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Enough, fanbois

17 Jun 2008

SMH’s story on aspiring model Isobella Jade, who perfected the art of freeloading by coming into the New York Apple store every day for 18 months to check her email, should be headlined:

Isobella Jade topless - I get more hits this wayApple perfects the art of freeloading off fanboi journos for publicity

Here’s a picture of Isobella Jade topless. I get more hits this way.

And here’s a picture of Ms Jade from Mac Directory magazine, where the SMH stole adapted the story from.

Isobella Jade in MacDirectory story

I mean, seriously, the two hottest stories in the Aussie tech media lately are:

  1. Apple releases product
  2. Apple opens shop.

I can’t imagine there ever being two stories with a stronger public interest angle.

It’s fine to be a fan of a particular brand or product, sure. But when you let your religious devotion to the Cult of Steve cloud your editorial judgment, you’re doing your readers a disservice and discrediting your publication as a click-chasing whore.

Posted in marketroids, media, nerds, sensitive stuff about chicks, techno-wankery | No Comments »

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tl;dr

11 Jun 2008

Nicholas Carr writes in The Atlantic how the internet (not just Google, despite the title) is sapping our ability to read in depth long passages of text. On the intertubes we tend to skim and sample, looking for the quick win; the nugget of information that means we can stop reading. However, Carr finds this behaviour is spilling over into his non-web reading.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

A colourful metaphor, to be certain. But was it a deliberate irony to publish all 4,100 words of this lengthy essay on the web without so much as a subheading? It’s almost as if Carr invites us to blanch at the vast slabs of text - too long; didn’t read.

Posted in techno-wankery, wordy things | No Comments »

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Was it good for you, ladies?

5 Jun 2008

As I write this, thousands of women around Australia are in the postorgasmic glow of having seen the breathlessly anticipated SATC movie. The SMH tells us that cinemas have reported being “compeltely overwhelmed” by the demand for tickets, as though the high-quality Aussie meeja hadn’t already given the bloody thing enough free publicity. “We haven’t seen this level of online ticket sales before except for the Harry Potter movie,” enthused Greater Union cinemas promotional manager Melissa Kesby.

Like we needed any further proof society was on the brink of imploding into the vacuum of its own self-obsessed fatuousness.

Posted in media, sensitive stuff about chicks | No Comments »

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Smart-arse Jewish scientists explain how sarcasm works

3 Jun 2008

A team of neuropsychologists from Haifa University have worked out how the brain processes sarcasm.

Dr Simone Shamay-Tsoory said language areas on the left hand side of the brain interpret the literal meaning of words and the frontal lobes and the right side of the brain understand the social and emotional context. An area called the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex then integrates the literal meaning with the social/emotional context, which will reveal any sarcasm.

People who suffer from autism or have had one of those parts of their brains damaged have trouble interpreting sarcasm - they tend to understand the statement literally - because they don’t pick up the emotional context or can’t reconcile the context with the literal meaning.

(Image courtesy of BBC)

Perhaps these parts of the brain atrophy through disuse, or can be removed through selective breeding. Which might explain Americans.

Posted in filthy kike propaganda, nerds, science | 6 Comments »

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Shouting at the screen

30 May 2008

Contemplating the seeming inevitability of a Tory government after the next UK general election, Charlie Brooker writes:

Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other.

This aptly describes the way I felt pretty much throughout the Howard years. Occasionally I’d get a bit worked up and shout at the screen - this blog is testament - but most of the time it was numb disengagement and keeping my mind on other things.

Following Australia’s transition to Ruddocracy, right-wing pundits pondered what the chattering classes would have to whinge about without their number-one hate figure. And the relatively infrequent postings on this blog in the past six months demonstrate the terrifying reality…

There just haven’t been that many things to get angry about.But that’s changing.

New South Wales Labor daily grows more arrogant, out of touch and incompetent while the state opposition flounders. Big Kev and pals have very poorly handled the transition from symbolic to practical. Their well-intentioned policy measures have been rife with unintended consequences. They’ve gone to jelly on petrol pricing when most punters accept the government can only tinker at the margins. The federal opposition has gone from ineffectual to unconscionable. The commercial media turns more crass, tabloid and trivial by the hour.

I’ve had a bit of a nap. It was a nice dream, but now it’s over and I’m grumpy as all hell.

Posted in media, politics | No Comments »

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For fuck’s sake, enough already

27 May 2008

Two stories that just won’t die: petrol taxes and free publicity for a stupid movie.

Has society really sunk so low that the product placements in a movie for Cosmo-reading twits are news?

And well done to Brendan Nelson for keeping the petrol tax non-story alive for so long. Fuck our future for an opinion poll blip, why don’t you? But you have to admire the politics. By promising to do something years into the future, which will have no noticeable effect if it ever happens, he forces the Government to do something, or look like they don’t care about the poor struggling masses.

