Jan 29, 2009
Tonight a very special and unique look into the advertising machine and those who hate it with a passion only describable in vulgarity. That's right, a screenshot of my e-mail client with almost all my e-mail since 11/05/2007. If you feel that you can find some hidden information in this screenshot, I don't doubt it at all. This is incredibly rich data about me and I really consider it to be a privilege for me to be able to be so open about my communication as to write this article with it included without any need for self-censorship.
The main reason for my writing this article is to call out Safeway into answering for their e-mail marketing campaign which is so awful that it is recommending "Rancher's Reserve Beef Ribeye Steak" and "Rancher's Reserve Boneless Beef Chuck Pot Roast" to a vegetarian of 6 years. I have not purchased any beef from Safeway in my entire life using the club card (loyalty discount card) or not. I am not saying that their algorithm is completely false because it matched Oroweat and Organic Salad, but I am absolutely certain that they have gone far beyond legitimate matching to provide a vegetarian with a sale on beef. I am offended by their algorithm. As you can see, it says quite specifically in the subject "JOEL, 6 new specials picked just for you" and elsewhere it says, "We've got great savings on several of your favorite items." I would not have been offended by this advertisement had it been completely random saying: "Yo bitch, we don't know you at all, so eat our meat," but instead it has named me specifically, given two items that I am very likely to eat and then completely obviously added two items which I would never eat in my entire life. This is my crusade against completely offensive advertising and today I start with you Safeway. Let's hear what you have to say in your defense.
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Dec 10, 2008
Che is a movie about a prolific revolutionary. Not his early years like Motorcycle Diaries. It's a huge story so it involves a 4.5 hour investment with an intermission. If you don't know whether you'll like it, let me answer for you: no. If you're looking for a long movie and you don't know whether you'll like it, you might like it. It's long and it doesn't mince words until the end. The first part is very glorious, heroic at times, and heavy on ideals. It explains what happened, why they did it, what role he and Castro had to play. If you know the story a tiny bit, you might not waste your time watching it, it's the details about city to city stuff. The second part explains the struggle in Bolivia. If you know a bit about Che, you probably understand that to compare the two parts of the movie is lame. A failed revolution is never going to be heroic or wonderful. And so Che is going to get a lot of flak from people who didn't really want to watch the second part. It's important for me to watch the second part because it shows that Che was mortal, died in a blaze of gunfire, and lived his ideals. Che has been symbolic for those who wish to shrug off the shackles of imperialism, tyranny, and dishonest governments. His life was powerfully lived as well as he probably could. A revolutionary who fails once or a hundred times has done what he or she can.
Am I trying to glorify Che? No, he probably gets as much credit as he deserves. It's the movie that I'm trying to redeem. People probably expect too much from the movie because there really isn't a revolutionary who can be glorified a lot more than Che and yet the second part of the "roadshow" was about him failing. If the directors had decided to stop at the end of part 1 and done the same as Motorcycle Diaries and printed the text saying: "Ernesto 'Che' Guevara went on to organized failed revolutions in the Congo, Venezuela, and Bolivia. He died in a hail of gunfire," it would certainly be a disservice to him. People would exit the movie and say: "and look at Cuba now, I bet they wish they were like Bolivia*." Describing what happened in Bolivia explains the duality of revolution, armed and unarmed conflict. Che partially led a successful armed revolution in Cuba because the support was far surpassing the enemy's number. In Bolivia, the lack of support and the overwhelming enemy military force was easily enough to defeat Che and the Bolivian rebels. What's this I talk about duality then? If revolution is just about numerical superiority, then no duality exists, does it? The duality of revolution is that numerical superiority comes from popular support, and popular support has nothing to do with violence. Popular support comes from ideals. If a revolution has better ideals and can sway the popular opinion, it will have the support it needs to win a war against an oppressive government. But here is where it gets tricky because if you have popular opinion, is armed revolution necessary? Che obviously thought it was and he has evidence. Evidence to the contrary is quite difficult to obtain. Pacifists may never obtain enough evidence that non-violence is the solution. So far we have India and possibly Tibet (which is in progress). Other evidence may possibly exist, but I'm not going to get into it. What people most certainly know is that when faced with a dictator who murders people, violent revolution has done the trick quite a few times.
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Dec 10, 2008
Talk is cheap, but talk takes time, time being money is not cheap, so why do we talk at all? Communication is important to life as social animals. Humans are bound to their society by needs, wants, and so forth and communication is needed to properly satisfy those tasks. From communicating for work, to community, and friendship, communication connects people in a way that no other medium can. Television, blogs, essays, and speeches fail to solve this because they are one-way monologue communication. If a person is properly coherent, people can glean meaning from a monologue form of communication. For example, a person who knows me well or who doesn't know me can read this and understand what I'm saying because I'm a straightforward speaker and I speak my mind in the same way I write a one sentence blog.
E-mail, IM, blog/forum comments, and telephone (a certainly dialogue form of communication) are notorious for their lack of appropriate guides for meaning. Face to face communication solves this issue by adding very quick responses, control over who gets to talk when, and facial expressions which help a lot for context and meaning. The obvious problem with face to face communication is that it takes time and energy to get to the same place at the same time. Since face to face communication is so important, people put a lot of work into making sure it occurs.
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Oct 18, 2008
It's probably been done before, but not with the Google Chart API (I suspect).
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=v&chd=t:100,100,0,10&chs=480x280&chtt=Intelligence&chdl=Smartest+Bears|Dumbest+Humans
