This is a great video from Dove on our perceptions of beauty. At a time when even young children have growing rates of eating disorders, we should be looking at the responsibility that advertising and the media should take for the growing dissatisfaction in our physical self-perception much in the way advertising of obesity causing foods is now being criticised. It’s great to see an ad like this that highlights how the images that we are supposed to aspire to are often figments of illusion. Actresses get in body models, lenses are vaselined, cellulite is airbrushed out, legs are stretched, pimples disappear… but the end result perfect images are all presented as the norm and any deviations are faults. At the very least, there should be a disclaimer that a particular image has been Photoshop-ed*.
Though you have to remember, Dove is not a standalone company, it is housed by Unilever which includes brands like Lynx that feature impossibly good looking women who probably do get Photoshop-ed (but I do find their ads hilarious, even if it’s just the thought that a naff deoderant can suddenly make some guy irresistable). And Unilever, like most big companies, is far from squeaky clean. So it does make you think how much of it really is just their brand differentiation as opposed to any real desire for ethical good. Like with the amazing success of pink branding to help breast cancer fundraising, social conscience can be a very profitable brand. I did find it a little ironic that substances that research has suggested possible carcinogenic links like artificial pink strawberry fillings (Tim Tams) and PET packaging (bottled water) were included in the list of fundraising products. Back to Dove though, despite questions to their motives, it is great to see people of different weights, ages and looks being represented because there is so little variety in advertising and ads. Hopefully, this will make commercial sense and other companies will be tempted to try out “real” people as models.
*both photoshoped and photoshopped look really weird to me. Maybe it should be “Photoshop’ed”? Argghhhhhh!!!
Though nothing beats zefrank’s stuff: it is the birthplace one of the most popular snowflake makers and home to odes to serendipity like the flower and garden makers. And of course there are games, like this sweet little simple game. Definitely one for the bookmarks…
Heard a nice little song on the radio and went to do a google search to see if I could find it. Of course by the time I’d got to the internet, I’d mixed up the artist so I typed in “whitest guy on earth dreams burning” and google asked me if I instead meant “hottest guy on earth dreams burning”. I thought I’d then tried “blackest guy…” to see if I’d get the same results, but no, it just went straight to the listings. I’m sure that there’s nothing nefarious going on, “whit” shares two letters with “hot” and o and i are very close together. I just thought it was funny that google thinks “whitest” is somehow linked with “hottest” in their complex algorithms, I doubt most people would consider the whitest person on the planet to also be the hottest.
Btw, I did find the song: it’s called “Burning” and it’s off the Dreams album… it’s by the whitest boy alive (from Norway) and here’s the MySpace. They also have 9,999 friends when I last checked. That’s a cool number.
One of Cory Doctorow’s students just started up a blog documenting the incredible small print that we’re subjected to daily. It’s called the Small Print Project and people are invited to post their experiences of dodgy clauses that they’ve noticed. It’s quite bizarre what companies try and impose, this one example from Cory:
Just last week, I had to cancel a speaking engagement at Disney Studios, whose speaker agreement includes a clause in which you promise never to use the word Disney again in an article or story without their written permission (!). This is apparently non-negotiable. [BoingBoing]
Have been meaning to do some sort of homebrewing for a number of years now with my latest fixation being mead. Anyway it seems a little bit easier than beer and wine and as Mead Made Complicated rightly note: “nobody knows mead: if you have friends taste wine you made, comments could be like: “it tastes like Bordeaux, just not as good”. If people do not like the mead you made, it is possible to pretend that they just do not like mead in general.” So this might be a good idea for a summer project.
Unsurprisingly, the type of of honey makes a huge difference to final taste.
The type of honey used will determine the flavor of the Mead. Experience has proven that Clover is so delicate a flavor it could be called Generic Mead. Blueberry, Cranberry, Orange, and Raspberry taste like the fruits. Thyme makes unique ale-like mead. Wildflower produces an alcoholic perfume, not for everybody’s taste, yet probably most like the ecstatic stupor experienced by the small creatures who make it all possible, the BEES! [Making Mead]
These are a little old, but my household has been singing them all week and I thought I’d share the madness.
The most annoying is the Schnappi song – the small schnappi crocodile that buries its catchi tunes deep into your neural pathways so even the smallest hint of a “snee” or a “schni” will set it off.
Anything on rathergood.com (”Your One Stop Shop for Good and Evil Kittens”) but my all time favourite is We Like the Moon (brilliant AND annoying… even more brilliant!).
Finally, there’s the Bang Bang Bang song which is offensive in the extreme, but oh so catchy (”You want me to do things to you like the sun and the moon. Idiot! I don’t have time, I have too many women”). I once knew someone (still do, he’s a great guy) who asked me whether he should send it to someone he wanted to break up with. He didn’t (I think). If you can’t work out quite what they’re saying here are the lyrics. Also it inspired what has to be the crappiest machinima I’ve ever seen. Anyway the original song is done by Group X and they are also responsible for Schfifty Five.
Penny Arcade’s Gabe has posted a video of his screen while he’s doing a Boba Fett sketch on a Tablet with a mashup of 50 cent and Queen in the background. It’s pretty cool.
