PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.
I am proud to say that I have stuck firmly to my Never Learning Powerpoint policy and am instead learning Prezi. I think Malcolm Gladwell would be disappointed and Marshall McLuhan would be proud, and that’s enough for me.
Did you have a good Valentine’s Day? Was it filled with the company of one who adores you, flowers, choccies, and expensive baubles in tiny velvet boxes? Yes?
Well, fuck you.
Ah, Valentine’s Day: that time of the year when smug couples magically up their smugness by a factor of twenty but somehow, appallingly, you are still not allowed to garrote them with the tawdry pink ribbons from their bouquets. The world is not yet just, as Immanuel Kant could have told us. HE wouldn’t have lorded it over singletons; HE surely wouldn’t have ragged on Jesus for being dateless every damn February 14th.
Which brings me to my point: me. Well, I certainly can’t complain about the company I had for Valentine’s Day (me) and unlike most of those couples, I was never for a moment in any uncertainty whatsoever about whether or not I was getting laid that night.
Which reminds me of the time I was at the drugstore buying, get this, Virgin Springs mineral water, and I realized it was Valentine’s Day.
But that was so long ago now…three years goes by in a heartbeat.
In any case, because Valentine’s Day posts are mega hit bringers in this day and age where you may not care enough to send the very best, but you care just enough to send an e-card, here is a roundup of the very very bestest commemorative Valentine’s Day thingies I saw on the internet yesterday.
Read ‘em and weep.
A ten tentacle salute to love!
Because the thing about stock Valentine’s Day cards is: not enough tentacles. Hat tip to MistressCowfish
I DID get a Valentine of sorts in the comments on Gawker:
TWO headlines and one picture (headline chopped off) is all the new format allows me to see in the sidebar. TWO headlines. How the fuck is anyone supposed to read Gawker that way??? Don’t you know how many people you lose with every forced click??? You lose eighty percent.
Jesus Christ, when even raincoaster is driven to a) comment elsewhere b) refer to herself in the third person, you know you’ve alienated people.
I still like the look of it. I just cannot use it. BRING BACK THE ENDLESS SCROLL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Wow, nice to see a familiar face (since there are fewer and fewer here). Have you realized that Denton, based on his published remarks and leaks, is actually trying to reduce comments?
Five days in, and the absence of most of the critical social intranetworking tools (hearting, messaging, and comment notification) speaks volumes.
This post (“Welcome to the New Gawker”) has been removed from the front page of this new newspaper. And I hear the death rattle of the former, enjoyable brouhaha that we knew as commenting.
I can’t comment at all now. Doubt this will go through. Every time I try to go to Gawker.com I get redirected to ca.gawker.com and FUCK THAT WITH A CHAINSAW.
I love the clean look. I just cannot use this shit. Also, I appear to be banned again, as all my comments get “Post failed” notifications. Reducing comments? If he’d banned me last year, he would have cut back on them 50%~!
You don’t appear to have be banned. In fact, your screen name in your reply to which I am replying still bears your star. I think that the coding problems are still around and might account for your difficulty with posting a comment.
I know we weren’t especially close, but it seems like only yesterday we were connecting effortlessly every month or so. I recall a story about your meeting William Gibson, I think, but it would be so difficult now to go back through the comments and find it. It’s so odd to have lost so many connections so quickly.
I still come back here from time to time, I think because Gawker played a big part in my life for a while. I haven’t read any articles because it’s such a different approach visually and maybe editorially. If I want serious content, I am going to go to a major newspaper site like economist.com or unplug and read something pressed onto paper.
PS Gawker has really gotten you worked up–I’ve never seen you scream in caps before. You’re gorgeous when you’re angry.
If I had known this was a date, I would have washed off the trail dust and brushed my hair with a frying pan. Maybe you’re earthy, though, and okay with it all.
Here, love, I took my Bowie knife and carved a slice of Logan bread into the shape of a heart just for you.
Awwww. Are we sure this isn’t Gawker Dating?
Welcome to the Satellite of Love
Geek Valentine’s cards! A whole gallery of Time Lordian and Han-shot-firstian goodness.
