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greetingsfromthebottomofthewell · 7 years

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ABANDONED BY DISNEY

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i can only imagine the stress of working at such a park. smiling is painful.

[source] [triggers]

Some of you may have heard that the Disney corporation is responsible for at least one real, "live" Ghost Town.

Disney built the "Treasure Island" resort in Baker's Bay in the Bahamas. It didn't START as a ghost town! Disney's cruise ships would actually stop at the resort and leave tourists there to relax in luxury.

This is a FACT. Look it up.

Disney blew $30,000,000 on the place... yes, thirty million dollars.

Then they abandoned it.

Disney blamed the shallow waters (too shallow for their ships to safely operate) and there was even blame cast on the workers, saying that since they were from the Bahamas, they were too lazy to work a regular schedule.

That's where the factual nature of their story ends. It wasn't because of sand, and it obviously wasn't because "foreigners are lazy". Both are convenient excuses.

No, I sincerely doubt those reasons were legitimate. Why don't I buy the official story?

Because of Mowgli's Palace.

Near the beachside city of Emerald Isle in North Carolina, Disney began construction of "Mowgli's Palace" in the late 1990s. The concept was a Jungle-themed resort with a large, you guessed it, PALACE in the center of the whole thing.

If you're unfamiliar with the character of Mowgli, then you might better remember the story "The Jungle Book". If you haven't seen it anywhere else, you'd know it as the Disney cartoon from decades past.

Mowgli is an abandoned child, in the jungle, essentially raised by animals and simultaneously threatened/pursued by other animals.

Mowgli's Palace was a controversial undertaking from the start. Disney bought up a ton of high-priced land for the project, and there was actually a scandal surrounding some of the purchases. The local Government claimed "eminent domain" on people's homes, then turned around and sold the properties to Disney. At one point a home that had just been constructed was immediately condemned with little to no explanation.

The land grabbed by the Government was supposedly for some fictional highway project. Knowing full well what was going on, people started calling it "Mickey Mouse Highway".

Then there was the concept art. A group of stuffed shirts from Disney Co. actually held a city meeting. They intended to sell everyone on how lucrative this project was going to be for everyone. When they showed the concept art, this gigantic Indian Palace... surrounded by JUNGLE... staffed with men and women in loincloths and tribal gear... well, suffice to say everyone flipped their shit.

We're talking about a large Indian Palace, Jungle, and Loincloths not only in the center of a relatively wealth area, but also a somewhat "xenophobic" area of the southern USA. It was a questionable mix at that point in history.

One member of the crowd tried to storm the stage, but he was quickly subdued by security after he managed to break one of the presentation boards over his knee.

Disney took that community and essentially broke it over its knee, as well. The houses were razed, the land was cleared, and there wasn't a damned thing anyone could do or say about it. Local TV and Newspapers were against the resort at the beginning, but some insane connection between Disney's media holdings and the local venues came into play and their opinions turned on a dime.

So anyway, Treasure Island, the Bahamas. Disney sunk those millions in and then split. The same thing happened with Mowgli's Palace.

Construction was complete. Visitors actually stayed at the resort. The surrounding communities were flooded with traffic and the usual annoyances associated with an influx of lost and irate tourists.

Then it all just stopped.

Disney shut it down and nobody knew what the Hell to think. But they were pretty happy about it. Disney's loss was pretty hilarious and wonderful to a large group of folks who didn't want this in the first place.

I honestly didn't give the place another thought since hearing it closed over a decade ago. I live maybe four hours from Emerald Isle, so really I only heard the rumblings and didn't experience any of it first-hand.

Then I read this article from someone who had explored the Treasure Island resort and posted a whole blog about all the crazy shit he found there. Stuff just... left behind. Things smashed, defaced, probably ruined by the disgruntled former employees who had lost their jobs.

Hell, the locals from all around probably had a hand in wrecking that place. People there felt just as angry about Treasure Island as folks here did about Mowgli's Palace.

Plus there were rumors that Disney had released their aquarium "stock" into the local waters when they closed... including sharks.

Who wouldn't want to take a few swings at some merchandise after that?

Well, what I'm getting at is that this blog about Treasure Island got me thinking. Even though many years had passed since its closing, I figured it might be cool to do some "Urban Exploration" at Mowgli's Palace. Take some photos, write about my experience, and probably see if there was anything I could take home as a memento.

I'm not going to say I wasted no time in getting there, because honestly it took me another year after I first found that Treasure Island article to get around to going up to Emerald Isle.

Over the course of that year, I did a lot of research on the Palace resort... or rather, I tried to.

Naturally, no official Disney site or resource made any mention of the place. That had been scrubbed clean.

