gossip_guy
VIP Member
No surprise, her Skillshare course is really bad.
She struggled to fill a 15 minute video on commonplacing, so it's no great shock that it's even worse when Ruby stretches all her usual misunderstood buzzwords, Googled quotes and stolen lecture handout material to an excruciating 35 minutes.
Her cartoonish fake FRACKLES are on full display and she's really trying desperately to hammer home the ADOLT AMMA WATSYON fake accent variant that she switched to when starting Oxford now that she's pretending to be a VARRY IMPRASSIVE ACADAMMICKAL AWKSFWUD STYEEDUNT.
I'd say she's put slightly more effort into this Skillshare series than her usual YEECHEEB WAAHRK, but it's still incredibly dumb and profoundly lazy, she's just found a few different, completely inept ways to present that half-assed stupidity.
Ruby has evidently watched a couple of ADDJOOKAYSHONUL VIDEEEYOWWS ON SKILLSHAAAH and tries to imitate them here. But, as with everything she imitates, she knows how to copy some of the aesthetics in theory, but doesn't know why they do what they do or how to copy any of what makes them good.
Now, Skillshare recommend changing the camera angle unusually often:
Apparently Skillshare don't believe that people who signed up to learn on their own time on a study platform will have the attention span for a 3 minute video unless THINGS ARE CONSTANTLY CHOPPING AND CHANGING.
But a competent creator will know how to include a variety of angles and inserts to create a video that flows smoothly and keeps a viewer's focus without distracting from the material. Ruby has almost a decade of experience making videos. Ruby should be at least vaguely competent by now, even if by accident.
Nope.
Along with the familiar talking-to-camera YEECHEEB setup, she's added an extra side-profile camera angle as seen above. She cuts to it constantly, to the point where it might be used more often than the facing-camera close-up angle.
It instantly disconnects the viewer visually from the already rambling, asinine material; with Ruby facing off-screen while she's talking to imaginary people off-camera, the viewer is now a third wheel in the virtual private lecture they ostensibly paid for.
Here's an example from a random video on the home page recommendations to show how almost every other content creator does this better:
From a close, head-and-shoulders shot, to a wider angle. There's a visual change for variety, but there's a smooth, consistent continuity - the creator is still maintaining eye contact with you, the viewer, while talking.
Ruby goes the opposite route, inserting jarring camera changes that disconnect the viewer visually. The usual jump-cut edits that litter her normal content are also present and accounted for here regardless of the angle, making the situation even worse. This is a scripted video that she was paid a substantial amount to make, and still, she simply could not be bothered to rehearse or film a second take to avoid jump-cuts.
Ironically, she declares that she personally uses her commonplace book as a means to collect useful or interesting quotes and claims that she sits on park benches, reading and memorising these quotes in her spare time. In this video, she couldn't even memorise a few quotes for the purpose of filming a single shot for a video about how to use commonplace books.
The magic of editing means she'd have an infinite number of tries to commit the quote to memory even in the short term and practice to get it right for the camera, yet she still couldn't be bothered. Instead, she recites it from her iPad with her usual repertoire of AMMA WATSYON brow-furrowing, head shaking affectations.
Again, instead of cutting to an animated slide of the quote while she reads it, she awkwardly disconnects herself from the viewers by keeping herself on-screen while she's speaking, but averting her eyes from the camera to read something off-screen. She does this countless times throughout the video. It's the video equivalent of a bad college presentation.
Speaking of slides, per the Skillshare recommendation, she's added some on-screen graphics and inserts...
...But she added them everywhere.
Instead of cutting to an aesthetically-pleasing slide with information and voiceover, Ruby just slaps it on her face.
Instead of framing the shot so that graphics are filling the empty space in the frame, Ruby just slaps it on her face.
Instead of waiting until the current graphic has gone before adding new, different information and quotes, Ruby just throws new quotes on top of old quotes and slaps it all on her face.
Almost every shot is interrupted with a random, cluttered junk-heap of distracting crap thrown atop Ruby's face while she has a manic, bug-eyed, incoherent rant either at you or at some invisible, off-screen person.
