you could give up all your worldly possessions

interlude -- aka that thing i do when i'm not directly talking about advertising/social media/marketing. instead, this post is dedicated to Blog Action Day, inspired when i read Advergirl's response. really, go read it. because she did it well and i'm not going to head in the same direction.

the theme this year is poverty. Advergirl gives examples of hands-on ways you can change poverty in the world around you. i think that's the point of the action, but i want to talk philosophically instead. i want to talk about the word possession. not its roots, but its context. because i think the root of poverty is our concept of possession. i'm not going to tell you to give up all your worldly possessions. we all need stuff. duh. that's kinda the point of poverty actions. to help people who don't have stuff get stuff. so yes, in essence, i'm pro-stuff.

but the concept of ownership--of possession--of items or of people has been tripping me up lately. i've been thinking a lot about infidelity, no small part in thanks to AV Flox [on the person-level] and on the corporate-level [that's just one link, hat tip to Gavin]. and also about ownership literally. like in the beginning of Fight Club where the narrator's apartment, his whole life basically right down to his treasured Ikea furniture, goes up in flames. and he has nothing.

"it's very easy to take more than nothing" -- Mad Hatter [Lewis Carroll]

if we think of ourselves as owning nothing, then everything we have is its own gift, come to us by way of the world, into our laps, and can go just as swiftly. letting go becomes easy. giving becomes easy. after all, what is it to you, who needs nothing, and can always have more than nothing? why do you not give? what are you saving for? what do you think you own? what do you fear to lose? what do you fear?

you get upset when someone leaves you because you thought you owned some part of them. that they for a moment might become a part of you. and that fear encroaches on many relationships. fear of cheating, fear of abandonment, fear of emotional distance, etc. you get upset when an object breaks, when you lose a stock, when hours are cut. i'm not saying any of those are unrealistic fears. i'm saying, comparatively, you would feel less stressed if you were less concerned with your territory, your ownership.

because right now, if you own up to the fact that you own nothing, you still "have stuff." you've changed your thought patterns but not your life, and that's alright. i'm not saying become a recluse and get out of every relationship because you can't have any true security in it. you don't have to go become a monk, but next time you can give, you might think of it as a little easier. easier to give more than nothing. and more thankful for those moments in which others give to you--a new sweater, an hour spent, a moment of intertwined fingers.

[disclosure: in my ugliest state, i am an intensely territorial creature. i am that jungle predator in my head, i like the idea of ownership and i can be incredibly defensive about it. a poem i wrote in college had the line "i would piss on tree bark just to prove it's not yours"; a paraphrase but still true. things belong to me because they have become a part of me. "you are not your fucking khakis" -- palahniuk. i am working through this. i am learning what it means not to own. i am good at giving. i am trying to be better.]

"quietly" pissing me off, Verizon.

Verizon has done the unthinkable. they've succeeding in pissing me off. mind you, i love(d?) Verizon. a devout Verizon advocate and recommender type. swear by Verizon's service in the NY area.

Dear Verizon,

Verizon, you suck right now. you suck for "quietly shutting down" sms txt confirmation from vzw to vzw customers.

i first noticed this september 18th and no one could tell me why i wasn't getting my little delivery notifications. and i certainly wasn't notified. nor asked--far be it.

don't you THINK that MAYBE if you're going to remove a feature that we're all used to having you MIGHT want to run that BY US?! or TELL me or something. i don't care if it saves you 1KB each way. we paid for that inclusion and now we're paying the same amount but get one less feature.

more over, there are unconfirmed rumours that it's so it can be a paid-for add-on feature. uh. why don't you just allow people who don't give a shit, of which there are quite a few, to opt-out? rather than removing it from those of us who care and are paying for it already?

how much more money is going to be wasted now that i have to ask if someone's received my txt? or do i sit in wait, wondering if i'm being ignored, or if it's a Verizon fuckup, or if their phone is off?

OKAY i know that sounds silly and teenager or something but i swear it's not. it's actually a big deal to a lot of us. especially my gen when half our lives are spent texting and half the benefit of being on Verizon is that all our friends are on Verizon so we know when we're talking to one another.

i heard that so many people complained that they're turning it back on October 1st. can anyone confirm or deny this? i'm trying to find out. i want my check marks back.

UPDATE: my Verizon rep, Cain (Kane?), tells me that delivery messages will NOT be returning October 1st. they WILL be phased out indefinitely in due course; apparently the phase out is 'on pause' right now. there is NO truth to the $1.99/mo rumour. this is what i'm told, anyway. i requested updates and made suggestions.

