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Pre-Announcing: Yahoo! Tumblickr GLASS!
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Dear Yahoo! user-base:
I have now accumulated 40,000 of you. That sure didn’t take y’all long.
So, you ten thousand new guys must have caught on about my exciting role at the new Yahoo! combined Flickr-Tumblr service: Yahoo! Tumblickr. Yep, things have been lively at the Tumblickr R&D lab.
I bet you’re not surprised to learn this: we’ve been way-busy with our new Tumblickr Glass! head-mounted display.
I happen to be a widely-known expert on “Google Glass” (because I’ve been seen wearing one in my Flickr set). Of course I was quickly recruited for the crash Yahoo! development of our awesome Tumblr head-wearable.
Once again, my horde of followers will be the first to know about it. Pretty convenient, eh?
Obviously, “Google Glass” is light years ahead of any similar face-grabber gizmo that Microsoft, Amazon, Apple or Facebook are cooking up. However, luckily for Tumblr, our Yahoo chieftainette, MelissaMayr.tumblr.com, is an ex-Googler. Those absent-minded Moonshot geniuses over at the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, well, they forgot to confiscate Melissa’s house keys, wink wink. (Please don’t go forwarding or hearting that.)
Anyhow, our ultra-cool if slightly-purloined knock-off of Glass works pretty good — almost as good as Google Glass itself, almost, kind of, sorta works. It’s even better, in some ways, since it’s much cuter. Also, Tumblickr Glass! has exciting new Yahoo! features, such as the Yahoo! exclamation point on our Glass!, which neatly avoids Google’s trademarks.
Google Glass merely pipes a chain of images over your right eyeball — basically, they look like old-skool 8bit screens hanging in midair. Here at the Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! lab, we have *reversed this process.* How? We turn the camera toward your eyeball, and we take pictures of whatever image is reflected on the surface of your eye!
That’s right! Instead of clumsily snapping pictures whenever the userbase talks to the device — “OK Glass take a picture” — Yahoo! Tumblickr Glass! inverts that process, and turns *everything you see* into a nifty Tumblr-style jiff or jaypeg!
Then we store those pix for you, in the cloud, forever! If you figure out later that you want to upload something to Tumblr, fine, go ahead, that’s your lookout. You can just pick it out of the colossal database of everything that you ever saw.
“But where on Earth do you get the battery, bandwidth and storage to obtain millions of pictures from every Glass! user?” — you may ask me. I mean, you’ll ask me that if you’re some weirdo techno-geek — if you’re the usual Tumblr newbie, teen or cat-fancier, you (a) won’t ask and (b) wouldn’t understand if I told you.
The cool part is that I’m LEGALLY FORBIDDEN to tell you how it works. Yup, we can do it all right — but I can’t tell you how. Because my lips are sealed by federal secret court order! You may have heard of the “National Security Agency” (kids, if you haven’t, look them up on Yahoo! Search (because it’ll be the first time you ever used that service)).
Anyway, the NSA, our cool new business allies, are some super-smart PhD computer-science and crypto dudes who live under a hill in Fort Meade. Man, do they ever have cloud storage in there. Anybody who can store a “cloud” under a “hill” can solve minor tech issues like bandwidth and battery life.
“But — but why would I want to become a spy for the NSA whose every waking moment is uploaded straight to Yahoo!?” Sure — that’s a natural question — but if you’re me asking that, you’re too damn old! That’s right, geezer! Wake up! Your day is over! The native Tumblr demographic is tattooed emo teen chicks stripping off their tops at the Skrillex gig!
Tumblr teen girls — the coolest chicks on the Internet, bar none — they’re gonna be the early adopters for Tumblickr Glass. Them, grandpa. Not you, all gray-haired and indignant, still muttering about the Fourth Amendment like some kind of right-wing crank!
These inventive, adaptable young women with unusual haircuts — tomorrow’s voters — they already know that the NSA is gonna crush all opposition underfoot, just like the NRA did. They may be high as kites on blunts, but they’re not stupid. Just wait till you see the awesome packaging we’ve created for their big sexy plastic Glass! frames — dolphins, seagulls, squids, bacon, unicorns, spangles, thongs, pug-dogs, everything that Tumblr chicks really dig.
