Once more we gaze into the abyss - figuratively and literally, as Ruby's decided once again that the very first frame of her video needs to be the nightmarish image of her psychotically staring at you, mouth wide open like a snake trying to dislocate its jaw to consume its prey.
"Hello, it's Roobee and today I am sooo excited tyoo bee sharing with yoo the yaahly planner for twentee twentee tyoo," Ruby says, as her dog immediately starts wailing and barking in anguish in the background.
I've consulted canine linguistics experts and they've translated this dog's panicked cries for me:
"Not again! I thought she'd buggered off to uni?" the dog asks. "Why does she keep coming back every three days to subject us to this loud, rambling madness?!"
Ruby has previously argued that of
course she prioritises aesthetics in videos over substance, since you need to make videos aesthetically pleasing. So this distracting anguished dog wailing was apparently a professional, aesthetic choice, rather than an act of sheer laziness from someone who simply could not be bothered to film a second take despite months of opportunity to plan and film. Or, y'know, stay at uni and film in a house with no barking dogs, rather than running home to film in a constantly noisy environment.
"Somehow this is the fourth planner that we've released," Ruby says with tired, glassy-eyes while once again pinching the air like a disgruntled Italian chef.
Four planners is not counting all the faulty variants that customers have been forced to return, like the ones with jumbled, out-of-order months, or the 'September Who? We Need to Skip Straight to October Because I Love October! Special Edition', which was missing an entire month. Coming soon: "Yearly Planner: Oops, all Januaries! Edition."
"I'm
syo, syo happy with how it
tahned out," Ruby says as the speech centre of her brain is eroded by ongoing stupidity, like a coastline being forced to recede by unrelenting ocean waves.
Translation: "I can't believe you morons are still paying money for this trash! I just keep releasing the same overpriced, low-effort, cheaply-made, poor quality garbage and you keep falling for it every year!"
Her dog evidently has no patience for this bullshit, either, as it keeps barking through this entire segment until Ruby likely cut, went to yell at her parents for not stopping their dog from acting like a dog, then came back to not bother rerecording anything. Aesthetics, y'all!
Ruby shows off some recycled footage of her old academic planner, where she proves once again that she has no idea what "admin" means (apparently "washing up" is a business-related administration task now and not just an everyday household chore) and has apparently invented her own written language (it's Monday, don't forget to "organue yookjueit" and "finlon reaaing hoou lol pieajure"!)
She claims that this yearly planner is similar, but different to the academic planner, because the academic one is designed around studying. Y'know, with those important study-related things, like an entire section for your morning and night routine, and a place to remind yourself what your favourite movies are.
The yearly planner, however, is designed for "life planning" and will be more useful, Ruby says, if you're
not in education. Because in Ruby's mind, if you're a student, things like social events, fun non-academic plans and generally having a life are strictly off the table. You can either be a student, or have a life. The two are apparently mutually exclusive. And rather than research the needs of everyday students and design a single planner that catered to a balanced student life, Ruby milked two equally
crappy planners out of this thing.
Ruby says she prefers the yearly planner for herself, because
of course the one she's advertising is going to be her current pretend favourite. But she says she still uses both, and claims she usually just switches between the two.
It's likely just lies, of course, but either way, not a single person should be using Ruby as someone to emulate when it comes to planning and organisation when she's claiming to use two annual planners concurrently alongside all her other pointless planning platforms like Notion.
How often does Ruby claims she's having to finish things last minute, or has forgotten the room for her seminar and shown up to the wrong one, or forgot to plan for something like buying a book? She's an unbridled shitshow of disorganisation, and her inability to consolidate all her redundant planning systems into one is only part of the problem.
Ruby lies and says she can't even believe the planner is finally being released, since so much time and planning has gone into getting it ready. You can tell by the fact that the cover and general design is identical to the academic planner released months ago, and all that's changed is the title of some sections in the master design document.
(Before and after months and months of hard work.)
Ruby raves that this planner has a "cel-ass-tial" design, and she loves all of the "star deedles" on the cover.
You can't see it in the video, possibly due to YouTube's compression, but I believe this mention of "star deedles" is a surprise reveal that there'll be mini holographic images of the late, great Paul Walker hidden on the cover to pay tribute to his obscure 1998 Disney movie:
Ruby mentions the ribbon, because she's still got 1,331 overpriced ribbons to somehow get rid of after her ordering far too many last time and only selling a few hundred. She says you can easily just tie the ribbon to the wiring of the planner, which doesn't look cheap and unprofessional at all. Most planners with bookmark ribbons tend to have them built into the spine and not charge £6 extra for them, but anyway...