UPDATE 2 [next day]: 1: Cain/Kane, the service rep, just called me back. that's awesome in and of itself. yay customer service! to tell me that 2: Verizon WILL be giving SMS delivery confirmation messaging back as of tomorrow to the cancelled sectors. so many people complained that they decided 1KB wasn't worth it, i guess.

somethin' about the way garyvee says douchebag

...just makes me feel all aflutter inside.



i found this via @TDefren's new post. in this video, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about passion and patience.

which is funny, considering both have the same Latin root, pati, meaning "to suffer." [HOL reference for you there, kids <3]

which is to say, garyvee [it just rolls so nicely, i have to type it like that] believes that if you don't like what you do--not even a little--STOP. just STOP. and do SOMETHING ELSE. even if that thing is smurfs. me, i don't buy into the monetization of a smurf blog, but hell, i believe him, and his Pinot Grigio Hour. that's where the passion comes in. life is too short to be doing something you hate. yadda yadda motivational speech.

[hey does it sound like that stuff your generation sold my generation and now you want to take it back because we all think we're genuinely entitled to that Pursuit of Happiness? i thought so--but there's a catch.]

yeah, that patience thing, which has to do with that suffering thing i mentioned earlier. "how do i monetize my new Smurf Empire?" you may ask, and he answers: by doing some serious damage between the hours of 7pm and 2am, before you pass out, go to work, take an hour break to "kiss the dog," and do it all over again. so that you still have to go to work. to make the money. to do serious damage. to make your new Empire.

i'm not at all belittling garyvee's view. i think it's powerful, poignant, and necessary. its passion is inspiring and the message is spot-on. but i've also heard it before.

i think that, reading between the lines, it's also a message that requires you to keep that passion when you're up until 2am working on the new Empire, have barely seen family or friends, and still aren't so keen on the job you're spending 8-10 hours of daylight on. the message is to feel like he does on that stage, only every morning. and i think that's the hardest part. not just saying "I Quit!" as Audience Man #1 did, but sticking out the suck for the better ahead.

not the interest, not the late night Empire, and not the years of development.
but keeping the passion, and acquiring the patience, through those times of suffering.

skewering women to save sharks

it's times like these that Riot's feminisms (that's right, plural, people) are at war with one another. [and if you're not sure the difference in the mindset of different 'waves' of feminism, drop me a line--i'd be happy to explain.]

the stunt at hand: Lush, a company i admittedly love [bring me those massage bars!], was raising awareness on behalf of Sea Shepheard about the hacking of shark fins to make soup [among other things].

at first, the ad-Riot says, okay, this is pretty sweet. using a skin pull, also called suspension, to attract attention from passers-by and draw the parallel that animal folks are into: "animals are people too." not dissing that. the performance artist, Alice Newstead, hung for fifteen minutes.

old-school second-wave college feminist Riot rebukes with, what the fuck is that shite? excellent. let's replace mutilated sharks with mutilated women. that's a brilliant statement. because what's better than information? a half-naked woman giving said information. duh! it only propagates objectification of women, and while that's almost forgivable by corporate slime, progressive groups should know better, or at least think harder. [aka: this is the feminist "external view" or appropriation of the gaze]

post/third wave real world feminist Riot retorts with, whatthefuckever, it's performance art. which is to say, Alice was not in pain, consented, views it as art, for a good cause, and it made her happy to do so. not to mention she had the balls to get those piercings in the first place, and probably did her fair share of skin pulls prior. which is to say: it's her own damn choice and don't put your politics on her beyond that which she is stating: stop cutting up sharks. [aka: the feminist "internal view" or, 'what makes a given female happy is inherently feminist for her']

[i always tend to go toward my third wave views, but the college breeding always makes me feel guilty for it... i hear my Womens101 prof in my head as she rants in disbelief over how i felt classic nudes were not always objectifications. ohhh well.]

anyway. cool and controversial. always a plus in the wondrous world of ads. via.

hate hate: keira knightley. & boobs.

alright, i don't hate boobs. but i do hate keira knightley. her poor excuse, stoic, mouth-acting has ruined every single period piece film for the past half a decade (i won't get into star wars or pirates). and the only historic one she didn't corrupt was overrun with her twin natalie portman.

but, as Adrants has pointed out, keira did something maybe kinda halfway decent (arguably for the first time). she declined post-production touch-ups to enhance her breasts for the collateral on the new movie The Duchess. and you know what? i'm more than okay with that. dare i say i wish other actresses would follow suit.

it's nice for someone to make a stand like that and say, my body is good the way it is. kudos to keira for that. the real thing is, though, i wonder how many magazines are going to cover this information, or is it just going to be an afterthought (somewhere after the thought 'did she get a breast reduction?'). i recognize it's all over google and the celeb dish blogs, but i'm talking about the kids.

i would love for a girls' magazine to cover this, interview her, and let her be that role model. i want to see it in Elle Girl, in CosmoGirl, in Seventeen, in YM. disappointing to just have it fall by the wayside, covered by us folks intrigued by advertising and photoshop, and not the folks who should be sending the message.