At one point, the cover of one of the many books that Ruby quotes from but hasn't read is shunted off the screen by a wall of warped-perspective text which crawls up the screen and disappears into Ruby's receding hairline.
It looks like the beginning to the world's worst Star Wars fan film.
Some of the inserts and quotes have spelling errors added. She uses the same B-roll inserts multiple times.
There's also multiple instances of single black frames or frames that are completely garbled - I thought this might be Skillshare's player acting up, but it's in the original video (and it's far from the first time her videos have had these kind of glaring errors).
It's a non-stop barrage of distracting bullshit and technical incompetence.
Audio-wise it's not massively better.
She's recording audio through that crappy lavalier mic she bought (and kept holding like a normal microphone, because she's a dumbass). This time, she's clipped it to her shirt at least, but with all the frantic, claw-handed gesticulating she keeps doing, she keeps brushing the mic so the video's peppered with abrasive and horrible sounds different to the usual ones she makes whenever she speaks.
There's also the usual sped-up speech and complete lack of effort with audio levels, so occasionally she just blasts your ear drums with volume changes for no reason.
I'm not sure if Martha edited this or Ruby did, but the buck stops with Ruby and her incompetence sets the tone even when she delegates this crap. For someone who claims to have a YARRHNING FWORE LAHHHRNING, she'd be better off spending this latest GAP YAHHHH learning to make and edit videos properly.
The technical issues might be slightly more forgivable if the actual material was engaging, but this doesn't break the infinite streak of bad Ruby content. There's nothing here that wasn't included in that latest YouTube video she did on commonplacing and nothing added but endless padding.
You could condense her 8-chapter exercise in nonsensical waffling into a succinct, 45 second YouTube short:
"Hustle culture is bad. When we enjoy what we study, we're more likely to want to study it. You can collect and categorise information that you come across in everyday life in notebooks and refer back to it later - you can compile whatever you want, however you want. Many famous authors did this in their own notebooks, which they came to refer to as commonplace books."
Of course, it's all lies as far as Ruby's concerned. She's a huge proponent of hustle culture; it's the foundation on which she built her fake brand, pretending to have done more than anyone else in faked vlogs, purely to inspire jealousy in children. She doesn't enjoy what she does in her content, whether it's reading, writing or studying; she's actively avoided engaging with almost everything she's studied or pretended to read and just cynically reads study guides instead of the book, or copies whatever lecture handouts or Goodreads quotes she saw that month to pass off as her own to try to appear intelligent.
This Skillshare series and her recent commonplacing video are prime examples. She supposedly writes in a commonplace every day, studied the practice and history of commonplace books as part of her Masters degree and claims to have researched extensively in her free time. And yet she has almost nothing to say about it beyond the basic quotes and ideas that she found in her lecture handouts. As with everything, her video on the subject is a padded jumble of stolen thoughts and disconnected, largely irrelevant ideas.
For some reason an entire chapter of this "class" is devoted to "irresponsible reading" or reading for the joy of it. And then Ruby tries awkwardly to tie this to commonplacing. Irresponsible reading is at the core of commonplacing, Ruby claims. We need to read for the fun of it, so it's VARRY IMPWORETANT that you do substantial pre-research on what you're about to read, prep a commonplace notebook about the ideas you might encounter, then divert from your reading constantly to take notes, then do pre-research for the post-research. And - if you're anything like Ruby claims to be - you'll keep several drafts of your commonplace book, so you can copy the information to and from 5 different places. This is what it's like to read for fun, apparently. It's just the most incoherent, contradictory nonsense.
Ruby babbles through an neverending stream of borrowed quotes about what other people said about commonplacing and synoptic thinking. Conspicuously absent is any kind of clear example of how or why Ruby thinks it's important or how it works for her in practice. Even the random snatches quotes don't paint a clear picture of what the hell she's rambling about. Ruby makes no effort to attempt to explain what she believes a commonplace book offers over more versatile modern digital platforms which she clearly feels more comfortable using. There's no examples, no explanation, nothing.