Onto the first page, which contains a mission statement from Ruby and is not at all a waste of paper.
And it's definitely not the exact same text that she's put in every single planner to avoid additional work, with the only difference being the illustrations. And those images definitely weren't just grabbed from free image service FreePik.com and that totally isn't why FreePik are included in the copyright section. None of those things are true at all! (
Psst! They're all absolutely true.)
(Pictured: The last yearly planner, which is not at all nearly identical to the new one.)
The recycled mission statement claims that Ruby designed this planner from the ground up because she was tired of using multiple planners and decided to consolidate everything anyone could need into one handy planner. Which is why she still apparently needs to use two concurrent annual planners, Notion, to-do lists, and various additional trackers. It's also why she sells a To-Do List, a Mini-Master To-Do List, a Meal Planner, a Stress Tracker, a Kindness Journal, and so on.
At least the opening statement is on-brand for Ruby - it's full of blatant lies and bullshit embellishments.
Moving on to the 'About Me' section, Ruby says she usually gets bored filling out this part if it just has the bare minimum of 'Name' and 'Address' in it.
Not content with having this section be a clear, functional section with basic info for someone to locate you if you leave the planner on a bus or in a class, Ruby has opted to turn the 'About Me' section into a weird amalgam of a Buzzfeed quiz and a letter to Santa:
If anyone does find this lost planner, they're very likely to toss it in a river after seeing that the insufferable owner is pretentious enough to use five different superficial aesthetics to characterise their entire identity. Again, this planner was designed for Ruby, by Ruby, and precious few other people are going to see much value in this nonsense. Only Ruby needs to be reminded of the many things she's pretending to be or like.
Ruby has filled hers out with inane nonsense and lies.
Her favourite things are random acts of kindness, like randomly subjecting impressionable or vulnerable fans to endless, toxic content and refusing to acknowledge it or change when faced with a deluge of concerned comments. (See also: Ruby being 'Grateful For' support online, despite providing none to the people commenting asking her to
please stop posting blatant ED-baiting content and deleting concerned comments.) Or random acts of kindness like taking money from multiple charities and lying constantly to avoid giving it back.
She's grateful for her body, which she's absolutely destroying through malnourishment and unsafe exercise routines.
She's put her family fourth on the list of five favourite things, to show how independent she is, despite running home or dragging her parents to see her at least once a week, writing them daily letters, and generally being unable to cope away from them for more than seven days.
She's a self-proclaimed bookworm, but has grouped books with rain, tea, candles as one combined aesthetic - she doesn't enjoy reading, she enjoys the superficial appearance of being a bookworm.
She's looking forward to her family holiday after graduation, as opposed to the weekly family holidays that make up her academic year.
She's also looking forward to fully dedicating herself to her dissertation, despite still having no clear, relevant ideas for it.
Onto the contents page, and Ruby once again mentions how much she loves the "little star deedles" at the top of the page (#RIPPaul).
The contents page is a confusing mess of pointless and/or irrelevant sections and topics, but perhaps their relevance will make sense later when Ruby explains them in detail...
Yet again, there's an entire section for morning and night routines for some reason.
And why dump your bucket list section in September (or include one at all)? Is September the month for pondering your mortality, and the grim spectre of death edging ever closer? I thought that was more of a late October kind of vibe?
There's an "add-rasses" section now, where Ruby pretends she knows more than six people and that half the people she knows don't live in her family home. And despite her obsessing over her many Victorian-inspired affectations and letter-writing fetishism, she still hasn't mastered the art of not making wax seals look like a completely half-assed mess.
"Our morning routines set up the precedent for the day," Ruby says, proving that she should've included a 'Words to Look Up The Meaning and Use of' section, since it something she consistently fails at. Even her dog has no patience for this
tit and starts barking loudly again.
A quick language lesson for Ruby:
You shouldn't say "set
up the precedent". This makes it sounds like you're doing something before the precedent to plan it. In this case, you're saying your morning "sets up the precedent". So, when does the precedent happen? At brunch? Just say "sets the precedent", like setting a mould.
"Setting the precedent" also doesn't mean "setting the tone". A precedent is something that should be used as a direct example to follow in similar, future circumstances.
