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Archive for July, 2008

Meta: Illin’

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Hi. I’m sick. No new posts until, next Monday, ‘kay?

Your Designs Are Wasted On Me

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

All the hype and “news” coverage over the new iPhone got me thinking — which, I’m sure is the opposite of the effect that was intended, but never-mind.

Anyway, it all got me thinking about all of the hype about the first iPhone, and just how often the word “sexy” got thrown around. Now, I’m not the kind of person who believes in the purity of language, or in prescriptive lexicons, but c’mon: attempting to compliment the design aesthetic of a commercial product by suggesting that its appearance will somehow cause the average onlooker’s genitals to suddenly become engorged with blood is a little ridiculous. (And in the case of most of this so-called sexy technology, the general effect is one where the prospective purchaser’s wallet shrivels up and tries to hide under the couch.)

Then again, if the Internet has taught me anything, it’s that people generally haven’t the slightest clue how to use the English language, and also, there is no object that hasn’t become the center of a maelstrom of fetish; therefore, I have no difficulty believing that someone, somewhere, even as we type nonsense at one another, is busily trying to fuck their iPhone in some twisted attempt to “get their money’s worth” out of the thing — or maybe their just looking at porn. But I digress.

The point I had originally intended to make when I sat down to write this post was this: Sexy technology just doesn’t work for me.

I don’t just mean that in the sense that I’ve never been compelled to sleep with anything you might find in an Apple store, nor am I trying to point out that most everything tagged with the word “sexy” would be something you’d find in an Ikea, if you could turn a cellphone into a bookshelf — no. What I’m saying is that I am a black-hole whose intense squareness is so strong that even cool cannot escape my event horizon.

The thing is that I’m 5′ 6″, I weigh 270 pounds, have bad hair, skin, and teeth, and I look like I’m about to topple over when I walk. Put me in a tailored suit, stand me next to a flashy car, and all you’ll see is that I have the miraculous ability to make 90,000 dollars look cheap. And if you put a sexy little piece of high technology in my hands, it looks like a gorilla fondling a Barbie doll.

It’s fine, I’ve learned to cope with this sort of thing (and the rent for a one bedroom, one bath bell-tower isn’t that bad, it turns out), but what I don’t need is for every cellphone I’m interested in to look like it fell out of Steve Jobs’ ass.

Give me that invisible grey, those sharp corners, and a boring, non-reflective surface. I want boring functionality, something that looks like it came from the old Soviet Union (except that it works properly). I don’t need people to look at me and think, “There’s an ugly guy with a truly beautiful cellphone.” Rather, I want them to think, “There’s an ugly guy with a phone that he’s probably not going to try to have sex with.”

Square and grey. Give it a chance, yeah?

Meet the Policy

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

With all of the controversy that’s come up in response to the recent practices of certain blogs out there, we felt it would be a good idea to codify some of the policies and positions of our site. To that end, we’ve added a new “Site Policies” page to our blog. We also thought it would be a good Idea to post them, in full, on our front page. So, we now present:

Site Policies

Disclaimers:

This site may contain foul language, adult subject matter, and juvenile humor. No pictures of naked ladies, though � so keep on surfing, Horny W. McGee.

Advertising:

We do not host advertisements. We used to, and someday, we might do it again, but for now we don�t. Since our readership numbers in the low � um, numbers, it doesn�t seem fair to subject them to ads that they might find annoying. If traffic spikes and our hosting costs go up, well, who knows?

We do not accept compensation for positive blog posts either, by the way. Review copies cannot buy our good words, (though we�d be happy to accept them � for review purposes � as soon as we get some kind of mail-drop set up.

Keep in mind, however, that we do tend to fall in love with things. So if we occasionally gush about something, be assured that it�s due to genuine affection, and not remuneration.

Comments:

Comments at Sloganeering.Org are hosted by kind indulgence of the management, and they are strictly moderated. Your first comment will always be held for moderation; after it has been approved, you can comment directly on any post. Comments deemed inappropriate will be deleted. As protean as this sounds, we think you�ll get our meaning. Since this has been an object of some contention on other sites, we offer this handy field guide to comments:

Adoration: �I love your site!� or �Great post� = Approved!

Friendly: �Interesting� or �I see, and here�s what I think about�� = Approved!

Useful: �You posted about X. Well, here�s a site that deals with X�� = Approved!

