Johnson was driving past the statue recently with her young daughters and several of her daughters’ friends when the girls began to point, giggle and comment on the anatomically correct “David”.
“I didn’t even know it was art,” Johnson said. “To me, it’s just a naked man standing on the side of the road. Once the girls saw it, I found myself in a position where I had to explain what a penis is.”
Jesus christ! You mean you had to actually be a parent for once! Oh my god!
The problem with the Jakob Nielsen approach is that a site designed solely from the perspective of usability is useless from the perspective of emotion. And emotion is where long-term customer relationships start, which is what you were after when you made that huge investment in your web presence, isn’t it?
Interested in a thorough and sociologial look at the success of “All Your Base” (AYB)? Check it out. It’s a pretty interesting breakdown of memes, and how they penetrate society.
Naturally, questions arise. Notably: what the hell does this “All Your Base” nonsense mean? And why should I care about it? Come to that, why do I find myself repeating the oddest phrases, all-but-senseless strings of quasi-English along the lines of “Somebody set up us the bomb”?
The very definition of badass… The spring METAphrenie reel. (22Mb QT download)
from Salon:
The families of several victims in the Columbine massacre have filed a lawsuit against companies that create violent video games and sex-oriented Web sites, claiming their products influenced the gunmen.
“Absent the combination of extremely violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred,” said the lawsuit filed Thursday, a day before the two-year anniversary of the shootings.
Fucking bullshit. Mother-fucking ass-fucking holes. Jesus God-damned Christ in a fucking handbag. GAH.
The entertainment industry is NOT to fucking blame for something like this… especially for something that happened over 2 years ago… and the game they’re blaming (Doom) was created 6 years before THAT. This is a prime example of stupid people looking for someone to sue. It’s not about the victims anymore, it’s about the need to bleed the system dry, and get as many pennies as you fucking can. This is utter, complete bullshit. The only people to blame are the fucking victims themselves. If they left enough alone, those 2 kids would have had no reason to fucking shoot up the damn place. Do you honestly think that playing Doom or Quake and going to ‘sex-related’ websites had ANYTHING to do with the fact that these kids were verbally tortured day-in and day-out for nothing other than they didn’t play sports or look like the rest of the fucking kids in that school? I’m not defending the gunmen in the least, it was a despicable and ugly, horrible thing to do, but let’s face the facts here, they didn’t do it ’cause Sarge told ’em to.
Now, I’m jumping out on a limb here, but I’ve lived in Littleton, and I know what those people are like. These parents I can almost guarantee are suburban Republicans with giant houses and gas-guzzling Expeditions. They LOVE their capitalist way of life that affords them these great items. This ‘free market’ of ours has done wonders for their bank accounts and stock portfolios. But when the video game market determines that violent video games are what sells, they freak out because, well, violent video games are the reason why their kids are dead or injured. Why can’t these people see the way the world fucking works? Why can’t they wake up from their suburban sub-reality and see that they’re simply WRONG? It’s okay they’re pissed, but why can’t they truly search inside themselves for what THEY might have done wrong? When money, complacency and lack of compassion take the place of love in your hearts, peope die. Rage Against the Machine said it best..”Cellular phones, sounding a death toll.”
Check out the second post down in this Plastic.com discussion about it.
Ximian announced the availability Ximian GNOME 1.4 today… which looks strkingly like… well, MacOS 9, except for the installation manager, which looks a lot like WinXP, which I won’t even link to.
I really hope the next Zelda on Nintendo’s Gamecube looks this good. (1.7Mb)
Something I posted earlier as a comment on SVN
I am 22 years old. When I was around 14, computers became more than something we used in school to do book reports and HyperCard presentations… they became a source of entertainment, a way of connecting to my friends and the world.
Now, when you’re 14 years old, you don’t have much money, and even less morals as far as ‘free’ items go. I was the at the right (or wrong) age at precicely the same moment in time when applications and software and games could be copied and traded with relative ease… If one of my friends’ parents bought them ‘X-Wing,’ for example… what was the harm in simply making a copy of all (17) installation disks for me? Theft? We were just 14-year olds with no money trading some software, we weren’t criminals.
We strived to belong to the ‘3l33t3’ (elite) BBSs, so that we could get software (over a blazing fast 14.4 connection) that no one we knew in person had purchased. Again, we didn’t see ourselves as pirates, we saw the act of acquiring bootlegged software as just as much fun (if not more) than actually using the software itself… Using arcane keyboard commands… knowing passwords… getting the right number to dial.
So, all the way up through high school and college, I simply continued this practice, again due to the lack of money. I didn’t use software for ‘commercial’ purposes… I just wanted some decent software experience before I got to college, so I took Photoshop 3 from my high school. When I got to college, I still wasn’t making money, and having software at home was more convenient than always using (virus-infected and slow) school computers. So I went from not spending $50 for games to not spending $600 for professional software packages; from scanning WWIV BBSs to scanning Hotline. Music? Hell yeah, once that came around as downloadable, instead of copying CDs to tape, I just Napstered up a few tunes.
Victimless crime? Not exactly, but as victimless as you can get, perhaps… Oh, poor multi-billion dollar Adobe didn’t get the $600 for the version of Photoshop I’m running at home. Aw, too bad. Now, I did buy MacOS X 10.0, because I happen to feel that the mass success of that software will determine Apple’s future and longevity, a company I probably care a little too much about… The only companies hurt by software piracy are companies like Panic, who independently create useful, wonderful software that no one else has the balls to make. After using a ‘distributed’ Audion serial number for a while, when version 2.0 came out, I bought my own copy of it. Did I ‘distribute’ that serial number to a few friends of mine? Sure I did. Did I feel bad about it? Not really. It was mine to give, at that point, or at least that’s the way it felt.
Maybe I’m wrong. I probably am. But to someone like me who’s been doing this for a long time and seen no consequences, it’s hard to prove to me that piracy and Napster are all that big a deal.
I’m going to see Boy Sets Fire tonight with Eddie and I woke up this morning with this need to find a decent Emo-streaming internet radio station. Now, having heard Scott describe Boy Sets Fire as ‘scream-o,’ I thought of the perfect name for a streaming emo station… ‘Stream-o.’ Jesus christ, am I sexy.
From *spark-online:
You couldn’t find two more different lives as far as their experiences go. Boy, girl. West coast, east coast. Public school, private Catholic school. Unisex, all-girl. Middle class, upper-middle class. Broken home, still married. Warm weather, cold weather. Wild shooting spree, calculated hit. 15 years old, 14 years old. But the result was the same: two completely abused, miserable, lonely, hopeless, ignored, shuffled, suicidal kids could take no more. Not another day. Williams not only profusely shared his plan to shoot up his school (while recanting it of course as a joke), saying he really didn’t want to go to school that day. Bush internalized her pain, so isolated that her plan included only herself.
I guarantee you this is the experience of Elizabeth Bush and Andy Williams and Dylan Klebold and all the others that came before and will make their mark in years to come.
The question is, will society ever start making an effort to stomp out the bullies and take THEM into examination? Will people start thinking before they have children, for whom they don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to care for, guide, and nurture? As long as the hard long arm of the law slams down on these minor-aged offenders, as long as the punks who tormented the victims appear on a thousand video clips declaring the evil of their victim’s acts, as long as the blame is placed on gun laws and only by whiff, the parents, these killings will continue.
What could have easily become my situation in High School, described very well. Some insight on why ‘kids these days’ seem more violent than ever.
