Helping you hate yourself
Posted: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 6:16 PM by Will Femia
I'd considered a bit of a rant about the Men Are Pigs condom ad which has drawn more attention in the blogosphere for being banned by a couple networks even though those same networks have no trouble lacing their programming with as much cheap sex as can fit (not that I object to cheap sex, of course). But then I saw this set of Brazilian ads which don't actually call women pigs by tries to help them feel that way. Larger versions are here. I don't think those are the original actresses Photoshopped. I think they're different models.
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Gamers and their avatars
Speaking of killing the buzz of gaming, Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW (WoW is World of Warcraft the online role playing game.)
Though I should know better, I wonder if voice chat will spark a renaissance of verbal eloquence. I wondered the same thing about text chat and literacy and that didn't exactly work out. "Limited by early lexical laxity, the average North American adult knows only 30,000 to 60,000 words, out of a potential "working vocabulary" of 700,000."
Google Street View appears to have captured some kind of street fight.
Good copy Bad Copy - Another copyright documentary. My first thought was how much this reminds me of Frank Zappa at the PMRC hearings. This one is about DJ culture and sampling. DJ Dangermouse in interviewed. This copyright fight is pretty old in itself. when was that Beastie Boys song that caused such a fuss?
Speaking of pirating, is there any negotiating with pirates? It's a story/interview about a developer who asked pirates to stop distributing/stealing his work. He got a pleasant, civil reply. Go figure.
Sopranos is a distant memory at this point but for those of you who are looking for where the deep thinkers on the subject are, this guy has the most to say about the final episode that I've seen so far. He's got a lot of ideas working there but one is that the whole show is a funeral for Tony, with symbols of a funeral ritual appearing throughout.
Speaking of the Sopranos being a distant memory, it appears that the second stage of withdrawal from a popular series is parody. This one appears to be baseball mascots. The best is the view from the stands because you can hear the crowd reaction to the blackout.
And of course, the Hillary version. (Too bad she picked the lamest song.)
Speaking of progressive women, holy moly, Digby the blogger is a woman. Nicely done. I never guessed that.
The only problem with being a really fast rapper is that you have to come up with more lyrics to fit into the song. The guy says the words faster than I can read them. (Some interest in the fact that this is a UK.YouTube link.)
Speaking of finding stuff on YouTube, a few people have written in to point out some of the new features they've got going on there. I mentioned the remixer the other day, but did you see the Streams yet?
Also, I see YouTubers are planning an event in NYC on 7/7/07. So at least we know there will be lots of amateur video of the Second Coming.
I put my e-mail address in for the waitlist to try Zattoo. It sounds a whole lot like Joost, which also claims to be the new way of watching TV. Thankfully, someone sent me an invite to Joost a while ago so I've actually played with that one. It's a big video player with channel menus and show menus within the channels. Unlike TV, everything is on demand. Meanwhile, last night I bought a 15-foot cord to plug my computer monitor output into my new HDTV. I also hope to somewhere dig up a hack for how to get the episodes of The Backyardagains from my DVR onto my computer. My point is that the question of whether TV will eat the Internet or the Internet will eat the TV is not quite resolved for me.
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Speaking of Web vs. TV, it looks like Strongbad has made his choice.
Speaking of doing old media online, instead of radio today I'm listening to the Project Playlist buzz tracks. I got there because I was reading a blog with a little player widget built into the margin. And in the way that these ideas can be similar from site to site I later saw almost the same thing but it was produced through a site called WebJay.
"So-called mirror-touch synaesthetes actually feel a touch on their own skin when they watch someone else being touched." What's most unusual about this article is that the condition isn't some rare case or fluke or possible hoax. It might actually be wide-spread.
Hurray For High Gas Prices! That's a Freakonomics link, so you know they're using some twisty logic to explain why higher gas taxes are a good idea.
Are Computer Keyboards Dishwasher Safe? The official answer is no, but the one the reporter tries sounds like it works, so go figure. I've heard that if your cell phone is wet you can use alcohol to get the water out. I wonder if you could do something similar to a keyboard once you took it out of the dishwasher.
Commuter Click: Sy Hersh's latest on Abu Ghraib and Taguba's report. I'm not sure Americans care about this story any more, if anyone ever did in the first place, but the piece is compellingly written. I reckon part of the reason people are open to the idea of a two year presidential election campaign is that they're too weary from scandal fatigue to think about the current administration anymore.
Speaking of scandal fatigue, political game hunters are really hot on the deleted e-mails story. The idea is that the White House is supposed to be non-partisan so it's a scandal that White House business is so intertwined with RNC business.
I should probably be afraid to link to Newsbusters, but grumbling about weather reporting is one of my favorite things to do so I got a kick out of this relaying of a report on poorly functioning weather stations. (I don't quite go for the theory that global warming is just false reporting by malfunctioning weather stations though.)
Speaking of faulty weather reports, possibly the most amazing prank ever: "Members of ZTOHOVEN connected up to one of the stationary camera during TV weathercast and in real time broadcast their own shots, which showed nuclear explosion. Then the picture changed. Instead of the name of the locality (Black Mine) the website reference ZTOHOVEN.com (now is overloaded) came up on the screen." This is their site.
Speaking of pranks, bicycle activists get sick of waiting for the government to put in bike lanes so they paint them themselves. I'm not sure why they use pink paint though. And for that matter, I'm not sure bike lanes really make cyclists that much safer. Literally just yesterday I was walking down the street and a car beeped as it passed a woman on a bicycle in the bike lane. The woman freaked out screaming, "Beep Beep! I'm in the bike lane! I'm in the F****** BIKE LANE!!" I think she got a better cardio workout from the tirade than from the biking. My point is that cars don't necessarily respect bike lanes just because they're painted on the road.
I'm not sure where this photo of the space shuttle launch comes from or even when it was taken but it does a good job of putting things in perspective.
National Lampoon’s 72 Virgins - It's a trailer and you're meant to vote on whether National Lampoon should make the movie. I feel like I saw the whole thing already just watching the (fake?) trailer. Why extend it to 90 minutes? Just so they can add some boobs?
"Three countries use non-metric measurement systems: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States."
John Hodgeman has a blog. Here he is talking about the recent segment he did on the Daily Show about mixed martial arts fighting being homoerotic. (I don't think it is. Those guy kick ass.)
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