Number seven will blow your mind
It’s Summer reading season and I’m working my way through my backlog of saved articles. I’ve just finished this interesting story from the New Yorker’s January issue on Emerson Spartz, one of those irritating young new media booboos who are transforming the internet into a eyeball abusing listicle shithole. Things that don’t surprise me:
■ 80% of his company’s time is spent on social media (mostly FaceBook) promoting content, 20% on developing actual content.
■ His content isn’t his content. It’s borrowed from other sites (like mine, I s’pose, but I’m not running a clickfarm).
■ His every fiber yearns for you to hit that button. There is no other purpose to his activity.
He has a staff of elves that actually feed content into his sites. Himself sits all day in front of a screen of analytics. He will publish the same exact story on FaceBook with ten different titles, then watch which title get the most clicks in realtime, then winnow out the losers until he has found the perfect Darwinian clickbait.
Yes, it looks as though he is the creator of my current favorite hate title: X pictures of Y, #Z will blow your mind!
I’m a veteran of these things because I hang out on FaceBook passively stalking old friends and family members, and I love looking at pictures.
You click on the first picture and there’s, like, ten ads all around it. Usually animated. Usually the next button is hidden and several of the ads have right arrow buttons that look like the next button. Next picture, whole new set of ads. I’ve gotten so wadded up about these things I’m currently taking a positive delight in not clicking the bastards.
I’ve got one in front of me now. The obvious next button is actually an ad for M&S Men ‘s Linen Trousers (one above and one below the picture). Marks and Spencer’s. What are they thinking? What the hell kind of customer relationship do you build when you trick people into clicking an ad they didn’t want to click?
One of two possibilities: either the internet is so huge that if one in a hundred of the one in ten people who mistake-click your ad go on to buy your crappy trousers, it’s worth your advertising money, even if you piss off everyone else.
Or this approach to marketing is a big stupid obvious mistake that we will look back on some day and shake our heads.
June 4, 2015 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 14
Puny mortals!
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about GamerGate.
GamerGate is an unfolding nasty slap-fight between low-status nerdy video game players and high-status hipster smartasses. It should be small and meaningless, but it’s blossomed into something big and ugly…and emblematic.
I’m firmly on Team Nerd, but I haven’t been able to articulate what I think about it — and before I managed to do it, someone at PopeHat did it ever so much better than I could, with links and references and everything. (If you don’t read PopeHat, I recommend that you do. This group blog frequently pisses me off — I’m just sure they take more pokes at my team than they do the other guys — but is nearly always thoughtful and interesting and seldom wasted time).
Clark does a bang-up job relating the current kerfuffle to the larger historical trends, which is the very thing I have been thinking about lately. Larger historical trends, I mean. If you haven’t got time for the whole thing, skip to the bit that’s sub-headed “Our forces have Technograd surrounded are pounding it with shame bombs, and our sappers are inside the walls” (I’d link to it directly, but there isn’t a tag for me to grab onto. That’s nerd talk).
Oh, and see you back here tomorrow, 6pm WBT, Dead Pool Round 70!
October 23, 2014 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 8
That is so effing French
There is a pedestrian bridge in Paris over the Seine near the Louvre called the Pont des Arts. Here, lovers come to write their names on padlocks, clamp them to the bridge railings and fling the key into the river, an expression of undying lurv.
The railings are collapsing. Duh.
This is not an ancient tradition, it is a recent thing, a creation of social media. It’s spread from Paris to Moscow and New York and elsewhither. Different cities are dealing with it in different ways, mostly involving cutting them off.
I just love the idea of Parisian infrastructure collapsing under the weight of empty romantic gestures.
I’ve come to dislike the French since I moved here. It’s not exposure to the English what’s done it, it’s exposure to the French.
June 17, 2014 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 24
Wouldja lookit the time!
Well, would you look at that! It’s Friday the 13th, it’s a full moon and the whole world is burning (those excitable brown people in the East, anyway). Eh, in the immortal words of Scarlet O’Hara, “fuck that, it’s Friday!”
Here, I think you should follow this guy on Twitter: Greenwich Mean Time. Twice a day, randomly, it tells you the time. And is mean to you.
It’s 8.37pm. You didn’t get that job because you smell like shit and also because you’re fucking stupid…It’s 8.15pm. It’s not just in your head, your tone of voice IS awful…It’s 10.50am. You could be outside but instead, you’re stuck in an office because you made all the wrong life decisions…It’s 2.41pm. All your school friends were paid actors from a local children’s television workshop. It nearly bankrupted your parents…It’s 11.19pm. I hope you shit yourself in your sleep…It’s 10.29pm. You’re a twatparrot…It’s 12.15am. Even those fake followers you bought have muted you.
What? No, I don’t use Twitter much these days, either. But I’d rather have an anonymous internutter pretending to be a clock insult me twice a day than follow current events at the moment. Or, you know, sharp stick in the eye is good.
Good weekend, all!
June 13, 2014 — 10:15 pm
Comments: 28
Here’s a strange one
You won’t be surprised to learn I spend a lot of time browsing art online. There are some astonishing people in concept art today (above, Popeye by Lee Romao). Love that sweet, sweet eye candy.
There are lots of group art sites, duh. Storage is a burden, but building an art site is still an attractive prospect — the kind of proposition where users jostle to provide your content for you.
