Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

On Facebook Activism



This week the United States Supreme Court has heard–back-to-back–two landmark cases in the gay and non-hetero cis-gendered civil rights movements. The first yesterday regarded California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state by referendum, and today the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act which labels marriage for the purpose of federal benefits as exclusively between one man and one woman, and has already been overturned 6 times on its way to the Supreme Court.

This is the precipice over which we as a nation may fall or off which we may launch great heights. This is so important, it calls for incredibly flowery, corny language, because one day someone is going to write all of this down, and you damn sure want to make sure your argument isn't the one that keeps parents from using your name when they have kids.

However, popular opinion is a queer animal right now.

Voting-wise, conservativism  has had a sizable upswing resultant from economic woes and political fear mongering. This of course only polls those old enough to vote, with the time to do so in the middle of a week day, and angry enough about something to back a party rather over a single political issue.

The Internet is decidedly left-leaning, even if you take out the insane "hacktivists" and techno-anarchists, and advocating for a technological utopia ruled from the highest seats of T1 lines by Linux-based programming gurus who probably failed gym. Kidding aside, the Internet is the domain of the young and the idealistic, and the geniuses too stupid to know they can't just make something work, so who do. Daily.

Which unfortunately is also something true of the truly stupid. "Like this page to support breast cancer." Fuck you, I hate breast cancer. What are you even doing? Liking a Facebook page or sharing a photo, does absolutely nothing. It changes a couple 0s to 1s in a box in a room in a server farm in Kansas. That's what Facebook activism does.

Recently the White House had to up the number of e-signatures required for an official response to any petition created on its special website. Because nerds wanted to know why we haven't built a Death Star yet. Then the Library of Congress, not understanding technology in the slightest, made it a felony to unlock your phone. The Internet wrote a petition, raised the newly required number of e-signatures, and the White House responded in favor of rewriting the stupid immediately.

That is political action taking place on the Internet. Online petitions. That's it. And yes, also Anonymous DDoSing certain websites and WikiLeaks publishing damning data hidden by our government for the set purpose of maintaining political supremacy by keeping the population ignorant of vicious mistakes and terrible crimes. Those count, though they remain illegal maneuvers themselves.

Changing your profile photo to a picture of a cat does not save kittens. It might make Sarah McLachlan a few dollars in some roundabout way with all the YouTube clicks, but it does not save a abused kitten. It does negative good. Effort that could have gone into something useful is wasted on showing off to all your friends that you care about issues.

If every time someone feels the need to "support" anything on Facebook, they instead donated $1 to said cause, we'd probably have developed a functional artificial pancreas by now. We'd have afforded pricier lobbyists years ago. We'd have funded cheap gene therapy. The tax write-offs alone could help rebound the economy. But instead we make in-app purchases to refill out digital Mazerati's tank a little faster.

The only thing I can imagine Facebook sharing and photo trends affecting is if some of the Chief Justices go to check their Inbox at the end of the day, they become as confused and furiously annoyed as I was when I woke up one morning to discover 3,000 new updates of people all changing their profile pictures to the same hot-pink image and linking the same three newswire pieces over and over and over again.

Maybe then they'll just sanction looser definitions of marriage just to shut us the hell up.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

When I'm An Adult

Let's just assume this whole post is accompanied by a soundtrack
so Jewish it pleases my Yiddish grandmother.

Yesterday was "Homemade Tomato Sauce Day," and–like all things I hype on Facebook, failed so spectacularly that I am aghast at the sheer lack of quality of it all.

I really thought I couldn't ruin this too terribly.

1) Place ten skinned, crushed roma tomatoes in a crockpot with 1/4 cup olive oil, half a small diced onion, a couple garlic cloves, a pinch of cinnamon, and 1 tsp. each basil, oregano, salt, pepper, and Cheyenne.

2) Cook on low 1-15 hours.

That's it. No fuss.

No. Fuss. After 3 hours I could tell something was wrong since the spices were burning. I mixed them in, but to no avail. Over the course of the day I encountered only an increasingly brown and blackened paste that smelled strongly of over-spiced bruschetta. After eight hours I just gave up. My best guess is the slow cooker was too big, meaning instead of stewing the tomatoes just kind of heaped in a corner while the liquid boiled off and the spices turned to charcoal in the recesses of the pot. The taste I had burned with spice violently. It looked more like undercooked meat than overcooked fruits.

