Monday, July 2, 2007

To everyone else its self-parody

The iphone coverage on the web has been incredible, to say the least. You would think BB, the hipest of the tech blogs, would have some incredible content. Other than the rehashes you'll find at better sites like engadged.com or digg.com Today they posted not one, but two, iphone articles. The first being an unfunny last supper parody, which is the visual equivalant of a chain-letter joke you might get from grandma. The second is a goatse jpeg formatted to fit the iphone screen. Goatse? Hello, Xeni, 1997 is calling. Thanks but no thanks. What's next? Tubgirl? Maybe if Apple actually released an SDK someone could port a flash animation of the infamous screaming head. Of course if you read BB, you probably haven't been told that there is no SDK for the iphone and how this limits the device. Considering neither Cory nor Xeni (or perhaps all of them) aren't coders, I'm not sure they even know what an SDK is. Although, "look at the pretty pictures of the iphone, isnt it pretty, it even shows goatse" level posts are the norm for BB.

Metafilter users hate Cory Doctorow.

Incredibly revealing thread here. You would think a site that caters to the tech/web/lefty elite would hold Cory in high esteem. Instead you get stuff like this. It sounds like actual techies and those who care about the web see him as a harmless poseur at best.

Yes, steam does rise from it.

Steampunk screenplay based on "Hackers"

This is just incredibly unfunny. Even the pimple-faced chubby geek version of me in high school wouldn't even chuckle at this. I don't think "steampunk" is the infectious meme Cory thinks it is. I do think steampunk is very visually interesting and there's a lot of great steampunk art (GIS for steampunk) but constantly posting some new steampunk image is like knowing that guy who finds out he can make the cool kids laugh by snorting milk out of his nose, and does it at every lunch period.

The worst part of this little fan script is that you have to have seen the one star groanfest Hackers to even get the so called gags. I guess the big difference between me and the boingboing people is back in 1996 when Hackers came out, I was saving my pennies for movies like MST3K and Brain Candy, and avoiding this content-free jargon heavy box office bomb. Funny, "content free and jargon heavy" does describe Cory's postings pretty well.

Heck, there was a another steampunk posting yesterday. It looks more Dune-ish to me than Steamish, but what cracks me up is this line, "This guy is to lighting what Roger Wood is to clocks." Err, Who? I've never heard of this guy outside of BB. Now the steampunk non-craze is being used to promote Cory's pals?