Noted without comment.
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Author Archives: tacit
It’s all about the marketing
So, it would appear that there are so many people taking Prozac in Great Britain that it’s actually ending up in the water supply, as sewer treatment facilities aren’t set up to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.
Now, other people may see a problem there, but I see it as an opportunity. Rather than spending lots of money changing all the wastewater treatment facilities, what’s needed is just a different attitude–a different outlook on the situation. All they really need to do is convince the public that psychoactive drugs in the water supply are a feature, not a bug!
A good way to start, I think, would be with some creative pro-psychoactive slogans. Something like “I’m Xany for Xanax,” perhaps. With enough positive spin, people might start expecting–hell, demanding–antidepressants in their water.
And why stop at water? Just think of the marketing possibilities here! “Hey kids, are you bummed out because Mom is pressuring you to clean your room? Stressed over homework? Disappointed about the prom? Try new Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Plus. The “Plus” is Prozac!”
Anyway, just thinkin’.
Fun link o’ the day
Courtesy of phyrra, the Darth Tater Mr. Potato Head. I weep for the world.
Randomness at a grocery store, and the suckitude of life
At the grocery store this evening, between the frozen aisle and the canned goods, two women bumped into each other and started talking about a mutual acquaintance. “Has So-and so gotten married yet?” “No, she’s still not married.” “Really? That’s too bad.” “Yeah, i don’t know what it is. She has to find a husband some time.” “Maybe she’s just too picky.”
Dear God, I didn’t know there was anyone left like that in the world–not for real. Seriously. I thought that was something you’d only find on bad TV sitcoms. This is 2004, not 1904, right? Women do have value that doesn’t derive from their husbands, right?
Later, at the checkout line, the cashier looks at me and says “You know what’s interesting? All these countries that don’t like the USA, and say bad things about America, when something happens to them, who do they turn to? We give everyone in the world handouts and they still don’t like us. Like Russia. And why doesn’t Canada have its own army?”
The Universe of Suck Department: This weekend, Shelly and I were supposed to go to Atlanta with nihilus and phyrra so we could look at apartments, then from there up to Nashville to pick up their car. And as it turns out, next weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach with a client instead. Suck, suck, suck.
Yes, boys and girls, there really is something worse than reality TV
So last week, Shelly and I were over at M & S’s house, where we were treated to the Star Wars Holiday Special, first aired in November 1978 and never shown since. This movie is arguably the worst thing ever to be shown on network television–worse than Big Brother, worse than Barney, worse than the Super Mario Brothers TV show, worse than Starsky & Hutch and Hee-Haw combined.
The show, which was produced by George Lucas, is so awful that Lucas himself said if he had the time and money, he would “track down every copy of the show out there and smash it to bits with a hammer.” The premise: Han is trying to take Chewbacca home to visit his family for the Wookie holiday of “Life Day,” and gets sidetracked along the way dealing with Imperials and (in an animated sequence worse than the classic Hanna-Barbera saturday morning cartons, Boba Fett).
The show is done as a variety act, with long and mnd-destroying scenes of life on the Wookie homeworld (including a fifteen-minute-long conversation between Chewbacca’s wife and his son, in Wookie, with no subtitles), a transvestite Harvey Korman doing a Julia-Childs-esque cooking show about roast Bantha meat, Luke Skywalker with bleached hair and so much makeup he might as well be a transvestite, and, incredibly, Carrie Fisher trying to sing.
Yes, you read that right. Carrie Fisher, right in the beginning of her long slide into drug addiction, makes an appearance, glassy-eyed and so completely blitzed out of her mind that she can barely walk, and sings.