Even odder, however, was that nobody before myself had apparently thought to blog about the place or even post a photo. None of the local TV or Newspaper sites had one word about the place, though that was to be expected since they had all swung Disney's way. They wouldn't be out there lauding their embarrassment, you know?

Recently, I learned that corporations can actually ask Google, for example, to remove links from search results... basically for no good reason. Looking back, it's probably not that nobody spoke of the resort, but rather their words were made inaccessible.

So in the end I could barely find the place. All I had to go on was an old-as-hell map I'd received in the mail back in the 90s. It was a promotional item sent out to people who had recently been to Disney world, and I guess since I had been there in the late 80s, that was "recent".

I didn't really intend to hang onto it. It just got shoved in with my books and comics from my childhood. I'd only remembered it months into my research, and even then it took me another few weeks to locate the storage bin my parents had shoved it all into.

But I DID find it. Locals were no help, as most were transplants who had moved to the beach in recent years... or old residents who just sneered at me and made rude gestures the second I managed to say "Where would I find Mowgli's---"

The drive took me through an inordinately long corridor of overgrowth. Tropical plants that had run rampant and overpopulated the area mixed with the native species of flora that actually BELONGED there and had tried to reclaim the land.

I was in awe when I reached the front gates of the resort. Tremendous, monolithic wooden gates whose supports to either side looked like they must've been cut from giant sequoias. The gate itself had been gouged in several places by woodpeckers and eaten away at the base by burrowing insects.

Hanging on the gate was a sheet of metal, some random scrap, with hand-painted letters scrawled in black. "ABANDONED BY DISNEY". Clearly the handiwork of some past local or an employee who wanted to make some small protest.

The gates were open enough to walk through, but not drive, so grabbing my digital camera and the map, whose flip-side showed a layout of the resort, I set off on foot.

The inner grounds of the place were just as overgrown as the entryway. Palm trees stood untended and ragged among piles of their own coconuts. Banana plants similarly stood in their own stinking, bug-riddled refuse. There was this sort of clash between order and chaos, as carefully planted rows of perennial flowers mixed with obnoxious tall weeds and stinking, blackened mushrooms.

All that remained of any outdoor structures were broken, rotting wood and various charred bits of unidentifiable material. What was most likely an information booth or an outdoor bar was now simply a pile of assorted debris chopped up by past vandalism and ravaged by weather.

The most interesting thing on the grounds was a statue of Baloo, the friendly bear from the Jungle Book, which stood in a sort of courtyard in front of the main building. He was frozen in a jovial wave toward no one, staring into empty space with a silly, toothy grin as bird shit covered whole swaths of his "fur" and vines ensnared his platform.

I approached the main building - the PALACE - only to find the outside of the building covered in graffiti where the original paint hadn't peeled and chipped away. The front doors weren't just open, they had been taken off their hinges and were stolen.

Above the front doors, or the gaping maw where they had been, someone had once again painted "ABANDONED BY DISNEY".

I wish I could tell you about all the awesome stuff I saw inside the Palace. Forgotten statues, abandoned cash registers, a full-fledged secret society of homeless bums... but no.

The inside of the building was so stark, so bare, that I actually think people had stolen the molding off the walls. Anything that was too big to steal... counters, desks, giant fake trees... they were all resting amid this empty echo chamber that amplified my every step like a slow rat-a-tat of a machine gun.

I checked the floorplan and headed to all the locations that might seem in any way interesting.

The kitchen was as you'd imagine... an industrial food prep area with all the appliances and space, no expenses spared. Every glass surface was broken, every door knocked off its hinges, every metal surface kicked and dented. The entire place smelled like very old piss.

The huge freezer, not even remotely cool now, had row upon row of empty shelf space. Hooks hung from the ceiling, probably for hanging cuts of meat, and as I stood inside for a moment, I noticed they were swinging.

Each hook swung in a random direction, but their movements were so slow and small that it was almost impossible to see. I figured it had been caused by my footsteps, so I stopped one from swinging by clutching it in my fist, then carefully letting go, but within seconds it started to swing once more.

The bathrooms were in much the same state as the rest of the place. Just like the Treasure Island resort, someone had methodically smashed each porcelain commode with coconuts and other implements. There was about a half inch of rancid, stinking stagnant water on the floor, so I didn't stay there very long.

What's odd is that the toilets and the sinks (and the bidets in the ladies' room, yes I went there) all dripped, leaked, or just ran freely. It seemed to me that they should've shut the water off long, LONG ago.

There were plenty of rooms in the resort, but naturally I didn't have time to look through them all. The few I did peer into were similarly wrecked, and I didn't expect to find anything there. I thought there was actually a television or radio in one room, as I really think I heard a quiet conversation coming out.

