not falling down

So I opened Facebook and saw this much of an ad on my screen:

And I was like, “What, does she need emergency reverse liposuction? I mean, obviously she DOES, but is that going to save her–oh.” Because by this point I had copied the image out and could see the first frame of the animated gif, to which it apparently never resets:

Hi! St. Jude? Call me. We need to talk about this concept called “above the fold.”

According to my stats and the report they sent me, my latest ad at Blank Label got 188 clickthroughs in 20,000 views, or a little less than 1%.

If any of the original dotcom ad firms had done that well, they’d… still exist.

Seen on a banner ad:

Bachelor’s in

13 MONTHS

Master’s in

10 MONTHS

Well hell, man, why bother with a Bachelor’s?

Let’s zoom in on that, shall we?

Please tell me they did that on purpose. I need you to tell me that they did that on purpose.

Fitness Myths: Separate Fact From Fiction

Ah, yes, always good to know which myths are factual.

I’ve gotten bored with Dog Bites, so I’m probably gonna quit posting there for a while unless something blah blah blah. This is what RSS feeds are for!

Charity ad seen on the back of a bus:

Donate Your Car To Us
& End Homelessness

“The Hausenbildenmächina works at last, Greta! It could be change the future of the world! But the reaction only occurs at exactly 88 miles per hour.” Hans shakes his head in despair. “I can’t go that fast! Not even on my European racing-style bicycle!”

“Ach, Hans!” Greta takes his hands in her own. Her eyes are full and bright. “I always believed in you, always knew–if only we had some way to obtain one car! Any car! But our German-or-possibly-Austrian credit doesn’t carry over to these United States.”

“Greta,” says Hans, face suddenly alight, “I may just have a plan!”

So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.

Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!

It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)

Goat With Mad Cow Disease Raises New Fears

“People eat goat?” say terrified scientists