joeblog

By “liking” a celebrity on Facebook these days, in many instances, you’re able to see into the semi-private world of your favorite celebrity. The thing that creeps me out more than anything are the fans that post comments as if they are pals – and perhaps some of them are, but honestly, with 283,746 comments on some of the more popular artists’ walls and photos, do you really think, if the celeb even updates their own Facebook that they’re going to read every one?  I have to admit, I’m a bit of a lurker; I cannot bring myself to comment on anything on a celebrity’s Facebook other than a quick “like” if I really like the post - and even then I feel creepy and unwashed. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I’ve left a an example here and may continue to post these when I see a particularly bone-headed response in a celebrity Facebook comments section.

Robert DeNiro and Anna Faris??

The mash-up you're about to see after the jump is so cool! If you try and double-dip my wife, I'll put a social footprint up yo ass! BOOYAH!

Some seem to enjoy the pretension of having a handle on media-based etymology in the current zeitgeist. Here’s several of web-based terms that have cropped up or been perverted in the last 10 years – and of course, driven me insane enough to write a rant regarding them.

“cool”
A once revered term from the 50s to the 70s, “cool” originated in the 30s, via jazz musicians, it’s wide-ranging usage spanned decades before being besmirched by internet biz-fucks somewhere around the mid 90s. It was at that time that the word ceased to have any real import, to me anyway. Given the barrage of chuckle-heads labeling everything online with “cool” or the sub-moronic “sweet!”, “cool” was no longer a word to be relegated to the ultimate in laid-back-ness.

“after the break” or “after the jump”
The internet isn’t television. Well, not yet anyway. Regardless, re-imagining an old TV phrase from live television in the 50s (“We’ll be right back; after this commercial break!”) and using it to describe a users eye-balls moving past a web-ad on a scrolling web-page is just beyond cretinous and completely condescending. In fact, I don’t even notice ads any more. They’d have to jump out of the screen and throttle me. I guess that over the years, I’ve become accustomed to mentally deleting them from the page completely and seeing only content.

“below the fold”

Ah yes, the classic term from the newspaper days. What’s a newspaper, you ask? Anyway, this phrase means cramming all the important info you can into the top of the screen before some lazy, fat user has to move his pudgy little hand to scroll down past his computer resolution sight-line. God forbid! Let me just say this. You cannot “fold” a computer monitor (although I have seen floppy futuristic versions of a computer “paper” and god knows why anyone would want to use the rubbery, pointless techno-gadget). Besides, I hate the cumbersome and unruly size of newspapers and more to the point, have always wondered why “newspaper-men” didn’t just create a paper that you didn’t have to fold? Oh wait, they finally did. It’s called a computer – with scrolling capability.

“mash-up”
Some bright-eyed young turd came up with the idea of taking two pieces of content and committing copyright infring— I mean, merging them. It’s supposed to provide users with a synchronous media experience that is pleasing to the eye and or ear. That they dubbed it a “mash-up” sounds like it should be an annoying cacophony of regurgitated foods that a small child puked all over their papa’s shoulder.

“footprint”
Apparently anyone using the internet is obsessed with simplistic metaphors that allow even the most addled, drooling, dim-wit to “get” what this crazy digital “inter-web” is all about. Whether it’s to stave off the inevitable future shock of having to sit in front of a screen for endless hours getting carpal tunnel and glaucoma or if it’s just so mom and dad won’t think the internet is the devil’s playground, marketing analysts and their ilk insist on coming up with these lame parallels. Thank god for their ingenuity, or I wouldn’t know what to call “surfing”.

“double-dip”
Used in various ways, this creepy term (which I refuse to even type again) was once a concept where a party guest would take a vegetable or cracker, place it in a bowl of flavored, milk-based gelatin, bite it, then place their saliva soaked nibble back in the bowl to infect the entire party with god knows what horrible disease. Disgusting. In it’s current incarnation, it’s used to describe things like bringing out a product not once, but twice. For example, bringing out a film release on DVD, then a year down the road re-releasing it with more extras, or a home video of one of the films’ celebrities beating his wife and throwing up on the carpet. In the adult world (porn) it could be used as another term for getting sloppy-seconds. Yep. Disgusting all around. Just stop fucking using it, you buffoons.

Well, that’s all for now folks. If you have any annoying web-isms you’d like to include, just drop em in the comment box.

Huzzah!

It's cracked! Ya get it? Huh?

I do enjoy Cracked.com. I find the writers more humorous than say, The Onion, who are more newsy and political by nature. Not my cup of tea. The consistent foolishness of the human race is closer to the grist the Cracked team enjoys milling. So, in this new age of mobile compatibility, I was, of course, overjoyed to find an iPhone app that accessed the current Cracked newsfeed. At first. As I continued to enjoy the wry wit of the Cracked team, I discovered that their iPhone app was lacking in features that most basic RSS apps have by default. And they charge .99 cents for the thing. Is the joke on me?

Anyway, in the Cracked tradition of listing 5-10 things that drive them mad (ho ho… that’s a joke a son; you’re too low to the ground) I’ve compiled my own little list. Enjoy.

1. A Search.
There’s a huge archive of great Cracked articles online, so why make me exit the app, go to Safari and try to read their non-mobile site?