In legal terms, lawyers use the decisions and logic applied to old cases (the precedent) to help determine the outcome of their current one, for instance - if a judge applied a certain logic of law previously, lawyers will argue that the prior case
set the precedent for the same logic to apply again in similar circumstances for future cases.
It makes no sense in the context you used it. If your morning sets the precedent for the rest of the day, you're saying that you should follow your morning routine all day long. Enjoy your entire day of brushing your teeth while pretending to read a book, Ruby!
Ruby rambles incoherently about morning routines. She apparently doesn't understand what habits are, and mentions that the habit section is for things that you like that work for you. Rubes, if you have to write it down and plan it, it's not really a habit.
This is a section that's only useful for Ruby and her performative tendencies - a place to note down the things she pretends to do in videos so that she can remind herself later, or just a place to write down things that she already does to make her feel like she's been productive by writing something, however pointless, in a planner.
She also says that it's really good to change your morning and night routines, which implies that most people have the benefit of having a wide open schedule to
duck around with and don't have to get up for work every day in a morning.
So, basically, Ruby's advice is to plan your morning by filling up your planner section with things you do anyway, then change it all after you've run out of space (just in time for the inevitable announcement of the separate "Morning Routine Planner" and the "Night Routine Planner").
After unintentionally explaining all the reasons that her morning routine section is a useless waste of space, she shows her own habits, which are a mixture of outright lies ("Straight to work." Ha! "Hearty breakfast," Ruby?
Really?) and incomprehensible handwriting ("early unetch", "journauing on NONOn"
Ruby moves onto the 'Resolutions'/'Things I Want to Accomplish' section. She evidently has no clue what the word "yearly" means, since two thirds of this section is taken up with space to detail your wishlist for life in five years or just the distant future.
Ruby has filled hers with goals that are either laughably unattainable (for her, at least) or where the bar is so low that it'll be hard not to accomplish ("Publish an article "somewhere"" - y'know, like a blog. Done! "Read Emma by Jane Austen" - Ruby will read the Sparknotes summary and mark this done.)
She's also set herself up for disappointment by expecting a first for her degree, even though she's struggling to meet deadlines or come up with even a basic foundation for her dissertation. Good luck with the Masters thing, Ruby!
Ruby thinks she can get a book deal, even though her dwindling popularity and vanishing relevance takes her out of the running for a vanity book deal, and no way can she get one on her own merits. Considering her lack of talent, her inability to use language coherently and the book she self-published being a major red flag to publishers, I wouldn't count on this happening, if I were her.
Onto more pointless time-wasting.
This is, according to Ruby, a place to jot down your regular go-to meals. She says "go-to" means "things that you don't have to, like, think about tyoo much to eat". Ruby, if you've had to either write in a planner or refer to notes in a planner to remember your favourite "go-to" meals, you've already thought about it too much. In reality, nobody does or should do this.
An entire section to note down all the things you already eat regularly anyway is a waste of planner space.
Unsurprisingly, Ruby has filled hers with insubstantial ED staple foods bereft of any real nutritional value. These aren't meals. Some are nightmarish (peas in a mug) and the only entries that come close to being substantial food are very blatantly foods that she never eats.
At no point when showing this section full of nutritionally barren meals does Ruby point out the importance of eating a full, balance diet of nutritious food. She simply presents hers as something to emulate.
Onto the "Expenses" section.
Ruby says she loves this section because it says "Bank of
Pun-kin Productivity" (it doesn't). Ruby has added a 'Bank of
Pumpkin Productivity' ledger design, and it looks incredibly childish, like a notepad you'd get with a kids' bank playset.
Rubes shows herself putting in 'Santaland Diaries - Waterstones', because she'll be chasing that sponsorship until she's six feet deep. It's unclear if Ruby uses this section for her actual expenses, uni expenses or just random
tit she bought and felt like writing down for a productivity placebo.
She inserts a random shot of herself placing a pair of scissors on the desk while wearing a different jumper. Why? Who knows.
She quickly moves on to the 'Books I've Read' section, or to Ruby, the 'Books I've Pretended to Read' section.
Ruby mentions that this section now has three pages, since lots of people mentioned that one page might be enough for Ruby, but other people need more space to cover the amount that they read in a year. Ruby felt that. In fairness, things like that are easy to overlook when you do no market research for your planner and only pretend to read things.
