Category: Uncategorized

Hotmail is telling me that there are no messages in any folder of my (nine-year-old) account. Intriguing!

Update 1540 hrs: Oh, they’re back. Boredom.

Is anybody else just fucking creeped out by the American Apparel “Meet Melissa” ads? I’ve seen them a lot on the Onion and a few times on IndieClick affiliates, I’m not sure where else. The ad is a picture of a pretty girl with dark hair in a white t-shirt, smiling under a badly lit shower and looking kind of nervous. The ad has a rollover sidebar. Expanded, it reads:

“Meet Melissa. She won an unofficial wet T-shirt contest held at the American Apparel apartment in Montreal. Her prize for winning was a travel mug from McGill University, and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Melissa is wearing our new ultralight Sheer Jersey T-Shirt, AKA “The Summer Shirt,” available at our stores and online.”

Let’s translate that.

“Meet Melissa No Last Name. We had a party at a company apartment, then piled on the peer pressure and alcohol until we got some girls to pose under a shower. We thought this one was hot, so we’re going to put her face and upper chest on a few billion pageviews. We didn’t pay her shit!

We’re reasonably sure Melissa’s over 18, but hey, no last name and no pay means no paper trail, right? P.S. Go to our site and you don’t even have to look at her face, just her hands over her breasts splashed real big on the front page.”

For a company that’s trying to build a rep as progressive (“Sweatshop Free, Brand Free Clothes”), they sure come off like fratboy assholes there.

Update 1453 hrs: Ashleigh linked me to an enlightening Business Week article.

Why hasn’t anyone started using the Griffin Roadtrip or similar devices as personal pirate radio transmitters? They’d be perfect for coffee shops, student unions, seating areas of city parks–especially places that don’t have free wi-fi yet. All you’d have to do is set out the big LCD screen so passersby can see it, turn on your mp3 player of choice and be the ultralocal DJ. I’m totally going to do this whenever I cave and buy an overpriced hard drive with a stereo jack on it.

It’d be better to increase the gain on your tiny transmitter, of course, maybe by adding bigger batteries or using a higher-watt AC adapter, but I’m not an electrical engineer and I don’t think I know any. Also, I think boosting an FM transmitter above a certain level is illegal, but then that’s half the reason to do it anyway. It’d also be pretty cool to trump the LCD screen by wearing a t-shirt with your band of choice real big on the front. 88.5: ME RADIO!

I wonder if printing up such t-shirts would qualify as willful inducement? I hope so.

I chose the last one, predictably. You can read more about the pieces showing up in my brain over at its Iron Game Chef forum thread. Read some of the other stuff there, too–The Dinner Party, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, City of the Moon and Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom all look fantastic to me (you can already see preview PDFs of the former two).

Also, man, I’d forgotten what playing frisbee does to your fingernails!

How hip are you? How hip do you want to be?

I’m comfortably hip.

Beware of all enterprises requiring a new vocabulary.

I hereby and shamefacedly retract my assertion that fu dogs are Japanese statuary; they’re Chinese, of course.

It’s easy to figure out.

Postnerd.

Seriously, why hasn’t anybody put a scrollball on top of a mouse yet? They’ve had tiny trackballs on keyboards for decades, so it can’t be technically challenging, and we all know tiltwheels are nonoptimal–tilting is inferior to scrolling because it’s a fixed rate of movement (unless maybe there are analog tilters), and what’s more you can’t tilt and scroll simultaneously.