It’s Crazy Bitch Friday!
Did you see this thing on Drudge? A baby doll that says something that sounds remarkably like “hey, crazy bitch!”
It does, too — but the story is a bit of a put-up job. They play it to shoppers and ask them if they’re outrageously outraged, which the dutifully try to pretend to be for the camera. Except this lady right at the end, who is clearly the crazy bitch they’re talking about.
Many years ago, there was a Po the Teletubby doll that said something suspiciously like unto “bite my butt!” Closest I’ve ever come to soiling myself in public, I was in a department store in downtown London, gave Po a poke, and sure enough…
Oh, also…film has surfaced of the guy who took a couple of shots at the White House. It was taken back in September and he’s wangling for a spot on Oprah. He claims to be Jesus and all kinds of crazy shit, but — funny thing — he doesn’t peg my crazy meter. Usually I have pretty good schitz-dar. I wonder if he’s more Hinckley than M’Naghten.
Oh, also, there’s this crazy dude, who forges works of art and then gives them to museums for free. Just a garden variety crazy dude, apparently.
And finally, from those crazy bitches at the European Food Standards Authority: EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration. They picked a bad time to land themselves on the front page doing something retarded again.
Good weekend, all!
November 18, 2011 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 51
We are building something ever so strange…
Look, it’s me! I’m a naked acid-puking necromorph!
This is the multiplayer Dead Space 2, which is played on servers belonging to Electronic Arts. It’s a fairly long wait before enough people jump in to make up a game (it’s played in two teams, humans versus aliens; you need a good 6-8 people to start) so I listen in on the the chatter of players who’ve left their microphones open.
Now, I realize I’m in Britain, so the closest servers are probably in Europe somewhere, but I’m gob-smacked at the range of voices I hear. Not just European languages…there are quite a few from further afield. Russians and Chinese. Indians, I think. I’m not the best at identifying languages. The voices belong to older people than I would have guessed (or maybe it’s just older people who are dumb enough to leave their mics on). I often hear children and TV in the background.
Thing is, this mirrors my observations in art and music forums: thanks to the internet, we’re cobbling together a weird international monoculture. It’s heavily but not exclusively American. Anime and Manga are powerful influences in the visual arts, for example. Chinese martial arts in gaming.
In many countries, it can only be a tiny minority who have access to broadband and gaming-spec computers. But among those people, we are all sharing a single culture: music, movies, comics, animation…and especially video games. I have no idea what this means, but I’m sure it’s important. And weird. And completely unprecedented.
There are kids in Beijing and Bangalore playing rock and roll, and you would recognize the song.
— 12:06 am
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