Petrol taxes are TOO LOW, you moron. Until the price reflects the scarcity of the resource and the environmental damage it causes, people have no incentive to stop using it. But try selling that to the battlers.

Posted in media, money, politics, sensitive stuff about chicks | 1 Comment »

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Bush to Mugabe: rigging elections is bad

18 Apr 2008

US President George W Bush has criticised Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe for not releasing the results of last month’s election.

” . . . you can’t have elections unless you’re willing to put the results out. What kind of election is it if you not let the will of the people be known?” Bush told reporters after a White House meeting with British PM Gordon Brown.

George W should perhaps have consulted his diaries for 7 November 2000, or thereabouts, before making statements of this kind.

But I suppose, it makes sense. George W rigs elections, nobbles the media, spies on his citizens, imprisons and tortures people without trial, abuses human rights and keeps poor black people in third-world conditions while ruining the economy to corruptly enrich a cadre of cronies and insiders, blaming all the country’s ills on a nebulous foreign bogeyman.

Whereas Mugabe . . . ?

Posted in politics, violence | No Comments »

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Workplace hazards

19 Mar 2008

Wall St securities trader Stephen Chang, a married man in his early 30s, is seeking damages from the Hot Lap Dance Club near Madison Square Garden, after a stripper allegedly hit his face with her high heel while she was performing a lap dance for him. The club retorts that Chang did not seek first aid or report the incident to club management at the time.

Those dismissing Chang’s claim as shameless or without merit do not realise how hazardous such venues can be for patrons. In these high-risk environments, guests are susceptible to all kinds of injuries, such as:

  • Eye strain, due to having to focus up close on things in low lighting
  • Heart attack or stroke from raised blood pressure
  • Muscle strain, back injury or hernia from supporting dancers’ weight during tricky manoeuvres
  • Heat rash
  • Sequin-related lacerations or abrasions
  • And of course, groin strain.

Posted in money, sensitive stuff about chicks | No Comments »

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Bob Carr: genius

19 Mar 2008

Former NSW premier Bob Carr was often criticised for being too cosy with business. Especially with the development of large infrastructure projects such as the Sydney Airport railway line, Cross-City Tunnel and Lane Cove Tunnel, many believe Carr ignored the interests of citizens to get better deals for his mates in construction and investment banking.

However, recent events have revealed Carr’s true nature: a socialist subversive, intent on swindling the corporate fat cats for the benefit of the good people of New South Wales.

What all these projects have in common, the latest being the Lane Cove Tunnel,  was that once these projects failed to achieve their ridiculously inflated income projections, the investors wrote off the billions they spent or sold off their stakes at a drastically reduced price.

This was all a deliberate strategy on Carr’s part. He was willing to wear the endless criticisms of being a capitalist stooge and big-business crony, because deep down he knew that within a few years, he would effectively have given the citizens of this great state a beautiful gift: free roads and railways!

What better way to build infrastructure than to con a bunch of investment bank money men, lured by false and unachievable promises of revenue, into paying for it?

Cost to taxpayer: zip. Cost to business: who cares?

It’s no wonder Bob went straight from Sussex St to Macquarie Bank. After the people of NSW helped themselves to such an enormous free dinner, Bob’s going to have to wash a lot of dishes to make up for it.

Posted in Sydney, money, politics | 1 Comment »

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Slightly faster broadband

3 Mar 2008

Minister for Broadband Stephen Conroy yesterday delivered the exciting news that the government’s planned $4.7 billion broadband network would deliver speeds “up to 100 times faster than what is currently available”. Sounds great!

It will achieve this by running fibre-optic connections to the telecommunications pillar mushrooms on street corners then using VDSL (very fast digital something something else) to deliver speeds of up to 25Mbps to homes.

Call me a pedant if you must, but that’s not 100 times faster than what’s currently available. I may be decaf soy latte drinking inner city elite, but I get around 19Mbps using ADSL2 and living about a kilometre from my phone exchange. I’m no maths genius, but I’m pretty sure 25Mbps is not 100 times faster than 19Mpbs. In fact I’d say it something closer to 1.3 times faster.

But Senator Conroy’s calculation is based on the claim that “most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second”. Which is

  • A lie - statistics more than a year old show two-thirds of broadband users on faster than 256Kbps and
  • A damning criticism of how Conroy’s predecessors let Telstra and the rest of the internet industry deliberately retard broadband access and make obscene profits.

Seems like when it comes to technology, the new federal government is as pompous and incompetent as the last.

Posted in damned lies and statistics, money, politics, techno-wankery, turtleneck wearing latté sippers | 1 Comment »

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