Though it was like a whisper, probably my own breathing echoing in the silence, or just another case of the sound of flowing water playing tricks on the mind, this is what it sounded like...

1: "I didn't believe it."

2: (short, unknown reply)

1: "I didn't know that. I didn't know that."

2: "Your father told you."

1: (unknown reply, or possibly just weeping.)

I know, I know, that sounds ridiculous. I'm just telling you what I experienced, why I thought there might've been something running in that room - or worse, some vagrants who had holed up there and probably would've knifed me.

At the front doors of the Palace again, I figured I hadn't found anything of note and had wasted the trip up.

As I looked out the door, I noticed something interesting in the courtyard that I had apparently missed. Something that would give me at least ONE thing to show for all my trouble, even if it was just a photograph.

There as a lifelike statue of a python, maybe eighty feet long, coiled up and "sunning" itself on a pedestal right in the center of the area. It was almost time for the sun to start setting, so the light fell onto the object in the PERFECT way for a photograph.

I approached the python and snapped a photo. Then I stood on my toes and snapped another. I moved closer again to get the detail of its face.

Slowly, casually, the python lifted its head, looked directly into my eyes, turned, and slithered off the pedestal, across the grass, and into the trees.

All eighty feet of it. Its head long disappeared into the woods before its tail even left the sunning spot.

Disney had released all their exotic animals onto the grounds. Right there on my floorplan map was the "Reptile House". I should have known. I'd read about the sharks at Treasure Isle, and I should have KNOWN they'd done this.

I was dumbfounded, just utterly stupefied. My mouth must've been hanging open for the longest time before I came back down to Earth and snapped it shut. I blinked a few times and backed away from where the snake had been, back toward the Palace.

Even though it was totally gone, I still wasn't taking any chances and backed my way into the building.

It took a few deep breaths and slaps to my own face to get myself right in the head again after that.

I looked for a place to sit down, as my legs were feeling a bit like jelly at this point. Of course, there WAS no place to sit down unless I wanted to recline in the broken glass and dead leaf carpet or haul myself up onto a desk of questionably reliability.

I had seen some stairs near the Palace's lobby and decided to go have a seat there until I felt better.

The staircase was far enough away from the front of the building to be relatively clean, save for a startling accumulation of dust. I pulled a wedge of metal off the wall, once again painted with the "ABANDONED BY DISNEY" motto I'd become accustomed to. I placed the wedge on the stairs and sat on it to keep at least somewhat clean.

The stairway led downward, below ground level. Using my camera flash as a sort of improvised flashlight, I could see that the stair case ended in a metal mesh door with a padlock. A sign on the door... a REAL sign... read "MASCOTS ONLY! THANK YOU!".

This perked up my spirits a little bit, for two reasons. One, a Mascots-Only area would have definitely had some interesting stuff back in the day... Two, the padlock was still in place. Nobody had gone down there. Not the vandals, not the looters, nobody.

This was the one place I could actually "explore" and perhaps find something interesting to photograph or wantonly steal. I had come to the Palace essentially agreeing with myself that it was okay to take anything I wanted because - hey - "abandoned".

It didn't take much to bust the lock. Well, actually that's wrong. It didn't take much to bust the metal plate on the wall that the padlock was hooked to. Time and decay had done most of the work for me, and I was able to bend the metal plate enough to pull the screws out of the wall - something nobody else had apparently thought of, or hadn't been able to do at the time.

The Mascots-Only area was a startling and very welcomed change from the rest of the building I'd seen. For one, every second or third fluorescent light overhead was illuminated, even though they flickered and faded randomly. Also, nothing had been stolen or broken, even if age and exposure were definately taking their toll.

Tables had note pads and pens, there were clocks... even a punch-in clock on the wall complete with filled-out time cards. Chairs were scattered around and there was even a small break room with an old, static-filled television and long rotted-out food and drink on the counters.

It was like one of those post-apocalypse movies where everything is left in the state of evacuation.

As I walked the maze-like sub-basement hallways of the Mascots-Only area, the sights just became more and more interesting. As I went further, desks and tables were knocked over, papers scattered and almost melded with the damp floor, and a large carpet of mold was slowly overtaking the real rotting crimson floor-covering.

Everything was just sort of "squishy". Anything wood disintegrated into mush when I applied even the least amount of force, and clothing items hanging on hooks in one of the rooms simply fell to moist threads if I tried to unhook them.

One thing that annoyed me was that the light was becoming more sparse and unreliable as I went further into the dank, suffocating depths of the place.

Eventually, I reached a black and yellow striped door with the words "CHARACTER PREP 1" stenciled on it.

