Archive for the 'Culture' Category

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internet nastiness

Posted in Culture, Technology on July 26th, 2006 by Jeff


Great article by Andrew Brown investigating why it’s so easy to be a jerk to other people online:

George Meyer, the most admired writer on the Simpsons - and so one of the funniest men alive today - said in a New Yorker profile some years ago that television comedy has got meaner and nastier because it is now taped in front of a live studio audience. If the laugh isn’t immediate, it goes; and what’s recognised as an immediate laugh is something cruel. The participants in American sitcoms routinely say things to each other which in real life would have the recipient running from the room in tears - and yet, on television, they are greeted with roars of sycophantic laughter. The Internet gives everyone a studio audience in that sense. We are all among Friends when we type.

…George Meyer is also credited with the infamous Simpsons “sandwich gag” (I told that idiot to slice my sandwich!), so I’m inclined to believe him.

~jeff

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the internet, circa 1996: not as different as you’d hope

Posted in Culture, Technology on July 24th, 2006 by Jeff


I have never even thought to try to take a Dalmatian to McDonalds — not even so he could try the new McSnausage Wraps — but for some reason in 1996 McDonalds was purporting to be your “Dalmatian location”. Still, it’s not nearly as bad as “Pepsi World” was:

We believe in keeping things new, fresh, so that we can claim to move you in unexpected directions which hopefully, rev up the nerve center of your imagination to a degree never before experienced.

The holiday spirit has smacked us on the face with the strength of a snow-charged blow of frigid Nordic air. It’s Pepsi Holiday 96! Peruse our new wonderland and discover a bountiful chest of surprises. Get nifty e-cards, icy-cool screensavers, Microsoft stuff you’ve been wishing for and more prizes than stars up in the cloudless moonlit yonder.

…Pepsi’s 1996 over-cooked promitional copy possibly written by the same ad wizards who came up with “The Hub“, Walmart’s weak stab at a non-union, Mexican MySpace equivalent. Seriously, point at it and laugh, it’s rilly awful.

~jeff

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mid-30’s conversational bingo

Posted in Comics, Culture, Fine Literature on July 15th, 2006 by Jeff

mid 30\'s conversational bingo cartoon

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lush

Posted in Culture on July 11th, 2006 by tucker g perry

a_walk_in_the_park.jpg

Art.

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holla at p. nis

Posted in Culture, Television on July 10th, 2006 by Jeff


Another oldie but a goodie:
On February 26, 2004, we had a snowstorm here in Raleigh, and all the news channels posted the businesses and schools that would be closed the next day. One of these fine news organizations, Time Warner Cable’s News 14 Carolina, chose the most convenient but least secure method to allow businesses to report closings: the Internet.

~jeff

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life lifting

Posted in Culture, Technology on June 29th, 2006 by tucker g perry

TAL

Ok, so partially out of curiosity, and partially out of geeky challenge, I set about trying to download back episodes of This American Life. It was simple at first. Downloading and peering inside the .m3u playlist from their site showed the mp3s actual url as being http://audio.wbez.org/archives/tal/304.mp3 or somesuch. You could just download them from your browser. But then after all of this “deep linking” hullabaloo, they got fancy. They switched to a shoutcast server, which basically does the same thing as the old system, but is a little more picky about who downloads content. It looks for a user-agent string (a.k.a. browser identification) from a known mp3 player, and will reject you if you try to download the source mp3 file with a standard browser. So now we have to change things up a bit.

Launch Firefox, enter about:config in the address bar and press enter.
Right-click anywhere on the page it opens, and select New String
Add “general.useragent.override” as the string name, and “iTunes/4.7 (Macintosh; N; PPC)” as the value.

Now the Shoutcast server will let you through, thinking Firefox is iTunes. But if you try to download an mp3 in Firefox, it will just try to open it in the browser window, which besides sucking, sucks. Soo, you have to whip up a little html page that looks something like this: 

<html>
<body>
<a href="http://url.of/episode/300.mp3">300</a><br>
<a href="http://url.of/episode/301.mp3">301</a><br>
<a href="http://url.of/episode/302.mp3">302</a><br>
<a href="http://url.of/episode/303.mp3">303</a><br>
<a href="http://url.of/episode/304.mp3">304</a><br>
</body>
</html>

Save it as a .html file, open it in Firefox, and start option-clicking away. Once the files are downloaded to your desktop, feel free to kick back with some organic coffee harvested by free-range migrant workers and get your hipster nerd-on at your leisure.

And, yes, I seem to have changed my mind.

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new mac ads

Posted in Culture, Technology on June 13th, 2006 by Jeff

justkickingit.jpg

All the new Apple ads have been pretty good — but the new one, “Work vs. Home“, made me laugh out loud. John Hodgman is awesome. I’ve really been enjoying his stint on the Daily Show as “Resident Expert”, and his new-ish book “The Areas of my Expertise” can be picked up used on Amazon for $7, which would be the best $7 you’ve ever spent, my friend. The chapter on hobos is worth it alone.