All things ruined, I gave up on life and window-shopped for expensive nerd toys I can't own, which led to a solid quarter-life crisis.


Things I Will Buy When I Am An Adult:

  • A custom Force FX lightsaber
  • Movie-accurate fitted Jedi costume with belt and boots
  • A new new car. I get to drive it off the lot and everything.
  • A bed with a headboard
  • More book shelves
  • A spice rack I can't tear off the wall and heave across the kitchen in despair

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Masturbatory Self-Congratulations

All I'm saying, is this guy looks cocky as shit and I love it.


Supersize that image to look at Romney's "I'm getting photographed" sad smile, too.

I'm going to sleep now. I'll try to catch up on those 300 mutual facebook congrats notices tomorrow. After that, I plan on paying my taxes, enjoying my health care, and buying my multiple, bisexual, atheist lovers buy-one/get-one abortion gift cards.

If you think he was too liberal before, you have no idea what kind of Jed Bartlet shit Barry's gonna pull now that he's got nothing to lose.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

I Hope You All Know A Good Photography Major

Does anybody remember taking rolls of film to be developed at a photo hut in the mall? Or even your local Walmart or pharmacy?

Do you recall paying so much extra for double prints or trying to avoid the watchful stare of the developer, in your shared knowledge that he has already seen photos of your girlfriend naked? Even before you got to see how they came out?

I ask you this, because I realized I don't have photographs in my room. I've have art – pop art prints, a signed-and-framed movie poster, even a few original paintings. All my photos are in albums next to yearbooks and whatnot in my night stand. The last, maybe half of those are just printouts of facebook pics.

Pics. Not photos, but "pics." One or two might even have little neon hearts and dates on them, but a few are just cropped. All are on standard, bleached white printer paper.

I own photo paper, what the hell? I could make a real photograph out of any hi-res image on my drive. Why didn't I? Why don't I?

And I'm in a better predicament than most. Half of my friends don't own a printer. Several don't own a working computer. Several are without cell phones. In 2012.

And that may be the problem. It's 2012. I've seen this movie. We don't grab our digital photo frames. The kids grab their GameBoy 6GS-X's and John Cusack grabs the kids and throws them in his plane. Everything is connected, and everything is in the cloud. Hoarding physical media collections is considered an eccentricity, and I can see why. We have fewer things in physical space, just as we expand our presence out into cyberspace. There's an infinite world a half-dimension away from us, and we're just expanding laterally.

Except none of us have any faces of friends and family on our shelves.

So for everyone with adorable children on the horizon and fantastic adventures in your spyglasses, I encourage you to invest in a stack of high-gloss Kodak paper.

Either that, or make nice with your friends from high school who ended up buying $3000 Canon Rebels, because they're going to be the only ones who'll be able to hook you up with eight-by-tens or know what stop bath is.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

If Carly Simon Had the Internet in 1971














 




And then she'd tell everyone to stop commenting on her private feelings, but leave all the posts as "Public."

I'm sure she'd also post a scathing private entry on Xenga, then Tumble a few dozen sepia photographs of passive-aggressive, sad, couple-y stuff.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Fun with Fetuses

Someone posted a sonogram to facebook the other day. I hope she's really happy. I'm a little sad, though. She's trading possibility and a killer beach bod for a tiny, incapable monster that won't appreciate her for 30 years.

Mostly, I'm just skeeved out by pregnancy. I mean look at this thing:


I know you're supposed to look at that T.V. static peanut and see a baby like so:

But all I see is this:


I'm pretty sure I've seen that Pokémon before. I'm also pretty sure it burst out of Kane's chest in Ridley Scott's Alien.

Pregnancy is terrifying.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

The MySpaceification of Facebook

Things are getting out of hand.


"LIKE if you Like it <3"

Let's ignore the lack of punctuation and inconsistent capitalization, although that's so, so special in this phrase. It really is.

"Like if you like" it? Really?

That is literally what liking something means. Not just in reality, but on facebook too. If I didn't like the thing I'm clicking, I wouldn't click the button that says "Like." You want to see how easy that is?

