thereof is a central theme around here.1See, for example: The Alpine Stranger and/or Hello, Mother F*ckers! For the sake of expediency, I have been using a WordPress “Censorship” plugin that will take a list of black-listed potty words, and then any time they show up in a post or comment, those words are replaced with dashes (i.e. something like “- – – -” will show up in place of the world-famous f-bomb).
In theory, this approach would allow me to change how the blog is censored in the future–or to turn it off all together–without having to edit every ----- post I’ve ever written. Also, it let’s me cuss to my heart’s content when writing, while minimizing the number of minor strokes my dearest mother experiences when reading my handiwork. Everybody wins, right?
Anyways, the Censorship plugin doesn’t quite always do its job. There is one particular off-the-rails example that I need to show you, because the absurdity only happens behind the scenes.
I believe it was when putting together A Pound Casual Asshat that I felt particularly compelled to write:
If all that seems like an atypically optimistic outlook coming from yours truly, then I applaud your keen sense of What the Fuck’s Up (emphasis added).
A Pound Casual Asshat (2019)
As of this writing, you should be able to see an uncensored version of the f-bomb.2There is an off chance that I’ve implemented my own censorship plugin by the time you’re reading this, in which case it may be properly censored.
And before that, included in my original batch of posts, was A Most Excellent Life Lesson, in which I employed the classic possessive form of the f-bomb:
Oh, for fuck’s sake people…CONTEXT! (again, emphasis added)
A Most Excellent Life Lesson (2019)
Well, interestingly enough, for the life of me, I could not get Censorship to detect and censor “fuck’s”.
Mom, I feel like you deserve to know how valiantly and bravely I wrestled the machine to try to protect you.
For those of you with a bit of coding/computer science background, you may know that the humble apostrophe–aka a single quote–is often a special character which is interpreted as signifying the beginning or end of some exactly quoted text, as opposed to be taken literally as an apostrophe that should appear in the text.
In most cases, special characters can be made literal–as I needed in this situation–by putting a so-called “escape character” before it. This is typically a backslash (“\”).
So when Censorship didn’t bleep out “fuck’s” after I had add it to the blacklist, I tried escaping the apostrophe, and thus typed into the software as “fuck\’s” (without the double quotes).
When that didn’t work, I added several variations, hoping to empirically find something that would work and spare my poor mother’s eyes of beholding the horror of “fuck’s.”
Well, something in the Censorship code tells it re-process all the potty words every time one is added. Each time it does this, it tries to be smart and add an escape character in front of any special characters it finds.
Guess what? The backslash is also a special character–it is the escape character, after all. Pretty ----- special, I would say.
The best part is that it has no way to know which backslashes it had automatically inserted the last time a word was added to the list. Therefore, each time it doubles (at least) the number of ----- backslashes it thinks it needs to look for.
Let me just show you how ----- out-of-hand it has gotten–just consider the fact that I had to take two screenshots and then turn them on their sides just to present the following to you in any comprehensible manner:
That’s 256 backslashes in the longest instance, for those of you keeping score at home.
I’m pretty sure if I add just a few more words to this list, that that initial instance of “fuck’s” will break my entire website…
Actually, according to my math, if I add 12 words, that “fuck’s” alone will be 1 MB, and 10 more words after that it will be 1 GB.3Uncompressed–this particular type of information can be compressed with almost infinite efficiency. Another 10 words and the Censorship code running on the server hosting this website will attempt to compare a 1 TB (1000 GB) string against every word of every post it loads. OOF, Le OOF.
In America, you censor “fuck’s,” but in Soviet Russia4I wrote whole post on this topic: In Soviet Russia. Read it today! the Censor ----- you.
Wait, wait, that’s not how the joke is supposed to go…
…but in Soviet Russia “fuck’s” censors you.
Screw it–they’re both accurate descriptions.
My inner Yakov Smirnoff going off on a tangent
Don’t forgot to tune in next week as we hit #5, #3, and, of course, #1!
Content created on: 3/4 January 2020 (Friday/Saturday)
Footnotes & References:
Ok, you wrestled the machine to protect me, but I think that paragraph would have sounded better if there had been more spaces between the end of the —-word sentence & the beginning of the next sentence which starts “Mom”? I would have felt more comfortable. The auto correct wasn’t working that day I’m guessing. Xo
Hello, Mother.
So…just split that into 2 separate paragraphs? If that’s what you meant, consider it done! If that’s not what you meant, then you’ll need to explain it differently.