Why has the idea of ‘fail’ risen to prominence in the murky soup of web culture? It obviously originated with the idea of applying the term ‘FAIL’ (and, later, ‘EPIC FAIL’ to photos of screw-ups, accidents and douchebaggery. In one sense, it’s just a more distilled version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, except ruder and more sardonic.
I wonder where that practice began? Usually these memes start in an obscure online discussion group, but my 76 seconds of research couldn’t turn up anything definitive. This sounds like a job for Anil or Andy, master investigators of internet memes.
The ‘fail’ meme feels like a distant cousin of LOLcats, as well as demotivational posters. Oddly (or not), there hasn’t been a similar plague of images tagged with ‘SUCCESS’ or ‘WIN’.
In any case, it’s spawned a number of blogs, including FAIL blog, Shipment of Fail and Fail Dogs (there are also, I’m sure, Fail Octopi, Fail Emu, and so forth). The infamous Twitter-is-b0rked image is known as the Fail Whale. And now, at long last, there’s Fail Camp in Philadelphia. From the camp’s Upcoming page:
This isn’t about finger pointing. It’s about having a safe place to admit YOUR mess – ups, small and large and most importantly, what you learned.
We all make mistakes. The best of us learn from them. The best of the best help others learn from their mistakes.
These can be business failures. These can be life failures. We want your fail.
To paraphrase good ol’ Santayana, those who fail to study failures are destined to repeat them. Or, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “my reputation grows with every failure”.
Back in the eighties, Vancouverites would frequently made odysseys across the border and visit the foreign temples of capitalism. At that time, there were a ton of brands which didn’t have a presence north of the border: Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic and so forth. People felt thrilled and sophisticated to be wearing clothes that you couldn’t buy in Canada.
Times changed, and we have more than enough of those once-exotic stores up here. However, there’s a new segregation in town, and it’s digital. Canucks can’t watch Hulu, the popular TV on demand service. Likewise for a lot of BBC programming.
Personally, I’m frustrated by the fact that I can’t use Rhapsody’s or Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 services. I’d happily pay ten bucks for an album, but not if it comes with DRM or in some proprietary format. So iTunes is out. I already subscribe to eMusic, but they often don’t have albums that I want (Hem, for example).
Canadians are second class citizens, I assume, because these services haven’t negotiated deals with Canadian rights holders. And they’re probably in no hurry–there’s only 30 million potential buyers up here.
In the meantime, my only alternatives are going to a store and buying a hunk of plastic (unreliable and not very green) or illegally downloading the albums I can’t buy on eMusic (sometimes unreliable). I trust we’ll get MP3s on Amazon.ca eventually, but hopefully it takes less time than for The Gap to come to Vancouver.
Back in the late nineties, we ran a little theatre company in Vancouver (also Darren’s First Web Design). We needed a coffin for one of the shows (George F. Walker’s excellent “Theatre of the Film Noir”, if I recall correctly) and, in light of our shoestring budget, couldn’t afford to buy one.
A member of the creative team had a day job in a retail store, and the store had a ton of pallets in the basement. He got the excellent idea to ‘borrow’ a few of these pallets, tear them apart and build a half-decent coffin out of the wood. It worked out nicely.
Pallets are great material for this application because they are sturdy, inexpensive and readily available. In most cases in a disaster relief effort many of the pallets will arrive as part of the transpiration of food and materials requiring no additional logistics to procure them. If more are needed I-Beam states that they can be built by hand at a rate of 500-600 pallets per day. One transitional shelter measuring 10′ x 20′ would take 80 pallets to build and cost approximately $500.
After those darn plastic chairs (put to great use by Brian Jungen), pallets feel like one of the most ubiquitous human-made objects on Earth. Plus, other forms of aid usually arrives at disaster areas on pallets, so nothing goes to waste.
I was talking to a friend who’s worked on board cruise ships for a number of years. I was asking a bunch of questions about life aboard a cruise ship (staff get their laundry done for free, but it helps to leave a tip in your laundry bag). As you may know, many cruise ships feature small cinemas that show current films (they rotate every month, apparently). However, the newest ships no longer have these movie theatres. Guests prefer to rent DVDs from the ship and watch them in their cabins.
Speaking of the Stanley Theatre, I’ve written a lot on this site about the long, slow demise of cinemas. This seemed like a sign of things to come.