Boom.

That was me, just now, not hitting like on a picture of someone's sonogram. Because I don't give a crap about a sonogram. I don't like it, so I didn't Like it.

What's more upsetting here is the trend I'm starting to see with more 'Victorian woodcut/lithograph figures with amusingly juxtaposed text' e-cards and 'I appreciate my [close relative or sig-oth]'image posts.

I'm waiting for the day facebook releases a security update that secretly converts all of our profile photos into .GIF format and enables "sparkly" as a comment font option.

Friday, March 9, 2012

On Apathy

Maybe a year ago I created two groups on facebook, invited all my friends, then promptly left the groups myself. The two groups were one of those contests between two states, New York and California in this case. The idea: pit the two against each other in a competition to see which state was the most apathetic.

The idea was simple: whichever state got the most members, obviously, lost.

No one really got it. There was a flood of new users. Last time I checked, I think New York was more apathetic, something like 12-16?

Ah, but seeing today, facebook "migrated" all the old groups, meaning I'm the only member in anything now, and I'd have to reinvite anyone else. Rather, I think I will kill both groups and let all the states be equally apathetic.

Except Kansas. Everyone's been pretty nice there.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Fuck You, Word Captcha

Seriously, fuck you.

That's fuckin' Chinese, you ass. My keyboard doesn't even know that language exists outside of some random key while pressing alt to make a yuan money symbol. Seriously, dude. You know this, because I very specifically did not include "Mandarin" in my language setting.

You're just lucky I know only one word in any Captcha is ever necessary. If I had had to learn Chinese to post my link, I would have been 該死惱怒.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Sperm Bank Advertises Surfing, 3D

What the hell am I looking at that this comes up as a recommended ad on facebook?

Oh, that's right, I unchecked that box and now I get the weirdest possible ads from the dregs of society.

So yes, I AM a poor, poor man, currently. And yes, I HAVE considered selling my genetics to a good vagina, but let's consider for a moment:

I am short, furry, predisposed to worrisomeness and smart-alec-cy, and frankly I'm pretty sedentary.

Additionally, I have some very unsettling thoughts about any children conceived with my junk accidentally intermingling with my own our other in vitro Zucker bloodlines. I don't want my kids winding up married and on "I Didn't Know We Were Related" shows. I don't need that kind of publicity.

And now I have to worry about what kind of person would be pulled in by this advert. Apparently, it would be someone who identifies as a "surfer," or at least enjoys surfing on the regs. He would appreciate too traditional Japanese and tribal tattooing, judging from the stylized waves. From the two-tone sunglasses I can infer that he also really really enjoys 3D movies, or is possibly a great fan of Warren Ellis' seminal (pun totally intended .35 seconds after I typed that) graphic novel series "Transmetroplitan."


Also, he would not be creeped out by giant, anthropomorphic spermatozoa, or walking into a building recognized as "the nation's largest sperm bank." That's a lot of little plastic cups, guys.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Google+ Is Pepsi For People Who Hate Coke


So I feel like I've used this enough to give a not-quite-knee-jerk reaction to this doodad.

You arrange people you want to follow into different "circles," and you don't have to even mutually friend a person, so I have a circle for High School Friends and another for College Buddies and a completely separate one for "Cartoonists I've Never Or Rarely Met." So it's like Twitter, in that I can subscribe to your posts without your express permission (though you can obviously affect the visibility of your posts as you post them.)

Essentially, it's being called Facebook for people who don't like Facebook (the company). Eventually, you'll be able to sign up for this service the same as Blogger or Google Calendar or any of Googles other services just by turning it 'on' with your Gmail account.

You can post text of any length, already format it with BOLD italics and strikethrough, and then explicitly state (every single time) who gets to see it. You can also use Gchat straight from your feed, group video chat, and group chat in "Huddle," so you can plan things without having to text everybody back-and-forth.

So here's my official review:

Why?

Nothing here is new. At all. There is literally no reason for any of this. It innovates nothing. It adds nothing. The only real benefit of this is for people who dislike Facebook. You love circles? Yeah, I did too. A year ago, when Facebook introduced them as "Lists."


You see that? Facebook has had that for a year already. You can view your feed just for that list just like G+. And You know what else? You can make posts visible to only those groups.
 


