2 posts tagged “of”
(Sorry this took me so long to post! Reason below!)
As anyone who's ever run a popular blog can tell you, the moment you do start running a popular blog, you IMMEDIATELY start hearing from all those annoying fucking word-of-mouth marketing companies out there, all of them desperately trying to get you to try out their product for a couple of weeks, in return for you writing about the experience at your popular blog. And thus it is that I find myself these days with a superduper expensivoliola Nokia N95 "smartphone" on my possession, which the Nokia people are really hoping that I will put to the test, and really push to the limit and see what exactly it can and cannot do.
Which unfortunately for Nokia I've now done, and have come up with an unfortunately corporate-unfriendly answer, which I know that the word-of-mouth-marketing people there at Nokia really don't want to hear me say -- that if you own a Macintosh, it's pretty much useless to buy a Nokia N95, SERIOUSLY IT'S FUCKING USELESS, because the Nokia N95 won't play a single video that your Mac creates or understands, nor will it play a single song or podcast that you happened to get through Apple's iTunes. SERIOUSLY, IT WON'T PLAY ANY OF YOUR MAC SONGS OR VIDEOS, and seriously it's pretty much pointless to own a Nokia N95 if you own a Macintosh. I know, I know, Nokia doesn't want me to say this, and we'll see if I ever actually get reimbursed for the surprisingly high 30 fucking dollars I'm going to end up paying just to ship this Nokia N95 back to this weasely little word-of-mouth marketing agency; we'll see, I guess, whether I ever get those 30 bucks back, or whether I'm going to have to get back on this fucking blog and talk yet fucking again about how this fucking word-of-mouth marketing agency stiffed me out of 30 fucking dollars, after they claimed that this entire process was going to be a stress-free and financially-free one for me. Yeah. We'll see.
But meanwhile here's the first video I shot, which I swear to God I tried to upload in its original, higher-quality MP4 form; but for some reason, both SixApart and YouTube are scared to fucking death of the MP4 version of this video, and will only let me upload the cheaper, more pixelated 3GP version; for those who would like to see the better version themselves, they can simply click/right-click/copy-and--paste the following: http://www.cclapcenter.com/archives/bikeloopnokia.mp4 . Seriously, the much larger MP4 version is so much better than the 3GP version, I don't even know where to start. Please check it out if you're on broadband and have the extra time/resources to do so. Grr, MP4 broken uploads! Seriously, Six Apart and YouTube, fix this!
So I was at one of those uber-bookstores the other day, reading books for free, since the uber-bookstores make it so damn easy to do so, when I walked by what I now refer to in my head as "The Big Box of Friends:"
Yes, every episode of "Friends" ever made, all in one big box, which can be yours for only US$300 (150 pounds, 225 euros). Which of course got me immediately thinking...
Who in their right mind would ever watch all 240 episodes or whatever of "Friends" on DVD? Especially when the show can still be caught multiple times a day on television?
The only people who watch 240 episodes of a television show on DVD are people like me -- complete fucking science-fiction losers. And we weren't the ones religiously watching "Friends" when it was originally on the air; it was the slightly daffy meatsacks of the world who were doing that.
You know, the ones who insisted that a show about sassy urban singles end with almost all of them married off and with children, and with half of them on their way to the suburbs. Those meatsacks.
And who, for the love of all that is good, is going to spend $300 for the privilege on top of everything else?
No one, that's who. This Big Box of Friends was in fact designed for one purpose and one purpose only: For those with too much discretionary income to purchase as a gift for others with too much discretionary income.
When the Big Box of Friends was first put together and released, not a single human being expected a single other human being to actually use this product from beginning to end. It is instead a $300 excuse for one person to say to another person, "I was thinking of you recently," for the other person to stick on a back shelf in an already overcrowded den, and to promptly never think about again for the rest of their life.
And then I thought, Wow, has it really gotten that expensive to maintain the consumerist status quo? Has it really come to this?
Yeah, I guess so. Out there in the hazy white-collar suburbs of the world, these sort of dim clouds for me now that I can never quite seem to understand anymore (even after spending my childhood in one), this is what people are doing -- they're working their asses to the bone, 14 hours a day sometimes, throwing their married lives into havoc, missing their offsprings' entire childhoods, getting road rage from those endless hours sitting on a vehicular tarmac, huffing gas fumes as they wait for the endless tie-up of terrorist-supporting ecohorrors to all move up another inch, so that they can all exchange $300 Big Boxes of Friends with each other at every wedding reception and birthday party, and promptly all throw their Big Boxes of Friends on a back shelf in a den and never touch them nor even think of them again.
Is this really what all you people out there in the white-collar sections of the world are doing? I can scarcely believe it. But yet there's the Big Box of Friends in the uber-bookstore to prove it.
Okay, I'm getting off my high horse now; it's time for me to bike over to my friend Tom's Memorial Day party. Price of a bike ride, by the way, after purchase of my $60 bike: free. And a lot more fun than 240 episodes of fucking "Friends."