We move on to the 'Library Book Log' section, where Ruby performatively rambles about the importance of libraries. Libraries are a vital public service, but hearing Ruby finger-wag at everyone else about how libraries are struggling, when she and her family are all Tories and are actively voting against financial support for public services, is a bit much.
Ruby, why not volunteer your time to a local library? Or instead of hoarding books you never read, why not donate them? Or use your wealth to buy and donate a selection of new release books once a month to donate as an "act of kindness"? No? Didn't think so. Once again, Ruby stresses that
other people should do more, while she'll continue leeching off whoever she can and voting Conservative.
And onto 'Book Recommendation', where Ruby has taken the presumptive liberty of filling in one of your sections with a book that she hasn't read herself:
Then there's a dotted notes section, followed by a calendar:
Yet again, Ruby proves that this thing wasn't designed from the ground up to meet all her needs. This was a template calendar slapped on a design doc.
Ruby mentions that she's used hers for term dates. After highlighting them, the immediate question becomes: "How will you remember what any highlighted dates mean?" There's no 'key' section in the planner design, so Ruby awkwardly tapes half a post-it note in to make one herself.
It looks shoddy and cheap, and would've easily been solved by including a simple, blank 'key' section in either corner for the owner to fill in. But again, no thought, no research, no planning.
Ruby rambles about the 'cel-ass-tial' designs again, and mentions that she did the drawings.
Which checks out, since it looks like a picture drawn by a four year old. Her parents probably taped this to the fridge.
Ruby shows more pointless, wasted space - there's a page to tape a picture of your role model. This is a
planner, no? The
duck is this nonsense? It's a step removed from having a section to scribble the name of your biggest crush in Year 7. At least Ruby didn't go ahead and pre-fill this section with her own face.
Ruby shows her own role model photo, taped in with cheap-looking graph paper washi tape to give this a serious, scientific subtext.
She doesn't explain who her role model is, though. Is it actress Saoirse Ronan? Is it Ronan's character in Little Women, Jo March? Is it the random woman in the backround with the bonnet and the blurry, sour glare? Is it the bonnet itself? Who the
duck knows?
Ruby mentions that these 'attach a photo of' sections are now included throughout the book. She enthusiastically says that planners should reflect your individual personality. Yet she's done away with blank sections for people to use to suit their individual tastes and has instead dictated how everyone should use them by printing bizarre, random instructions on.
If you would've rather written things in these sections, you're
tit outta luck.
Ruby demonstrates the sheer versatility of these sections by using the 'Tape photos of your dream house!' section and plastering it with pictures of herself with some random children at school, because she had to delve deep into her past to find photos of her being social with people she isn't related to. See, you have the freedom to do whatever you want with these sections, so long as it's taping random photos to them!
Her creepy obsession with idolising fictional children despite being a 21 year old adult woman also continues:
Ruby moves on to how she actually plans her days with the monthy "sprahds". It starts with stupidity and moves on from there.
She says she writes all her plans, colour codes them by module (bear in mind, this is the "general"
yearly planner, not the academic one) and then numbers them in order of "when she want to complete them". Why not just write them in the order you want to do them?
A jarring edit occurs and Ruby intrudes on her own video from some random point in time, her voiceover suddenly much louder than before as some strange noise whirs in the background.
"Fountain pens also
don't bleed through the paper and nor dyoo dippin
pens-ahn ink," she says sternly. She proves this by writing on the paper in fountain pen, then refusing to show the other side.
She mentions that the whole planner is full of "fun" planner sections. Like a
bleeping 'Spring Cleaning' section:
Ruby has shown the versatility of her planner by once again pre-filling almost the entire planner section. If you has drastically different activities that you eanted to put on here? Tough
tit. Ruby's rules. She's left you a third of the page space to use, what more do you want in the planner that you paid way too much for?
Almost all the things she's stubbornly pre-filled are also things that she never does.
'Donate old items'? You expect people to believe you do that? Or clean anything ever?
Next up, 'Reasons to be Happy':
"Someone's having the best day of their life." Note how Ruby doesn't put "Someone
else is having the best day of their life" - if it's not happening to Ruby, Ruby don't care.
"People talking on trains" - Ruby never takes the train, she forces her parents to chauffeur her everywhere. Maybe her parents told her what trains are like, based on that time her mum posted a casually racist blog about how an Asian couple ruined their journey by (shock, horror!) listening to a film in seats they paid to sit in.
