I guess the hint wasn’t good enough.

I’m sure this will be fixed in an hour or two, which may or may not break the link, but here it is anyway :)

Edit: They pulled the article about half an hour later.

This is how it’s done in Japan.

Image: Pixiv.

It’s something like that.

Image: My Apokalips.

You’re doing it wrong.

Image: kiske.

LOL.

Image: imgur.

Sarcasm isn’t exactly lost on the Internet. Smashing Magazine tweeted this pic today, showing the W3C laying a Twitter-sarcasm smackdown — I guess they’re not quite as dry a group of nerds as I thought they were — and it had me laughing. Then I read that a company in Michigan is now trying to sell a sarcasm punctuation mark.

That’s right. Sell. They want $1.99 for it. A punctuation mark that they made up. I’m not kidding you, it’s all right here, as reported by the Telegraph.

Behold, in all its stupidity: The “SarcMark”

Alright, SarkMark, I’ll tell you how I really feel: You’re idiots. Getting past the glaringly obvious fact that there is absolutely no need for a punctuation mark to denote sarcasm, the mark looks like shit. Honestly, it looks like a third-grader drew it, on a napkin, on a park bench. It pains me to think that these people are actually trying to sell this garbage, and it pains me even more that they’re actually attempting to patent the thing.

The reasoning put forth by these geniuses: That people need some way to more concretely convey their sarcasm over the Internet. According to them, we should cater to people who are too stupid to either write sarcastically, or to understand sarcasm when it’s staring them in the face. Their slogan:

Never again be misunderstood! Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it! Sarcasm – Punctuate It – SarcMark [X]

The [X] at the end of the slogan is where their ridiculous looking punctuation mark goes, but since you have to pay them to download it, nobody can see the mark unless they’ve installed it. This makes me happy, since it means the likelihood of ever seeing the horrid thing is slim. Normally I’d cross my fingers and hope that a thing like this fails, hard, but I don’t think these people stand a chance. Check out their hilariously skeezy site here.

Images: RunLevel6, Telegraph.

It seems they’ll never learn. Yesterday, this pop-up introduced itself to Facebook users across the globe, and it wasn’t to the warmest of welcomes, either. Out of the millions of users who see this pop-up, roughly half can be expected to actually follow through with the indoctrination into new privacy features, while the rest will simply click the comfortable-looking “skip for now” button. Some users logged into their accounts and were never greeted with the pop-up at all, even though the changes had already taken place.

There’s an explanation for that — apparently they’re rolling this out incrementally, and it only seems like a full release because of the site’s massive user-base. Facebook’s Ana Muller explains thusly:

If you haven’t yet seen the three-step transition tool for reviewing and updating your privacy settings, you will shortly. We’re asking all 350 million people who use Facebook to go through this process and are rolling out the changes incrementally to make sure it goes smoothly. Keep in mind that you also won’t see the new Privacy Settings page until you’ve gone through the transition process.

These new changes weren’t a surprise by any means, but were actually known and expected; when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently posted his An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (I honestly never get tired of saying that, I can’t believe how pretentious that guy is…), he concentrated on the eventual phasing-out of regional networks while only mentioning the privacy update. He pointed to a post from way back in July of this year, which basically talked about Facebook’s willingness to move toward the present privacy-controls as quickly as possible. The whole thing was dragged out and veiled in maybe’s, but it’s happening now.

Is it really so bad?

In short: Yes.

The picture above is a direct screenshot of the new, ultra-simplified privacy options presented to users when they follow through with the pop-up. The settings shown in the picture are the default settings that Facebook has pre-selected for users. The move to push users to inadvertently over-share is so brazen that even the BBC said something about it in a post this morning.

I’m not even about to lie; this blog is and has always been extremely critical of Facebook, especially since breaking the story about Facebook ads and privacy earlier this year. I will, however, be fair in explaining my stance on this new round of changes.

With the sole exception of sharing posts (which I left set to “everybody”), I immediately set all options back to the right-side column. This is a personal preference, and I’ll admit that it’s one largely based on principal and a history with Facebook that’s left a bad taste in my mouth. The reason I’ve gone ahead and left the posts option public is that I usually post things that are open to anyone to see — I don’t generally get very private in Facebook status updates.

That being said, there is an issue that needs attention.

The Actual Settings Are Still Confusing

I watched somebody attempt to configure their new privacy settings without the aid of the pop-up, only to find that they hadn’t really changed at all from the hopeless jumble of confusing mess that’s already known and hated. It turns out that the shiny new simplified version is only for users who follow through with the pop-up, while everyone else is stuck with the same poorly-worded quagmire that we’ve become so accustomed to bashing. Facebook calls these legacy settings “extensive and granular” — I call them just plain shitty.

Read the full, official Facebook blog post here.

I’m one of over 350 million Facebook users. Being extremely generous, I’d be willing to say that one million users both attempt to locate and successfully navigate their way through the privacy settings, and finally affect a desired change in them. That’s being extremely generous, because we all know that the odds are heavily against that there are anywhere near that many people who even know there are privacy settings.

