noooooo
total shitstorm at work this week. some idiot thought this would be a good way to celebrate the agency’s 21st year in business.
http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/02/22/phd-promotional-video-taking-a-kicking-on-youtube/
its like celebrating your birthday by walking round with a sign on your back saying kick me.
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Posted by: Mrs Much on February 23, 2011
more out of office
More crimes against out of office autoreply.
This one reminds me of those sanctimonious brats on “why don’t you (just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead)” but, like, AFTER you’ve watched why don’t you presumably. in which kids with strong regional accents will tell you how to make cornflake crunchies, or show fillums about playing outdoors.
I give you:
OUT OF OFFICE:
Eh-oop
On holiday. Back Monday. Have a lovely weekend, won’t you? Don’t sit around… go and do something.
xx
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Posted by: Mrs Much on February 7, 2011
wine
Picture the scene: curry house in the provinces. School friend of friend orders a bottle of ‘red’ off the menu. Not the Shiraz, not even the second cheapest. Red. Sure enough it tastes foul. I order a fresh, more palatable bottle and tuck in. “Our wine not good enough for you, then?” No, frankly.
(Internal memo: yes Mrs Much we know your views on curry + wine = big no; but you only drink from the Beaune region).
We bought friends in the same group a stand-up bottle of Chablis (because ‘she doesn’t buy herself nice wine’). When she promptly diluted her glass with lemonade to the tune of, “Oh you don’t mind, do you?” I could see why. Wince. But as an acquaintance points out, you should give those sorts of people Blue Nun.
When nuns cry.
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Posted by: Mr Pea on October 14, 2010
#vomitlolly 2
Was reminded of my friend’s spookily accurate facebook pisstake of my office today by finding this slab of sci-fi / mediageek nonsense posted in the comments section of a colleague’s blog.
I don’t think you need a background in the media world this came from to get how emetic it is:
“The last one left on Wednesday. There was a big drink-up that was sort of sad and exciting at the same time, like finally reaching a big decision that you’d been putting off for ages but, once you’ve made it, feels like a huge relief. It’s OK for me, mister uber-analyst. Three promotions in fifteen months and now I’m responsible for all of our TV analytics. I think we only call it TV because no-one has ever been able to find a better name for it. “Shorter form moving image content” was never really going to catch on, was it? To me TV evokes a time I know about from talking to my dad and watching dataclips the big G archived back in the day when you had no real idea who was watching, what they were watching, where they were when they were watching it, what they looked for as a result of what they were watching, what they bought off the back of that…the things that keep the bizmod from falling apart faster than a sick person who hasn’t got enough Credits left to pay for their Remedies.
I liked a lot of the Comms crew, despite their overall blandness, their gnawing sense of their own redundancy. It’s upside down from my dad’s time, when the analysts were the nerds because of all the number crunching they had to do. The Comms lot were the individuals, the eccentrics, the hedonists, the boutique-destination travellers. Sometime between then and now, things flipped. All the smart cookies got into data, because the more the machines did the math, the more imagination the analysts needed. My old man says he saw it coming, gently but firmly nudging me towards what seemed at the time a bizarre combination of exam subjects: pattern recognition, statistics, narratology. It makes massive sense now; given my work is basically an amalgam of numbers and storytelling. I’m forever in his debt – metaphorically as well as literally – way beyond the Credits that flow out of my site and into his every day, payback for all the education, the upkeep, the lost opportunity cost of raising a child.
Data is just about the only permanent thing we save from our everyday lives. Not that we save it, of course: but at least somebody does. And the data itself is so complex that telling stories with it is just about the only way to make any sense out of it. Most storytellers work in data nowadays. The rest work in what we still call TV, scripting two minute m-soap episodes or Reality News for the Network. I think there are still some pure writers out there, but given the utter lack of context for non-commercial storytelling, they surely must be forced to eke out an existence beyond society, almost religious figures or shamans in their magnificent austerity, martyrs dying young at eighty-five or ninety.
I’ve tried to put narratives together for myself, at home, and find it impossible to know where to start, what to write about. Where would I get inspiration from without data?
I might stay in touch with some of the Comms crew, but I doubt it. If I’m honest I feel a bit guilty about how it’s all shaken out. But once the big G managed to buy up all the data feeds and blasted the whole operation up into orbit, there has been only one game in town. And, if you think about it, there’s really no such a thing as Comms any more, anyway. How the stories get to people, no-one cares; servers, satellites, airwaves, mobiles – whatever. Connect to the nearest screen, out flow the Credits for the rental time, and there it is; whatever the data thinks you wanted. All I do is to create the story that makes it real.”
makemesquirm would like to reward you for reaching the end of this post with a lovely image of something else thats random, vacuous and sci-fi themed
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Posted by: Mrs Much on October 12, 2010
combine
reminded today of childhood squirm – from a friend who grew up on a farm in the west country.
playing with friends one afternoon he decided to take off all his clothes and get them to tie him to the front of his dad’s combine harvester. he’s never fully explained the game scenario that got him to this point but i think its pretty easy to work out what was going on in his head here.
then they heard someone coming. his friends paniced and scattered leaving him to be found.
naked.
tied to heavy farm machinery.
by his dad.
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Posted by: Mrs Much on October 8, 2010
little chef
just been reminded by this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/06/i_love_charlie/ of an early teen birthday disaster.
i was at boarding school at the time. my parents had written to say they would pick me up from school on my birthday and take me out for something to eat. i got all excited, told everyone i was going out for my birthday and wore my party frock specially.
they took me to a little chef.
i fucking don't
yeah i took a fair bit of piss taking for that when i was summarily dropped back off 2 hours later, pink with shame and smelling of chips.
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Posted by: Mrs Much on October 6, 2010
amy lame
while watching ed miliband doing conference speech on tv last night, the bbc footage cut away several times to show audience reaction shots. one of which prompted this exchange:
me: “ooh! is that any lame? why did they cut to her?” (thinks: well she’s a queer icon, but not exactly a news at ten audience staple reference point is she?)
duckie darling
him: “she’s sitting next to john prescott” (i hadn’t even noticed) “i imagine its more his reaction they were showing” (thinks: OMG i am married to a total halfwit)
oops.
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Posted by: Mrs Much on September 29, 2010
vibrator
i recieved a conference invite in the post yesterday in this:
- bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
bit weird shaking contents of jiffy bag out onto desk with a clang that made all my colleagues look up just in time to see me to confronted by what looks suspiciously like a vibrator.
but no – it just contains an invite to some boring old speaker thing. talk about disappointing.
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Posted by: Mrs Much on September 28, 2010
vomitlolly
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Posted by: Mrs Much on September 27, 2010
#whatatwat
from twitter:
 Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)24/09/2010 12:03 Shelter aside, good architecture is about embedding values we revere into matter – so we can be reminded of what counts. |
pretentious? lui?
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Posted by: Mrs Much on September 24, 2010
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