Over the last few years — as usually happens with anything online — one site pulled ahead and became pretty much the standard for digital artists. Lots of illustrators used it as their main online portfolio showcase. I spent many a happy hour there, catching up with my favorites.
I won’t link, because CG Hub is gone. About six weeks ago, the URL went flakey and people assumed they’d forgotten to renew their domain name or something. Then the developer released a terse and strange message:
No more CGHUB. Sad day. Project CGHUB is officially closed. The reason behind this extremely tough decision is personal and will remain private. It’s absolutely not connected with business or any kind of technical difficulties. On behalf of development team I would like to apologize to CGHUB users and fans for abrupt project closure and delay with its announcement. – The Shakuro Team
Personal and private? The hell? There was even a for-pay mode and they’ve been busily refunded moneys.
The only thing I can glean is that the developers and owner of the name were different entities, and at odds. The development team has launched a Kickstarter to rebuild the site under a new name, but I don’t imagine they’ll prevail. By the time they get anything going, the circus will have moved on.
Art Station looks pretty cool.
May 20, 2014 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 7
e pluribus…wait, what?
Here it is — just in time for Valentine’s Day — FaceBook’s new list of all the possible ways to describe your gender on your FB profile:
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans*Female
Trans*Male
Trans*Man
Trans*Person
Trans*Woman
Transexual
Transexual Female
Transexual Male
Transexual Man
Transexual Person
Transexual Woman
Transgender Female
Transgender Person
Transmasculine
Two-spirit
Huh. Many of these words mean the same thing. I guess in the world of people who disagree with the big basic dichotomy, the subtleties — things like the difference between trans, trans*, transgender or transsexual — loom large.
Nope. That didn’t make sense to me, either.
More likely, FaceBook is leaking badly and is desperate to pump some air back in. I’m not sure this is the way to do it, but hey — am I a billionaire? No. I am not.
Oh, do yourselves a favor: don’t ever undertake a Google Images search of “reproductive organs,” m’kay?
February 13, 2014 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 47
I did not know this…
Interesting article in the Metro about free-to-play games and ‘microtransactions’. The current crop of free phone/tablet/browser games offer gameplay enhancements and add-ons for small sums. At today’s exchange rate, per the figure in the graphic, that’s almost a million bucks a day one game is taking in. (Games trigger the same reward brainjuice as cocaine, you betcha).
In the abstract, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. We’re all grownups and game designers gotta eat.
Provided the charges aren’t hidden, or easy to rack up by accident. Or aimed at kids. Or centrally important to a game you’ve actually already paid a lot of money for. And some of these new games have apparently done those bad things, but I suppose that’s to be expected. New idea shaking out and all.
I think their constituency is commuters and other bored people with smartphones. Not really my kind of gaming, happy to say. I played vanilla Angry Birds through once — fairly obsessively until it was done, I have to admit — and that scratched the itch.
January 29, 2014 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 17
I thought y’all racists needed to see this.
Again and again, until you get it. Y’all need to stop picking on our president of color, like, RIGHT NOW.
If you don’t recognize it, this is a standard internet reaction gif that I deconstructed in P’shop and fiddled with. I just love doing that. I thought about making reaction gifs for a living, but then I thought, “oh, yeah — that shit’s free.”
p.s. Oh, stop complaining. At least I didn’t post it Friday and leave it up for the weekend.
November 18, 2013 — 11:17 pm
Comments: 22
Put me some knowledge
Happy Armistice Day slash Veterans Day, folks. Especially you veterans. And armistixes. The web seems boring today, so I will be, too.
Are any of you using Google+? Can you ‘splain it to me?
I’ve heard it called FaceBook without FaceBook. I get the impression Google is pushing it pretty hard right now, which is pissing people off. I understand they’ve tied Google+ to the comment system on YouTube, likewise pissing people off. And that’s pretty much all I know.
Uncle B and I have both seen a big uptick lately in requests for Google+ linkages and Hangouts. He’s a bit like this about social media. I’m willing to try things, but I live in terror that my tablet is going to rat me out to my desktop PC some day. You know — real name, medical history, jeans size, the latitude and longitude of the spot I’m sitting now typing this useless bullshit somehow find themselves on a banner ad on Drudge. With a link to my blog.
So. How about that Google+.
November 11, 2013 — 11:13 pm
Comments: 38
So, what’s the problem?
This is Li Meng. He hasn’t left this computer terminal for six years. He gets up to pee and shower and they hold his place for him. The rest of the time, he’s sitting in this internet cafe in this very chair playing video games. If you Google “Li Meng” and “internet cafe” you’ll get a ton of different takes on the story, mostly a bunch of handwringing about “internet addiction”.
But here’s the thing: renting a spot full time in the internet cafe costs him about eighty bucks a month. Playing video games, he says he’s making about $325 a month. You know what I say? THIS MAN IS THE KING OF AWESOME.
Plays video games all night, sleeps in the chair all day, slips out for a wash and some Chinese takeaway and puts money in the bank every month. I am NOT seeing a problem here.
It’s like when heroin got cheap in the Nineties and there were all these articles about how horrible it was that junkies could take a McDonald’s job and have enough money to rent a small apartment and support a smack habit. And I’m thinking, “wait…they’re fully supporting themselves and their wicked habits with an honest job? So what part of this is your business?”
April 2, 2013 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 33