~jeff

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aliens . . . or pulverized bats?

Posted in Culture on June 3rd, 2006 by Sarah

Boy, aliens sure are much smaller and redder than I'd imagined they'd be.

There’s something very Arthur C. Clarke-ian about having “blood rains” (what one might consider a sign of that elusive beast, Satan, or at least of the impending apocalypse. . . of course, I’m using the term “one” as shorthand for “psychotic religious nut”) turn out to be an alien life form. Although I can’t say that I don’t love the idea that’s it’s just a really fine misting of bat blood.

DNA-less bat blood.

That self-replicates.

At temperatures exceeding 600ºF.

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art in advertising

Posted in Culture, Design on June 2nd, 2006 by Carrie

ATM

Human Vending Machines (found in a Russian-language livejournal community by way of geisha). Клас!

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ooops. . .

Posted in Culture, Lunatics on May 25th, 2006 by Sarah


So a few months ago during a leisurely hike, a friend of mine and Lou’s (my best friend and ex-boyfriend) suggested we put together a comedy fire routine, possibly for the upcoming Xara festival (for which we were already performing with our fire conclave, The Phoenix Projekt). This was very exciting to us, because no one EVER does fire comedy. . . fire performers are generally too busy accumulating all the trappings of would-be rock stars to think outside the Tribal/Sexy/Intense box.

Cut to one month later, and this is what we made (that’s me on the left, with the red dreads, and lou is the bald man on the left). . .featuring the Tubatron stylings of our very own David Silverman, who explains how to make a Tubatron here.

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quick links

Posted in Culture, Technology on May 25th, 2006 by Jeff

url.png

~jeff

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‘goldensmell’ as globalization

Posted in Culture on May 22nd, 2006 by Carrie


I love the pan-Asian grocery store. I can go down the street, make a turn into a dubious looking building, and be completely linguistically and olfactorily alienated. I also really like some of the foods I’ve been introduced to, usually through a friend. But most of all, I love the Engrish.

Case in point: Goldensmell brand Chinese foods.

I get a lot of pleasure out of encountering a ridiculous cultural/language faux pas like this in print. And with the increased availability of cheaply produced goods from markets within other cultures with other languages, I get to see more and more of this all the time. It’s like a cross between a pun and a joke and a poem, totally unintentionally: a result of either negligence or just a lack of resources. I’m sort of an asshole for being so entertained by this, probably, since I don’t speak any other languages with the fluency I’m expecting when I read a label on a jar of fried wheat gluten. They’re not even being particularly stupid, just not very exacting in their search for the right word or proper grammar. Nevertheless I continue to think it’s hilarious. Mostly because it gets me to laugh at how our murderously difficult language usually seems so natural to me and is, in fact, very silly even when it’s being used correctly.

I thought that as the English-dominated internet spread further and further (mostly to people with the type of capital necessary to produce and ship preserved foods all over the world) and as people become exposed to each others’ cultures and began consuming one another’s goods, that I would see fewer and fewer errors. (But why, again, did I think “teh interent” would improve anyone’s knowledge of spelling or grammatical and idiomatic English?) Maybe over time, as we get adjusted more and more thorough globalization, this type of entertainment will slowly diminish until it fades away into our Utopian — or dystopian — evenly brown, McDonald’s-dominated One True Culture under world government. Maybe. I’m glad to see that for now, Goldensmell is still around.

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pyramids as ancient farming clocks

Posted in Culture on May 21st, 2006 by Jeff


Cool article on a pyramid found in the Andes and how it was used to alert farmers on when to plant their crops. I can’t even remember to bring the 4$ off coupon to Stop & Shop to get my crops, so I can totally see how a pyramid like this would come in handy.

~jeff

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my god, it’s full of ipods

Posted in Culture, Technology on May 20th, 2006 by Jeff


Really nifty time-lapse photography of the first 24 hours of the new NYC Apple Store here (QuickTime required). It looks stunning, and I’m particularly happy to see that the glass steps of the entrance’s spiral staircase are frosted so the store doesn’t quickly devolve into New York City’s premiere destination spot for upskirt photography.

It’s interesting to note that when Steve Jobs appeared on the scene, the first thing he apparently did was to take his glasses off and squint intently at the microscopic joins of his giant glass cube; that’s the crazed, monomaniacal hyper-attention to detail that I’ve come to expect from The Steve.

~jeff

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carbon dioxide emissions, the keystone of life

Posted in Culture on May 18th, 2006 by Jeff

compare.
contrast.

Hooray for front organizations! This propaganda is particularly rich — the only thing truly missing is a nebbishy-looking Ed Begley Jr. forcing you to drive an underpowered electric car.

“Competitive Enterprise Institute” = Exxon, by the way.

~jeff

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