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Project Implicit

Do you have an implicit bias against certain ages, races, genders, sexual orientations or ability levels? You can assist researchers and find out what lies beneath your own assumptions and beliefs by following the link above and registering for a study, or try a demo test.

February 25 13

things that are on my mind (oscars & more edition):

among reality television contestants, referring to yourself in the third person is usually the biggest giveaway of mental instability.

the number of times a person attempts to casually solicit interest in their upcoming travel destination is directly inverse to the number of interesting places they’ve been in their life.

i was convinced we’d finish borderlands 2 this weekend. instead, about twenty new missions opened and the difficulty curved just soared. i enjoy the game’s grindiness, but this just feels like homework.

ikea meatballs may or may not contain horsemeat (at least in europe).

apparently the fact that i think seth macfarlane did a fine (read: hacky, predictable, amusing) job as oscar host means that i’m a racist, sexist, homophobe. personally, i thought it was tame, and i wish he’d been able to go harder, but since the rest of the world has already tied their knickers in knots over the juvenile and barely offensive jokes he did make, perhaps it’s for the best he didn’t.

fyi, perhaps it’d be best for next year’s oscars to have, you know, like a trigger warning in front of them? you know, ‘cause like, being reminded that rhianna is with a guy that beat her to a pulp, and that, like, the sound of music has nazis in it and like, some women go topless on film sometimes is like, deeply scarring?

also, fuck you.

oh, and apparently that ted bit about a post-oscar sex party is a rape joke, according to this lunatic, because “Nicholson’s pad is notorious for hosting Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl”. okey dokey, then.

i was mostly weirded out that that the majority of twitter commenters who were offended by macfarlane’s “sexism” were white men.

here’s a list of things more offensive about last night than any of seth macfarlane’s jokes:

the average price of the garments on the guests, amortized over the amount of time they will be used.
that a high ranking member of the government was conscripted to announce an oscar winner, along with a backdrop of military personnel.
that the oscar in question went to a film that grossly rewrites history in a questionably jingoistic way.
that the same people that took offense to a joke about a perpetrator of domestic violence are active participants in a star system that has gone on to reward him time and again. case in point? that perpetrator was sitting comfortably at elton john’s oscar viewing party at the time that joke was being made.
that the value of the oscar gift basket this year is several thousands of dollars more than the average american salary… for a year.

how’s that for a start?

UPDATE: To be clear, I want to expand on my comment about Michelle Obama’s appearance last night, which is not coming from a partisan place. Over my lifetime, I have seen a distinct blurring between politics and entertainment. Whenever I see a sitting president or presidential hopeful and/or his family on

a) Entertainment Tonight, or the like,

b) People Magazine, or the like, or

c) any chat show that generally does not cover politics,

it makes me cringe. I understand that this might be my personal view, and that this might represent an old fashioned or out of touch way of thinking. While I do get that contemporary media tends to give equal weight to all issues, regardless of importance, and that politicians want to reach out to “the people” through the outlets that have access to the most ears and eyes, no matter how vapid, I don’t believe that it should necessarily be that way.

I understand that the office of the First Lady is mostly ceremonial. Traditionally, while campaigning, or once ensconced in the White House, the spouse of the president focuses on “soft” issues of a social and ceremonial nature. As an unpaid, unelected and unappointed role, the First Lady is not a government official. She is, however, considered a member of the Administration, and is a political figure in her own right, and while many might disagree, I feel that opening the envelope at the Academy Awards is absolutely beneath that role.

That the right wing is jumping on this idea to further attempt to chip away at the Obama presidency is not a surprise, and frankly, if the issue of “dignity” is in question, I’d argue that many on the right should be the last to weigh in. Ultimately, I think this boils down to perception about the awards in general. To those who consider the Oscars to be a venerable institution that rewards the meritorious in a specific industry in a gracious and dignified manner, perhaps her appearance is not incongruous. To those who consider the Oscars to be a self-congratulatory circle jerk for the vain and ultra-rich, like I do, the presence of someone highly connected in the sitting federal government is embarrassing, no matter how likeable or glamorous.

I guess my bottom line is, can’t we at least pretend that politics and entertainment haven’t become the same thing?

February 13 13

All Look Same?

Can you distinguish between Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces, artwork, or food? Are you sure? Turns out, according to these tests, I can’t, not really anyways. In fact, the only category I scored reasonably well in is “food”, but really, there’s no pride in that, although I guess I don’t feel so terrible since apparently Asian people aren’t scoring so well on the facial recognition test either.

January 25 13

Hey poor non-white people!

You’re to blame for Apple’s loss of market share! Gizmodo is generally known for worshipping at the Cult of Jobs, but this article is so laughably offensive in its butthurt fanboyism that it’s hard to believe it’s not just a giant troll. Other than the photo of a homeless person with a smartphone by their legs used to illustrate the article, here are some samples from the article to illustrate author Sam Biddle’s lack of taste and judgement:

Step forward a few years, and Apple is losing to Google—at least in sheer numbers of phones being sold. What happened?
People without money happened.

Later, “people without money” is defined as:

22-percent of those with annual incomes below $30,000 were Android owners, as opposed to just 12 percent for iPhone. With those towards the lower-middle class, the trend holds: Android owns 23-percent of incomes up to $50,000, with iPhones at 18.

You know, people without money, also known as… the majority of the population. In fact, 2010 US Census statistics indicate that just over 75% of Americans make under 50k a year [source].

Biddle then begins equating “people without money” to black and hispanic people (yeah, really), and talks about how Android-based companies like Samsung are targeting people of color by including more non-white people in their advertising, spotlighting the ad they did with LeBron James. Confusingly, Biddle asserts:

In the meantime, Apple’s closest stabs at diversity star the universally-beloved Samuel L. Jackson eating gazpacho and the Williams sisters playing ping pong. Black people, but massively wealthy black people.

