Garrr Tuxedo Crab takes no prisoners
Was formulating a hilarious tweet about Netflix and how you can tell my mom and I share an account from the genre recommendations (“Critically-acclaimed French Dramas,” “Horror Movies,” etc.)
Then found myself debating whether to @ a friend, because while the tweet would be relevant to him, it…
Every tweet of mine goes through this filter and has all the @`s removed.
…our world having once emerged for no purpose, nobody knows exactly how, it follows its course perfectly indifferent to our wishes and it will certainly end one way or another: the earth incinerated by the dying sun, the universe immobilized forever in thermodynamic equilibrium, the solar system reduced to a black hole. As to human destiny, “they were born, they suffered, they died,” as Anatole France’s shortest world history would have it. Ultimately, the history of the universe appears to be the history of the defeat of Being by Nothingness: matter, life, the human race, human intelligence and creativity —everything is bound to end in defeat; all our efforts, suffering, and delights will perish forever in the void, leaving no traces behind.
This sounds banal and it is banal and therefore important, as the banal is no less than what is known and experienced by all.
I read a lot of Dilbert when I was a kid (weird how popular that strip is among pre-employment audiences), so I grew up hating corporate jargon before ever being around it. I snickered at synergy before I knew what it meant.
Now that I’ve spent almost 3(!) years in the workplace, I’ve come to…
Other examples I`ve encountered:
“We`ve got John here to give us some color on the European luxury market.” means “John is here to tell us what he knows, but we don`t guarantee he`ll have any great insights.”
“Mike, a Partner from the Dallas office, is going to provide part of the thought leadership for the first phase.” means “Mike isn`t going to do anything but his name will be on the client materials.”
“There`s a lot of low-hanging fruit we can focus on first.” means “We don`t know how to fix the important, complicated issues so we`ll first fix the easy ones so that we can show that we`re doing something.”
Went to dinner at one of the many Sergio Arno restaurants in my temporary neighborhood on Friday night, and this is exactly how I chose our wine. Except in Brazil only Chilean and Argentine wines are both good and affordable so the last line in the picture should also be in bold.
Wine List
This Tiger Woods ad parody came out pretty quickly - even if the original Google ad has been around for a while, months before we all saw it on the Super Bowl.
The ad ends on a note that to me is a subtle commentary on this whole situation - Tiger had thousands of slutty girlfriends, shopped at Zales, and got caught in a pathetic web of lies and deceit. But he’s the best golfer to ever have lived, and at some point we’ll all remember that again.
Nelson Mandela forgave the Afrikaner minority because he knew that a cycle of revenge leads to nothing but pain and the mutual destruction of the parties involved, and that his country could only move on once they had gotten over the past, we should forgive all of the terrible things Tiger has done and let him make more awesome chip shots.
That could be a way to catalyze donations, consciousness of or support for anything. Create a form of “socially conscious spam”, where the goal isn’t for the user to purchase V!agr@ or enlarge their penis, but to give money or get behind a particular cause.
On website, launch irritating popups that only go away once you commit to a $2 microdonation. Email newsletters that require you send $1 to Darfur in order to unsubscribe.
Exploring Tumblr today, I accidentally ended up getting a funny little ribbon on the bottom-right corner of my avatar. This signified that I had donated money to Haiti relief, which I hadn’t done. To remedy the situation, I tried to remove the ribbon. This proved to be impossible. Left with no other options — except hypocrisy — I gave some money to Doctors Without Borders.
A bad user experience created a good outcome. Go Tumblr!
PS: I really do wish I could easily remove this ribbon. It’s not a big deal, but I just don’t like:
- Joining some faceless online army for any reason
- Changing — or even noticing — my avatar. Avatars are like small, mean mirrors that pop up on your computer screen with minimal warning. I guess this is rooted in deeper issues.
- Gestures of support that inevitably conclude. Remember when Iran had that election and everyone on Twitter made their avatar green? I don’t see any more green avatars. At this point, a green avatar would be ridiculous and dated. But I would hate to be the Twitter user deciding who, for the sake of aesthetics and timeliness, changes their avatar back to normal and in so doing essentially withdraws support from Iranian dissenters.
PPS: I might have donated money anyway, even without the ribbon! But we’ll never know. The events that transpired rendered impossible any understanding of my own actions; forever — at least in this particular case — closing the door to self-knowledge.