Oh, but you hate how Facebook defaults to sharing everything with everybody?


SO DOES FUCKING GOOGLE!

"But it's so much easier to share with just certain groups on G+!" Are you fucking retaded? (Sorry, "differently tarded.")


 It's been right there since you complained about it the first time. And you can change the defaults just like Google copied. Actually, Google+ has fewer privacy options for posts, and even fewer on their settings page.

Here's what Google+ is: It's a long-form version of Twitter, where pictures, video and links don't need shortlinks. Google+ is Twitter without a character limit.

Here's the difference between Facebook and Google+:
  • Google+ doesn't have apps yet
  • Google+ isn't social in that you can share something to another person's feed, only share with only them through YOUR feed.
  • Facebook won't have video chatting until they get theirs working over Skype in a few months.
  • G+ has all the chatrooms AIM must have sold off in 2001 for being useless.

Reasons to Get Google+
  • You hate Facebook but NEED to be social in order to contact people via the internet.
  • You want to video chat without using a Mac, iPhone, Droid, other smartphone, Tinychat, Stickam, Skype, Yahoo, an IM client or any of the other services expressly designed to do that expressly. You know, including Gchat.
  • You want to be able to message people without that pesky problem of having to use the Private Message service of every other social networking app, and would rather all such messages appear in your Gmail inbox, assuming of course you only have a single email address and not, say, eight of them like anyone else under the age of 35.
  • You would prefer shuffling between G+ pages for chat, video, email, sharing, photos and you 3 other email addresses to leaving open one window each for mail, facebook, and maybe Twitter. THREE active browser tabs? What are we? Bajillionaires? I gotta PAY for those bytes, brother.
  • You are a Google Faboy.
That's about it. If you love Google then, by all means, Download the G+ Android app to your Nexus 2 and wait for all your (likely 2) friends to get into the beta and start sharing pictures using the facebook to G+ photo transfer tool.

That's right, Google+ depends on facebook for the time being to get you interested.

And so far, that's how I've given out every invite I've given. (All three of them.) Facebook.

But go for it, Google. I mean you buy or create a version of every other Most Successful Service, why not through one more in the mix. I'm sure you'll get a few thousand people who exclusively use your product because they think a billion dollar information conglomerate  is more trustworthy to hold personal data than a dedicated social network with seasoned legal teams constantly reverting their fuckups.

After all, someone has to hate Mob City notifications that much. (And lack the knowledge to click the 'block app' X button.)

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Facebook Features I Wish Would Be Implemented

  • A 'Sympathize' button - not a 'Dislike' button, because I know that'd immediately turn into a whole big to do over who or what is the most despised and that's no good. I just want a button that says, "I concur with your status but it would be linguistically and socially inappropriate to say I 'like' it." Aw, your grandma just died? 'Sympathize' button. I don't know her, I can't say anything about her or your religious beliefs, but damn it I can sure empathize with your situation!

  • A 'How do you know this person?' for 'I know a friend of yours and we've never met but I think you're super attractive.' - This one's pretty self-explanatory. Somehow, even after abolishing the .edu email requirements, Facebook hasn't devolved into MySpace's level of friend-anybody, oh-that's-probably-a-spambot hijinks. I just want to be friends with more pretty girls, but it jut seems rude to say, "You're pretty, I'd like to Friend Request you, if you know what I mean."

  • No little heart when I update my relationship status - Small adjustment. It's just awkward when you are "no longer listed as single" and you have to explain, "No, I just took that info down. I'm not dating anyone." Worse, every time you go from "In a relationship" to "single" and on top of the flood of faux-sympathizers and would-be sex vultures you have to look at that happy little heart right next to the words "no longer."

  • Free Pizza and Ice Cream Fridays
I have gotten exactly zero tail from my name being so similar to
Mark Zuckerberg's. Though I haven't tried. Still, I've gotten more interest
out of telling people I directed "Phone Booth" and that Colin Farrell is a great guy.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Of Scale and Strata

I've been trying to figure out the crazy, rock-paper-scissors-like rules for who beats who when it comes to internet networking.

Clearly the Twitterverse encompasses the most area, being comprised of every opinion everyone has all the time, plus what they had for lunch.

