Well, this has been a day for what-the-fuck communiqués at work:
I got one of the odder e-mails I've received in a while:
I feel that you should write an article on Opera Disappearing. She is on magazines all the time because of her weight loss, what if she lost it all, or instead of losing 100 pounds, she is not 100g? Her audience would have to use magnifying glasses to enjoy her, and the book club had to start using light weight pamphlets instead of books.
The email address is from "belgianperson @ [site.com]," so I momentarily thought there was some Belgian superstar out there named Opera Disappearing. C'mon, like that would be any odder than "Lady Gaga"? Googling "Opera Disappearing" didn't get me anywhere interesting, but searching for "Opera Disappearing weight loss" caused the Internet to say "You obviously mean OPRAH, dumbfuck." Oh. Well, that makes the book-club reference a little clearer, though there's still no inherent sense to the rest of it. Also, worrying about Oprah's weight loss in this day and age? Isn't this email at least a decade behind the times?
And I just got a VERY!!! EXCITED!!! AND EMPHATIC!!! press release!!! from the makers of something called "PeekaBoo Tranny!" This is an iPhone app that randomly goes through your stored photos and "adds photobomb overlays of various fierce trannies in hilarious poses," which of course gives you "a tranny surprise in every shot!" The app is only a buck, but apparently you have to buy each tranny separately. But it's worth it, because "The iPhone user will never take another sad, solemn photo again. The PeekaBoo Tranny app will add sass and sexiness to any photo you take!"
Has it come to this? Do I live in a world that wants this? (Or even that wants a good version of this, since the actual version of this produces what looks like terrible, incompetent, lazy Photoshop kludges.) Also, might it be possible to convince the publicists behind this to stop saying "tranny" so much?
And finally, the mail brought the usual pile of slush-pile books, including a memoir about unemployment. And I picked it up, and out fell a torn-off sheet of looseleaf notebook paper, covered with a large drawing of a misshapen, very hairy, very veiny set of male genitals, and the scrawled words "MADE YOU LOOK!" Thanks, memoirist guy. You clearly have a lot of time on your hands, what with the unemployment and all. Glad to see you're using it productively. Now get back to emailing people about your concerns over Opera's weight-loss.
That's how I read it too, which is just one of the reasons I find this press release off-putting. I wasn't sure whether I was just behind the times and it had been reclaimed.
Well, maybe there are some bored rich kid wankers out there who think that this is funny, but I'll wager that for every one of them there's at least three others who will see this for the ugliness that it is, if not feel actually personally trashed by it.
If this is what passes for 'humour' these days on Apple phone platforms, I know where my dollars could be going instead.
Seriously, if Apple can reject apps because they have 'iPod' in the name, then surely this one should have been stopped at the gate on its title alone.
I'd be sorely tempted to write a letter to the publicist and say something to the effect that you were GOING to read the book and review it, but due to XYZ factors (such as pictures of genitalia) I won't be, and your book is going right to the round file.
Yeah, but that'd be a whole bunch of lies. We weren't going to cover it. We wouldn't not-cover it over something so petty and harmless. (And amusing to Josh, at least.) And I don't throw away books. That's a lot of lies in the service of no real purpose except tattling on a stranger.
As a graphic designer, I can only say one thing about PeekaBoo Tranny: "You want really silly people/aliens/farm animals layered over your pictures? I can do that, and they will be properly cut out and lovely. This app makes no sense, in a world where they teach you how to use Photoshop better than that by the fifth grade!"
I'm just as pissed off at polyfrog up there, not by the terrible word choice but by the terrible, terrible cut-out job. GRAPHIC DESIGNER PRO SMASH!!!
Yeah, the part where they didn't even take the time to excise the photos properly baffles me. Surely if you're selling something, you can take the extra 20 minutes to at least make the SAMPLES look professional?
I got here because of the rage-and-what-the-fuck-inducing app, but I find myself not mentioning that to the maximum because of the first thing.
It sounds like a prank that would be pulled by Markoff Chaney, the all-hating midget, on Dr. Frank Dashwood, of ORGASM Research, in the novel The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. Are you engaged in any business that would bother a fictional misanthrope that much?
"I have an idea for a funny fake newspaper story: Oprah, Disappearing! So many times she was on a magazine cover because she lost weight. In this article, you will claim that she lost 100g! Her audience would have to use magnifying glasses to enjoy her, and the book club had to start using light-weight pamphlets instead of books."
(He is obviously unaware that, these days, Oprah is on magazines because it's HER magazine.)
rollick
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