Editorial & Opinion
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Virtual Reality Shopping Remains A Virtual Reality
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 22, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, June 22nd, 2009This week’s Monday Demotivators focuses on something much more important than Flash games and puzzles: SHOPPING!
If you’re here for the Flash games & puzzles usually featured in our Monday Demotivators, our apologies. Today we’re going to talk about something much more important: shopping! Soon to be featured in part two of my list of disappointing technologies will be virtual shopping. As someone who loves trying on glasses with friends, but really loathes trying them on alone at a revolving drug store display, this tool for trying on Silhouette sunglasses struck my fancy yesterday, and got me thinking: whatever happened to that future full of virtual reality shopping they promised us back in the nineties? Well, apparently, not much. While there are moderately functional sites like H & M’s Personal Dressing Room, which at least lets you add your own photo, there are many more sites (Land’s End, Sears, Levi, etc.) which only let you drag clothes around on a generic avatar-like model, usually using the third-party tool My Virtual Model. A couple of years ago we had the epic fail of TheMallPlus.com, which looks like it was constructed from Lawnmower Man out-takes. And more recently, developers like Holition are working on interesting ideas like a virtual mirror. But in terms of an actually useful tool, most retailers seemed to have abandoned the concept, focusing instead on quirky virals like Ikea’s Dream Kitchen, which is kind of like “Bullet Time meets This Old House”, or The Gap’s Watch Me Change, which is really just a customizable cartoon strip show (especially if you forget to choose an outfit, like I did). Know of any interesting virtual reality shopping tools? I really couldn’t find much….
Muphry’s Law Strikes Again
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 17, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009The Peter Principle’s Penetrating Insights Into Incompetance
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Is your boss an incompetent lout? Maybe it’s not their fault. They may simply be a victim of the Peter Principle. If you’re not familiar with the concept, or simply need a refresher (as I did today), The Peter Principle
Avoid Food While Waiting For Sperm Rider To Load
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 15, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, June 15th, 2009If thumb wrestling is your idea of a workout, we have some fun things lined up to help derail your Monday morning.
  Is this your idea of exercise? |
I’ll probably never have a legitimate reason to say that again in this lifetime, but as a headline for this week’s Monday Demotivators, there’s absolutely nothing gratuitous in the phrase. So let’s get (ahem) rolling. Here’s a game a lot of us fat Americans should try (don’t think you’re fat? Check the NIH Body Mass Calculator first, you might be surprised). Anyway, the object of Sprinster is simply to avoid food. ‘nough said. To help you avoid food, pretty much for the rest of the day, try 5 Fingers Fillet. I think the name is warning enough. Not for the faint-hearted. Who dreams this crap up, anyway, and why, in the name of God, do I link to it? Oh yeah. Revenue. So, moving along. Sperm Rider takes forever to load (did I really just type that?) but there’s something entrancing about piloting a cowboy stick figure who’s riding a huge sperm through an urban landscape to a stripped-down cowpunk soundtrack. I didn’t even care what my score was. Much like in Super Lava Jumper, which tells you “Oops you died. No worries though” when you fail. This, while a boinky late 90′s house soundtrack plays at 120 decibels. If you like pixelated games with crappy soundtracks, you might also want to try Heavy Metal Girl, which is a little less relaxed about your death, and much more intent on providing it. And if love is more your thing, try Romeo, in which (much like life) you round up volumes of Shakespeare that you will never read, while you search for true love. Want my opinion? Go to the cafe. The odds of meeting someone are a lot better there than if you sit here playing dumb Flash games all day. And get some exercise while you’re at it. Maybe start with something easy, like Thumb Wrestling
Monday Morning Meticulously Mapped Out?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 8, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, June 8th, 2009Axis if we care. Our plot to disrupt the day you’ve carefully charted for yourself involves graphic depictions of death, birth, crime, and…Wikipedia?
