my first piece of wired propaganda

The good folks at Wired mag approved this new ad I put together to run on reddit. Now go buy a subscription :-)

Hopefully this will spawn an entire "PRINT: It's the future" campaign...

going where no dutchman has gone before

To paraphrase the immortal words of the Onion, fuck everything, we're turning our "e" on its side. That's right, a full ninety degrees of fun.

A number of our users, including one of our own (Jeremy), reported a significant increase in their enjoyment of reddit. And with no obvious side effects.

He suggested we up the ante on those Heineken brand managers (hell, they have three "e"s to tilt) and tip ours over -- make it look like it's spent a bit too much time in Amsterdam (great brewery tour, btw).

it's all about the slant of your "e"

I was getting throttled by Steve's sister in Wii Tennis last night, which shouldn't have surprised me. At some point the sweat on my brow began to bleed into the tears in my eyes -- I needed to pause the game.

As I dried myself off, something in the pause menu caught my attention.

It was the tilt of the "e".

(I know, this is a random screencapture of the Wii main menu, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of photographing Steve's TV. Take a look at "Disc Channel" . If you still don't believe me, go fire up your Wii -- this post will still be here, just don't play Amanda in Wii Tennis. She's brimming with bloodlust.)

That's right, Nintendo astutely designed a crooked "e" for their Wii font. This is a system they've clearly put a lot of thought into (and borrowed a few tricks from Apple along the way) but why the tilted "e"?

The only reason this even got my attention in the first place was because of a branding project I'd done in college on Heineken. Since most of us are still drinking PBR, here's the logo to jog your memory:

Somewhere in the Heineken corporate literature was a reference to these leaning "e"s. It stated (I'm paraphrasing here) that they were specially tilted to convey the brand's easy-going nature and to emphasize the fun of drinking a Heineken.

I didn't believe it when Heineken did it (I still haven't found a beer that didn't make me feel more easy-going and fun). But when Nintendo does it, I have no choice but to respect and trumpet it is an act of design genius.

Therefore, I thought it wouldn't hurt to tilt reddit's "e" for a day. Please let me know if your reddit experience has been heightened in any way.

**the Wii screencapture is not mine, I've ganked it from technabob. It's nothing personal, it just happened to be the first thing that came up on the Google image search. Hopefully they won't goatse me...

yaroslavl oblast, we salute you

Please don't send your halberd-wielding bears after us.

a new low: ganking content from reddit

I couldn't help myself. This is quite possibly the greatest flag ever: a godless killing machine armed with a massive axe halberd (a savvy redditor pointed out that it's actually not a massive axe -- clearly someone with some D&D experience).

This flag is apparently from the Russian province of Yaroslavl Oblast, which is known for its well-organized and well-armed bear population. It's for this very reason that I remain firmly opposed to the right to arm bears.

In case you hadn't already seen the link on reddit, I felt the need to share this. The folks over at Yard Flags certainly agree, it's #1 on their world's ten best flags.

Maybe you can find a cooler flag? Please share it in the comments. Otherwise, quake in awe before the mighty banner of Yaroslavl Oblast.

happy mother's day

For all the mommas out there. I know this is one of those Hallmark holidays, but even the alien wouldn't be here if it weren't for a mom.

Let her know how much she rocks for carrying you around roughly nine months.

mindjob and corn flakes

While eating my cereal this morning, something dawned on me:

If I have zero tolerance for intolerance, what does that make me?

It's questions like these that philosophers like Socrates undoubtedly also pondered over Special K® Red Berries. Any philsophy majors wanna rationalize this one for me?

You're all probably too stoned to bother anyway...

revolution? sold!

There you have it, folks. It's everything you need to know about political science:

It doesn't matter how great and equitable the ideology may seem on paper -- aliens are greedy.

mayday may day!

It depends on who you ask, but the first of May is a day that involves either dancing around a pole or celebrating the proles.

I didn't even know -- until I checked the above Wikipedia entry -- that this day is purportedly observed as Loyalty Day here in the USA. Granted, you can't trust anything on Wikipedia (the article also said that the number of "endangered" African elephants has actually been doubling every year) but the explanation sounded reasonable enough:

The holiday was first observed in 1921[1] as "Americanization Day,"[2] and was intended to counterbalance the celebration of the Labour Day on May Day — May 1, which was perceived as communist.

Looks like the Commie pinkos wanted to have their day for the working class (the whole thing apparently started as a pre-Christian European pagan holiday anyway). I suppose this kind of fervent nationalism was still en vogue back then, especially shortly after the first World War. Although, for a modern reader, there is something a bit unsettling about a Loyalty Day "for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom".

You have to wonder how many folks were still celebrating Loyalty Day on May 1st, 1930 -- after feeling the wrath of a free market.

Incidentally, this logo will have a second part tomorrow that should encompass all the lessons of an introductory poli-sci class. I suspect this series will find its way into classroom texts for generations to come.

(And yes, I know the Cyrillic is fake. I never professed to know Russian, it just looks prettier this way.)