The door wouldn't open at first. I figured this was probably where the costumes were kept, and I definitely wanted a photograph of that twisted, stinking mess. Try as I might, whatever angle or trick I tried, the door wouldn't budge.

That is, until I gave up and started to walk away. That was when there was a slight popping sound and the door creaked open slowly.

Inside, the room was completely dark. Pitch black. I used the camera flash to look for a light switch in the wall by the door, but there was nothing.

As I made my search, I was jarred out of my sense of excitement by a loud electrical buzz. Rows of lights overhead suddenly flashed to life, flickering and fading in and out like the rest I had passed.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust, and it seemed like the light was going to just keep getting brighter until all the bulbs exploded... but just when I thought it would reach that critical stage, the lights dimmed a bit and steadied.

The room was exactly as I had pictured it. Various Disney costumes hung on the walls, fully put together like strange cartoon cadavers hung from invisible nooses.

There was an entire rack of loincloths and "native" clothes on hangers toward the back.

What I found odd, and what I wanted to photograph right away, was a Mickey Mouse costume at the center of the room. Unlike the other costumes, it was lying on its back in the center of the floor like a murder victim. The fur on the costume was rotten and shedding, creating bare patches.

What was even odder, however, was the coloring of the costume. It was like a photo negative of the actual Mickey Mouse. Black where he should be white and white where he should be black. His normally red overalls were light blue.

The sight was off-putting enough that I actually put off photographing the thing until last.

I took a picture of the costumes hanging on the walls. Upward angles, downward angles, side shots to show an entire row of frozen, putrid cartoon faces, some with plastic eyes missing.

Then I decided to stage a shot. Just one of the bedraggled character heads on the slick, grimy floor.

I reached for the headpiece of a Donald Duck costume and carefully removed it so the thing wouldn't fall apart in my hands.

As I looked into the face of the wide-eyed, moldering head, a loud clattering sound made me jump with fright.

I looked down at my feet, and there between my shoes was a human skull. It had fallen out of the mascot head and shattered into pieces at my feet; only the empty face and lower jaw remained, staring up at me.

I dropped the Duck head immediately, as you'd expect, and moved for the door. As I stood in the doorway, I looked back to the skull on the floor.

I had to take a picture of it, you know? I HAD to, for any number of reasons that may seem silly, but only if you don't think it through.

I'd need proof of what happened, especially if Disney was going to somehow make this go away. I had no doubt in my mind, right from the start, that even if it was just gross negligence, Disney was RESPONSIBLE for this.

That's when Mickey, that photo negative, opposite-Mickey in the middle of the floor, started to get up.

First sitting up, then climbing to its feet, the Mickey Mouse costume... or whoever was inside of it, stood there at the center of the room, its fake face just starting directly at me as I mumbled "No..." over and over and over...

With shaking hands, a violently thrashing heart, and legs that had once again turned to jelly, I managed to lift the camera and aim it at the opposite creature now quietly sizing me up.

The digital camera's screen displayed only dead pixels in the shape of the thing. It was a perfect silhouette of the Mickey costume. As the camera moved in my unsteady hands, the dead pixels spread, marring the screen wherever Mickey's outline moved to.

Then the camera died. Went blank and quiet and... broken.

I raised my eyes once again to the Mickey Mouse costume.

"Hey," it said in a hushed, perverted, but perfectly executed Mickey Mouse voice, "Wanna see my head come off?"

It started to pull at its own head, working its clumsy, glove-clad fingers around its neck with clawing, impatient movements similar to a wounded man trying to pull himself free of a predator's jaws...

As it worked its digits into its neck... so much blood...

So much thick, chunky, yellow blood...

I turned away as I heard a sickening tearing of cloth and flesh... only cared about getting away. Above the doorway out of this room, I saw the final message clawed into the metal with bone or fingernails...

"ABANDONED BY GOD"

I never got the pictures out of the camera. I never wrote the blog entry about it. After I ran from that place, fled for my sanity if not my very life, I knew why Disney didn't want anyone to know about this place.

They didn't want anyone like me getting in.

They didn't want anything like that getting out.

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#horror #scary #scary stories #creepypasta #nosleep #abandoned by disney #stories

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maximelebled · 7 years

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2016

Wo-ho-ho-ho there, it's time for my yearly blogpost again.

We all know how bad this year has looked; 2016 is a terrible year, 2016 was the worst year, 2016 this, 2016 that. And really, who could blame anyone for thinking that? But I feel like I'd be doing myself a disservice by focusing too much on the negatives; with our cognitive bias and all that, we tend to forget that the world keeps on getting progressively better and that despite appearances, overall, things are looking... up? Not that we should let our guard down; in fact, more than ever, we need to be aware of each other and look out for each other. The two greatest values you can have, and that you can transmit to other people, going into 2017, are empathy and curiosity.

