And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattles your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses to do hair-check in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their own TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulse in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked like to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with the high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. (147)

But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you’re good-looking or not — e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. (Wallace 148)

Taken from an earlier quote-post for my reading of Infinite Jest.

The Citroën Karin was a concept car from the 1980 Paris Motor Show. If it had an extra-large exhaust, I would have mistaken it for a F-Zero model replica.

Augmented Reality is “live direct or indirect view of a real-world environment whose elements are supplemented with-, or augmented by computer-generated imagery. The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in meaningful context with environmental elements. The term is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time.”

“Square” is a credit card checkout system for the iPhone currently in early alpha stage testing. It’s currently being used at Self Edge NY.

Via Cool Hunting.

How very Gibson-esque of the times. All you’ll need is a cubicle, a wireless connection, and away you go into the ether of cyberspace.

Via Kottke.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the new iPod shuffle. It’s absolutely gorgeous. The only thing is, didn’t we joke around about the iPod shuffle being engineered until it was too small to do anything? I then remembered: the iPod flea.

We’re almost there.

My favorite show on the Internet, Diggnation, got (even) huge(r) on national television last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Check out this Twitter experiment. @bryanbrinkman now has 23,000+ followers.

“According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia,” the lawyer added.

While it’s obvious what is going on with torrent sites all over the Internet, megacorporations have just fallen behind with technology plain and simple. It’s only day three of the trial, and the Pirate Bay’s defense seems bulletproof. If they were to book them on charges, they’ll have to connect them to a direct criminal act of infringement, as the RIAA, MPAA, etc. are trying to do. What never ceases to amaze me is Peter Sunde, one third of the Pirate Bay facilitators, and his piss-in-the-wind attitude in the face of scary conglomerates.

Peter said that after today’s proceedings they all went for some pizza, where they met the whole opposing side. He asked if they could pick up the check. “They refused,” he said.

Via TorrentFreak.

Via Daring Fireball.