The number of people being manipulated into sharing more information than they’d likely choose is nothing short of mind-bending. The ad-revenue is staggering, and the information gleaned from extensive data-mining is equally astounding. Just something to think about.

Yep, completely and utterly missing. It’s been the better part of a day without the much-maligned pile of fail feature that Twitter’s massive ego of a CEO insisted we’d all grow to love — and they’ve not said a word about it. Unfortunately, because of their noted silence on the matter, the odds are about 50/50 that the horrid thing will be back tomorrow, bright eyed and bushy-tailed. I believe this to be the likeliest case because it’s what I don’t want to happen.

I’m still crossing my fingers.

We mustn’t discount the possibility that Twitter may actually have killed the beast, once and for all. I wouldn’t count on it — there’s that whole sticky issue of Twitter’s self-affirming infallibility being at stake here, after all.

[UPDATE]:

After hours of pleasing me with their absence, Twitter’s foul retweets are back. It was nice while it lasted.

Yes, those are “stacks” of “benjamins.”

His Twitter page was hilarious enough as it was without the G-Money MySpace retard-shot he has plastered as a background image. The MySpace theme runs throughout his scam-site too, including badges that lead back to his profile. And this really hits the mark; nothing says gaudy like a sleazy MySpace page…

WARNING: MySpace pages have been known to lower IQ, view at your own risk.

This guy is amazing. At the end of his MySpace youtube video, he gets in his Nissan 350Z and drives off, and yes, the camera keeps running until he drives down the street. He has two separate youtube videos, one for his MySpace and one as a greeter for his site. I’m sure he’d have one for Twitter as well, if he could. But these profile pages are just runners up compared to the grand-daddy of them all, his actual website.

Behold, in all its trashy glory: MiragesMoney.com

After laughing at his ridiculous Twitter background image for a solid five minutes, I clicked the link to his website, where I sat and laughed for another solid five minutes. Then I watched his terribad, self-promotional youtube video that he uses for a site-greeter, and laughed for another five minutes, and then it just got better as I clicked through to see the “Success Guide” portion of his site.

The Success Guide

This is truly hilarious; it’s his step-by-step guide to “become a baller.” Seriously.

From the guide intro:

Alright alright, so you want to pursure this make money from home thing and you want to stack $$$ like Mirage huh? You got some work to do. But hey, if Mirage can stack thousands a day then so can you. So here it is you wanna be ballers, the ultimate guide to making money online. Aka the success guide. I don’t know why Mirage did it, but I guess he just has a sweet spot in his heart for those who are struggling like he was. Now dont even think about jumping ahead in any section! Read each section diligently, join the networks he tells you to and structure everything the way he teaches and start ballin.

It only gets better from there, including a life history, written in nearly seventh-grade reading level, and many, many paragraphs of juicy internet-marketing secrets. This guy lays it all bare for the world to see, so that we can all become ballers just like him. Go ahead, cruise his pages, it’s good for about 20 minutes of uninterrupted laughter. When you’re finished, just be sure to gouge out your eyes, burn your computer, and lament the sad state of humanity to which the world has now bore witness.

In case that sounds a bit harsh, it’s because it is, but after reading yesterday’s release from the Oxford University Press, it’s warranted. The release announced Oxford’s coveted Word of the Year to be none other than the now ubiquitous Unfriend, which in and of itself is no matter of contention.

The problem is how they’ve gone and incorporated the word into their once-respectable tomes. They couldn’t simply acknowledge the word for being pervasive and relevant to the times — they had to pander and show how horrid social ineptitude can get in an office full of lexicographers and linguists.

Here’s what the OUP had to say about this joyous event:

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

Did you notice it? Facebook was expressly mentioned not once, but twice. This may not seem so important if you don’t follow the importance of dictionaries, and their historical value, but it is. A dictionary, like Oxford, is inherently sacred in that it acts as a vehicle for our very language. Soiling its pages with proper names of companies that will likely no longer exist in 20 years time is simply irresponsible and disrespects the lexicon.

The definition provided is entirely sufficient without the added “such as Facebook” clause. Including it was wrong. Using it again in the example is gratuitously wrong, and to really make things sad and pathetic, they even link back to Facebook whenever they use the word.

But that’s not all they managed to screw up in this hapless festival of failed tech-hipstering — in showing off their other bleeding edge words of tech, they showed that they not only have no idea what a netbook is, but also that they’ve never used Twitter, or read a history book.

According to these geniuses, netbooks are differentiated from laptops only by their “limited memory,” and the definition for hashtags is so absurdly lengthy that it’s obviously written by a person who learns all they know of Twitter from CNN. They also made a point of reinventing the word Teabagger, and not in the perverted way that one might expect; they pandered to the sickening displays of ignorance and pygmy-mindedness that are new America’s Tea Parties — “in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.” Apparently the fact that the original teabaggers earned their name 200 years ago isn’t important when it’s so damn trendy these days to be a bigot and idiot.