"The moment a plane takes off" - Ruby never goes on planes, but in her mind, the plane taking off means that her father has escaped arrest for tax evasion and is safely on route to a non-extradition country, which makes her happy.
""Too many" books" - Ruby has so many books that she doesn't have time to read a single one, let alone think about needing more than one page for completed books in a planner. Take that, haters!
"A dog's loyalty" - said by someone who has visibly disliked her dogs most of the time.
"A cat's pride/a cacu pnde/a cactus parade" - ???
So you've just survived a plane crash, and the medics tell you how lucky you are to be alive. You pledge that from this day forth, you'll never take a single second of life for granted. Every moment is a gift, and you'll cherish it dearly.
The paramedic says, "So what are you most thankful for?"
You look at the medic with tears of joy welling in your eyes as you ponder how lucky you are, and you say, "A cat's pride."
And then the paramedic recommends that they check you for severe brain damage.
Ruby's getting about as bored of her planner as I am, and starts rushing through it.
There's a section for "midyaah reflackshens". In August there's a space for a "bockit list". In October there's
another "bockit list", in case you were planning on being dead by the end of September, completed all the August list and find yourself miraculously alive with nothing to do but bask in the majesty of a cat's pride.
Ruby adds that this the October one can be used as an Autumn bucket list if you're in the "Northern Hammus-Fehhr", which sounds like it might be in Scotland somewhere, or possibly Norway. "Because Autumn is a
wonderful month," she says...
Next there's a Christmas gift section with spaces for gift ideas. "
Just a few," Ruby stresses - you don't need to be thinking too much about other people! Christmas is about depriving other people and charities of money in Ruby's eyes, not spending her own!
Ruby mentions that the Christmas sections in the old planner and the new planner are slightly different, but to give you an example of how the new planner works, she's going to put it aside and fill out the old one instead.
Despite Ruby claiming to own the company, she evidently could only get a single yearly planner to advertise, so she doesn't want to go actually using it to advertise the product she's selling.
Ruby's apparently planning to make Christmas cards, despite ditching uni to spend an entire day making Christmas cards with her mum and a friend of her parents. She's also planning to make wrapping paper, so some poor bastard's gonna get a poorly-thought-out gift wrapped in old, soiled copies of the New Yorker.
Martha is not getting a gift this year, but her grandparents all are, since Ruby's keeping them sweet to get her hands on the inheritance.
Ruby's also planning to "Buy gifn" and "Bug a Christmas tree". This will presumably be the tree at Blakeney's family home that she's chosen to rig with listening devices, so Ruby can eavesdrop at all times.
Finally, after some blank dotted notes pages "for versatility" (because versatility is suddenly important again after boxing off half the planner with pre-filled bullshit), there's a space for back-patting accomplishments and a vision board:
Ruby, this is a planner, not Pinterest.
Ruby shows an example of how she'd use hers by taping all the same photos as before in:
And if her filth-encrusted chipped nails weren't enough for you, then Ruby has made sure to get as many disgusting stray hairs on the tape as she could before sticking it on her planner for all to see.
So aesthetic!
And then she cuts up atlases, New Yorker issues and more to create a collage to tape onto the page anyway, making the gross hair shot completely unnecessary, although the end result still looks like crap:
And that's the tour over, so Ruby repeats her dubious spiel about how she designed the planner from the ground up and it includes everything she needs, despite all evidence to the contrary.
She's in the middle of saying this is the greatest planner ever and you'll never need another one when she realised that she wants you to buy the next academic planner and the yearly one, so she adds this on-screen note to say that they're both the best she's ever used:
The planner's £16, which is at least £14 too much.
And because nobody's buying those ribbons, you can get those for £1 with the new planner (because that worked out so well last time).
You can also buy the planner, ribbon and notebook (what happened to the planner doing everything, Rubes?) for a bundle deal of £21, because nobody's buying those even at discount prices either. Ruby, that's flimsy notebook is worth no more than £1. Price it as such.
Then she mentions that she'll also be releasing a timetable. Again, what happened to the planner having everything? If you regularly need and use a timetable, why didn't you include one in your planner?
Ruby has filled hers with lies - she expects people will believe she actually read Hamlet, let alone plans on re-reading it.
It goes without saying, but nobody should buy this crap. Buy a blank planner and customise it to your liking, or pick up any number of higher quality planners for much cheaper. Don't reward this clown and her half-assed money-making schemes.
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