But anyway, I'm not a skilled writer and other folks will have already said more or less the same thing already, so now it's time to talk about myself again!

Before I do that, though, I would like to give my most heartfelt thanks to the people who have supported me through this year, whether from close circles or from further. I know, it's cliché, but at the same time I feel like people don't realize how much their support means to me, and the true, hidden impact it has had on my life. You know who you are! ♥

I still find writing this blog post to be as oddly awkward as last year, but it's good to let things out, have it all laid out in front of yourself; especially when things keep becoming more of a blur over time. I can't really distinctly remember specific periods from this year as well as 2015, but then again I'm also writing this while coming down from a nasty flu. I've read that things become more of a blur over time the more you age, because you have more of a frame of a reference to go through. That prospect makes me uneasy, but at the same time, I don’t dread it as much as I used to.

2015 was arguably a worse rollercoaster as far as I was concerned, with higher highs but also much lower lows. 2016, smoother ride? Less exciting. Even though from an outside eye it may look more impressive, which feels like a weird contradiction.

In February, I got taken onboard at Nightdive Studios to work on a really cool project: a remake of System Shock. It started out as a 1:1 project (almost like a Doom source port, if you see what I mean?) but eventually the ambitions grew into actually doing a full-fledged reboot. We ended up releasing a "pre-alpha" demo for a Kickstarter that grossed $1.35 million, and people seem to be quite excited, which I'm happy about. I wasn't very happy with my animation work in the demo but since then, I got time to iterate on it and I'm more at peace with it right now. Of course, I wish I could talk more about the project, but I obviously am not in the position to! ;)

It's funky, going from nearly two years of Dota & "cartoonish" animation right into something more AAA-realist, with less stylization, and the transition is a bit hard, but of course, it's a very valuable process to learn how to dial your own style back. I’ve felt that animating kind of goes like this:

At first, you have zero idea what you're doing and everything is super stiff and robotic. Then you learn about follow-through and inertia and you start doing that everywhere because it makes things smooth... too smooth. So then you dial it back... back... oh wait, things are too stiff again! And ultimately, after 15 years of repeating that process, back and forth, you'll probably be an amazing godlike Pixar-worthy animator... when you reach the point of being able to animate stiffness that looks smooth.

Of course, all that is a (relatively humorous) generalization but it's a pattern I've observed in other animators, mostly in the SFM community; their growth in skill over time seemed to have this sort of trend. I think I'm about halfway there... hopefully!

Right now, we’re in the middle of our vertical slice phase. My favourite part of the project is— well, I have quite a few of them, but I wanna say my coworkers are an absolute delight and our lead programmer is a freaking angel. I feel really lucky to be able to work with these people. And that’s gonna sound dumb, but it makes me feel weird that they LIKE ME BACK. But you know, impostor’s syndrome, etc. though that’s gotten better recently. Still, it’s hard to get used to the thought of things like “dude, there are animators from Blizzard who follow you on Twitter, stop doubting yourself for a second”.

youtube

July rolls around, and I decided to participate, again, to The International 2016′s Short Film Contest. This time around, I teamed up with EDJE (Erick Wright) and @zandraart — and I won again. First place! I was legitimately expecting to get third, at best, even though there were people like SirActionSlacks telling me “dude you won already stop worrying”. Unfortunately, my brain was louder than their voices; I remember the night before the results were announced, I couldn’t sleep despite having taken two sleeping pills...

As self-centered as a statement like that may sound, winning three animation contests and having worked on four games eventually ends up drilling in your head that there is no reason to let shitty people influence your brain. I guess it’s a self-esteem thing 😃

This sort of feeling that I was not being myself, forcing myself to not be me, well, it’s gone! And for the first time I’m starting to feel like I got my shit together, even if only just a bit, so that’s relieving.

We did the movie in two weeks again, but I’m not gonna lie, I’m not as happy with it as I was with Enigma’s Exasperation. The execution might be a little stronger but the idea is weaker for the one minute format. But a good thing to remember: it’s fine to not always outdo yourself even if you meant to.

That said, for next year’s contest, I hope I’ll be able to dedicate more time to making the film. I’m hoping they extend the maximum time to 90 seconds and make the prize pool less top-heavy again... but, unfortunately, knowing Valve, I wouldn’t count on it.