Once they get into it, you’ll come around. You sure don’t want to be the only guy around who *ISN’T* a spy for the NSA — any more than you want to be the last guy on your block with an unregistered assault weapon. So it’ll take us a while, but as soon as the user-base catches on to the New Normal, man, these headmounted spy displays are gonna sell themselves. Just like you will. When you venture out in public without your Glass! exposed, you’ll feel even nakeder than the naked people on Tumblr.
Forward to 50,000!
Welcome! To! The! Future! :)
(via milenab)
Thanks, everybody, for sending me your Dark Science cast suggestions! It was good fun, and there were some great ideas. Here are my favorites:
- Kim Ross - Min Hyo Rin (Sunny). This is an inherently tough cast, so most folks went with a visual similarity. Though I don’t know if she’s fluent in english, Min Hyo Rin’s got chops when it comes to dour/scrappy characters.
- Vonnie Awning - Amber Heard (Zombieland, Drive Angry). Heard’s great at simultaneously glamorous and deranged characters, I think she’s a great choice for Vonnie.
- Balthazar Bogan - Aidan Turner (Being Human, The Hobbit). Turner’s very good at being tossed around and not taken seriously, a necessary skill for Balthazar.
- Kaito Kusanagi - Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer, Thor). I can’t think of a better actor to play the progressively unhinged Kusanagi.
- Alisa Caspar - Vera Farminga (The Departed, Bates Motel). Farminga’s downright brilliant in everything she does. I think she can pull off the casual flair of Caspar.
- Mathias Melchior - Matt Smith (Doctor Who). Matt Smith is very good at shifting from lighthearted to terrifying. He also has an amazing frown.
- D.H. Ron - Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Star Trek Into Darkness). Think about it, he’s perfect.
Now *there’s* a movie I’d like to see.
Recession Books by Standard Designs
Very funny!
Where’s “Lord of the Pawned Rings”?
“We went to Kineshma, that’s in Ivanovo region, to visit his parents. I went as a heroine and I never expected someone to welcome me, a front-line girl, like that. We’ve gone through so much, we’ve saved lives, lifes of mothers, wives. And then… I heard accusations, I was bad-mouthed. Before that I’ve only ever been “dear sister”… We had tea and my husband’s mother took him aside and started crying: “Who did you marry? A front-line girl… You have two younger sisters. Who’s going to marry them now?” When I think back to that moment I feel tears welling up. Imagine: I had a record, I loved it a lot. There was a song, it said: you have the right to wear the best shoes. That was about a front-line girl. I had it playing, and [his?] elder sister came up and broke it apart, saying: you have no rights. They destroyed all my photos from the war… We, front-line girls, went through so much during hte war… and then we had another war. Another terrible war. The men left us, they didn’t cover our backs. Not like at the front.” from С.Алексеевич “У войны не женское лицо”
In Soviet Union women participating in WWII were erased from history, remaining as the occasional anecdote of a female sniper or simply as medical staff or, at best, radio specialists. The word “front-line girl” (frontovichka) became a terrible insult, synonimous to “whore”. Hundreds thousand of girls who went to war to protect their homeland with their very lives, who came back injured or disabled, with medals for valor, had to hide it to protect themselves from public scorn.
This has always happened in history: Women do something important. Then they get shamed for it (so nobody will talk about it) and it gets erased from history.
And then certain men will say: “Women suck, they’ve never done anything important.”
Look into history and learn that women have played a far greater role then douches (present and past) wanted you to know.
Yet another erasure, and one that I’d never heard of at all until today.
(via milenab)
this needs to be rebloggable
We joke about cats being utterly venal and self-centred; well, they are, but they do sometimes show that they care about their blobs, when they’re really needed.
(via huntingfornightmares)
you-are-bolin submitted:
I was going through some comic archives and came across this. Thought instantly of this blog :)
Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/8836-Mortal-Kombat
I choked on my drink. Perfection.
So that explains it.
Maintaining standards in behaviour. Propriety,
repost via @samadahabdulrahim. I am CRYING.
*dies*
*weeps gently*
For real, I feel better now. I really do.
Mumblr: A quick primer on why and how WORDS *ARE* VIOLENCE, and there is no such thing as "just an opinion" when someone's human...
An autistic person writes a post mentioning being a parent. This is a response from someone who reblogged it:
I can’t believe you are thirty-two…
And the fact that you’re autistic and a mother. Autistic people shouldn’t be allowed to parent or have kids….
Yes, we’re *still* destroying those who are different, those we don’t (or choose not to) understand. Can we stop now, please?