"If you compile a list of disconnected quotes and thoughts, you'll find a new connection between the material!" Ruby says. She can't tell you when or how that ever happened to her. She has no further information to offer because her lecturer strangely didn't cover the contents of Ruby's commonplace book during her degree, so she has nothing to copy from on that matter.
Even the basic, practical questions that might arise when thinking about starting a commonplace book, like 'how do you avoid running out of room in a book so small?' go entirely unmentioned. Ruby says that you should flip the book around, start from the back and write 50 questions about the contents of your commonplace book.
But before you can ask how you'll have the space to fill the back of a tiny notebook with 50 random questions if - as Ruby insists - it MOSST BYEE MASSY AND YOU SHOULDN'T REHAARSE OR REWROITE IT, YEU MOSST THROW ASOID YORE PARFACSHIONISM, Ruby shows herself workshopping all her questions in a separate notebook (not PONKINPOD TIFTEA branded, big shock) like she did in the YEECHEEB video. Yet more pointless busywork that shows how performative all this is for her.
In yet another incredibly telling moment, Ruby recommends that you (like she does) ask ChatGPT to tell you how to think critically about whatever you scribbled in your commonplace book.
I'm not even kidding. In this mess of a video lecture series where Ruby unconvincingly shouts about the joy of learning for the sake of learning and does a completely cack-handed job of telling people that commonplacing is a wonderful way to engage independently with material critically in new ways (with zero examples), Ruby straight up says: "Avoid thinking for yourself. Just get AI to do the critical thinking for you, like I do." The fucking audacity.
She also recommends looking up everything you read on Wikipedia (she calls this "pre-resaaarch" - it's JANUINELY not just what she does instead of reading things for herself, HONNASTLEEEE). Again, this is a video lecture series on a paid learning platform, in which Ruby is supposed to be educating people on the joys of learning independently, yet she couldn't help but reveal for the thousandth time that she actively avoids learning.
She struggled to fill a 15 minute video on commonplacing, so it's no great shock that it's even worse when Ruby stretches all her usual misunderstood buzzwords, Googled quotes and stolen lecture handout material to an excruciating 35 minutes.
Her cartoonish fake FRACKLES are on full display and she's really trying desperately to hammer home the ADOLT AMMA WATSYON fake accent variant that she switched to when starting Oxford now that she's pretending to be a VARRY IMPRASSIVE ACADAMMICKAL AWKSFWUD STYEEDUNT.
I'd say she's put slightly more effort into this Skillshare series than her usual YEECHEEB WAAHRK, but it's still incredibly dumb and profoundly lazy, she's just found a few different, completely inept ways to present that half-assed stupidity.
Ruby has evidently watched a couple of ADDJOOKAYSHONUL VIDEEEYOWWS ON SKILLSHAAAH and tries to imitate them here. But, as with everything she imitates, she knows how to copy some of the aesthetics in theory, but doesn't know why they do what they do or how to copy any of what makes them good.
Now, Skillshare recommend changing the camera angle unusually often:
Apparently Skillshare don't believe that people who signed up to learn on their own time on a study platform will have the attention span for a 3 minute video unless THINGS ARE CONSTANTLY CHOPPING AND CHANGING.
But a competent creator will know how to include a variety of angles and inserts to create a video that flows smoothly and keeps a viewer's focus without distracting from the material. Ruby has almost a decade of experience making videos. Ruby should be at least vaguely competent by now, even if by accident.
Nope.
Along with the familiar talking-to-camera YEECHEEB setup, she's added an extra side-profile camera angle as seen above. She cuts to it constantly, to the point where it might be used more often than the facing-camera close-up angle.
It instantly disconnects the viewer visually from the already rambling, asinine material; with Ruby facing off-screen while she's talking to imaginary people off-camera, the viewer is now a third wheel in the virtual private lecture they ostensibly paid for.
