Category: Etc

Hate to make a big deal about it, but I’ve been getting some pretty amazing comments on random posts lately, thought I’d share.

Responding to a comment I made on this post about the recent election (where I made some dismissive comments about the Bloc Quebecois, Jean-Francois Boudreault had this to say:

fuck english canada canada doesnt like québec ,well guess what i hate your fucking guts too we will win the next référendum please believe dat fucking pussys

and later:

i want canada to hate québec ,to hate me so i can get my country as quick as possible hate us please hate me hate le FIER QUÉBÉCOIS QUI VEUT SA NATION , LE CANADA NE SE DÉFERRAS JAMAIS DES PATRIOTES COMME NOUS

After which he just gets belligerent:

jeremy clarke is a pussy

My response.

It may be interesting to note that the conversation later continued in email where he unambiguously judged me for being an “anglo-saxon”, quite literally taking a sensitive socio-political issue and putting some serious and strained effort into making it a racist endeavor as well (I mean really, anglo-saxon? As if there’s any real genetic difference between UKers and The French). Thanks for making my opinions look clean and respectful Jean-Francois, you racist prick.

On the “Can’t take a joke” front we have “joey”, who was upset that some people said nice things about this picture:

this website is fucking stupid.
Since when is a picture of a fucking stop light “beautiful.” What a bunch of fuck sticks. And did you guys see this guys zombie-sex porn site? Yes, I am serious.

http://simianuprising.com/zombierotica/

Fucking douchebag. Fuck you.

Again, thanks for the input Joey, you might want to check out this post though, as I take credit in it for the joke site I built and licenced Creative Commons. If you were joking you need to work on your jokes. If you were serious you need to relax, man, or the internet is gonna make you pretty angry a lot of the time.

Finally, the craziest of all, from Jess, a girl I had the most intensely romantic night of my life with at grad 8 graduation prom (I went to a “middle school”) and who moved away the next day (can you spell “trauma”?), on this post:

Wow, what a thing to find while stumbling through Google…
My picture on your website…

It’s weird to think that my Google Pagerank means that mentioning someone by name in the blog means that vanity searches lead back to me (that post was on the first page of a google for her name). I may have to stop saying horrible things about people from my past after all…

Do you use MySpace.com? Have you noticed that it’s unbearably ugly? Or maybe that attempts to personalize it tend to go horribly wrong? “Why?” you ask. “Does the internet have to look like this?”

The answer is no. The problem is that the coders who put MySpace together don’t know the difference between the markup they get paid to write and the string of characters generated by a baby mashing a keyboard looking for bugs. Also that most of them are probably colorblind.

Luckily there’s a solution at hand. Conveniently I am it’s leader.

The Myspace Beautification Front

Check the link for details, but in a nutshell I teased a plain-jane white-based template off another website to look half decent, then posted the code in a convenient format on the site. The idea is that everyone switches over to the simpler, more elegant style so that it becomes like a new default. It’s not for the people who want to customize and be different. It’s for the lazy people who also hate ugly things. It’s for you.

A spectre is haunting MySpace, the spectre of elegance!

Asked why I listed my religion as “other” on my myspace profile today I said that the only even closely suitable choice, “atheism”, didn’t really get at what I think, leading me to guess that maybe “semioclasty” was more up my alley.

Semioclasty, referring to semiotics (the study of signs), could be defined as the practice of debunking and clarifying the functioning of signs and signification, making a semioclast someone who tries to smash the illusion created by our associations between signs and ideas (i.e. someone who points out that “security” often means being controlled, or that needing Nike swooshes to perform well at sports will always be for the biggest losers of all). But that’s not really the point.

The point is that in googling for a defnition of semioclasty, my friend noticed there were only 7 references to the word online.

The point is also that in googling for the related and entertaining word “semioclash” (which I would define as a conflict of semiotic understandings of some kind) I discovered that there were NO references to it anywhere online. Not that it’s really a real word but I would have guessed there’d be a book, a conference, that someone would have used it at some point.

Really though, the point is that I’m adding it to the list of awesome words that I said first on the internet (currently it is in company with artbusting). You’re welcome, the internet. Enjoy it.

My former professor of digital communications and boss (when I was TAing the introductory class) has released a film he made a few years back for free on his website BrandHype (the site is a database of movies and the products that were inserted into them as advertising).

I first saw the film, Hollywood Goes Hypercommercial, when I was in cegep and a professor showed it to our class. It totally blew me away. I mean, we all know the ads are there and that they aren’t even close to legit, but somehow this vid manages to make the commercialism of the relationship extremely visceral, to the point where I now really do feel kind of sick when I notice placements in films. I can’t recommend this enough. It’s short, interesting, relevant and free.

You can download it in five chunks from the BrandHype front page here.

Dude at a european conference about digital creativity and collaboration made a that’s – exactly – what – I – was – thinking – but – couldn’t – say – properly speech about how digitality exacerbates and complicates the relation between “works”, “creators” and “copies” to the point where a complete overhaul of our understanding is necessary. He also points out how the network and the bits make current copyright policy look like a laws against player pianos or VCRs (both of which, of course, were narrowly dodged when the technologies emerged and sound as ridiculous now as the idea of a law against file-sharing will sound in fourty years).

The text can get a bit theory-heavy at times but is definitely more rewarding than difficult if you like this kind of stuff.

Read it here.

Having spent some significant amount of time considering my grandmother’s recent passing, I’ve decided that if I died, there are certain songs I’d want played at whatever ceremony occurred (as well as the fact that nothing from the standard issue hymnal is to be played).

It just happens that today I found a video of the top song on the list, Love Love Love by The Mountain Goats. It’s a recording of a live show, which, of course, is the only real way to experience this kind of music. The sound is clear though and the performance is amazing. Send me an email if you want an mp3 of the track. If you really get a kick out of it there’s a ton of other show videos up on youtube here.

P.S. This is completely insane and exactly how he behaves on stage. One day I will be a rockstar too.

Ze Frank has been making awesome and simple little internetmovies for a while now. Gems like Red Alert and Request always made me wish he would update his stuff more often (they were released pretty sporadically) so I wouldn’t forget to check. Luckily, this problem was solved while I was away from the internet (I’m back now, goodbye WoW). Ze is now producing a 3 minute show (called “The Show”) every weekday where he talks about politics, design and his social movement The League of Awesomeness (with it’s devotees, the Sports Racers). It’s fast as hell and immediately funny, sort of like The Daily Show but it only lasts three minutes and you don’t have to steal it off the internet to avoid that big blinking box in the living room .

The first episode can be found here while the newest episode can always be found here. I’m still working on my powermove.

(click image for trailer page)

Insanely, Al Gore has worked with some documentary filmmakers to make a feature length film about the nightmarish reality of global warming and the impending d00m that only a moron could ignore. Marc from BoingBoing’s writeup says it’s both entertaining and solutions based, I can’t believe it’s real. America, this is who was going to be Leader? Time to restart my time-machine work.