There’s a lot of singing here. Jefferson Airplane sings in a “Wookie Entertainment” scene. Bea Arthur sings in a bar, with footage spliced in from the original cantina in the movie–and they couldn’t afford to rebuild the entire cantina set as it was in the movie, so the design of the cantina keeps changing and parts of the cantina jump around every time the camera angle changes. (Why is she singing? Because the Imperials have closed down the bar. We know this because a bunch of stormtroopers are watching a film of the bar as part of a “moral education lesson.”)Diane Carol appears as a hologram inside some sort of gadget that Chewy’s father owns, which as near as I can tell is the futuristic version of a Playboy centerfold, and she sings.
And Han meets Boba Fett, on a planet which is for some unexplained reason entirely covered in six feet of red pasta sauce.
There’s enough material in the movie for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, stretched out to fill two hours that feel more like twelve. The show just goes on and on and on, and every time you think it can’t get any more dreadful, it does.
We definitely need to find a copy on DVD.
(Potentially) happy news…
So. three days ago, I get an email from an editor of PC Player magazine–they’re doing an article on geek wear, they want to feature the Villain Tees Web site, and could I please send him high-resolution press-ready CMYK TIFF images of the geek-related shirts on the site?
The Villain Tees ordering system has been b0rken for months, in part because I had to switch to a new screen printer and a new ordering system and I didn’t have the energy to fix it.
Fixed now; the ordering system is back online, the new screen printer is actually giving me a better price than my former screen printer was, and it’s ready to go. Be interesting to see if the magazine article actually drives people to the site…
Extropians, take heart…
…even the end of the universe may not be an insurmountable problem. String theory to the rescue! (Thanks to nihilus for the link.)
The beach, Georgia, and urban decay Florida style
A couple days ago, Shelly and I went to the beach, and admired the sun setting over Clearwater’s urban decay. It was quite lovely (the urban decay, that is; Florida sunsets are always lovely), and the beach was utterly abandoned save for us.
My client–the electronics firm that wants to hire me and send me up to Atlanta–received notification last week that their venture capital funds had been transferred from the overseas VC group, so the move is on. Some of the principals of the company have been in Atlanta for the past several days, getting ready to sign the lease on the research and manufacturing facility they’ll be moving into; the place is nothing short of amazinf, a 33,000 square-foot, brand-new facility that’s completely gorgeous. Shelly’s been apartment hunting all week; we’re in the process of narrowing down the likely places to live, and we’ll be taking a trip up there in a couple of weeks to check out the places on the short list. phyrra and nihilus have volunteered to accompany us and help us look, which rocks.
On the one hand, not owning my own business is going to take some adjusting. on the other hand, the potential exists to make an absolutely obscene amount of money, and one of my contacts at another client (a large nationwide retail chain) is relocating to the client’s corporate office in Atlanta, so I’ll likely be continuing to work with him; since I’ll still have clients of my own in Atlanta, working for a startup is not as risky as it could be.
We’ve been spending a great deal of time with nihilus and phyrra lately, and not all of it has been playing World of Warcraft. 🙂 Spending the night at their house last night was absolutely delightful, and I’m really looking forward to continuing the trend. The friendships Shelly and I have been building with them and with S and her partner M, and the frienships we have with the Smoosh and other people in Tampa, are the most difficult part of leaving here for Atlanta; odds are good we’ll probably still be spending a great deal of time in Tampa even after the move.
Slay me with KY00T!
American culture and the N-word
There is a word a simple two-syllable word starting with the letter “N,” thatcarries with it literally hundreds of years of associations and ideas about the role of a particular subset of people in society. the word carries connotations of race, class, and even social status, and at one time was applied only to a highly specific group of people.
The N-word word carries cultural connotations in modern American society that are increasingly divorced from its original meaning. The racial and cultural assumptions behind the word are becoming increasingly blurred; nowadays, in some subcultures, people may refer to one another by the N-word even when it’s clear that the word in its most basic meaning does not apply.
That word, of course, is Ninja.
I bring this up because New year’s Eve was the birthday celebration of cyber_wolf_2020 and datan0de, and the theme for the party was–you guessed it–ninjas.
When ninjas go wild, it is a frightening thing. Continue reading