Critical: �You are very wrong about this, and here are some logical reasons why�� = Approved!

Cranky: �Yeah, well I�m having a terrible day�� = Hmm�. Approved!

Vaguely Creepy: �I�ll bet you�ve got soft hands.� = Denied!

Creepy: �How come you don�t call Sam any more? Also, are you still wearing that hideous shirt?� = Denied! or, Mom, is that you?

Abusive: �You fucking piece of shit!� = Denied!

Threatening: No example necessary = Denied!

Incoherent: �Purple wagon! Ear-snape! Spinich roller-coaster!� = Flandorffed!

Redacting:

We have been known, on occasion, to post some really whiny, self-indulgent garbage on this site. This has not happened often, and we usually deleted such posts out of sheer embarrassment. However, we recognize that this kind of thing is wrong, and should not have been done. Unfortunately (or� conveniently), all of those now-deleted posts are irrecoverable, so we can�t prove anything. Nevertheless, from this point forward, anything we post to this site will stay posted, unless it has to be withdrawn for legal or ethical reasons.

If either of those two situations should occur, we will try as best we can (within legal and ethical limits, of course) to explain what happened, what the nature of the offending post was, and why it had to be removed; all comments meeting the site�s approval guidelines will be left intact, if at all possible.

Privacy:

Any personal information collected on this site, or emailed to the editoral address (that�s editor(((at)))sloganeering.org, by the way) will not be shared, sold, or otherwise distributed. At all. Ever. Unless you ask us to publish it for some reason.

Hopefully, these policies will allow us to have a good, interesting time here at Sloganeering.Org. Thank you for reading, and enjoy the Internet!

Beautiful Solitude

Monday, July 21st, 2008

What we’ve got here is the first panel of this Able and Baker comic, and the reason it’s up there is because I feel it distills my own existence quite well.

If you aren’t lucky enough to live alone, and if you also happen to be a reader, then the odds are slightly better than 50/50 that the person(s) you live with despise your books.

Because, sometimes, you get stuck living with a person who cannot sit quietly in a room with another person. They must talk. They have to talk. They can’t not talk. And, heaven forefend you should partake in some quiet, focused activity in their presence.

Because if you’re not talking to them, you are therefore ignoring them; you are willfully and deliberately shutting them out, silently pointing up their unimportance in your life. You are depriving fuel from an already weak flame that, due to your selfishness and neglect, is in danger of fluttering out completely.

How often have I sat in the front room, reading peacefully during one of the few hours of free time I have left, when all of a sudden, I am assailed by the phrase, "Talk to me." We’ve just talked, we’ll talk again in a minute, but that’s not enough. If we were watching TV, we could both be quiet. Ah, that solves everything.

Lovely Parting Gift

Monday, July 21st, 2008

So, this weekend I ventured into a national retail chain because I had a tire that needed to be replaced. It took them about three hours for them to figure out that they couldn’t help me with that, so I wound up pacing from one end of the store to the other. And that’s when I ran across this:

Oh, yes.

Because who hasn’t watched “The Hit Fox TV Show,” Moment of Truth without thinking, gee I wish I could recreate the excitement I’m seeing now, in my own home! That’s a good idea: what every relationship needs is a good going-over with a lie detector.

The only reason Moment of Truth works as a television show is this: modern life is possible only because people have no compunction about lying as fully and freely as possible. Lies are the grease that keeps the engine of civilization from seizing up: Your customers think that you really care about them, your boss thinks that you are a respectful, servile little minion, your kids think that you love them all equally, and your husband thinks he was your first choice. Any deviation from these deceptions will only create time-wasting drama.

What Moment of Truth does is peel away the protective layer of deceit, breaking a person down, all for our entertainment. Ninety-nine percent of us, the television-watching public, would adamantly refuse to take a lie detector test on national TV, no matter how much money was at stake. Because we are too deep into the lies our lives are made of to ever be willing to emerge from them, breaking the surface as our moist, sickly, genuine selves, naked to the world for the first time since we first learned that we have some control over how other people see us.

On the other hand, this is a ten dollar boardgame with a cheap plastic “lie detector”, which is probably as effective a diagnostic tool as an e-meter, so never mind.

Archive for July, 2008

Meta: Illin’

Your Designs Are Wasted On Me

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