Here’s a list of my favourite music albums that I listened to this year:

The Timura Trilogy series of albums by Bjørn Lynne (Wizard of the Winds, Wolves of the Gods, The Gods Awaken)

Fortress by James Hunter USA (bandcamp)

Everything from Nelward

Orange Express (1981) by Sadao Watanabe

Memories in Beach House (1983) from the CBS/Sony Sound Image Series

The Dark Crystal movie soundtrack by Trevor Jones (if you’ve never watched the movie, you should, it is absolutely incredible)

Now onto health... I believe I've mentioned this subject a couple times before. Being a nerd who works from home, I'm subject to many of the sins that come with having a commute consisting of merely walking down the stairs from one's bedroom. The two biggest being 1) a terrible sleep schedule and 2) lack of physical activity.

I use the Sleep as Android app; upon telling it that I'm in bed, it starts using my Pebble smartwatch to track my motions and determine the quality of my sleep, the phases, the cycles, and whatnot. But the most insightful data doesn't even come from that algorithmic tracking; the times for "when I went to bed" and "when I got up" are more telling. Here's a chart of my sleeping times since the beginning of 2015. Each vertical bar represents the sleep of one day.

I've taken the liberty to highlight the time range between 22:00 and 9:00 in the morning, sleeping times that would make you say "yeah, this person is a reasonable adult". As you can see, my sleeping times often didn't fall into that range, and the whole graph has a stripey appearance because my sleeping times keep shifting a little every day, almost like I'm living 25, 26 hour days.

What I love about this graph is that you can definitely see the times when I had to get it together; The International 2015 is very noticeable, with no "stripe" pattern where there would have been three previously.

Here's a zoom on only 2016:

There’s actually a bit of improvement here; the length of the "stripes" keeps growing, and in the middle of some of the stripes, I hang to regular times for longer and longer before slipping away into indecency again. I’m trying my best to keep that progress on the right track. (a track that goes right to my bed)

Now, as for the lack of physical activity. It's very tempting to stock my fridge and then live like a hermit for 3 days, but I've tried to make sure this wouldn't happen. The goal is to not have a single day where I don't move at least a minimum amount of time, unless I have a very good reason to (like illness).

I use the S Health app to passively track my steps; it offers a few fun statistics, and also counts steps onto an additional counter if you've walked fast enough for a certain amount of time, that is to say, at a pace that is considered physical activity. If I were to walk for 1 hour, and during 15 of those minutes, I was at a pace that was above 100 steps a minute (I believe that’s the threshold), it would amount to about 6000 steps, 1500 of which would then be qualifying as "healthy steps".

I took all the average monthly values and put them in this chart:

It's really easy to see on here when my motivation just plummeted post-TI5, after all that terrible stuff I've mentioned before. It took quite a while to shake the depression off. I would consider 3000 steps per day to be the baseline goal, as it amounts roughly to 30 minutes of walking per day. In the latter half of 2016, I managed to reach that goal!

The last thing I wanna talk about, health-wise, is understanding, in my opinion, the two big hidden plagues on ourselves: the first one is sugar, the second one is stress. I saw a very eye-opening documentary on Arte that talked about how cholesterol was made to take the fall for heart disease and whatnot, and sugar is in fact the true culprit — combine that with recent studies showing how it’s, in fact, “similar to drugs”, and it’s easy to see how we’ve come to think it’s harmless but it’s not, much like how we thought cigarettes were good in the 50s. This makes me glad I stopped drinking sodas and eating candy as much as I did four years ago; I’ve largely replaced the drinks by either carbonated water or the stuff that’s light on sugar (both in terms of sugar AND taste).

The second plague is stress. This ties into mental health. I deeply believe that learning how to stay sane and relaxed, as weird as that may sound, is one of the fundamental keys to living well; don’t worry about stuff you can’t control. Of course, that doesn’t mean “be apathetic to the world”. Our cognitive bias makes us focus so much on the negatives that it’s become so hard to perceive the positive side of things. This is gonna sound stupid but I hope you see what I’m trying to get at here: for example, there are really shitty people being all like “I’m gonna run over Black Lives Matter protestors”, stuff like that, and we get outraged at it, and rightly so; but in the process, we forget that it’s a really good positive thing that BLM exists in the first place. You know what I mean? I don’t know how to phrase it. Like I said before, I’m not a skilled writer!

And it’s frustrating, really, to have all these ideas, vague concepts floating around your head; you know what you mean to yourself, but you don’t know how to communicate that to other people. Language, writing, and communication are skills far more important than most people realize!

Anyway, to reiterate what I’ve already said like three times now, it comes down to not worrying about things you can’t control. It’s hard to internalize and it took me years to understand it, but it’s a valuable life lesson.