2. Being Able to Pop Out a linked URL.
It’s great that any app can browse from within its’ confines, but most of them are slow and rather pointless. Why wouldn’t you just code it so the article would display in Safari or add in a “save to Instapaper” feature for offline reading? Are you trying to keep me in the app for a reason? Fair enough. I get it – with users attention spans akin to a shit-addled rat, we must keep eye-balls on the subject at hand. This, then, brings me to the next bone-headed annoyance…

3. The “GUI”.
If I do have to leave the app to, for example, look up something triggered by the hilarious and yet, well-researched articles in Cracked, how about being in the same spot in the article I was reading when i return? Every time I do something – answer a call or get out of the app to research a fact to see if they’re bullshitting me, I am always greeted with the top news-feed on my return. This is confusing and unnecessary.

Now... uh... where was I again?

4. Zooming into an article’s text or image.
The captions under images within a Cracked article are a great underlining of an already humorous diatribe. Why not let us read them on an iPhone? Try clicking on the image below. Frustrating isn’t it? Same goes for pictures. Maybe someone wants to see a close-up of an image of a Hooter’s waitress. (Not me, someone else.) I can tap to get it on it’s own, then zoom in, but when I exit the viewing “interface”, I am shot back up to the beginning of the article. The app also pops out the bare jpeg like I was on a web page with poor coding. Knowing how hi-larious and yet sometimes long-winded the Cracked author can be, this requires repetitious scrolling down to where I was reading.

Can you read this? Didn't think so.

5. More nudity.
They’ve apparently taken care of this in the past few posts.

Well over-all, until Cracked does some serious work on this app, I’ve just grabbed their RSS feed via MobileRSS. I’ll cross my fingers and wait for an update.

Ah, the internet. Where else can one find meaningless fun in a random, slogan generator?
My favorite word of choice to input? “Shit“. Every press of the button is a new classic, yet unusable, phrase for your company.

While I am not perfect when it comes to publishing my blog, the blogger movement at large has created a great deal of useless information. (I know, huge surprise…) One of the major problems with the internet in general is the immediacy of it. Unlike print publishing, all you have to do is click “publish” in your favorite blogging interface and walk away. Fix it later, when you catch the mistakes, right? Or even better – use the public as your proof reader. Reading blogs is like slogging through a massive fan-zine bin. Perhaps one day, some industrious programmer can develop a web app that “translates” some nitwit’s blog from unreadable dross to a concise, informative document. Google? Any plans for this?

Have a look at this excerpt from a “web designer” tip source blog. Is it really that laborious to type two more letters to finish words like “you” or use a fucking spell check? This type of lazy writing raises my hackles. I’m not even going to attack the grammar. Jesus… I’d pick the entire paragraph apart, but we’d be here all day.

—

It is the most important part which we neglect while publishing a post. Lets take a simple example. I am about ot publish a post lets say.
10 Awesome Graphics Designs and Digital Artworks  the URL would be :

www.yoursite.com/category/10-awesome-graphics-designs-and-digital-artworks
Seems pretty much alright, right? Well..here u miss about 30% of your visibility!!
A simple reason using STOP WORDS in title and URL are the worst idea u can think up of. !! AND is a stop word. About the url why make it so long using extra stuff in it like the word 10 , and etc. Trust me no one will search for your content in search engines with these words 10 graphics design.  If they look for that they will search graphics designs etc.
So get rid of 10 , and from your URL. Here is how they should be:

If you love email spam, you can thank Alan Ralsky. He started spamming back before anyone knew what spam was, in the late 90s. By 2001, he managed to push so much shit through the Verizon servers he shut them down, leading to a lawsuit from Verizon.

That lawsuit was settled and by 2002, Ralsky was rolling in enough dick enlargement cream cash to buy a $750,000 mansion. He continued spamming, using a database of 250 million names, charging companies to send out their shit e-mails for them. Up to 70 million a day, by his own admission.

As with all great assholes, the taint of arrogance was right around the corner, under the ballsack of stupidity. Ralsky, smug and potentially borderline retarded, did an interview with the Detroit News in which he seemed quite pleased with himself and the legal way he was doing business.

Readers didn’t find things as amusing as he did and when the interview was posted on Slashdot, some people went out of their way to find the address to his new home, which they then posted. The result was Ralsky being signed up to every hardcopy mailing campaign people could find.

Snail mail, as the kids call it, started arriving at Ralsky’s mansion by the truckload. Literally by the truckload, as tons of it was delivered to his house each and every day. Ralsky’s reaction was to complain that he was being harassed and was going to sue. This lead to massive bouts of laughter and an unprecedented level of not giving a shit. But at least the man won’t have to leave home to do his Christmas shopping.

Source: Cracked.com

This is quite a bold claim… but can they cure the heartbreak of psoriasis?

After my idiot hosting company allowed their rackspace monkeys to delete all mySQL databases on my blogs and websites and after posting about ten entries since last March ’07, the creeps have pulled another accidental mySQL deletion. They’ve thankfully made restitution for this second blunder and have finally put a redundancy system in place.

So, for all ten of you out there reading the ol’ blog, it’s back up. Any entries after “From Beyond on DVD” are sadly lost, but they weren’t Wordsworth or anything, so I’ll just start from here. Also, if you’re on my Facebook, forget about clicking on any note links to read the rest of any of the newsfeed entries.

The internet is useless. Remember kids, if you care about your intangible work online – make backups constantly, and don’t write directly in the blog editor like I’m doing right n———–