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This was noticed by Sloop, who sent me the link. Great sketch.

Death knell for idiot marketing

I subscribe to WIRED, which means that I find out about cool new geek stuff at the exact moment when it becomes old and uncool (because nothing can be truly leet if a print publication has noticed it). On the other hand, WIRED acts as a bridge between the pioneers (Dewey) and the relatively early adapters (me, Janet, etc).

Anyway, I point out this video thanks to this item in the March issue's package on Snack Culture:

Sony's two-hour press conference on May 8, 2006, was a slo-mo car crash. Intended to rally geeks around the PlayStation 3, the event instead left them cranky about the feckless sales pitch, weak games, and high price tag. Over the next few days, bloggers tried to capture Sony's cluelessness, but none were so eloquent as YouTube user Macaw45, who posted a video titled "Sony E3 2006 Press Conference in 1 Minute." Editing footage from the event, Macaw45's clip distilled the meltdown with DJ-like dexterity, looping key moments for maximum effect. The defining shot in Macaw45's montage showed a game developer explaining how to defeat giant enemy crabs: "Attack its weak point for massive damage!" A meme was born: The phrase became the "All your base are belong to us" of 2006, and it was used as shorthand for Sony's lameness. The inevitable T-shirts, dance remixes, and homages followed. Marketing execs beware: Geeks with iFilm can pare you down to your essence - you'd better hope you like what they find.
- Daniel Dumas

I don't think this is a small thing culturally. How much of what we deal with in life is crappy because of slickly marketed shoddiness? And I'm not just saying this as a consumer. Shoddiness is a disease of the soul -- punished in individuals, but often rewarded by institutions and corporations. This is why we've come to hate flacks, mouthpieces and pitchmen. This is why advertising -- as we know it -- is in a state of flux.

Oscars 2007!!

Oscar Picks and Hopes 2007 with Spibby and JMSloop

 Greetings from the Balcony! We thought we would add some clarity to the usual muddle of Oscar deliberations. Yes, you could seek out the advice of professional magazines, staffed by trained journalists with contacts in the movie industry and a vested interest in providing both accurate and concise analysis, but let’s not kid ourselves; this is the Internet. We know why we’re here. We may not be accurate or concise (one of us can’t order a cup of coffee in less than two paragraphs, and the other can’t even pick an Oscar winner without drafting a “principles” manifesto complete with footnotes), but we hope you’ll read on, anyway.

And the nominees are....

 

How the Internets work

OK, now I'm only going to explain this once: You start with Tim Berners Lee and the W3C and you wind up with PornoTube, LaLa, ytmnd and that "Numa Numa" guy. And it's all done with computers, coffee, business plans and Douglas Coupland novels. Don't understand it? Well why do you think they call it "code," dumbass? (Click image to see full-size... built with Gliffy).

(Saturday A.M. UPDATE: While the popularity of this diagram has faded in the English-speaking world since yesterday's Reddit/Digg/Netvibes frenzy, this morning it's popular in the Spanish-speaking world. Here's how it's described at Meneame: "Un interesante mapa de como funciona internet." And look, if that winds up being Portugese, don't give me a hard time, por favor.)

A guardian of family values

Coming Soon...

Dan's Saturday links, etc. (2.18)

TIKI! TIKI-TIKI! TIKI-TIKI-TIKI-TIKI! Finally! There's another episode of Tiki Bar TV! Hooray!

Episode No. 13 is the first of 2006, an unexplained hiatus that made some people (uh, by "some people" I mean "me') wonder if this strangely entertaining vlog was, in fact, dead. Silly some-people.

This episode's malady? The inability to answer direct questions. Dr. Tiki's prescribed cocktail? A Skull and Bones.  Hmmm....

Wow. When a homemade drunkfest like Tiki Bar TV starts doing political satire, something is going on...

A NEW BOOKMARK: Check this out -- a site that "footnotes" topical TV shows like our favorites The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but also network stuff like Boston Legal that I could never imagine myself watching.