A little love song from Tom Lehrer: I Hold Your Hand in Mine, Love:
Valentines for those who have stopped pretending, from MyConfinedSpace:
The confined space is between my ears
Valentines for Hopeless Realists (I’d actually send these)
I am ALL OVER the baseball one
The social media fallout of an iconic romantic moment: This chick is SO not getting a backstage pass.
I never would have gone out with that mope in the first place
Sissydude Valentines! I think this brand has a lot of potential.
Isn't that cute, he sent his valentine to a pony. I think???
A Valentine from Godzilla:
Does anything say Love In Post-Modern Japan like Haiku and Godzilla?
When you think of passionate romantic attachment, who do you think of? That’s right:
Noam Chomsky.
Alone Noam Moar!
Something for cat ladies:
and your Morrissey albums. There's that too.
The New York City department of Health just launched an iPhone app that shows you where you can get free condoms:
Now THAT is servicey!
This Valentine is…touching.
The Human Centipede Valentine: From your lips to ... never mind, don't think about that part
For the bookish, there are NPR Valentines:
This Valentine was brought to you by National Public Radio, and by listeners like you
The New Yorker brings you a selection of dirty pictures with intellectual pretensions, so it’s okay to look if it’s by Ellen Unwerth, etc. Here’s Nan Goldin’s image, perfect for the one who plays Nancy Spungen to your Sid Vicious.
Be My ... collateral damage
A roundup of the most uncomfortable screen kisses of all time (and yeah, they even got Howard the Duck in there):
Ben Kling does nifty series of dictator valentines, including the least flexible dictator ever, HAL:
The linear-thinking National Post presents a flow chart of how to buy flowers for Valentine’s Day:
If you need this, you shouldn't be having sex in the first place. You might reproduce
Salon brings us Valentine Candy Hearts of the Stars.
Or it would have been, if he had exact change
Here’s to Valentine’s Day!
Bottom's Up!
If all of this has you bummed out and feeling hopeless, HAVE I GOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU!!!
If you’ve read this far in a Valentine’s Day post posted the day AFTER Valentine’s Day, I know one thing: You, my friend, have a deep and abiding interest in romantic pursuits, or at least cheap sex. Wouldn’t you like to support a cause that combines them both, plus patriotism? Sure you would.
What’s this about? Take a heart and turn it upside down, and that’ll give you a clue:
I heard on Vancouver is Awesome‘s 100.5 The Peak segment this weekend that a campaign is underway to save Beaver Lake that would see an investment of $100,000 for dredging and restoration by the Vancouver Park Board. Without these efforts, the Stanley Park Ecology Society says the lake could dry up within the next decade or two.
Well, because they’re all so fucking inferior, sillies! God put the Feebs here to be our rightful prey, and don’t you forget it!
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children. Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference. Albert Camus
I’m pretty sure it was Camus who said that it was the moral duty of the intelligent to repress the less intelligent, lest they rise up and take over the world; but the world ignored him, and now we have Snooki as a New York Times best-selling author and Kim Kardashian recording an album. America gets the celebrities it deserves.
Chair Dancing with the Has-Beens: GET ME CLORIS LEACHMAN ON THE PHONE THIS INSTANT
Ladies and Gentlemen, the fine, and near-forgotten, art of Chair Dancing, is sadly overlooked in the realm of vicarious pleasures deemed suitable for reality television. Crocheting with the Has-Beens? Sure. Chair Dancing with the Hotties from the Office Upstairs That You’re Not Sure What They Do But It Must Be Software, They’re All So Young? Not a chance.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a damn shame. Because, in an Orwellian world, chairdancing is freedom. They can take away our Aeron Chairs and replace them with crappy stationary ripoffs from Ikea, but they cannot take away our ability to bop mindlessly to Backstreet Boys while remaining seated. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, yes this is chairdancing in the Twenty-First Century Anno Domini:
It’s come so far! Remember the video that started the craze, way back in the last century2004?
This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.
There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.
What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).
Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.
@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..
@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.
@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.
This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.
I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.
Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.
They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.
@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..
@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.
Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish.
@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.
Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.
@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.
and replace them with crappy stationary ripoffs from Ikea, but they cannot take away our ability to bop mindlessly to Backstreet Boys while remaining seated. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, yes this is chairdancing in the Twenty-First Century Anno Domini:
