What is it about that last hormone blast that makes so many teenage boys start the wrong shit with the wrong people by reacting the wrong way?

I was at a great party Saturday night, and aside from about five minutes, everything went great. But for 30 seconds someone didn’t follow the rules, a potential fight got broken up, and then the four friends of the teenager in question tried to keep it going. They got swarmed by around 30 people in a half second, continued yelling for 10 seconds, then realized that it was a very, very bad idea to start a fight amongst a group of people that fights amongst itself regularly for fun.

On the upside, maybe they learned they’re not invincible. Probably not.

It turns out beyond being a major crazy player in the Tea Party doesn’t do it these days to get traffic. You have to manipulate the SEO too. I know, shocking, right?

Now it’s one thing, of course, to use normal meta tags. Only these aren’t meta tags. Mark Williams, writer of the “colored people letter to Lincoln” and leader in the Tea Party Express, has done the same thing you see on shady shady websites. Text hidden by Javascript or simply slapped down to size 1 font blended with the background, with clearly politically related text like “Buy Adobe CS4″, “Windows 7 Ultimate License”, and “Download Macromedia Software.” Yes, they’re sales/piratey terms, spamming up the page. BEFORE the actual content. Really. Header image, SEO bait, crazytext.

Naturally, Mark Williams has not responded to the questions about why he feels the need to do this, and why he doesn’t consider it unethical.

Edit:In the interest of fairness, I’m finding out if this was intentional, or if it was a hack. This could be someone attacking his site, him setting up an “I’m a victim of the liberals!” play, or a genuine attempt to get more traffic through deceptive keywords. But we’ll find out soon! Well, probably not, because I think the odds are a declaration of “It was an attack!” is assured, no matter what it was.

There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.

To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?

Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?

Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!

I’m not sure who’s to blame, whether it’s a person or a group of programmers, but whoever decided years ago that AOL Instant Messenger is so important a new message window should always pop up and take control must be killed.

It’s been 13 years now since AIM was intially released. I know it’s expected for it to have sucked back then, afterall, it’s AOL. It’s been long enough to NOT do this. But no, despite all the version changes, despite total overhauls of protocols, despite “Triton”, despite the fact now there’s one unified IM window…god help you if you leave AIM on without something already open, because when you’re on a Team Fortress 2 hot streak, when you and Sandvich are destroying everyone assaulting your base, someone will send you a message.

AIM will decide nothing, NOTHING is more important than it is, and it will force any fullscreen app to close and take control of the keyboard.

Whoever made this decision must now be killed, and if I ever experience the joys of time travel, I will use it to prevent this decision from ever being made. Granted, depending on your theory of time travel and time the fact I’m typing this may mean I won’t ever do it, but causality can suck it I say.

Bionic Band has a little brother called iRenew. Yes, this is what happens when you combine snake oil and clueless marketers who claim to be experts in youth/popular culture. Probably the same one who gave us iSnack 2.0.

This time the claim is…hang on, let me try and remember. Oh, right, “BioField Technology.” How’s it work? Let me quote a review they paid for. “In truth, the commercial that demonstrates the balancing power of the bracelet can be considered a manifestation of a field that, to this day, still remains beyond our level of scientific understanding.”

So, it doesn’t. But it does use the same pitch and “demonstration.” Our frequencies are out of tune! We’re under attack constantly from radio waves! And energy! And OTHER HORRIBLE THINGS! Nevermind the fact that we’ve been bombarded by solar radiation and more from the first amoeba and developed things like melanin to deal with it. Fortunately, they have a cure, and you can even get it for plants and pets!

iRenew®’s proprietary, nano based BioField Technology™ not only improves the biofields of people but also can positively impact anything biological which includes the biofields of plants and animals as well.*

Yes, that asterisk IS the standard “This product has not been evaluated by anyone, ever, nor have the claims, and it does not cure treat or prevent any disease.

AKA, “It doesn’t actually do any of the things we’re implying it does.” The usual. But  because people read “nano” and presume it means something besides being on a molecular scale. These bracelets ARE certainly made of molecules. And just like Bionic Band, they claim to alter your frequency to its natural level. One by “aligning the motion of the nuclei of your atoms”, this one by…uh…well, they’re not sure. But somehow they manage to be MORE shady than the original by the fact they only have a P.O. box for mail and their email address is “iRenew@myorderstats.com.” Myorderstats.com. Because if there’s one thing in a domain name that screams “sincere and relaible”, it’s “My(anything).com/info/biz” instead of an actual domain like a respectable business/corporation has.

By the way, iRenew guys? The whole lower case letter “I” is for “internet.” Internet Mac, Internet Phone, Internet…pod. Okay, now it just means hipster, but it’s still used in relation to electronics. This is pretty far from it. This is some rubber and metal.

Now I’m sure someone will come and complain that this post is unfair and that iRenew really works. And to that person I say “Have you tried Alex Chiu’s Eternal Life Rings lately?” Really, the way I see it if you think increased energy is great, you should give immortality a try.

That’s the tagline of the bus bench ad I see driving to university. “If you’re not using us you’re losing money. FIRST PAGE INTERNET PRESENCE GUARANTEED!” it says, followed by a local phone number. No website, which isn’t surprising when I think about it. What is surprising is that this shady seeming ad isn’t a Russian phone number, because there is no first page of the internet. Plenty of people have Google as a homepage, but that’s certainly not the first page if you go through google.com first, is it? It’s the second even if it’s the first result.

So there’s two options the way I see it. One is that they mean first page AFTER a search, which is misleading the customers who really don’t realize Google is the first page of the internet because they know nothing of computers. Second is that they’re serious, and an incredibly shady spyware operation that really will make you the first page when someone opens a browser, the last page when they try to close it, and everything in between. Granted, I don’t think it’s actually good for your company to give the impression you infect computers, but the customers this company expects likely don’t understand the concept.

So everyone wins but the customer. And us! So nobody but the shady russian spyware production company wins, I guess. It’s like Alien Vs. Predator but the humans win, and nobody likes that ending.

“Guys always talk free at one eight hundred free love! (Messages cost between 99 cents and 1.99 depending on carrier Sprint and Nextel customers 19.99 a month subscription fee applies.)”

Yeah, a dollar a text sounds like free to me. Okay, I know, if you’re sad enough to go for sexy text messages from someone who doesn’t even have to try and sound attractive you’re probably not that concerned at paying a buck for 160 characters or less, but still. You’d think they’d hide the fees at least when two seconds ago they proclaimed how it’s free.

You’ve seen this, no doubt. Every time you load up say, Robot Unicorn Attack, you get an interstitial ad with the “Please wait, your game is loading” tag.

Bullshit.

My game isn’t loading. I know my game isn’t loading because it’s already cached. Or because when the ad ends, I get to a screen showing zero percent loaded. I could also talk about how convenient it is that the game never fails to load right as the ad ends, couldn’t I? But the truth of the matter is always that we’re being lied to for no reason. Why not a “This ad pays the bills. Wait 30 seconds and then you get your game.” Or “Your video is loaded, but bandwith costs money”? I’d support that for sure. Who wouldn’t? We’re…

Nevermind, this is the internet. Most of the adults act like 13 year olds on a good day, especially if a microphone is involved. Resume lying.

Say what you want, McDonald’s food is friendly. It’s happy to say hi to everything else you eat and see how it’s doing.

Chompie’s bagels, particularly an Everything Bagel, have a lot to offer too. They’ve got something for everyone, especially when you add cream cheese and vegemite to the mix of garlic, onion, poppy seed, and who knows what else.

A Sausage Egg McMuffin and a Chompie’s Everything Bagel will become quick friends in your digestive tract and intestines, sharing the trip. Your colon doesn’t like this. Colons are full of shit and everyone knows it, they don’t know how to keep friends. They get jealous and start throwing tantrums and become work-obsessed.

You, on the other hand, will wake up at 4:30 am, being alerted by the workaholic colon that “Damn it boss, I gotta clear the warehouse, open the door!” And as the sleepy manager you’ll comply because you’re sick of him smashing things up inside you anyway, but he didn’t tell you he plans to empty the whole warehouse.

But he does. He’s got OCD, and that warehouse is UNCLEAN.

Hope you brought a book.

I’m sure that’s who’s to blame, because once again, a product has an incredibly stupid name. “Crest 3D White Toothpaste.” Because, as we all know, toothpaste, teeth, and smiles are two dimensional. Life is in fact a two dimensional plane, we live in Flatland and our women are attractive but dangerous line segments.

Fucking hell, man, where do these “experts” graduate from, and why do people believe them?

Here’s another recent example. You probably don’t eat it, but you’re familiar with Vegemite I’m sure. Everyone is. So when a new version was created, mixed with cream cheese and a milder flavor, Kraft hired “marketing experts” to come up with a new name.

They came up with iSnack.

Do these people have a single original thought in their heads, or do they just clone anything they saw the name of? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, because once in a while you see an ad series produced by a startup company that’s original and effective, then you see 500 copies of it.

Let me say it again. iSnack. Next up, iSnack 3D 2.0, just you watch.

Fuck.