Beneath that lies the Blogosphere, full of satellite sites and other rants that are longer and far less interesting.

Then there's YouTube, because it's just you, and Facebook because it doesn't even have limbs or a torso to work with.

I was trying to place print media somewhere in there, but the only mental image I could conjure up was a coffin buried beneath YouTube's feet.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

On Catch-22's

So according to some news site I'm unfamiliar with and a friend of mine named Claudia, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg could be facing life imprisonment, death or life as an internationally hunted fugitive.

This of course because he and several other named parties created Facebook, Facebook then years later hosting a group for "International Draw Mohammad Day" which protested violence by Islamic extremists against (granted, tasteless) depictions of the Holy Prophet (blessed be his name) in popular media. This of course was highly insulting to anyone who takes being a Muslim seriously.

Since this group existed for a couple weeks before anyone important asked for it to be removed and Facebook immediately did so, Zuckerberg, who is not actually in charge of anything substantial, is obviously guilty of personally blaspheming The Prophet (BBHN). Long story short, the Pakistani representative to the U.N. is asking permission to bring this before the General Assembly and get Interpol to drag Zuckerberg out to be lynched tried for unholy crimes.

Honestly, I'm not sure I can infuse this with enough humor to make it funny-haha. Frankly, this is a best definition of a Catch-22 I've heard since "Catch-22 is such a long, dry book that no one can finish reading it, but since no one has finish it no one can complain about it being a legitimately bad book."

We grant freedoms of existence and expression in this country to people who would not grant us the same, but would then use our refusal to forcibly silence their extremism to meet their own objectives. We pried ourselves on allowing anyone to say anything unless it physically damages another human being, but it is that allowance itself that some take offense to, knowing we by principle can not silence their objections.

Extremists: can't live with them, can't descend to their methods of arguing.


But mostly the first thing, because they keep trying to imprison/kill people.



You know, as an aside, if you were to replace every instance of Islam in this post with "Scientology," every "Pakistan" with "Hollywood" and "extremism" with "Tom Cruise," this would all still be a perfectly valid editorial. Consider that for a moment.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

On Unnecessary Advertisements

Is this really a problem people have to deal with? Not having white eye whites?

Possible Target Audiences For Whiter Eyes:
  • Stoners
  • People with allergies
  • Anime characters
  • Red Coats who are suicidal
And just as a side note: look at those eyes! Where is she looking? It's like she's got one wandering eye and something interesting is happening waaaaay above her but her head is strapped into some kind of Sawian torture device.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Nineteen Profile Pictures That Need To Be Retired

The Four-Square - Have an uninteresting photo? So did Andy Worhol! Until he resized it and made prints side-by-side with different colors! Now you've got a brand new kind of crappy art all your friends will be clamoring over. Bonus points for including another person in the picture, more if it becomes impossible to tell who is who. Final bonus for having 20+ similar shots all in a row.


Anything Sepia - Half of us are barely old enough to remember how to load a roll of film into a non-digital camera, let alone have decades-aged photos lying around. For that matter, those photos weren't designed to be that color, the faded from a better version. To put this on your wall says, "I have neither smarts nor class, but I'm pretty sure this fakes both pretty well." Congratulations, you've cemented yuppie photography as an enduring art form.

The "Up, Up and Away!" (Sideways) - This image can be said to do nothing more than confuse the eye. It's a bird's eye, at an angle, rotated such that gravity is pointing to one of the image's corners. This allows for increasing visual cleavage, decreasing belly rolls, thinning the hips, hiding the jowls, augmenting height and can even be combined with any other digital effect on this list for the most intelligence-insulting images imaginable.


The Baby Picture - We get it, not only were you cute once, but you've just had the stunning realization that you have to grow up and be an adult now, fully culpable for all her own screw-ups. Also, you seem to think your childhood was so much better than your life now, but you know what? You can drive now. You can feed yourself and get up to poop all on your own. You can open a credit card and rent seasons of Firefly off the Netflix. Unless someone close to you in the photo has died and it is the anniversary week of his happening, I don't want to see your dad's skinny man-legs in '80s cutoff shorts.