Do you ever feel overwhelmed with the information and sensory input at your disposal these days? We’re here to help. Overwhelm you more, that is. In our ongoing plot to derail your Monday morning, we’ve touched on fleshmaps, facebook maps, why Ian can’t get a date maps, infographics, flowcharts , and million dollar graphics. So you’d think we’d be done, right? But no. Here we have 50 more examples of ways to visualize data, brought to you by WebDesignerDepot.com. Of all of the examples presented, I probably found TuneGlue the most useful; it visually cross-references musical artists and their work in a very simple interface, with Amazon links. By the way, a lot of those tools in that link made pretty graphs, but were in most cases visualizing things normal people don’t care about. And there’s definitely a flaw in the plan when a graphic actually makes it harder to understand complex information rather than easier. So check out 5,000 years of Middle East history in 90 seconds, or BreathingEarth, where you can watch deaths and births in real time and ponder your emissions. Even better, WorldClock displays everything from oil consumption to US crime stats in real time. And lastly, have you ever wondered what Wikipedia would look like if it were in book form?
I Don’t Want Your Money…
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 2, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009…but I wouldn’t MIND some of it. More importantly though, I might like your help.
It’s interesting that there’s an Editorial & Opinion section on Dissociated Press; there certainly has never been an editor around here, and the content of the site itself is rife with opinion. The fact is, the site’s creator and only contributor wanted a place to engage in uncategorized ranting, and creating this section seemed like a lot more fun than commenting on the Huffington Post. Did you notice the lack of link in those two words? That’s because the Huffington Post sucks. There’s an opinion for you.
The Original Plan
I originally created Dissociated Press with the intention of building blog-like content for six months, and then slowly evolving the site into more of a magazine-style format, still with daily bite-size content, but also featuring longer, in-depth articles. At the six month point I had intended to redesign the site (it’s currently still running on a sloppily-created front-end for WordPress), and begin aggressively promoting it, as well as optimizing for search engines. The current design is VERY search-engine unfriendly for the standard reasons that WordPress, by default, sucks for SEO. Although I’ve managed to update the site daily since June 11, 2008 and build a following of a few thousand very regular visitors (Thank you by the way! Most of you I only know by your IP address, but I appreciate your interest!), those are hardly the kinds of numbers that make a site profitable, which was almost exactly 50% of my interest in creating a site like this.
If You Want To Make God Laugh…
….as they say, tell him your plans. As luck would have it, at exactly the six-month point arrived, so did a heap of new work, and shortly after, a considerably reduced heap of work. This has been a volatile economy for everyone, but especially self-employed people like myself. It’s one thing to lose a steady job, and another thing altogether to secure or lose several at a time, which is what can happen when the employers are jumpy, anxious clients in troubled economic times. The net result of all of this is that I find myself at the one-year point in a bit of a quandary, the point that Seth Godin would call The Dip
I Don’t Want Your Money….
Although I’ve decided I need help to make the site profitable, there’s not a great business model here for seeking investors. The simple way to guarantee revenue from a site like this is to generate enough traffic and place enough ads that when all is said and done, you’ve simply replicated an annoying site like the Huffington Post, with 75% of the screen real estate devoted to ads, excruciating page load times, and content that ultimately feels like you’re watching the bleeding-heart liberal version of Fox News.
….But I Wouldn’t Mind Some Of It
That all being said, I don’t mind donations, especially birthday fund donations. Your money will be well-spent on either hosting or the main fuel required to run the site, a carefully balanced diet of chocolate, coffee, and actual food. In lean times, the site seems to run just fine on coffee alone. So consider a donation:
So What Do I Really Want?
I want help. If you’re a writer or business-minded person who enjoys the web and social networking, lets talk. I’d be especially happy to hook up with someone who likes to write about film & television or politics, or someone who would like to develop the business and marketing side of things so I could focus more on design and content. Or someone who can work on design and share the content load so I could exclusively focus on marketing and revenue generation. So let me reiterate in bulleted form what I’m looking for:
Are You….
- A writer who’d like to write about movies or politics?
- A business person who’d like to help develop a web site?
- A WordPress specialist who’d like to collaborate?
- An kind, attractive, female lawyer who wants to have kids and a work at home househusband?
Drop a line if you have some interest.