Category: Etc

Tom was nice enough to point out that 5ives beat me to the Hummer-dissing party by at least two years with this decision clincher:

Five great reasons to buy a Hummerâ„¢

1. You’ve been wanting to buy much wider groceries (but have been stymied by the timid width of your Escalade)
2. You and your make-believe wife were thinking of having 11 or 12 imaginary kids
3. You’re sick of always being the environment’s goddamned bitch
4. You could totally put a keg back there and just drive around and shit
5. They were all out of penises

While on the subject, it’s fun to note that the post for my video on ihumpedyourhummer.com got a completely disproportionate amount of hate comments from the Hummer-loving community, with gems like:

Dude, you are so GAY. First of all, you’re dressed like a fag and you hump a Hummer like it’s your boyfriend’s ass.

and

Big jeepy will kill you all – blue succers!!!

I mean, proving that the internet is full of jerks isn’t exactly a challenge, but it’s fun to imagine why they chose me specifically for their textual gay-bashing: Do I look more gay? Is it really my pants and/or “pizza face” as mentioned in a few of the comments? I’d ask a real-life Hummer enthusiast in person but I doubt they could perform the necessary oral motor-functions to respond coherently (/snap).

And to anyone arriving here after searching for Animal Porn..

What!?
It seems my use of the words ‘animal porn’ in the title of this post has placed me on the third page of google results for that search term. In terms of search it’s the biggest reason people come to my site. They arrive at this page and see the baby monkey sticking out his tongue at the scientist.

Here are some search engine keyword stats from Google Analytics for the curious:

Further proof that the revolution is coming along nicely (YouTube link). First man’s-best-friend, then his ideology, we’ll get there eventually.

(seriously, it’s a sweet little video. via the best site on the internet)

Also, while you’re at it, you might as well watch this. It’s not part of the uprising but kittens pwn in their own little way.

Woah

… Then the officer went to Facebook.com, a Web site where students can post profiles and leave messages for one another. Not only did Facebook help him identify Chiles, it also showed that Chiles and Gartner listed each other as friends, suggesting Gartner had lied to police.

There’s something pretty terrifying about police using sites like Facebook (which is like MySpace but focussed on specific educational institutions) to track down criminals, especially when it’s stuff on the scale of peeing in a bush on campus or telling some cops that you don’t know the name of that guy who was just peeing (they gave the urinators buddy a ticket for lying after they verified the friendship on FaceBook). Also, as the article points out, it’s kind of ridiculous that they’d expend so much effort just to give people tickets, which more than anything indicates that there were personal rather than legal motivations for all the background checking on such a stupidly lo-fi crime.

It also reminds me of the reason I never joined Facebook, they are exclusive enough that they only let you join if you have an email from your university (in my case it would be @alcor.concordia.ca) but that means that jerks like these cops or security guards from the school can log in using their work accounts and wreck everyone’s fun, while people like me (who never signed up for a university email account) just leave because it’s not worth the hassle. (Of course MySpace is no better, I’d imagine, as nothing could possibly be worse.)

As a fun bonus to this bit of Kafkaesque news you should probably check out this Daily Show piece (YouTube link) about MySpace which, if nothing else, points out the silliness of putting a lot of weight on the “friendships” exhibited in places like MySpace.

What makes nerds “nerds” is that they care to an irrational depth about certain specific things.

I’ve always felt like this was the basic idea behind what it is to be a nerd. All the trappings about computers, Magic cards and Dungeons & Dragons (stamps, movies, music etc.) really just comes down to a focus on details. It’s great to find a definition that sums you up in a few words.

The quote is from Daring Fireball, which is really only about Apple and Macintosh but somehow manages to be a great read all the time.

Maybe it’s just my frame of mind lately, but I can’t help interpreting most forms of excess as some or other kind of niche pornography. Case in point is this Bravia ad (bravia is some kind of TV made by Sony). It was publicised a year or so ago when Sony pulled the stunt of letting 250 thousand super/bouncy-balls go at the top of a street in San-Francisco. The end result, found here in a few different versions (I recommend the long one), is so intoxicatingly playful it seems like calling it anything but porn just doesn’t get the message across. If you don’t have time to watch it now save it for a day when you want something really beautiful and easy to watch. I wonder if kids would get off on this as much as adults do…

Just in case you were wondering, here are some other examples of the $X-Porn phenomenon:

• The Poseidon Adventure – Inarguably Disaster-Porn, really just a series of 12-minute scenes in which something invariably explodes (generally water-gushes near the end of the sequence), everyone almost dies and one unlucky person (usually not who you were expecting) does die. Features two full drowning/suffocation snuff scenes and lots of tunnel/claustrophobia action (also some great kiddie-disaster-porn scenes (“mooooommy! saaaaave me!”)
• Digg Labs Visualisations – Info-Porn at it’s best. This application watches the activity at Digg.com, a news filtering site, and gives you two views of where the activity is occuring. Useful and neat? Of course! But it’s also completely unnecessary and kind of creepy considering you’re watching the movement of real people. (A similar example of info-porn is the RSS-Screensaver that comes with MacOSX. Great for when you want to lose two hours staring at text elegantly flying all over your monitor to amuse you.)