The Tagger - It's one image, posted 837,000 times by 837,000 people. Half the time it is unsolicited and reposted simply because people who weren't included in the image felt let down and did it all over themselves, slighting the people who slighted them with tags like, "the little slut," or, "the ditzy one."






The Eyeball - "My Best Feature" might be more accurate, but 'The Eyeball' has broader recognition for everyone. A single shot of somebody's sense organ, eye, nose, mouth, ear, even random body parts like a shin bone. Someone snapped a picture they thought would look "artsy," hit soft focus and called it a night. We're tired of looking not at a picture of you, but rather some weird selection of part of you from which we're supposed to infer meaning other than,"I'm apparently friends with an artistic plebeian."

The Beach-Bound Attention Whore - Seriously, this exact posed is utilized in a rather well known internet meme simply titled "ATTENTION WHORE." The very fact that searching for a real-life counterpart to this image through actual Facebook profiles yielded three different women and a dozen or so attempts at a handstand is nothing short of horrifying. This particular image is a particularly striking doppelganger to the original, the only difference being I believe the attention whore in the original was wearing a red bikini. Also, it read, "LOOK AT ME I'M AN ATTENTION WHORE!" But you're all whores.


The Overly Hopeful Celebrity Look-Alike - I don't want anyone to think I'm leaving the men off this list. Frankly, if every redhead on the net wasn't tagging herself in pictures of Scarlett Johansson, men would be the primary perpetrators of this face-crime. I'm light skinned with dark hair and a goatee. Do you see me tagging myself in pictured of Johnny Depp? No. Why? Because I don't fucking look like Johnny Depp. My jaw isn't sharp enough, my hair is too wavy and I refuse to wear black-rimmed glasses and a tiny fedora. (Rimless glasses and a full size, sure.) The point is you do not look like any of the celebrities who are often only famous for being good-looking. Stop it. This is hurting your chances with the ladies by making them think of all the differences between you and more sexified celebs. If you wanna score, through up a picture of Seth Rogan pre-weight loss. Make the ladies realize you are more attractive than someone famous!

Lemon Face Mmmn!! - Lion Face Arrrr! Also called the "superpucker," this does about as much to turn guys off of super-fine ladies as the overachieving celebrity profiles hinder decent looking men. Ladies, you have lovely lips. I can guarantee you that some time this week a guy will want to make kisses with. It's just nature. However, every time you make that ridiculous kissy face in photos we respect you a little less, and not in a good way. We just want you to look nice for us. It's simple of us, but it shows that you take pride in your appearance and that you take pride when we perceive you positively. Moreover, it gives us something to look at in our "alone time."

The "Photoshopped Beyond All Recognition" - Jebus Christy, what the hell were you thinking!? Was this one not even worth trying the Four Square on? Did you just say, "Oh, it's completely out of focus, but I can't bring myself to hit the DELETE key?" You had to save it anyway and play with it so much in Photoshop that it lost all semblance of an image of a human being? Picasso, for Pete's sake, would see one of these and tell you that it resembles only the mad watercolorings of a deranged impressionist grappling with his own hang-ups about breaking classical rules of shape and contour. Also, he'd tell you they weren't very good watercolors.

The Over-Captioned - This is a minor infraction spun out of control. Like lax enforcement of jaywalking or litter laws. First there's the main image, then someone plays with the brightness because it was shot at night at a party. Then it gets forgotten about for months and posted only on a fairly arbitrary month-iversary, tagged with a date, the original time stamp, a title card in curly-cue font and a message of love. Sometimes, the guy will have died of cancer or a car crash and "R.I.P." will be added next to a diminutive of his name, like Rickie of Robby or Johnny. Maybe there'll be glitter.

The Somebody Else's Baby - This profile says, "I have replaced my own desire for having children at a young age with babysitting for the same families for twelve years." Either that or, "My friends and family are all incredibly fertile sluts, but at least I get to play with one of these without spitting it out of my own happy-hole."
Odds are it'll also scare away any guys you are or will potentially be dating. Why? Because our biological clocks tick down to 'power usurped by younger, stronger males.' Not 'baby o'clock.'


