thiswolf:

Smart. 

Only works with Guinness.  

Yes, except for an obvious flaw, which I am going to state in as profane a way as possible so as to give it appropriate emphasis:

WHO THE FUCK GIVES A SHIT ABOUT A QR CODE ON A FUCKING GLASS OF BEER?

I’m going to assume this is some student design project or some other type of demo work which will forever remain blessedly unrealized, because I believe the Guinness people are intelligent enough to realize that if they’re going to supply bars with promotional glassware, they might as well JUST USE THE GUINNESS LOGO, which is one of the most well-recognized brand names/logos in the WORLD, and which does not require some idiotic smartphone app to look up and translate into the Guinness URL WHICH ANYONE COULD HAVE DEDUCED ALREADY.

If some marketeer at Guinness really wants to put the URL on the glassware, then just put the URL on the glassware. UNDER THE LOGO.

This is the problem with QR codes. They translate to a URL. But their information density is actually LOWER than just printing the URL as text - they take up more space on a page/glass/screen/wall than the URL-as-text would - and they are opaque; you can tell where an URL goes just by reading it, but you can’t tell where a QR code goes until you scan it (hope it doesn’t lead somewhere you didn’t want to go!) It adds a needless extra step to a process that was already simple and transparent. It’s a fix that makes things worse.

The only reason QR codes are hot right now is because of the number of people superficially fascinated with smartphones who 1) need amusing things for it to do so they can show them off to other people and justify the price they paid for their status gadget and/or 2) are too lazy, or frustrated with the difficulty of typing input on those little things, to just type in a URL.

But as smartphones become so ubiquitous that they just become “phones,” the use cases will divide into two groups of people: the power-users, for whom the other capabilities of the phone are genuinely essential to their everyday life, and who have learned to use their phones efficiently and intelligently … who, in general, will be smart enough to realize the inherent problems in QR codes and not bother with them, especially as input methods for text improve; and the phone-focused users, for whom the extra features in smart phones are occasional and ancillary, and who will quickly lose interest in gimmickry like QR codes once their phone becomes just a phone to them and they stop wanting to show it off every five minutes.

QR codes are a fad, and one with a very short shelf-life. You read it here first.

EDIT: Of course there are all sorts of nuances and wrinkles to this, and a very interesting conversation on Twitter has ensued which unfortunately I now have neither the energy or the patience to duplicate here. I will point out one thing, though: I don’t think QR codes are useless, and I never said they were. There are a whole lot of applications where they are much better than bar codes. I just am tired of seeing them plastered on every single wall and advertisement in the universe, and I think - I hope! - that soon the rest of the world will get tired of them in that aspect as well.

ilovecharts:

Warning!

Via Kurt White

This reminded me of this. (We own the bag.)

More Teach the Controversy stuff! All guaranteed wryly hilarious!

Crap like this (and April Winchell’s excellent skewering of it) reminds me of my favorite quote from Ragtime, the one that stopped me dead for about ten minutes until my brain had recovered:

Millions of men were out of work …. In the coal fields a miner made a dollar sixty a day if he could dig three tons. He lived in the company’s shacks and bought his food from the company stores. On the tobacco farms Negroes stripped tobacco leaves thirteen hours a day and earned six cents an hour, man, woman or child. Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They were valued everywhere they were employed. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert. In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them. One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by starvation. There were oil trusts and banking trusts and railroad trusts and beef trusts and steel trusts. It became fashionable to honor the poor. At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

Pointing out that Esquire can be sexist and willfully ignorant, while true, is about as useful and fruitful a mission as pointing out that FHM can be hugely homophobic and obnoxious.

I mean, um, duh.

I think the crucial difference may be that I really don’t think pointing these things out will change the behavior of these magazines, and thus is not time/energy well-spent, unless the purpose is just to have a good gripe session together about how nasty and rotten they are. (I’m not knocking that. I see the appeal of a good gripe session.)

Even if it did change the behavior of the magazines, another something would just come along to fill that niche. After all, magazines in the FHM bracket are basically for men who felt that the likes of Esquire had grown too tasteful and modulated. If FHM calmed down, the next FHM would quickly arise.

The only real solution is to build/engineer better males. That’s been tried before; it never lasts.

AKA “Why I can’t bear to shop for new F/SF in a bookstore much anymore.”

ilovecharts:

via Kurt White

Except, of course, “blue” as an extremely rare steak is unheard of outside of France, as far as I know, and also, no two cooks will interpret these terms the same way, so, really, they’re pretty much useless.

If I ordered a medium rare steak and got the one for the “medium rare” picture above, I’d eat it (I don’t send food back unless it’s actually inedible, because I figure whatever will eventually be delivered back to me will have saliva in it), but I wouldn’t be particularly happy about it.

When I order “medium rare” I am mentally picturing the one above which says “medium.” But “medium” is dangerous. “Medium” to many kitchens means “basically well done.” (Never actually order a well-done steak in a restaurant. The cooks abuse well-done steaks.)

Still, the picture is useful. I think I’ll print it out and show it at a restaurant next time I order a steak, so I can explain “I’d like it as pink as possible inside without having any of that shiny uncooked meat anywhere that you see in the left three images.” (That should absolutely guarantee they’ll spit in my food.)

If I want raw steak I’ll chop it up, coat it in berbere, and call it kitfo.

I do order hamburgers well done, because 1) the meat is less reliable and 2) even slightly pink ground beef is gross. But I don’t eat very many hamburgers. And the few I eat even at the one place I do eat them always arrive somewhere around medium, because apparently the cook is trying to protect me from the horror of a well-done burger. I’ve never sent one back. I eat there three to five times a week and I have goodwill to maintain.

