4 ms·

It was a nice read, but the screenplay delivery added a lot of confusion that I felt detracted from the point of the actual message. Maybe if it hadn't been so

• tptacek 17y ago
  So I wrote out a straight prose version of this post, and even after a second draft it came out 40% longer and as dry and dense as melba toast. But I actually kind of agree (at the very least, it's visually noisier than the prose wall of text). There's a backstory to this; I haven't blogged in almost a year, and my most infamous blog post from before that was also a screenplay, so doing this post in this style was also an in-joke: http://www.matasano.com/log/248/metafuzzing/ http://www.matasano.com/log/248/metafuzzing/ (This post is funnier than today's post). I'm sure you're glad you know this now.
  • tdonia 17y ago
    great post. on the readability - i think the screenplay makes it more approachable but the visual formatting makes it rather hard to read. It seems like the slightly shortened, indented lines that run into the hard vertical line on the right, combined with the center aligned names, disrupts the eye flow. my eyes are drawn immediately to the center/end of line because that's where the most tension is but that's not where the line begins. i found the hex dumps to be the easiest part for my eyes to latch on to because it felt consistent. all that is a long way of saying, in spite of the visual formatting, it's a very interesting article. and personally, i think the the screenplay itself works.
    • tptacek 17y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I thought the same thing; I think I'll mod my hacked-up version of Markdown to dim the center lines.