Here's an example from a random video on the home page recommendations to show how almost every other content creator does this better:
From a close, head-and-shoulders shot, to a wider angle. There's a visual change for variety, but there's a smooth, consistent continuity - the creator is still maintaining eye contact with you, the viewer, while talking.
Ruby goes the opposite route, inserting jarring camera changes that disconnect the viewer visually. The usual jump-cut edits that litter her normal content are also present and accounted for here regardless of the angle, making the situation even worse. This is a scripted video that she was paid a substantial amount to make, and still, she simply could not be bothered to rehearse or film a second take to avoid jump-cuts.
Ironically, she declares that she personally uses her commonplace book as a means to collect useful or interesting quotes and claims that she sits on park benches, reading and memorising these quotes in her spare time. In this video, she couldn't even memorise a few quotes for the purpose of filming a single shot for a video about how to use commonplace books.
The magic of editing means she'd have an infinite number of tries to commit the quote to memory even in the short term and practice to get it right for the camera, yet she still couldn't be bothered. Instead, she recites it from her iPad with her usual repertoire of AMMA WATSYON brow-furrowing, head shaking affectations.
Again, instead of cutting to an animated slide of the quote while she reads it, she awkwardly disconnects herself from the viewers by keeping herself on-screen while she's speaking, but averting her eyes from the camera to read something off-screen. She does this countless times throughout the video. It's the video equivalent of a bad college presentation.
Speaking of slides, per the Skillshare recommendation, she's added some on-screen graphics and inserts...
...But she added them everywhere.
Instead of cutting to an aesthetically-pleasing slide with information and voiceover, Ruby just slaps it on her face.
Instead of framing the shot so that graphics are filling the empty space in the frame, Ruby just slaps it on her face.
Instead of waiting until the current graphic has gone before adding new, different information and quotes, Ruby just throws new quotes on top of old quotes and slaps it all on her face.
Almost every shot is interrupted with a random, cluttered junk-heap of distracting crap thrown atop Ruby's face while she has a manic, bug-eyed, incoherent rant either at you or at some invisible, off-screen person.
At one point, the cover of one of the many books that Ruby quotes from but hasn't read is shunted off the screen by a wall of warped-perspective text which crawls up the screen and disappears into Ruby's receding hairline.
It looks like the beginning to the world's worst Star Wars fan film.
Some of the inserts and quotes have spelling errors added. She uses the same B-roll inserts multiple times.
There's also multiple instances of single black frames or frames that are completely garbled - I thought this might be Skillshare's player acting up, but it's in the original video (and it's far from the first time her videos have had these kind of glaring errors).
It's a non-stop barrage of distracting bullshit and technical incompetence.
Audio-wise it's not massively better.
She's recording audio through that crappy lavalier mic she bought (and kept holding like a normal microphone, because she's a dumbass). This time, she's clipped it to her shirt at least, but with all the frantic, claw-handed gesticulating she keeps doing, she keeps brushing the mic so the video's peppered with abrasive and horrible sounds different to the usual ones she makes whenever she speaks.
There's also the usual sped-up speech and complete lack of effort with audio levels, so occasionally she just blasts your ear drums with volume changes for no reason.
I'm not sure if Martha edited this or Ruby did, but the buck stops with Ruby and her incompetence sets the tone even when she delegates this crap. For someone who claims to have a YARRHNING FWORE LAHHHRNING, she'd be better off spending this latest GAP YAHHHH learning to make and edit videos properly.
The technical issues might be slightly more forgivable if the actual material was engaging, but this doesn't break the infinite streak of bad Ruby content. There's nothing here that wasn't included in that latest YouTube video she did on commonplacing and nothing added but endless padding.
You could condense her 8-chapter exercise in nonsensical waffling into a succinct, 45 second YouTube short:
"Hustle culture is bad. When we enjoy what we study, we're more likely to want to study it. You can collect and categorise information that you come across in everyday life in notebooks and refer back to it later - you can compile whatever you want, however you want. Many famous authors did this in their own notebooks, which they came to refer to as commonplace books."