I guess didn’t realize that LeBron James was a poor person, like all the homeless folks buying Android smartphones. Anyways, after this nebulous discussion of race, Biddle abruptly comments:

Apple won’t play this game. Partly because it’s too stubborn (or too smart) to undercut the likes of HTC and Motorola and hit buyers for whom the price of entry matters more than almost anything.

… which, in context, seems like he’s saying that Apple is too smart to pander to poor black and hispanic people, and dilute their brand purity, if you get my drift. Of course, it’s the final paragraph that sings with the bitter tears we’ve come to associate with the death of the middle aged white Republican male:

This isn’t just a good strategy for Google, it’s a diabolical strategy for Google: carpet bomb the phone world with as many easy ways to use Google products as possible. Forget prestige. Just get people signed up. Apple might remain the most valuable company in the entire hoary history of capitalism, but Google’s playing the long con. As long as Android can keep feeding itself to companies and drive budget electronics, it’ll have its foot on the iPhone’s throat as a populist standby—and the Zooey Deschanels among us will start to feel like the real minority they are.

What’s incredibly confusing about this article is that Biddle clearly doesn’t know what he’s complaining about. On the one hand, he’s lamenting Apple’s loss of market share, to poor, non-white people and their “cheap” “chintzy” Android devices. On the other hand, he seems incredibly proud of the fact that Apple is maintaining its “prestige” by seemingly catering to rich white people like him. As one commenter states, “[i]t must be hard to be an Apple fanboy nowadays.”

Of course, many of the comments on this article side squarely on the side of the author, betraying even more deeply rooted (and keenly misplaced) distrust of poor/non-white people:

I have to agree. Android is the phone of the entitlement crowd - those who think they are owed something in life.

Perhaps Apple should learn a little something from the American Republican party, whose attempt to batten down the hatches against the inevitability of time has come back to bite it. Android has ensured its ubiquity through its accessibility and its inclusiveness, across devices, across price points, and if Biddle is to be believed, across racial lines, through its marketing. To imply that poor, non-white people are to blame for Apple’s recent poor performance is pathetic, to say the least, and will only negatively contribute to public perception of Apple products as overly expensive, not inclusive and ultimately less flexible than the Android environment. Of course, that’s assuming that someone other than the mythical Zooey Deschanel-type that Biddle fancies himself (you know, “the real minority”) actually reads Gizmodo, of which I am not sure.

December 20 12

Nice Guys of OK Cupid.

Oh yes, follow, follow, follow. If you have answered the question “Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?” or “Do you think women have an obligation to keep their legs shaved?” with yes, you are on notice.

December 6 12

To: white men, CC: everyone else everywhere

Also, you should most definitely click through to the piece on Richard Cohen, because it is super funny.

July 4 12

… and people wondered why I called the popo when some dumbass decided to set off some fireworks in my neighborhood at midnight on Canada Day. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t much feel like having my house set on fire by someone’s misplaced patriotism. Speaking of which, Happy 4th to all my Amerifriends! May you preserve your fingertips and eyebrows for another year.

(This video may be NSFW.)

April 11 12

whatever-the-weather:

Metal bands per 100,000 people.

If Québec was a separate country, we’d be deeply in the red.

(Source: whatever-the-weather, via ilovecharts)

January 3 12

You Are Not So Smart

This morning’s episode of Q (mercifully not hosted by the smugly insufferable Jian Ghomeshi for the next two weeks, o happy day!) introduced me to David McRaney, whose blog (and new book) You Are Not So Smart is about to take over my life. I’m posting this here as a reminder to myself, as a way of sharing this link with you, but also to record here an extremely interesting idea that he mentioned on the show this morning, which is the idea of indie/hipster/underground culture as the driving force of capitalism.

His contention is that, in the quest to constantly unearth music/clothing/items/etc. to distinguish themselves from mass produced mainstream culture, people interested in underground culture are inadvertently thrusting those things into popular culture. This is true of music (where small, unknown indie bands suddenly hit the mainstream, until even your mom knows who Arcade Fire is) to clothing (stores like Urban Outfitters have based their entire business model on knocking off thrift store items and designs by little known independent designers) to items in your house (which I will summarize with this simple phrase: “put a bird on it”).

The quest for authenticity (which I have previously written about on my other blog) therefore pushes the wheels of mass market capitalism onward, providing it with carefully curated ideas and trends ripe for being mass produced and sold into the mainstream. Remember “cool spotting” in the 90s? This model is so ingrained in our consciousness by this point that the entire marketing world is predicated on it, which is why the space between the genesis of new trends and their appearance at 60% off at the mega Walmart near you is narrowing ever more.

December 13 11

Pacifist Aggressive

Apart from boasting perhaps the cleverest title in Kotaku history, this article, about a player who has managed to reach level 35 in Skyrim without dealing a single blow, really tackles the issue of playstyle. How and why people choose to play videogames is a topic which I find endlessly fascinating, and recently discussed (in a bit of a roundabout way) in the context of The Sims here. That entry linked to a commentary I wrote about an earlier (terrible) article I had read about playstyle and political choice, which instantly came to mind as I was reading about this peculiar, and ingenious, approach to this year’s most popular RPG.

What this article demonstrates is the value of emergent gameplay. In the spaces between the developers’ intentions, choices can be made to exploit game mechanics in creative, and sometimes thought provoking ways. It also demonstrates that, unlike the article on politics and gaming implied, there can be a significant choices in approach in a variety of games for those willing to imagine them.