That’s Facebook in a nutshell. A place for friends, sure. But pull back the curtain and it’s a place for getting people ages 13 and over to willingly offer up the most direct ways to sell them things. It’s like being at a big party with all your friends but then realizing that the party is really a Pizza Hut focus group. And also, any pictures you take at the party are owned by the focus group forever. Sound fun to you?
Google has co-opted the It Gets Better campaign and turns it into an ad for Chrome.
It’s nice to give It Gets Better additional traction, and it’s neat to see a visualization of how the campaign evolved over time — but something isn’t sitting quite right with me about turning a successful grassroots PSA into a corporate promotion.
Over the past few days, there have been an alarming number of stories about birds falling out of the sky and fish dying in large numbers, and I am seeing references to these stories everywhere. And that’s understandable; I don’t mean to suggest it isn’t, because I’m interested in those stories, too.
But women are being raped in mass numbers in Haiti and Congo, day after day after day after goddamned day, and that has somehow failed to capture the interest of the global community in the way dead birds and fish has.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World’s video game aesthetic goes beyond just the surface look and feel of the movie; it’s also a commentary on how a generation brought up on video games seemingly prefers the tangible rewards system of video games to the ambiguities and dissatisfactions of adult life.
The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.
He inserted his male attachment into the female adapter, and watched his progress bar creep across the screen. The green line’s smooth rationality was undercut by the capricious time estimates that were careening wildly across the spectrum of likely endpoints. Five hours. Three minutes. Twelve minutes. A day. He thought of organized sports, for some reason.
Then, at last, the apex! The timer was counting down reliably from thirty seconds, the bar was filled with vigor. He hastened to his appointed destination, only to be distracted by a notification window (ERROR 739: FEMALE ORGASM NOT FOUND.) He felt his baud rate begin to slip. In a panic, he closed the window and pushed it from his mind. And then there it was: le petit écran bleu de la mort. He defragmented into a million bits of solitary pleasure.