how yahoo got on my shitlist.

of all emails, i have been with yahoo the longest.
i still have (i believe) my original 8th grade yahoo account.
if it's not the first, it's the second. at absolute worst.
back when email and AIM were the only social modes of communication.

and i haven't left it yet, if only because i enjoy those random Facebook-esque moments when people look into their address books and rediscover that email. it's easier than updating everyone to my gmail, and besides, i use my yahoo and gmail accounts differently. partly because of the huge influx of spam i get to my yahoo account. i mean on a given day i get upwards of 50 spam messages. that's with spam blocker enabled, and with my specifying "which messages are spam."

i understand the email's been "out there" for years.
i understand you're "doing what you can" to help with spam.
hell, i even get that with all your money, maybe you can't make your spam filters better. i even accept that some people want what i'd consider spam and so filters may not be the best answer.

but the heart of why they're on my shitlist is you can only block a grand total of 500 emails of spam. i'm getting really, really close to that number. to boot, it's really difficult to weed through blocked emails in case i want to unblock someone. if i have 400+ emails blocked and i accidentally blocked an Amazon email, i literally can't find the time to locate and unblock that email address. there is no search function. just one long scrolling list.

regardless. my real question is.
WHY ARE YOU LIMITING THE NUMBER OF EMAIL SENDERS I VIEW AS SPAM TO MY INBOX?
...isn't that MY choice? and after 7+ years, don't you think my numbers might be a bit high? way to penalize your long time users. and make us run screaming from our inbox in a tragically let-down manner. toward your competitors. hell. at least gmail's spamblocker does its job. (we'll see how long that lasts. only had that one for 2-3 years.)

twitter's fourth (brick) wall

i am not the first to discuss this, nor one of the best, either. but despite downtime, it's becoming quite apparent to me that the gods of twitter are displeased and are turning a deaf ear. and no, i don't just mean about the downtime.

am&a (@reverieapparel) and i were discussing ups and downs of twitter, functionally speaking. among the fact that easy to implement things would make twitter more useful (having a 'new messages' count for DMs apart from the lump sum, ie "1 // 12"; being able to select multiple DMs to delete rather than one at a time; the ability to search for a follower's name in the DM dropdown; all of these and more would be great)--we discovered there's no real way to get in touch with twitter.

continually people want to share (duh) and give feedback (hullo for free!) to make the service a better one for its users. and yet, there's no "feedback" button that gets you in touch with the company--at least not one that i've found or has been referred to me. apart from a lagging twitter account for updates and a blog in which they don't comment back, there's not much to close the loop.

the big question, o twitter which connects us, is: why?

why aren't you listening and getting involved? why aren't you utilizing your own work in the ways that other companies are? use twitter to get in touch with those on twitter. we're there. (a lot.)

on these websites everyone keeps talking about

case in point.

i mean, alright. some of us are forgetting functionality a wee bit.

HRP: kudos on the red smoke. it's visually engaging. i like red and grey together, even if it looks like 80 or so images on iStock. but overall, i'm going to go with a no. it is cool that, if i had a webcam, i could navigate your site with my finger (or something). but i don't. and, moreover, it takes for-ever-er to load. i'm already not interested. it's hard to navigate and hard to understand. HRP? sacrifice some art. especially when it's a wee bit s t o c k y.

R/GA and Grey are still stuck somewhere in the span of last year. come on, it's a spring update. how come Grey looks like the bastard lovechild of a smaller, lesser agency and a Gravitron? at least R/GA is visually pleasing in that flashy, fade-in fade-out javascript sort of way. i just feel like it's nothing i haven't seen before. not bad, but not buzzworthy.

Barbarian is interesting insofar as it's different. it holds with content is king, and, as a blogger, i like that. unfortunately, it also reminds me of--well--a blog. and while that's well and good, i also want it to remind me of an advertising agency, which, it currently does not. i'm not saying it needs more images, but i am saying it needs more style. less newspaper, more colour differentiation, perhaps.

and then, of course, there's Modernista. chances are you've seen it already, but if you haven't, be warned: it will appear on top of this page. the reds and pinks will clash. it will be an eye sore. consider yourself warned. that being said. i initially like this. it's new, it's funky, it's integrated, it's sexy. i'm for it. except for the first time, the links didn't work in my browser, so i was left confused. and then, if you scroll down too fast, the M! site hiccups all over the page. 3.5 stars and my fave of the group.

but you know what other site i really like? Zeus Jones. also funky, integrated, and sexy--but in a different way. the word that jumps to mind is "flatter," but that's not necessarily a bad thing in this site's case, i'd argue. and, kind of like the twitpitch, it speaks for itself. i'm for it. click away.