The iMaxi Pad: An iPad Case – With Wings!
To date there have been three main observations made about the Apple iPad:
- It's a life-affirming oversized iPhone that's so wonderful it also cures cancer
- It's bigger than a phone but less functional than a laptop, neatly filling the non-portable non-useful market niche
- It sounds like a high-tech feminine hygiene product, with a fresh fruit aroma
The last point has been taken to its bitter and mercilessly logical conclusion with the introduction of the iMaxi — an iPad case in the shape of a sanitary towel. The iMaxi's description is best left to Hip Handmaids, the talented housewives who make this must-have accessory:
With its durable vinyl outer layer and plush, quilted-cotton sleeve, the iMaxi helps keep your iPad clean and dry. Plus, the iMaxi's Velcro-latched, advanced wing design wraps snugly around your device, so your iPad always stays where it should. Best of all, it shields it from all those unsightly and embarrassing data leaks that would make any motherboard worry!
It's great that they went to the trouble of making this atrocity, but they should have just Photoshopped it — the only people conceited enough to buy one would probably want to pay for it with inside jokes and a cashier's cheque from the bank of Smugland.
Hip Handmaids' iMaxi
Embarrassing Facebook Updates Website More Addictive Than Facebook Itself
- Embarrassment like this on tap with Openbook
Photo by arthurohm
I'm not the first person to notice that Facebook is addictive. But it's not addictive in a bog-standard nicotine-to-gambling way — it's frustratingly mind-numbingly soul-destroyingly addictive, on a par with daytime TV and 24-hour news channels. But Facebook goes much further than TV's lean-back style of dependency: it nails the chair to your arse and staples your eyes to the screen, maintaining a state of helpless absorption that's neither completely passive nor truly interactive.
Why does Crackbook Facebook have this effect? Well, I believe it addresses a basic human need for gossip — who's doing what, when, where and to whom. It doesn't matter if you barely know the people involved, just the delicious knowledge that someone somewhere is doing something vaguely interesting, offensive or illegal is enough to tweak the pleasure-producing parts of your brain. But there's a problem: the juicy details we crave don't appear that often, so we keep browsing the site long after anything vaguely satisfying has been gained from the experience. Once in a blue moon you might stumble across an interesting photo or revealing status update, but on the whole it's very very dull.
But now there's a solution: a site that delivers the finest titillating chatter without any of the fishing around. It's called Openbook, and takes advantage of two things: Facebook's search interface for programmers, and people who make their status updates completely public. Not only do you get to see plenty of embarrassing status updates, you even get to choose what kind of cringe-inducing updates are shown. And if you can't be bothered with that, just pick from a list of terms other people have searched for. Unsurprisingly there's lots of filth on display, but some of the cleaner status updates contain phrases like these:
- Playing hooky (maybe not for long)
- I hate my... (job/life/body/poor awareness of online privacy)
- don't tell anyone (oh, the irony)
So there's all the spicy stuff, little risk of awkward encounters with people you actually know, and all the stalking gossiping goodness.
You Just Lost The Game
I'm sorry, you just lost The Game. And if you weren't playing The Game, I'm doubly sorry — because you are now and you just lost.
Before we go deep into the land of confusion I should point out that The Game does not confirm to what we normally expect of a game. No apparatus is required as it takes place only inside the heads of the players. You can't win in the traditional (game-ending) way — winning is rather an ongoing state. You can lose however, and often do, but The Game doesn't end there either. In fact, The Game doesn't really have an end or, some would argue, even a beginning.
Schools of thought differ about when you start playing The Game. Some believe that we have all been playing it since the dawn of time, but can only lose once we know the rules. Others assert that mankind only started playing in the late seventies, when The Game was invented by Cambridge University science fiction nerds. Still others think that you aren't playing The Game until you learn the rules. Whoever is right, it matters little, because by any yardstick you are definitely playing it now.
A very popular Christmas present, for all the wrong reasons
Here are the rules of The Game:
RULE 1
You are always playing The Game
RULE 2
You lose if you think about The Game
RULE 3
Loss must be announced
So the aim of The Game is to forget that you are playing it, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible. During those glorious intervals you are winning The Game, until someone or something reminds you that you are playing. Winning The Game sounds great, but as you are (by definition) not aware you are doing it there's no proud moment of triumph, only a bittersweet tang when you lose and realise that you had been winning up until that point.
Losing is unavoidable in The Game, so the best way to enjoy it is by making other people lose too, preferably without simultaneously losing yourself — which can only mean hiding notes telling the hapless finder that they have lost. Which they have, until they can forget they are playing again.
What has all this got to do with the internet? Well, the net might not be the place where The Game was invented, but it is definitely the place where it was made popular. Really really popular. You see, it's the perfect medium for reminding huge numbers of people that they are playing The Game and, therefore, have lost. Surely that only works if they already know about The Game? Well, yes. Good catch, batman. But you can do that too. Just paste in the rules, or a link to Lose The Game, and a whole new raft of unwitting (and probably unwilling) players is born.
How many people are playing The Game? It's hard to tell, but its Facebook group has 125,207 members so that's an indication. I recently joined the group, which was a very bad move, as I only need to look at my profile now to lose.
Like all the best internet memes, online popularity has spawned mainstream media coverage. In December 2008 the free Metro newspaper informed 3 million unlucky readers that they are now playing The Game. Articles and radio shows have added millions more.
Soon the whole world will be playing. And losing.
Know What I Meme?
It all began with a dancing baby. Or was it a hamster? Either way, we laughed innocently in the mid-to-late nineties when these crazy animations appeared on our foot-deep monitors. It was all courtesy of an archaic technology called "email", a way a way of sending private messages to specific people. (In those days you had to say who you wanted to communicate with, rather than your ramblings being automatically fed to all your subscribers/followers/friends you barely know.)
We've come a long way, hamster. I mean baby. Nowadays, these crazes are spread on social networking sites, remixed on YouTube, referenced endlessly on nerdy discussion boards, and finally end up on Family Guy (they're the weird bits you frown at). After toying with monikers like "virals", "internet phenomena" and "misuse of company email", these international in-jokes have a new name: Internet memes.
Family Guy: Where memes go to die. In this case, Chuck Norris Facts.
Why are they called memes? The explanation is really boring. But since you asked: "meme" was coined by author Richard Dawkins in 1976 and means an idea that is passed from person to person. Sociologists cream their pants discussing memes in hushed tones, as if a cat that (apparently) wants a cheeseburger is the pinnacle of high art. But the rest of us can carry on calling them catch phrases, in-jokes and random internet crap.
So what's the latest for the meme crowd? Well, they're busy building up gay potatoes, elephants painted like pandas and fake celebrity deaths. Expect to see them on Family Guy in about a year.
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