Real life ninja turtles are popping up all over the internet. The latest is this ninja who purposefully got himself caught by a fishing family – just so he could teach them a lesson.
Category: Culture
YouTube Tuesday: Bloody advertising
New Zealand is sick of crap drivers crashing in the rain – so an advertising agency came up with a billboard that bleeds in wet weather. Here’s the news report. It’s pretty awesome.
Coach, first class and business
You know what really annoys me. The theory that to be successful in the realm of business you need some sort of mentor, guru or coach. When did this happen?
I don’t care if your business coach or mentor is really successful – if they’re so good why aren’t you working for them?
Sure, learning from other people’s successes and failures is helpful. And wisdom comes from experience (including other people’s experience). Advice is great. But the idea that you need constant handholding and affirmation in order to realise your true potential is constantly frustrating. What happened to learning on the job and from your own experience – it seems that the approach these days is to run around collecting coaches and pithy advice before stepping out and doing something. It’s hardly entrepreneurial.
It’s especially frustrating when you run around telling everybody what your coach/mentor/guru/sage/seer etc told you and suggesting they apply it to their own endeavours in that field in a way that disparages everybody who does things differently or chooses to hold to an alternate philosophy.
That is all.
EDIT: In case anyone is wondering who this is directed at – it was vaguely work related. But I find this frustrating in every sphere.
Signage fail
We spotted this at our favourite cafe on Saturday – while I’m not a grammar nazi I am an irony fan – so this made me laugh. I tested it on people at work and most of them thought the slogan was funny without noticing the glaring error.
Guide to better working
Successful careers are a matter of working smarter not harder. I’m almost positive that’s the case. Every job has “short cuts” or tricks of the trade to make things easier. Here’s a collection of some of the best – from some obscure trades and some normal every day careers.
My favourites:
Mechanic
If you have to change a light bulb where the glass is broken, you can press a potato into the metal base to unscrew the remains of the bulb from the fixture.
Graphic Designer
If you have a client who is unable to approve a proposed design without putting her stamp on it, just put an obvious error in the proposal: a logo that’s too large, a font that’s too small, or a few judiciously seeded typos. The client requests the change and feels she’s done her part—and your design, which was perfect all along, sails through to approval.
Proofreader
If you’re reading too fast, your brain can “correct” typos, preventing you from catching them. That’s why it’s sometimes a good idea to read a page upside-down. It forces you to pay closer attention to individual words out of context, and you can’t race through pages too fast.
TV is crap, aliens told me so
According to this diagram aliens are listening to Music is Crap by Custard at about 40 Eridani – they’re also watching a whole bunch of rubbish television throughout the galaxy.
Pain to gain ratio
The old no pain no gain adage gets tested (along with physics and chemistry) in this video where the proponents have gone to far too much effort. At least the guy involved probably won’t be breeding any time soon.
Horsing around
I hate Nickelback. More than I hate U2. They are the world’s most painful band.
I was at the pub the other night with Tim and Aaran for trivia. There was a Nickelback had a video clip playing. Luckily there was no sound on. But the band have this odd habit of looking like they’re riding horses when they’re singing.
Microsoft, on the other hand, apparently love Nickelback – and they think you do too.
They want you to clog up your computer with their stupid product – and a stupid song by a stupid band. What an incentive.
Rubikcubism
Here’s a follow up to that Rubik’s Cube art post from the other day. It’s pretty incredible. According to the video this kind of artistic endeavour is called rubikcubism.
The video was in the original post – but something didn’t quite work and it’s worthy of its own post. Apologies if you’ve seen it already.
New kids on the block
Have you seen that video of all those prisoners doing the Thriller dance? It’s really moving and emotional and stuff… well, this is better.
Review: How To Rob A Bank
The full title – How To Rob A Bank: And Ten Tips To Actually Get Away With It.
Coming in at the perfect length (an hour and 12 minutes) this bank robbery caper would have been incredibly cheap to produce – it’s the movie Phone Booth would have been if it was a bank robbery comedy, only it’s got the recently departed David Carradine as the mastermind on the other end of the phone rather than Keither Sutherland (thanks Kutz).
It’s clever, entertaining, and beautifully shot. The script keeps things moving, the jokes are well executed. It’s not long so it’s worth a watch.
The ten tips – for those wondering… (with some slight language modifications)…
- Decide to rob a bank.