It’s a fantastic idea, to apply the navigation model of Google Maps to other virtual representations of atoms and bits. I include ‘bits’ because Zoomii will no doubt extend to MP3 downloads and ebooks, which have no real-world equivalent. I’m slowly reading Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. I wonder how he feels about a virtual representation of the space-limited physical world? Besides the obvious retail goods, what else could we Zoomiize? Voting records for Members of Parliament?
As I zipped around the Canadian version of Zoomi, I note that an author named Stephenie Meyer has no less than five books in the top 20 bestsellers on Amazon.ca. Can I get a WTF? They’re apparently vampire love sagas for the young adult crowd. Them kids–no accounting for taste.
On May 24, 1989 (I know the exact date thanks to this page), Rob Stover, Steve Lee and I cut out of Grade 10 afternoon classes. We drove (Steve had his license very early) all the way from our safe West Vancouver enclave over to the Stanley Theatre. We sat in the front row of the balcony and watched the first matinee show on the opening day of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
My friend Rob was a huge Indiana Jones fan, but it was a bit of a thrill for all of us. That was in the midst of my Premiere-reading period–I was a cinephile from early on.
The Stanley was a gorgeous cinema, and I miss seeing movies in that grand old space. It’s a lovely theatre, too, of course. It’s a pity the Arts Club doesn’t make consistently engaging shows to play inside it.
Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books. I’ve had the good fortune to listen to a series of recordings with excellent narrators. These include (for all but the first item, links go to iTunes so you can hear a sample) Tom Stechschulte reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (see the audio player at the bottom of the post), SteveMartin, David Rakoff and David Sedaris. I’ve probably only listened to 15 audiobooks in my whole life, so lately I’ve been making an accidental study of the form. My first conclusion: the narrator matters. A lot.
Just as the aesthetics of a book–its size, shape, typography, paper, etc–influence our reading, so too does the narrator influence our listening. In fact, I think the narrator’s impact is much broader. Consider what makes the aforementioned narrators great:
They have distinctive voices. Some have deep, resonant voices–voices made for radio, but all of them are recognizably specific. Stechschulte has a gravelly rasp, Martin’s voice is mellifluous and Sedaris seems to have a bit of a gay lisp.
They care about pronunciation. For me, hearing a word mispronounced in a professional recording is a bit like recognizing a location in a movie. It distracts me from the narrative.
They understand cadence, and adjust the pacing of their reading to reflect the story’s inertia.
If they do voice work, they do it well. This involves some degree of acting. If done poorly, or half-ass, it really ruins a recording. Done well, it can really elevate a book. Of course, this involves interpretation of the author’s words, but it’s a trade-off I happily make.
This is harder to evaluate, but they sound like they care about and are invested in the work.
This all came to mind because the narrator of the latest audio book I’m listening to is totally ordinary. It’s a business book, and narrated by the author (there’s no need to name and censure him for something outside his, uh, skill set). By ‘ordinary’, I just mean average. I’m sure, should we record an audio version of our book, we’ll do no better. It’s too bad that everybody can’t hire a narrator like Tom Stechschulte, but I expect that the economics of the publishing industry preclude that.
New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott narrates a nice five-minute video exploring the excellence and universal appeal of Pixar’s films. His thesis, in summary, is that they often feature an identity crisis–the hero feels he doesn’t belong. Humans of all stripes respond to such notions. Plus, of course, they’re usually exceptionally executed.
On a related note, I was recently listening in to a conversation among five 30-something, university-educated women. They were talking about movies. Despite being aware of the glowingreviews for Pixar’s Wall-E, they were unanimous in their lack of interest in seeing the movie.
I don’t want to inspire a lot of female commenters to contradict me, but I have a sense that women are generally less interested in animated films than men. This seems entirely understandable, given that most of the animated work they’ve seen has been a) made primarily for boys, featuring male protagonists and b) bad. Still, I think it’s unfortunate, because some of the most remarkable and effective movies of the last decade have been animated. I’m thinking here of Persepolis, Ratatouille and The Incredibles. The former of these movies obviously bucks this trend, but it didn’t necessarily have the broad appeal of the Pixar movies.
Why has the idea of ‘fail’ risen to prominence in the murky soup of web culture? It obviously originated with the idea of applying the term ‘FAIL’ (and, later, ‘EPIC FAIL’ to photos of screw-ups, accidents and douchebaggery. In one sense, it’s just a more distilled version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, except ruder and more sardonic.
