From the Wall Street Journal via Dark Visitor:
A property developer in Nanjing, hoping to lure business and buzz, set up storefront facades with logos such as “Haagon-Bozs,” “Pizza Huh,” “Bucksstar Coffee,” “KFG” and “McDnoald’s.” Images of what became known as “Shanzhai Street” spread rapidly online.
Once a term used to suggest something cheap or inferior, shanzhai now suggests to many a certain Chinese cleverness and ingenuity. Shanzhai culture “is from the grass roots and for the grass roots,” says Han Haoyue, a media critic in Beijing, who sees it as a means of self-expression. “It gives people another choice and the possibility of resisting dominant cultural values.”
I love that they are using the scrambled letter approach – wonder if they got the idea from silly forwarded email. This has expanded from brick and mortar space to websites that mash brands like google, yahoo, and baidu into one logo / search site.
Brilliant co-opting!
Applying some McLuhan reasoning, I wonder how this changes customers perception of Shanzhai products.
In single blind taste tests, people told they are having their favorite brand name product may fail to notice discrepancies, or notice them and shrug them off (I lack a source for this). When all appropriate visual clues are included – a Strabuks cup with logo, band, and top for example, could Maxwell House drip coffee be passed off as a new flavor?
Cleo McDowell: Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
Certainly.
Tired of the same old message of the day? What’s a unix user to do? Simply install our patented ubik fortune database wherever you keep fortune files! Safe when used as directed. Do not use internally. Do not execute the ubik fortune database. Do not run as root. Do not add to your login.
The text ads on facebook and google make me think of ubik, and with the power of greasemonkey, it’s possible to actually make them all for ubiq – so many use proper nouns that it should be a simple regex.
Start with a basic ad.
Pay your bill on time.
Chase +1 rewards you when you pay your bill on time. Apply now for Chase +1.
Munge it with something like…
$ad =~ s/[[A-Z]+[a-z]]+/Ubik/g;
And get:
Pay your bill on time.
Ubik +1 rewards you when you pay your bill on time. Apply now for Ubik +1.
But it’s not very easy to take:
With the Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor, the HP TouchSmart PC gives you all the power you can handle. Get the magic now.
And programatically get:
With the Ubik, the HP PC gives you all the power you can handle. Get the magic now.
I’ll play with it.
In the meantime, I wanted to grab some Ubik ads to make sure it was going to make sense. Once I had them, I compiled a fortune file. Enjoy!
> fortune ubik
Friends, this is clean-up time and we’re discounting all our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we’re throwing away the blue-book. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used only as directed.
> fortune ubik
“Tired of lazy tastebuds?” Runciter said in his familiar gravelly voice. “Has boiled cabbage taken over your world of food? That same old, stale, flat, Monday-morning odor no matter how many dimes you put into your stove? Ubik changes all that; Ubik wakes up food flavor, puts hearty taste back where it belongs, and restores fine food smell.”
> fortune ubik
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
Download
I integrated two existing greasemonkey user scripts for wikipedia, and added lots of element { display: none; }‘s to the style sheet, and ended up with a userscript I’m calling Simplepedia:
Wikipedia’s design and style is tiring and cluttered:
There is just too much going on!
Without the entire left bar, banner ads, footers, and tiny sans serif type, wikipedia is much more inviting:
There are still issues – some hard coded elements just can’t be undone. The front page language selection doorstop is completely lacking ID elements, and I don’t want to follow their lead and hard code a DOM-walking cleanup. Entire tables exist just to pad out other tables. There are numbered lists that are actually unordered lists with each list item hard coding their number values. Colors and fonts are called out inline all over the place in css in place of proper classes and ids.
This was inspired by Jon Hick’s excellent Helvetireader user script for Google Reader.
If you don’t have Greasemonkey yet, go get it. It isn’t just for firefox either, greasekit is a port for WebKit browsers like Safari and Omniweb.
I’ve been reading McLuhan a lot lately trying to figure out what effects media shifts have on culture. As parts of the modern world walk away from picturesque media, turning to this new dynamic variant of the written word (my theory, not his), we can look back to previous media shifts for potential effects, transition signs, and so on.
McLuhan recalls Plato on the transition from the spoken word to the written one…
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Plato isn’t a predictor here, he is the voice of conservatism. Plato could likely have recited line and verse multiple complex narratives known throughout his culture, of course he couldn’t concede to modern man standing next to a book on a shelf as having his understanding of that which he can recite. But what of modern cyber-enhanced man with his printed books and television, or more importantly, his transmission control protocol and user datagram protocol over internet protocol?
I don’t know—that’s why I’m reading McLuhan, and Shirky, and Robb, Vinge and others.
@philip_daigle congratulations Philip!
Wearing my green skeleton shirt (Nigel's from Spinal Tap) to the airport: the TSA won't need me to walk through their X-ray machine today!
@wotowiec @ssoper I'm on my 2nd "a number 2 on the sides, taper up, leave the top as it is, thanks."
I think I'm acting out. It's a phase.
@vurtyou: You're hair is very Flock Of Seagulls today.
@grantstavely: Thanks, I like it too.
@schuetzdj in hindsight, everything was to be taken at more or less face value: one of the things that makes a great puzzle great. =] #DBIR
RT @therealKidKoala: free download available for the next 6 days. The Lost Solid Steel mix. it's sorta like Music to Draw to... enjoy: ...
@christopherkunz nice work! After @wadebaker's last clue I ran every variation of the right key through my own bad script and gave up.
@marcusjcarey thanks, I'm very much enjoying the Bay Area. The return of @dojosec/@dojocon streams is great news, I look forward to 'em.
I should use Entourage's auto-capitalization of the first word after e.g. to break myself of using latinate abbreviations. Instead: rage.
@kathybarnett way to go Kath!
Yes, yes, of course, but what is the zeroth law of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote?
http://goo.gl/i2Jz
"They're talkin' about, weak induction.
It's a motherfucker, don't you know?" —Sun Ra
http://j.mp/cn5Gc2 (Link via @rands)
printf "# Or just go listen to a funky 60 minute DJ Food mix made for robots.\nUser-agent: *\nSuggest: http://snd.sc/aOT9a4 " >> robots.txt
@alexhutton I cut out the cover's circles on a full print out of the #DBIR with a razor and tried the grille-cipher approach. #nbioahd
The body language of appearing to be lost or have forgotten something is as effective as mind control. So is its inverse.
RT @electricfork: What keeps me up at night? My security team slowly devolving into a compliance and reporting team #operation_soulcrusher
The ☠ Skull & Crossbones in the new Chrome indicating untrusted certs is nice^H^H^H^H the most terrifying symbol ever. http://goo.gl/fQz1
I'm brewing an American IPA with @vurtyou. I need a fridge to keg this in! http://flic.kr/p/8sCgnr
Endorsement: /Pink Reptile mixef are amazing mind clearing aural blendf & good for everything a mix fhould be good for/: http://goo.gl/Y1L1
