MSN Spaces censorship – “Very bad news for fans of Russian literature. The blog title ‘Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov’ is deemed inappropriate, as are any titles I try to create with the 1955 book’s name.”
Maoist video game reviews – “‘Sim City’ has completely bourgeois assumptions, which is why it is not MIM’s favorite economic strategy game. The mayor has the power to set tax rates and this influences the level of development. There is no option to nationalize factories.”
A parent’s primer to computer slang from Microsoft – “Leet words can be expressed in hundreds of ways using different substitutions and combinations, but once one understands that nearly all characters are formed as phonemes and symbols, leetspeek isn’t difficult to translate.”
Holy shit, that’s a big fucker! – “The longest bony fish in the sea, it grows up to nine metres long with a bright red crest that runs the entire length of its body. It is probably the creature that sparked “sea serpent” legends following sightings by ancient mariners.”
Woopsy! – “A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife, state media reported.”
Has anyone tried these before? – “Spudnuts are different than doughnuts. For one thing they’re made from potato flour and for another they just plain taste better. We feel that it is only fair to warn you that spudnuts are habit forming.”
and finally, a great mental image..
“Imagine your elderly and very sheltered aunt trying to grapple with their first AOL account: the first month, every email is sent out in capital letters, because she can’t figure out how to turn it off, and then, after the first few tentative, experimental emails, everyone is being deluged by piles of forwarded inanities: lists of stupid jokes, corny captioned pictures of kittens and puppies, and a sudden an onslaught of virii and malware, after she installs the talking clock that she found on a ‘free cookie recipe’ website.
Now imagine this: this elderly aunt has the arms and legs of a thousand monkeys and belongs to Amway [eh?]. A thousand screaming howling monkeys banging away at typewriters, trying to figure out how to disguise their hidden agenda, in a way that will be confused with reliable, critical commentary. Or, at the very least, get people to check out whatever it is they are trying to shill that day.” – Is this the new spam?
