This morning was epic. Pristine skies. So much sin I thought we woke up somewhere other than Seattle. I get into the office and go to fire up my trusty 17″ MacBook Pro from early 2008 who’s seen it all.

Nothing.

After 20 min of trying this and that I decide to head home to work on Spun’s. Unfortunately, my PSDs are gone and the ones I do have don’t play very nicely with Photoshop CS3.

Fast forward 6+ hours and the deadline I had, comes and goes. An hour and a half more go by making Franken-mocks essentially stealing pieces from prior comps, splicing them together as best I can.

What a clusterf*ck.

Tomorrow, my calm little Saturday will be spent diagnosing the problem and perhaps plopping in a solid state drive, as I think that’s the failure point.

Time to celebrate a friend’s birthday and the end of a terrible work day.

The day itself may still en up being pretty awesome. Only time will tell.

Sad. This was a bottle I was really looking forward to. Too bad it reeked of mildew and vinegar.

Media evolves. This is fact. Often, there is one company who draws a line in the sand and forces America to shake off the old and embrace the new. This is not easy and many more companies fail at this than those who succeed. I will concede this one point to Hastings from his open post to members. AOL, Real, Classmates, Starbucks Hear Music (personally a sad one for me), IBM, Amway (oh wait, they’re Quixtar now … even worse than Netflix’s Quickster name ), dare I say GM, and yes hundreds of other businesses have fallen on their faces because they chose to (in the spirit of making movie references) hold the line one moment longer than Mel Gibson would have in Braveheart or jumped too early. Hell, even the mothership took a detour for a stint before getting Steve Jobs back on board to point them in the right direction. They could be going off to … ahem … a galaxy far far away for all we know with his recent decision to step down. But I digress, this is about Netflix, not the primordial soup of mutated, deceased, thriving or soon to be consumed companies around them.

Netflix, you’ve had something that very few companies have and all companies dream of … a loyal following who love being your marketing arm. I’d even go so far as to say they’re evangelists for your cause. We love movies. We love convenience. We loved Netflix.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty for a quick second here, shall we? This more or less shakes down to a few things: evolution of media, arrogance, poor communication, and entitlement. Like I said before, media evolves. When I was at Starbucks we fought to create a CD burning kiosk that was on the downward slope of the CD industry. It was great technology, worked seamlessly, etc, but iTunes Music Store killed the business model. The Concorde met the same fate due to video chat, email, higher gas prices and a more connected world. Technology dies so that new technology can live. [ can you hear Elton John's Circle of Life now? ] There is a natural order to this, one that requires the public to be generally ok with having things change. When change is imposed and the waters are overly disturbed … bad things happen. Nothing is clearer than seeing more than twenty three thousand comments to a post about this imposed change. Which brings us to arrogance. You have a business model that has some secret sauce the layperson isn’t privy to. Fine, that’s why we all don’t have our own Netflix companies. We can’t always know what you have up your sleeve (clearly), but we have grown accustomed to a standard display of reciprocal trust. We pay you for movies we love. You provide a service for said movies … be it physical media or streaming. This has gone really well for some time now. You grossly underestimated the public’s temperature when it came to digital vs physical media. This saddens me for a number of reasons; the largest being that we loved you and you didn’t listen. Girly, I know, but hey, I’m that dude in that role for this instance. A ton of us were ok with the price hike, not all, but we backed you up. We’re getting more now than we were before and we rationalized paying for it. But this? This shows you really don’t know your customers at all … and furthermore, that we don’t really know you Netflix. [ insert scene in movie where the jilted lover sends a friend to go get their DVDs back from his ex's house ] I’m ok with shelling out a few extra bucks for a service that works seamlessly across the board. As far as the frustration of having two accounts, or two payments, or two queues, or any of that crap … I’m going to let Bryan Thompson say it, because he said it best:

This is great news! My dentist just did the same thing. It’s so much better. Now when I have cavities on my top row of teeth I go to one dentist, and when I have cavities on the bottom row, I go to the other dentist across town. Sure it’s frustrating that sometimes they can’t access my dental records that used to all be in one place, and yes I admit that it seems strange that they now charge me almost twice as much for the exact same dental care I received six months ago…but they are innovators! Besides, what choice do I have? They’re the only two dentists around. Well done Netflix! If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Simply hike the price, alienate your customer base and complicate your user interface under the guise of “progress”. Kudos.

Your arrogance shows a one sided approach and poor business understanding. Your customers make your business. Now when they see a red envelope, they see red. We will not just perpetually take your antics with a spoonful of sugar to help this “medicine” go down. However, moving on to entitlement, we really don’t have any say as to what you want to do with your business. This is the hardest part and likely where my metaphors will start getting really mixed up. [ queue sappy music where the guy realizes that she needs to be free, remixed with a soundtrack for a baby walking for the first time and that scene where Scar kills Mufasa in the wildebeest stampede ] You need to sow your seeds apparently. You’re young and naïve. You’re going to fall on your face. I am your father… [ man the wheels are falling off ... wrap it up, wrap it up ] We feel entitled to this service, but we aren’t. We just pay for it. It’s a give/take relationship and you can choose to exit it on your own accord. Which it seems like, for some reason or another, you’re choosing to do. We’ll be pissed. We’ll eat chocolate cake and cry a tear or two as we sit in front of our VHS player we found in the garage or Hulu Plus. But we’ll always remember the good times where we all got along.