The "Money Shot" - It's like Lemon Face gone awry. Why would you do this to yourself, girls? Why are you teasing us with this image and, more importantly, why are you putting twelve of them up at a time for everyone and your grandma to see? I could maybe understand it if you were doing the angry face tongue, or throwing up metal hands at the same time, but no. No, you're always smiling away and rolling out the red carpet to your esophagus like you love it and goddamit you know damned well you never act like you like it when we suggest it so why? Just why?

The Open Invitation/The Open For Business - What did I just get finished explaining to you?!







The Negative - This is either a mediocre picture made increasingly disturbing or a moderately whorey picture made fappable through inversion of color and reduction of the mind's ability to discern all the gross parts of you.





The Digital Polaroid - What? (Often combined with Sepia, Captioning and Beach Whoring.)










High Contrast Harlotry - Turn up that contrast, turn up that tan! Make your bleach-job look blonder, those intimately stained tank tops brighter! Hide your face under some insect-eye Prada sunglasses and a ventilated trucker hat and no one will know that's you showing off her underwear through the bottoms of her cut-off jorts! Sunny day? Even better! Now every item in your room that wasn't already black or white fades demurely into the background to allow for near-total anonymity, perfect for when all those pictures you're posing for and sending to your boyfriend up at school get passed around the internet like a bad case of gonorrheal Windows Vista.

Feet In the Sand - I'm tired of seeing your feet in the sand. I know I've said this a hundred times, yes, women are disproportionately angry at their feet the more attractive they are. It's something she can fixate on because feet really are just plain weird looking things. However, feet do look weird and I don't want to look at them either. There's nothing artsy about feet in the sand. Even the Christians have a poem and associated photograph about footprints in the sand. I think it's called "Footprints in the Sand." This is not a great accomplishment for anyone. More annoyingly, the types of girls who are fine with how their feet look generally have far greater issues with themselves to pick at. I don't need to be seeing your false bravado. I need to be seeing either good beach art or bad art of you at the beach in a bathing suit. Either way, everybody wins.

Your Farmville Photos - The worst offender of all. I really need to see what your farm looks like. Or what you look like on your farm. Or what a frigging pig looks like on your farm. It's not even restricted to Farmville, anymore. Tons of games are adding inane photo albums, which pisses me off. And you know what? This shouldn't even need an explanation. I don't look at pictures of farms in my spare time, and I don't play very many video games. The times I do play video games it's for entertainment and escapism. I don't need to be spending all my free time down at a fake farm growing nothing and earning nothing for all my efforts. If I really wanted to milk a cow, you know what I would do? I'd go out and find a real fucking cow and milk the fucking shit out of it. That cow would be like, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT YEAH, THAT'S A MILKING, ALRIGHT!!!" and then I'd pasteurize the milk myself and drink it with fucking cookies because I earned a real, tangible fucking reward after all that work.

*All images have been utterly stolen without permission (the fun kind of stealing) from people on Facebook and then altered to protect those guilty of these Facebook Infractions. In order to browse photos I had to keep it within a few degrees of separation from my own friends and have already been informed I circuitously snagged one person's photo, but her big sister said she shouldn't mind because it was funny. If I have used your picture and you do not think it was funny, please contact me directly a dzucker1@gmail.com and I shall remove your photo and replace it with something much more offensive.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Sometimes I Amuse Myself In the Simplest Ways

The Simpsons' Prof. Frink once described the random oscillations in a Corn Popper toy to a class of kindergartners. When I child plaintively asked, "Mnff … can I play with it?" Frink replied immediately, "NO! You couldn't possibly enjoy it on as many levels as I do."

That's how I feel about certain things. Sometimes, it's not about only enjoying things that are very smart, but about enjoying the simple, even stupid things on more levels than dumber people.

Hence this:

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Ghosts of Social Networking











It's weird when someone your age dies.

It's weirder still when his Facebook profile starts accepting friend requests two years later.

  • Ghosts of Internet Past, starring Friendster, DJ KaZaA and Jennifer Aniston
  • The Ring(u) 2: Battlenet Edition
  • Ghost in the Shell 3: Get Me Out of This Fucking Shell Already
  • Dead Friends: The Deadening (I suppose Dead Friends should be released first)
  • Hey, This Is Bobby, I'm Still Dead and All, But I Wanted to See How You're Doing
  • MyDeathSpace.com: "We're really not awful people, we swear!"