Great idea.

"THE LAUGHING CAMPAIGN:" Last night the whole family gathered around the TV to watch re-runs of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and we laughed as hard as we have in days.

There's all sorts of stuff to be depressed about these days, and I've been relatively depressed the past couple of weeks. I'm fortunate to have a psychic/zen-Buddhist friend to help pull me out of my funks, and the lesson I took from my recent down-bout and recovery is that yes, things are awful, but you don't change that by fighting it. We have to accept what is without becoming enmeshed in it.

The Metro/Retro, blue/red, liberal/conservative divide is a tar baby. As my friend put it, fighting what we oppose only makes us part of the problem. To really change things, we have to focus on the outcomes we desire.

In other words, fighting the neo-con power cult with the same anger and scorn they apply to the rest of us won't ever build the kind of country we want to live in. As Emperor Palpatine so aptly put it:

Good, I can feel your anger. I am unarmed. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete!

And as we laughed at last night's satire, that thought took on a deeper meaning.

We aren't going to throw these people out of office. We're going to laugh them out of office.

We're going to laugh loud and long and we're going to invite others to laugh with us. We're going to share video clips and cartoons and jokes. We're going to pass blog links amongst each other.

When tools like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter spew their manipulative bile, we're not going to wade into their toxic sludge and slug it out until we become equally ugly mutants. We're going to laugh our collective asses off. We're going to have so much fun laughing at the transparent agendas behind their lies and smears and distortions that nobody in their right mind is going to want to defend them at the next barbecue.

Pretty soon they'll be laughing along with us -- because every American secretly wants to be in on the joke.

I believe this to be true: The pen may or may not be mightier than the sword, but nothing is more powerful than a joke that tells the truth.

Pony up, Cowboy...

Submitted by Xark-friend Kerri Glover.

Dan's Wednesday links, etc.

Dan here, reporting back after my first excursion into the land of Snake Oil Suitmen (by this I mean that I just gave my first PowerPoint presentations in front of groups yesterday). I did wear a black jacket, black slacks, pointy shoes and a white collared shirt, but you'll be happy to know that I eschewed the tie. I wear a lanyard with an I.D. on it, and  I figure that if you want me to wear that at the office, it should take the place of a tie. Deal with it.

My presentation: Trends on the web and what we intend to do about them. My favorite question from yesterday's sessions: "Where did you learn to use PowerPoint?"

Anyway, I've been so deep into work-think lately that it has rendered me dull, for which I apologize. As a peace offering, here's something obscure yet really cool (via Slashdot): Researchers at the University of Rochester have created a model of phase change in liquids (U of Rochester photo, researchers Eldred Chimowitz and Yonathan Shapir).

Dull, you say? Not hardly.

Phase change is one of the most underappreciated processes in the physical world. It's what happens when water turns to ice or vapor, and vice-versa. In other words, phase change is what happens when a changing variable stops making a thing more that way (hotter, colder, faster, slower, etc.) and causes it to assume a radically different state.

That sudden change of state -- the "light switch effect" -- is an issue in research into everything from fuel cell technology to global climate change. But because the complexity of the change is so enormous, computers have been unable to model what goes on within a system (or, in this case, a liquid) during the transition. In other words, the thing that is the most value to researchers has been the one part of the event that has remained invisible. Until now.

What does this mean for ordinary schlubs like us? That everything just speeded up, again. Duh.

PAT ROBERTSON, CRAZY PERSON: Perhaps the most amazing trait in American culture is our tendency to reward certifiable looniness with celebrity and status, so long as it's backed by inherited money, good looks or claims to Biblical authority.

Which brings us back to our old friend Pat Robertson, last seen here warning Dover, Pa., that God was going to make residents pay for turning out its loony, dishonest, "Intelligent Design" school board. Now Israel is punishing him for calling Ariel Sharon's stroke an act of divine retribution. Pat, who didn't like that Sharon was willing to deal land with the Palestinians, declared last week that "You read the Bible: This is my land, and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he's going to carve it up and give it away, God says no, this is mine."

