This morning my friend and I came up with a great plan for the day. (Sitting near one another, with our laptops.) I sent her a text message that I’d come over and pick up a few snacks on the way. She thought that idea was “Perf!” But her iPhone didn’t approve of her creative abbreviation and sent me a text that said simply:
Peed!
Today’s lesson? Getting too excited over text can leave an embarrassing smudge on your reputation.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Write and Wrong
Tagged best intextions, pee, predictive text, texting
The “I Love My Body” Victoria’s Secret campaign has been running for several months now, but I only just had the pleasure of catching one of the TV spots. You guys love your bodies, huh? Go fuck yourselves.
I know, I sound so typical, but I don’t even care. Seriously… just go fuck yourselves.
Sure, I get where you’re going: we should all love our bodies. And watching videos of supermodels explaining why they love theirs (1, 2, 3, 4) really makes me reflect on how I feel about mine. Truly inspiring, thanks. I have an idea for Vickie’s marketing staff. If you want your models to seem relateable, your next commercials should show them standing in front of the mirror pinching millimeters of belly skin and whining about their insecurities. Wow, models really are like the rest of us! That’ll make me a VS shopper for sure!
Assholes.
Posted in Shoot the Messenger
Tagged advertising, tits and ass, tv commercials, victoria's secret
I swear I have a rubber in here somewhere. (from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anitasarkeesian/)
The 24th annual Dragon*Con event wrapped up in Atlanta this weekend, leaving some nerds wondering “did I just miss my chance to score?” Thank goodness for Craigslist Missed Connections:
Hottest guy at Dragon Con! – w4m – 27
Date: 2010-09-06, 11:01PM EDT
Captain. Jack. Sparrow. I hit on you (in front of my date) at the Hyatt bar. Please reply to this if you’d be interested in hearing what I *didn’t* get to say…
Dragon*Con; You were Wolverine, and I was Poison Ivy – w4m – 25 (Marriott, Atlanta, GA)
Date: 2010-09-07, 4:16PM EDT
I can’t figure out why I left without getting your contact information. I know your name is Dan, and you make leather jackets. You were the best Wolverine I’ve ever seen. We talked for a while, just standing in the crowd. I wish I could find a picture of us. Hopefully, I’ll see you at another convention soon. :)
Spencer, I need a hug. – w4m – 28 (Dragon*Con)
Date: 2010-09-06, 11:31PM EDT
If I had a TARDIS, I’d go back and make myself ask you to dinner. Temporal paradoxes be damned.
More after the jump.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Unhappy Media
Tagged craigslist, dragon*con, missed connections, nerd, sci fi
More strange and awkward misapprehensions from the world of text messaging. This time we take a look at some common misnomers…
Do you have a friend name Brian? I do. And when I text him my phone makes an ethnic assumption. I type 27426 and it gives me Asian. Well, I guess thereĀ are probably way more Asians in the world than Brians.
If I want to write to or about my friend Andy, before I can get to his name my phone offers me Body. There’s something creepy about it that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Speaking of body parts, when I check in on my little bro I get arm.
My buddy Robbie tells me that when he tries to write to a girl named Karen, by the time he punches in the “e” his phone assumes he’s writing Lard. Here’s hoping you don’t have a fat friend named Karen.
And nine times out of ten, when I try to write the name Kev it comes out Jew. It’s just a typo, but I got this mad jewy friend named Kevin and it cracks me up every time. Ha. Jew.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Write and Wrong
Tagged best intextions, cell phones, predictive text, text message, texting
What I like about this set of Google suggestions is that it demonstrates some genuine, if misguided, attempts at self-edification.
I’m not quite sure why people are trying to find out what the most important languages are — can a language be unimportant? — and I don’t think that Catalogs.com’s list of history’s 10 most important people would have been my choice for top search result, but at least folks are trying, right?
Not long agoĀ met a guy, a recent college graduate (well, it was art school), who has never read a novel. I was happy to guide him in the direction of a few potential first books, weighing his personality and interests,Ā and managing to resist berating him mercilessly for his inexcusable illiteracy. I hope I make a lifetime reader out of him. Or at least that he reads one thing that’s notĀ some highminded po-mo criticism bullshit.Ā And I sincerely hope that someĀ Google searching for mostĀ important books will leadĀ to other hopeless illiterates picking up a volume or two.Ā Maybe that’s a stretch, but at least “Most Important Websites” hasn’t made it to the top 10 yet.
Posted in Google Game
Tagged books, Google Game, google suggest, literacy, most important
Heed the advice at thewildernessdowntown.com and download Google Chrome to launch this experimental interactive video for the new Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait,” from director Chris Milk and the boy wonders at Chrome Experiments.
Safe to venture it’s a music/web/video first, of Google Earth proportions. Totally safe for work, unless there’s a chance of the boss coming by in the next four minutes or so. Alt + Tab will get you nowhere.
Check it out. Pretty cool stuff indeed.
I really don’t mind being asked for, say, a restaurant reco or an easy and direct subway route. I’ve lived in this city a long time and am proud to impart my wisdom. But we’ve all gotten that query like “what are the museum’s hours?” which could just as easily be resolved by the query-er himself spending eight seconds on the internet. For that there’s let me google that for you.
lmgtfy.com
Go to the site, type the search term into the fake Google search bar and hit return. It will spit out a link. Hover over it to reveal a tiny url — it’s more subtle — copy it and send the link to your friend.Ā I could describe what it will do, but it’s more fun to experience it for yourself:
You’ll end up looking like a wise-ass, but a magnanimous wise ass: you’re friend’ll get his answer in the end.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway
That is the message being sent in this new commercial from ad agency Cramer-Krasselt, right?
Reminds me of Bud Light Lime’s anal sex campaign.
It’s hard to read the fine print at the end of the spot, but I’m pretty sure it says either “Warning: Consumption of alcoholic beverages may lead to balls flying at your face” orĀ “Please enjoy Corona responsibly, with a dental dam.”
I think it’s safe to say: If you have to ask, the answer is no.
…or at the very least, it can be assumed that those who are searching for the above:
dicĀ·tioĀ·nary
noun \Ėdik-shÉ-Ėner-Ä, -Ėne-rÄ\
archaic: a reference book containing words alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses. Historically dictionaries were printed on paper and bound between leather covers. [see: book, library, reading, obsolete]
It’s been coming for a while now: the unbookification of the Oxford English Dictionary. The publisher told the Associated Press Sunday that the next version of the reference series might not be printed on paper, but only available to online subscribers at OED.com.
Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, told The Sunday Times in an interview he didn’t think the newest edition will be printed. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year,” he said.
His comment related primarily to the full-length dictionary, but he said the convenience of the electronic format also is affecting demand for its shorter dictionaries.
It’s hard not to cringe at the idea of the OED, the world’s seminal authority on the English language, going out of print, but let’s be real for a minute. The full edition is 20 volumes, 22,000 pages and costs $995. Even if I had a grand to throw at a dictionary I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it. And I’m the kind of nerd who gazes fondly from across the room at her New Shorter OED like it’s a cute boy with glasses holding a puppy. Your average Joe isn’t going to consider dropping a G on a book of words.
The full volume has sold just 30,000 copies — since 1989. It was never a truly consumer product. But the website, which offers subscription-only access to the definitions of over half a million words for an annual fee of $295, gets 2 million hits a month. In an increasingly illiterate world, that’s pretty good.
Until you compare it to Twitter, which gets 100 times that. Sigh.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Unhappy Media, Write and Wrong
Tagged definition, oed, oxford english dictionary
No Happy Medium 