We await your next move Netflix. Like a magician, had better be a good prestige or I fear you’ll watch your theatre clear faster than if someone yelled “fire.” Don’t screw this next step up Netflix. [ queue Inception massive horn sound or crickets ... it can be your movie too ]

Gotta love people who think they don’t need to heed the stop line. This one took place on the tracks of Wall and Alaskan way this afternoon just before returning to the office from giving blood. Who knows, maybe my O+ will be needed for the next time someone pulls these sorts of antics. No one was injured from what I could tell. Oh and in more awesome news, I’ve given two gallons of blood and now have a pin to prove it. While the standard bathroom faucet can pour out two gallons in a minute, mine took me over a decade. I guess I’m not the guy that will bleed out quickly when we’re taken over by zombies … especially if they make me wait 8 weeks to donate to their cause every time like the vampires in town request. Other fun factoid to end the week, apparently highway patrol units around the country often carry two gallons of Coca-Cola with them to clean up blood off the highway. A myth confirmed by Jamie and Adam in Season one of The Mythbusters.

I should go get more fluids in me before I keep rambling.

Not entirely sure if Paper Hammer really, truly meant to use the Eiffel tower in lieu of the Space Needle as well as the Golden Gate Bridge instead of the actual Ballard Bridge, but it has been noticed. They do make mention of it on their blog as “Double Take” (which has one of the funkiest URLs I’ve seen in ages. If you wanted to be spotted, well done. Not sure if it’s the juxtaposition that you were hoping for, but I’d love to know. Spun and I have wanted to venture in for some time now, this may be the time to start making paper trails.

Which brings us to our final post of the week about DESTROY’s wheat paste paper graffiti. I was going to get the toaster at the end of the post, but stumbled upon the nuclear power plant that had been tagged. Seemed somewhat fitting to have the largest DESTROY text block pitted against one of the biggest power struggles of modern times. If one didn’t know any better I’d say they’d likely think that it was a politically charged piece promoting the destruction of these plants that have caused so much good and so much peril around the world. I’ll leave it up to you to infer your thoughts.

Yup, I’m talking to you girls who have decided to mix it up with some bonus boot height to keep your knees warm and snuggly … or protected when searching for a lost contact lens. Spun and I saw tons of these in Spain. It was awful. We’d hoped that we were smarter or perhaps in this one instance the puritanical US would actually score us a win, but alas, no dice.

For more on why these are awful and when you should wear over the knee boots, I give you a great manswer from Dr Awesome. Enjoy.

First, let’s start with the thing I hate the most: huge tall boots that ascend from the ankle, usually stopping near the knees, sometimes continuing on past the shoulder blades and beyond. I hate these boots with a passion, because they serve no purpose other than to look like something prostitutes wear. Hence, I call them prostiboots. In my mind, there are only 2 reasons to wear big tall boots like that: when you are walking through high water, or when you are walking through an area prone to snake attacks. But most of these prostiboots are neither snake-proof nor water-tight, so they are just big wastes of leather. And I hate being wasteful. So you’ve got on these uneconomical, impractical prostiboots that will help you none when floods and/or water moccasins come to town, and on top of that, apparently you want people to think of you as a woman of the night. I just don’t understand this. Now I’m not saying all women who wear these jacked up knee prostiboots are in fact harlots of iniquity…I know lots of upstanding young ladies of fine character who wear these boots. I just want you all to know that I think these boots are prostibootish, and would prefer that you wore some more normal shoes that were neither wasteful nor inspired by Julia Roberts in Pretty Women.

Eloquently stated sir. With that I give you other prostiboots caught in the wild. Oh and for the record, I spotted 5 on the way in this morning. Only one of which is documented (top photo).

Pike Place Market

Heathrow Terminal 5

UPDATE — 5 unique prostiboots sightings on my walk to the bus tunnel. Most notably was this gem: ruffled, mid thigh. Wow. Offensive on many levels. Really blondie, no loitering in my market. Move it along.

Shortly thereafter, s*** went off the rails. In an otherwise normal search for “happy family” I came across some massive lumps of coal that only through the massive pressure of the omnipresent eyes of the web are now available as diamonds for you to enjoy. This also begins my first pass in an [what I hope will be] ongoing series of massive blunders, photographic horrors and a larger stockpocalypse. Mind you, I only made it through about 1600 photos. There are still another 70k+ to dive into and enjoy … JUST in this set.

Without further adieu … I give you WTF iStock? — Happy Family. If you have other classics that match up with the theme, please bring these to the light of the world for others to revel in and perhaps even draw a single tear from laughter or sorrow for tainting the web just a little bit.

“Young Family”



“Portrait of a happy family standing together” These guys are neither happy … nor a family. They are however a capital-T-trainwreck though



“Active Mother and Daughter” On a side note, I think this probably was moderately well thought out but unfortunately POORLY implemented



“Child in Spring”



“Happy Man and Pregnant Woman” A.K.A. The CREEPER



“Father Holding Baby Daughter, Giving Her a Kiss” *Note that in all of the photos in this series, his hair is in this EXACT ‘windblown’ state



“Pregnant Woman with Her Husband: Sitting” WHY??


And my personal fave definitely for the day, if not for 2011 thus far goes to


“Teeth Brushing” A.K.A Mixed Oral Hygiene Messages. The guy is flossing … but I think everyone knows he’s just saying how he really feels about taking care of his gums.