His punishment: The Israeli government pulled out of a $50 million deal with Robertson that would have allowed the Virginia Beach televangelist to build a  Christian theme park near the Mount of Beatitudes, the site where Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, fed the multitudes, etc. Robertson and his partners had planned to call the facility The Galilee World Heritage Park.

Israeli officials went on to say they still like the idea of a Christian theme park as a tourist draw: "The contract is still open," said Tourism Ministry spokesman Ido Hurtuv, "but not to Mr. Robertson."

Better watch out, Mr. Hurtuv, or Pat's gonna slap a fatwah on yer ass!

Anyway, regarding the Galilee World Heritage Park: What Would Jesus Build?

MORE NEWSPAPER LAYOFFS AHEAD -- AND GANNETT TO BUY OUT KNIGHT-RIDDER? Maybe so, points out smart guy Tim Porter. That's pretty awful, but not nearly as alarming as speculation that FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch is scheming to buy up The Wall Street Journal (read this in the past week, but can't find the link... file it under scary thoughts, not solid info).

Meanwhile, Slashdot noted this bit about how Murdoch's minion's were thwarted in their attempts to block out every mention of their rivals by users of MySpace, which Murdoch purchased this past summer. In a refreshing bit of news, the MySpace users revolted -- and won (for now).

IRONY ALERT -- BIRD FLU STRIKES TURKEY: This isn't time to panic (let's face it, it's never time to panic), but it's time to start paying attention again. The number of human cases of H5N1 in Turkey are surprising and worth monitoring, and that's about all I'm willing to say right now beyond this: I've moved Effect Measure back up to a daily read again. The Reveres have had some interesting things to say in the past week.

Moral: Stop singing to the deaf

Damn. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones comes out and says what the rest of us have been saying for months, and suddenly everybody thinks he's Mr. Smart Guy.

To wit: Intelligent Design isn't science. End of discussion. Thanks for playing.

See, you can do that when you're a judge (particularly when you're a Republican judge). Such principled analysis appears to be is far beyond the ability of the modern media, though. I mean, the President likes Intelligent Design, right? And a lot of readers/viewers like it, right? And if we don't suck up to them, "People of Faith" will call us liberal, right? Well duh! Break out the patronizing "think-pieces" and go ask the choir director what she thinks about natural selection!

But this whole thing was never about science, never about faith, and certainly never about "people of faith" (cringe). It's about a few pushy people in this country who have somehow rationalized callous dishonesty and willful ignorance into essential traits in the service of the Way, the Truth and the Light. They live in an  unending quest to inflict their gothic psychological pathologies on the rest of us.

Jones grasped  this, God bless him. From The Washington Post:

When the trial ended in early November, Jones faced two choices. He could have construed the case narrowly and ruled on whether the school board had a religious motive. That, in Jones's view, was an easy call. He found that school board members had committed "outright lies under oath" and displayed a "striking ignorance" of intelligent design.

But Jones went further. "Intelligent Design is not science," he wrote. "Proponents . . . occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist [but] no serious alternative to God as designer has been proposed."

Intelligent design scientists are adept at finding holes in the science of evolutionary theory. Some notable mainstream scientists acknowledge these gaps. But Jones concluded this effort does not amount to a new theory of life's origins and development.

He found that the Discovery Institute had a wedge strategy, to use doubts about evolution to replace modern science with "theistic and Christian science."

Enough, enough, enough. These people don't need to be convinced they're wrong and brought along. Don't waste your time. You don't sing to the deaf.

This is the gift Jones gave us: From here on out, we can cite him and just move on.

(Oh, and for the record, I think the neo-Darwinist approach to evolution will likely be replaced by a better theory, one that involves consciousness. So what's the big difference between me and the Darwin critics from the I.D. "movement?" They want to see heir ideas taught to captive school children. I hope to see mine researched by scientists.--dc)