Let us consider the experience of buying games for the iPad in Apple’s app store.

I’m talking about the version of the app store interface that is actually on the iPad, you understand. It’s possible they have better versions somewhere else … but if you are going to buy software, it is most optimal to buy it directly on the machine where it will be downloaded and used, yes?

Now, if I had a specific objective - say I knew the name of the software I wanted to buy - that would be one thing. But let’s say I have no idea what I want to buy. I am looking for an interesting game I’ll enjoy - something I do on a regular basis. I am browsing. Window shopping. This is a prime sales opportunity! A customer is coming in with money to burn; all you have to do is hook her up with some sufficiently intriguing shiny object.

Apple fails miserably at this.

Read More

The other Rapture-related item from this week’s Phoenix (see previous item) I want to call to your attention is mostly here for the benefit of all my Jewish friends, although everyone else will probably like it too.

So, if that’s how it’s gonna be - and since those of you who might be offended won’t be around long to complain - let me say: I’m really looking forward to life after all you Christians are gone.

I’ll be honest: you can be pretty annoying. Slowing up the line at Kupel’s with all your questions about bagel toppings. Asking us to explain matzo and dreidel at the holidays. Whining every December if there’s a patch of space not plastered over with your Christmas kitsch. Making Holocaust movies implying that my family could have avoided slaughter by going all Rambo on the Nazis.

Everywhere I go, one of you wants to rope me into Bible classes - and worse, the rest of you know I’m heading for eternal hellfire but choose not to warn me. Thanks for caring.

No more will we have to listen to you Christians screwing up our Old Testament, telling us it mandates creationism and outlaws gay marriage. Come on, you guys can’t even figure out the right day of the week to have the Sabbath.

The Boston Phoenix has outdone itself with its Rapture-themed articles this week, starting with its Weekly World News-styled cover. Two articles especially stand out, both by David Bernstein. This one is an FAQ about this latest set of Rapture nonsense. The FAQ is actually mostly straightforward and factual; any humor in it is incidental. There is, however, some editorializing late in the piece:

WHY IS THERE DISAGREEMENT OVER WHETHER WE’RE ALREADY IN THE TRIBULATION PERIOD? 
As best I can tell, it depends on how you feel about the quantity of worldwide butt-fucking. All sides agree that the prevalence of gay sex is a sign of the approaching End Times. They also agree that gay sex will then be even more rampant during the Tribulations - one popular Rapture site notes that “homosexual and lesbian relationships [will be] highly encouraged.” The difference is that Camping believes that there is so much same-sex fucking in the world now, we must already be well into the Tribulations, while mainstreamers believe that this is nothing compared to the amount of gay banging we’ll see later.

CAN HOMOSEXUALS BE RAPTURED? 
Oh no, no, no. Judgment Day, according to the Rapture movement, is directly analogous to the destruction of the Sodomites for trying to have anal intercourse with Lot. In other words, the End Times is primarily about Jesus punishing butt-fuckers.

IS TODAY’S RAPTURE MOVEMENT DRIVEN MOSTLY BY THE SUBLIMATED VENGEANCE FANTASIES OF SELF-LOATHING CLOSETED HOMOSEXUALS? 
I would say on the whole it’s roughly 50 percent that, and 50 percent about punishing the other smart-alecs who look down their noses at true Christian believers. With Camping, maybe more like 80/20 - he’s really eager to see the homos suffer.

I happen to agree with Bernstein’s conclusions on this matter, of course (see quote two items down).

Why do I consider it fair game to mock millenialists, when I would never openly mock anyone else’s religion? ($cientology is not a religion.) Because their beliefs are actively hazardous - I don’t care what happens to the world because I will be swept up in the Rapture, so screw you all - and, when examined closely (see quote in previous item) rather vindictive.

But we do try to keep to a cheerful tone here, so I present the link above, which shows the appropriate spirit of good humor in its mockery.

[Edit: That site’s Wordpress installation is not coping well with the page’s current popularity. It’s worth a few retries, though.]

As I commented elsewhere, as an ex-Southerner, my reaction to this is not fit for print.

Oh, no, that doesn’t mean I disagree with it. It’s more like one of my SPUTTER FUME WHY CAN’T THESE IVORY TOWER LINGUISTICS IDIOTS SEE THE OBVIOUS fits.

Dropping the R is a sign you are a hick. It’s one of the first things Southerners who go north learn not to do so they won’t get mocked relentlessly by Northerners. It’s one of the first things people in the South choose not to do to indicate they’ve “made it” and to show how far they’ve come from sharecropper great-grandparents. It’s the first thing Southerners who get a good education learn not to do to show they got a good education.

And sometimes it happens unconsciously. When was the last time you saw a national news anchor drop R’s? Won’t happen, because they’re supposed to sound like they came from no place (they were grown asexually in a cornfield somewhere in Middle America). When was the last time you saw a character drop R’s in a movie except 1) as shorthand to show they are a Southerner 2) to give them comic value 3) (sadly common) both 1 and 2?

If you teach your children that dropping R’s makes them sound like Mater from the Cars movies, then you don’t get to be an academic shocked and saddened that it’s disappearing. I mean, honestly.

You’d think by 1970 there would have been less of this. (No, I don’t think this is a fake, mostly because I don’t think anyone can copy Whitney Darrow, Jr’s art that well.) I’m hoping someone will come along and tell me this was actually a page from Chauvinists Monthly Children’s Supplement, or that the next page of the feature went on to say, “Now, here’s why all that is bullshit ….”

iloveoldmagazines:

via world-shaker