August 24th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Sometimes I forget that the ‘rent a movie’ functionality in the average hotel is just a customized web browser, and the remote control has just replaced the keyboard:
This photo is only marginally amusing. But if you ask me, all of the humour derives from the fact that the fail message appears over a swishy Zac Efron.
November 16th, 2008, 25 Comments »
Today I read on Mathew’s site about how mommy bloggers are up in arms over a (beautifully designed, incidentally) Motrin commercial. Here it is:
The righteous indignation is pretty thick. Amy Gates characterized it as an attack on ‘babywearing’ (a term I hadn’t heard before). Jennifer says the ad “is offensive and extremely disrespectful to moms”. And, as you’d expect, there’s plenty of chatter on Twitter.
After watching the ad twice, I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Is the problem that Motrin suggests that carrying a child in some kind of wearable attachment might result in pain? That seems like a legitimate possibility. If a backpack or shoulder bag hurts your back, then why wouldn’t carrying a kid?
Is there some massive anti-baby-wearing conspiracy that I don’t know about? Are the nation’s pram-makers secretly funding anti-sling propaganda?
I’ve also read a lot of criticism of the ad’s thesis that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. That sounds accurate to me. Every celebrity magazine I see at the grocery store features famous women and their babies. Frequently the celebs are ‘wearing’ their baby. If these magazines reflect current trend, then it’s fair to say that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. Let me put this question to my older readers: is baby-wearing more popular today than it was twenty or thirty years ago?
The whole thing strikes me as a heated over-reaction to a totally ordinary advertisement. The rage from the mommy blogosphere implies that no mother ever suffered any pain from wearing her baby, and that the very notion is somehow abhorrent. When I compare this with the recent breast-feeding plus H&M issue, it pales in comparison along any axis.
Importantly, the ad doesn’t advocate a particular approach to child-rearing. It just says “hey, if your back hurts from wearing your kid, try our painkiller.” What am I missing?
In any case, it could make a nice fresh case study for the book we’re writing. We have a pending chapter tentatively entitled “Damage Control”.
UPDATE: Motrin posted an apology (direct link to the image) and promised to pull the ad. I’d excerpt it here, but it was posted as an image, not text. On the other hand, the image file is called ‘marketing_message.jpg’. If they had gone with text, that message might reach more people.
UPDATE #2: Here’s Seth’s take on Motrin’s response. He thinks it’s a “carefully crafted non-statement of a committee”.
UPDATE #3: Refreshingly, the Queen of Spain says “what happened this weekend went from smart, powerful activism to Palin-rally lynch-mob.”
UPDATE #4: I don’t think it’s very funny, but technically speaking here’s an excellent takeoff on the Motrin ad (thanks to James):
October 22nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
Via Twitter, I heard that Bioware and Lucasarts (awkward name, eh?) are launching Stars Wars: The Old Republic, a massively-multiplayer online game:
[BioWare co-founder] Muzyka explained that the designers of the game wanted to ensure that The Old Republic was a story-based MMO that followed in the tradition of the Knights of the Old Republic. He added that while people have often asked BioWare if the company would ever produce the third installment in the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, this new game amounts to installment Nos. three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and beyond.
There’s no release date as yet, so the game is probably more than a year away. I visited the game’s flashy-flash website in the hopes of subscribing to an RSS feed or something, so that I could periodically get news updates. There’s a newsletter, but I’d rather not give them my email address. I didn’t see a feed on the home page, but I did see this familiar row of social media icons:
Great, I thought, I’ll just subscribe to the Twitter feed. The link goes here. Unfortunately, there’s no account there. In fact, ’starwarstheoldrepublic’ is too long for a Twitter user name.
Ah well, maybe I’ll just subscribe to their YouTube channel instead. I click the little YouTube icon next to the Twitter one. Nope. That’s an invalid user name, too.
The other icons–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr–do work. But it’s a reminder to ensure that you get the little things right. I’m guessing their website has received, what, 50,000 visitors in the past day? At the very least.
No RSS feed on the home page and a 40% failure rate on their icons is a bit of a shame. I doubt they’ll lose many players at this stage, but those early adopters are too valuable to give away so easily.
After digging around a bit, I did find a developer blog for the game. I’m going to subscribe to that for the time being.
I should say that I’m looking forward to trying another Star Wars MMPORG. I quite enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies, at least until they screwed it up.
July 11th, 2008, 6 Comments »
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”.