There are a ton of other little life lessons that I don’t actively think about but which have been super valuable on a day-to-day basis; these are also, for the most part, hard to phrase into coherent words, but the best one would be that it’s okay to be wrong and to make mistakes, but it’s also (even more) okay to admit that you were wrong and that it’s not a personal failing, as in, a failure of you, as a person, to have made a mistake or whatever. I think it’s something that is extremely important to teach people, because it’s part of the entire “be open-minded” package, if that makes sense? It was hard for me to change myself until I realized that admitting that I made mistakes. It’s kind of like the five stages of grief; the first one is acceptance, and you’re not going to make any progress until you go past that...? When you say to someone, “you did something wrong”, or “you made a mistake”, whether it’s moral, personal, professional, whatever, if you don’t have that mindset, that person would perceive it as a personal attack. But to err is human, and errors are not reflections of your moral standing as a person. I guess it comes down to having this distance between... yourself... and what you do? See, here, words fail me again. That said, I hope you see what I’m getting at.

Anyway, that’s it for looking back on this year... here’s a sneak peek at my next big personal project, hopefully to be released in the first trimester of 2017!

#year in review

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hub-pub-bub · 7 years

Photo

Man, something is just off about this dude.

Uh-oh. Eleven Signs You May Have Hired a UX Hack

by Colin Eagan

"What data informed your design decision to wear that scarf?"

Oh, hey client. Look I get it. Being a client is hard. You didn't learn how to prepare for this in client school. You have to make hiring decisions to supplement your team's digital expertise, and it's difficult to know who's good or bad. Even for design roles. Especially for design roles. As opposed to other areas of your business, it's just more difficult to know what you're getting for your money. So you hired this guy (headshot above) on a short-term consulting basis. I mean, I guess he's ok. He's from a big name agency. He seems to understand Millennials, or whatever. But something is just off.

Well, you've heard it said here before that UX (User Experience) is like playing bass guitar: easy to do poorly, and really hard to do well. Here are some signs he may be selling you UX snake oil.

1. He asks you if you "like" the new design direction.

He's so polite! But this is the wrong question. You don't need to like the design. The design needs to further a set of principles that we agree will add value for our users and achieve our business objectives. Liking it has nothing to do with it. Here are some alternative questions that I just this moment pulled out of my butt, any of which would be a significantly better way to phrase this:

BETTER QUESTIONS THAN WHAT THIS GUY ASKED

Do you agree with my prioritization of elements on this page?

Does this design achieve our "mission critical" business and user goals?

Does the design "speak for itself?" Is it intuitive enough to the un-aided user?

Does the design include the appropriate redundancies?

Will this design hold up under our list of failure scenarios?

Does the design meet our established accessibility standards?

How can we make this design better?

But he didn't ask you any of that. This guy really seems to think he's an artist or something. He needs to read Mike Monteiro's Dear Design Student. After all, an artist is just a designer without a job.

After all, an artist is just a designer without a job.

2. He doesn't immediately ask about your customer service team.

I can't believe we have to say this: customer service teams are the best freakin' source of user information! They are the un-sung heroes dealing with your users on a daily basis. They get to hear what everyone hates about your current website, mobile app, web app, etc. And yet they are always taken for granted. This guy didn't bother to ask about them because, a) it didn't even cross his mind, or b) he thinks it's somehow beneath his job as "designer." Ew, call centers. They probably have florescent lights, and crumbs. Design is something to be handed down from on high by a 20-something wearing leather elbow pads.

Ew, call centers. They probably have florescent lights, and crumbs.

3. He gets really defensive about his work.

A good UX person makes his or her money in the design process, not the design delivery. This means working iteratively with the team to scrap what doesn't work and improve, quickly. But this guy is already getting super defensive about this comp he's showing us, and we're only five minutes into this friggin' meeting. UX people should absolutely push back on clients to help make the work better -- that's what we're getting paid for -- but it's a warning sign if every discussion turns into an ego feud. This guy kept telling us at lunch how he only reads real Americana like O'Connor and Faulkner, but I guess he missed the advice to "kill your darlings."

A good UX person makes his or her money in the design process, not the design delivery.

4. He legitimately seems to think that he's designing for someone just like him.

Wait, what? This dude's world-view is somewhat myopic. He keeps talking about how this will look killer on retina devices, but we know from the research that most of our users are older generation who may still use flip phones. (Is that embarrassing to admit?) We could see if this guy's boss has a broader perspective, but he's actually just like this guy, only ten years in the future. Probably too much to ask given that only 3% of creative directors are female, despite the fact that 73% of consumer purchasing decisions are made by women, $20 trillion of the world’s annual spending. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for that disparity that we just don't understand because we're not creatives. Humm.

