Perversiontracker: The Review Process, as told by Henry David Thoreau

Before yet any cat or dust bunny had run across my keyboard, or the sun had got above the protective shield, while all the dew was on, though the adults warned me against it — I would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on — I began to test the latest crap off VT in preparation for review. Early in the morning I worked buff, squabbling like an epileptic fencer with the haughty software, but later in the day the sun blistered my neck. There the sun lighted me to write this entry, slowly pacing backward and forward through the yellow gravelly interface, between the well-concealed REALbasic warts, 15 rods of them, the one end being simply visual glitches, the other in a field of loathsome spits and sparks. Ignoring the pustules, I attempted to put clean words around the roots, yet failed, instead opting for this cheap cop-out, making the black heart of crappy software express its summer thought in useless beauty, and blossoms rather than in wormy features and diaper and galoot frass, making the developer community say good software instead of fecal matter — this was my daily work. As I had little aid from grammar checkers, or hired editors and proofreaders, or improved knowledge of English, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my entry than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very vocabulum laboriosus was I to web surfers bound upward through MacSlash and Crazy Apple Rumors to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in Aerons, with elbows on rests, and mouse loosely underhand; I the home-staying, laborious native of the Web. But soon my website was out of their sight and thought. It was the only funny and cultivated site for a great distance, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man running the site heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: “This ‘new’ writer stinks! I don’t get the joke! where are the archives? they were funny, these are not!” ‘Tis the good surfer that makes the good review; a good head cannot read amiss: in every review he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear — for I continued to write when others had begun to post their poorly worded tripe — the timorous Windows IE 6 user had not suspected it. “Crappy software, my boy, for humor fodder; crap for fodder.” “You are suddenly less funny!” “Does he know his writing sucks?” asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured web surfer reins up his grateful Netscape 4 to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the review, and recommends a little more ribald software, or any little waste stuff, or it may be Python or Pop Culture. But here was a lengthy essay, and only a sparse mention of the software — there being an aversion to actual evaluation of software — “Explain the program! this is no help at all!” they said. Fellow-surfers as they cruised by compared it aloud with the sites which they had passed, so that I came to know how I stood in the Mac Humor world. This was one site not in Low End Mac’s survey, for it had not existed through a survey period. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the software which the teenagers of the world yield in the still wilder fields of open-source crap? The shareware software is carefully weighed, the features calculated, the speed and the ease of use; but in all dells and pond-holes in the web and swamps grows a rich and various variety of application only unreaped by MacUpdate users. My site was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated expanses of software; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my site was, though not in a bad sense, a confusing slough of styles and content. They were softwares cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state, that of obscurity, that I cultivated, and my keyboard played the Rans des Vaches for them.