Of course, it's all lies as far as Ruby's concerned. She's a huge proponent of hustle culture; it's the foundation on which she built her fake brand, pretending to have done more than anyone else in faked vlogs, purely to inspire jealousy in children. She doesn't enjoy what she does in her content, whether it's reading, writing or studying; she's actively avoided engaging with almost everything she's studied or pretended to read and just cynically reads study guides instead of the book, or copies whatever lecture handouts or Goodreads quotes she saw that month to pass off as her own to try to appear intelligent.
This Skillshare series and her recent commonplacing video are prime examples. She supposedly writes in a commonplace every day, studied the practice and history of commonplace books as part of her Masters degree and claims to have researched extensively in her free time. And yet she has almost nothing to say about it beyond the basic quotes and ideas that she found in her lecture handouts. As with everything, her video on the subject is a padded jumble of stolen thoughts and disconnected, largely irrelevant ideas.
For some reason an entire chapter of this "class" is devoted to "irresponsible reading" or reading for the joy of it. And then Ruby tries awkwardly to tie this to commonplacing. Irresponsible reading is at the core of commonplacing, Ruby claims. We need to read for the fun of it, so it's VARRY IMPWORETANT that you do substantial pre-research on what you're about to read, prep a commonplace notebook about the ideas you might encounter, then divert from your reading constantly to take notes, then do pre-research for the post-research. And - if you're anything like Ruby claims to be - you'll keep several drafts of your commonplace book, so you can copy the information to and from 5 different places. This is what it's like to read for fun, apparently. It's just the most incoherent, contradictory nonsense.
Ruby babbles through an neverending stream of borrowed quotes about what other people said about commonplacing and synoptic thinking. Conspicuously absent is any kind of clear example of how or why Ruby thinks it's important or how it works for her in practice. Even the random snatches quotes don't paint a clear picture of what the hell she's rambling about. Ruby makes no effort to attempt to explain what she believes a commonplace book offers over more versatile modern digital platforms which she clearly feels more comfortable using. There's no examples, no explanation, nothing.
"If you compile a list of disconnected quotes and thoughts, you'll find a new connection between the material!" Ruby says. She can't tell you when or how that ever happened to her. She has no further information to offer because her lecturer strangely didn't cover the contents of Ruby's commonplace book during her degree, so she has nothing to copy from on that matter.
Even the basic, practical questions that might arise when thinking about starting a commonplace book, like 'how do you avoid running out of room in a book so small?' go entirely unmentioned. Ruby says that you should flip the book around, start from the back and write 50 questions about the contents of your commonplace book.
But before you can ask how you'll have the space to fill the back of a tiny notebook with 50 random questions if - as Ruby insists - it MOSST BYEE MASSY AND YOU SHOULDN'T REHAARSE OR REWROITE IT, YEU MOSST THROW ASOID YORE PARFACSHIONISM, Ruby shows herself workshopping all her questions in a separate notebook (not PONKINPOD TIFTEA branded, big shock) like she did in the YEECHEEB video. Yet more pointless busywork that shows how performative all this is for her.
In yet another incredibly telling moment, Ruby recommends that you (like she does) ask ChatGPT to tell you how to think critically about whatever you scribbled in your commonplace book.
I'm not even kidding. In this mess of a video lecture series where Ruby unconvincingly shouts about the joy of learning for the sake of learning and does a completely cack-handed job of telling people that commonplacing is a wonderful way to engage independently with material critically in new ways (with zero examples), Ruby straight up says: "Avoid thinking for yourself. Just get AI to do the critical thinking for you, like I do." The fucking audacity.
She also recommends looking up everything you read on Wikipedia (she calls this "pre-resaaarch" - it's JANUINELY not just what she does instead of reading things for herself, HONNASTLEEEE). Again, this is a video lecture series on a paid learning platform, in which Ruby is supposed to be educating people on the joys of learning independently, yet she couldn't help but reveal for the thousandth time that she actively avoids learning.
what a waste of time and money