5. He wears a scarf to business meetings that are clearly taking place indoors.

Just throwing this one out there since we're all thinking it. What data informed your design decision to wear that scarf? Yes, it's October, but it's still 80 degrees outside. And furthermore, this conference room is definitely located on the interior of the building. Now, I can much better understand my female co-worker's decision to wear a scarf, as she is legitimately always freezing, since, among all the other shit women still have to deal with in the workplace, air conditioning standards are based on male metabolism. But this guy has no freaking excuse. God, he is just the worst.

This conference room is definitely located on the interior of the building.

6. He tells you his design is good because it is really "clean."

Oh boy here we go. Nope, that's not a thing. The layout may be better with more white-space and fewer words and visuals, but it's not a good design just because you think it looks better. Removing content for the sake of your design aesthetic is a terrible principle.

This guy really needs to review all the research coming out on content density. It confirms what the rest of us have been thinking for years now, that the move toward large-format, poster-style layouts has come at a cost, namely less information delivered to the end-user per second invested. You know this from all those websites that drive you nuts when you have to scroll for thirteen minutes to find half as many words. Oh shit, this guy designed those sites too, didn't he. Well that just figures.

7. He keeps using words like "cultural zeitgeist" or some garbage.

Oh really, this design of yours with three boxes and a stock photo taps into the Millennial cultural zeitgeist? What the actual f*ck, dude. We're designing websites and applications here, not 19th century German philosophical treatises. Who do you think you are anyway, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel? Well do you know the one thing he was bad at? Designing websites. He didn't even have an iPhone. Yes, we understand that any good UX strategy must take into account the larger brand vision and where it fits into culture and the universe. Vision is important. But the reality is the rest of us have to spend the next four to six months actually building this thing. So let's please focus at least a little bit on tangible goals, not impressive sounding phrases.

Who do you think you are anyway, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

8. He complains the design would have been better if you had just let him use Photoshop / InVision / etc.

Would it have? You will deliver the design in whichever format the client tells you to deliver the design. Do you have any idea how much shit I've had to design in PowerPoint? While it's convenient to pretend everyone lives in an all-Mac, pixel perfect universe, the reality is 90% of US corporations still run on Windows (48% of them on [gasp] Windows 7!) It is your job as a consultant to ensure that your work can live on once you pass it over to the business team. That's not to say you should let technology limit you. By all means, concept in the tool you're most comfortable with or is most appropriate to the design challenge. But when you get ready to hand it off, it had better be a file the client can, you know, open.

Do you have any idea how much shit I've had to design in PowerPoint?

9. He says "I'm not a writer."

Well, that's decidedly not encouraging. We're not claiming that everyone needs to be a professional copywriter for a living, but designers should be able to write and writers should be able to design, or at the absolute least have a healthy appreciation for it. Even if it's something as basic as writing an email to help clarify a design choice, designers need to be able to write. Please don't say "I'm an art director so I let someone else worry about the content." We live in a content-first world, bro. You need to start taking yourself seriously as a writer. Research, write blog posts, whatever. It will make your designs better. Steve Jobs himself said that the future of design lives at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Oh, you have his biography on your bedside table? No shit.

We live in a content-first world, bro.

10. He spends more time talking than listening.

He likes to talk, that's for sure. Actually he won't stop talking. But he really hasn't asked you all that many clarifying questions, nor does he really seem to care about your ideas. Granted, he looks in the general direction of your mouth while you're speaking, which is nice, but then he just says what he was going to say anyway. We understand that his time is super-valuable and all, but it would be nice if he at least made a small effort to treat his clients differently than, you know, his Tinder dates.

11. He tells you that you really need to be more like Snapchat, Facebook or Google.

No, you don't. This is not the best use of your time. Your homepage should not just be a single search box because Google does it and everyone loves Google. That small, prolific handful of tech companies is entirely in a separate category. While you should absolutely consider tactical matters related to these sites (e.g. SEO strategy for Google, social strategy for Facebook), and perhaps broader research on the effects these sites have on user expectations overall, it's a sign of design immaturity if someone is lecturing you on how sweet Pinterest is. You're much better served learning from leaders in your industry who have already taken lumps designing for your specific audience.

I'm sure some of those sites are really "clean" as well.

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Colin Eagan is Principal for Experience Design at ICF Olson in Washington, D.C., where he consults for clients including Liberty Mutual, Lowe's, AAA, Department of the Interior (DOI) and Depart of Energy (DOE). He is a frequent contributor to UX conferences and publications, including UXPA International, IA Summit, A List Apart, Ad Age, and The UX Booth. He credits any career success thus far to not going to law school.

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Citations / Further Reading: Inspiration for this article provided by Mr. Autumn Man, Terrible Creative Directors, and real life.

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