- Have a plan.
- Have a back-up plan.
- Establish clear communications.
- Choose your partners carefully.
- Expect the unexpected.
- Stuff happens.
- Don’t get greedy.
- Remember, stuff happens.
- Hang up and know when to walk away
Free thinking
Andrew and I have continued to discuss the implications of my “open source” Christian music idea.
Clearly both sides of the argument contain truths – particularly when applied to Christian music. Songwriters want their ideas spread as widely as possible, while they also need to be paid to write if they do it full time. There’s another paradigm to consider when it comes to whether or not God “owns” work produced through spiritual gifts. Then he’d own the intellectual property, and the copyright.
It’s part of a much bigger and broader argument about open source that’s going on in the upper echelons of thoughtful journalism – and a lot of the discussion is about the future of journalism and paid media in the context of the free media offered by the web.
Malcolm Gladwell – one of my favourite authors is engaged in a debate with Wired Magazine editor, and author of a book called “Free”, Chris Anderson.
Anderson wrote his book on the premise that “ideas and information” want to be “free”… that’s a nutshell summary.
Here’s Anderson’s take on music and the Internet as quoted in Gladwell’s review of the book (which was negative)…
“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.”
It’s a great article. Here’s another interesting passage from Anderson’s book, again quoted by Gladwell…
“Anderson describes an experiment conducted by the M.I.T. behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational.” Ariely offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon has had the same experience with its offer of free shipping for orders over twenty-five dollars. The idea is to induce you to buy a second book, if your first book comes in at less than the twenty-five-dollar threshold. And that’s exactly what it does. In France, however, the offer was mistakenly set at the equivalent of twenty cents—and consumers didn’t buy the second book. “From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free,” Anderson writes. “Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.”
Gladwell’s critique cites YouTube as an example.
“Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.”
Chris Anderson has since responded to Gladwell’s criticism on his blog. He uses blogging and bloggers getting book deals as a case study. Interesting stuff and worth a read. Seth Godin – the “guru” – has chimed in on the subject declaring Anderson right and Gladwell wrong. The Times Online’s tech blog predictably took the side of established journalism and declared Gladwell the winner.
Black comedy
Honestly, I thought long and hard about that title… because it’s semi racist – but it actually really epitomises the nature of the post in question.
The feedback to my decision to make references to making light about the death of Michael Jackson was not mixed. Most people don’t like the idea at laughing at death. I’m of the opinion that “where oh death is your victory, where oh death is your sting” (Corinthians 15:55) is essentially a mockery of death – and once death and sin (which crops up in verse 57) have been dealt with you are free to laugh at it.
Perhaps laughing at people who presumably haven’t dealt with sin isn’t the most sensitive thing to do.
But I digress – the reason for this post – is that I’m wondering about satire and death, and satire and death as “incisive social commentary” – particularly after viewing this Twitter account purportedly from a “Starving African Child” (obviously it’s not really from a starving African child).
It seems to tread close to where the Chaser’s infamous sketch dared to tread – though perhaps not quite so confrontationally, and yet it is as confronting as a World Vision ad – which uses pathos for persuasion rather than humour. Both are tools of persuasion – and yet we frown on one and not the other.
The sense of outrage surrounding the Chaser sketch seemed to be that it preyed on the vulnerable for laughs (while making some sort of point – perhaps their problem was with clarity in terms of the target – presumably cathartic middle class philanthropy… I’m really not sure what their point was), while World Vision et al are drawing attention to the plight of children. Is it wrong to use satire to do this? Is it only wrong when the target isn’t clear? Is it inherently wrong to satirise the vulnerable in order to draw the intended response from those in power?
Gulf War: Critics v Consumers
Transformers 2 is killing it at the box office and being killed by the critics.
“After just five days, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is halfway to $400 million domestically, a box-office milestone only eight other movies have reached. If it climbs that high, the “Transformers” sequel will be by far the worst-reviewed movie ever to make the $400 million club.
Critics and mainstream crowds often disagree, but “Revenge of the Fallen” sets a new standard for the gulf between what reviewers and mass audiences like. “
Yeah, cop that critics… you suck.
YouTube Twosday: Legolibrium
Equilibrium is a good movie. If you like badly adapted dystopian fusions of 1984 and the Matrix. Which I do. So it’s awesome that this guy has created lego versions of scenes from the movie…