I can clearly remember a subtle wave of disappointment washing over me after I unboxed and booted up my Coleco Adam circa 1987. Where were all the high-tech bleeps that announced each function? Why did blocks of text just show up on the screen all at once when I loaded a file, as opposed to typing themselves out in a stream with an accompanying series of high frequency notes to punctuate each letter?

The wiki of television and film cliches, TV Tropes, has a few entries dedicated to the highly impractical computer UI (User Interface) of screen infamy. Here are some of my favorite key tenets of the ubiquitous Viewer Friendly Readout:

• The UI must have distracting and superfluous widgets, animations, and nonsensical bits of technical-sounding text and random numbers.
• All computers running in a scientific institution display a spinning DNA helix, positioned in a top corner, at all times. Atoms with electrons on fixed paths are a popular alternative.
• All fonts must be huge, and the resolution must be ridiculously low.
• Every operation for the computer brings up a titled progress bar. This bar will be enormous, color-coded, will obscure the entire screen, and will always say something like “Hacking Into Pentagon: 45% Complete.”
• Passwords are never obscured by asterisks as they are typed. Passwords are always simple, non-case-sensitive English words, and never a random combination of numbers and letters.

All of the images I’m using for this entry are of UIs developed by Mark Coleran. He’s responsible for many of the futuristic computer screens utilized by spies/international assassins in films like The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and many others. If you’re a fan of the spy genre, you’ll likely recognize most of the work in his demo reel:

Many Windows users who seek more control over their UI will employ programs like LiteStep and RainMeter to add more visual panache to their experience. Here are some customizers who clearly took cues from the work of visual display artists like Mark Coleran:

If you want to dip into the spy aesthetic without the effort of tricking out your UI, then check out the game, Uplink, by Introversion Software. It allows you to pretend you’re a shady computer hacker, and gives you an instant, cinematic, Coleran-esque user interface to mess around with. Play it conspicuously at Starbucks to attract women seeking an international man of mystery.

Randy Ludacer (BoxVox.net) has been documenting packages that utilize the Droste effect for years – including the recursive effect’s namesake, Droste Cocoa.

He’s been able to find a wealth of examples so far, and I hope that his collection of Droste effect packages continues to grow.

On a related note, I recently played around with LogMeIn, a free service used to remotely control other computers over the internet, and used it to log into the computer that I was currently on to instantly achieve an infinite recursion of computer screens.

I use the term infinite, however, the recursions are anything but. By my count, the image recurs about twenty-one times before running headlong into the limitations of my computer’s graphics processing unit and the resolution of my screen. You can see the point at which the image degenerates into a single colored pixel. I find this “singularity” interesting, because it echoes the limitations faced, not only by our scientific instruments, but also our own central nervous systems, in apprehending the full scope of reality.

A mathematician can prove on paper that the Droste Cocoa image is a nested fractal that recurs infinitely, but at the end of the day, there are the limits of our universe to contend with. Even if the artist handed off the paining to a smaller artist (say, an elf?) to paint the smaller cocoa powder box within the cocoa powder box, and that elf handed it off to an even tinier being, and so on – the artist who is the size of a single molecule would face the limitation of having only a handful of particles with which to work. The final image in the series would simply be a solitary atom.

I think that the degeneration of images also echoes the degeneration of concepts from their archetypal form to the rough sketches that manifest as objects, people, smells, and sounds in our experience. Could this fleeting and hard-to-define concept be part of what keeps people coming back to old-school video games full of heavily pixelated images? The charm and joy of these games certainly does seem to be more than nostalgia, as even younger people who grew up after Atari and Nintendo find themselves fascinated by the blocky avatars and bleeping sine waves of the reductionist worlds of early gaming. Perhaps it all helps to mold some semblance of form to these murky concepts deep within our minds – just beyond the reach of language.

Netscope – when you need an instant dossier on the victim of your next serial murder, accept no substitutes.

It can be pretty much guaranteed that Dexter will never touch a real brand or frequently patronize a real business on-screen. There aren’t many companies that would take kindly to being a psychopathic killer’s “____ of choice”.

Here is Dex’s favorite beer brand, Jekyll Island.

When the physical manifestation of Gozer the Gozerian (aka Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, Gozer the Traveler,  and Lord of the Sebouillia) occurs, it’s a devastating blow to any realm unfortunate enough to be the host for this malevolent deity. Although The Ghostbusters happened to vanquish the extradimensional threat within minutes of its arrival, Stay Puft Marshmallow stock took a massive plunge due to the use of its mascot as the form of The Destructor.

It’s been more than twenty-five years since the incident that transformed Manhattan into a giant s’more, and Omni Consumer Products Corporation has decided that Stay Puft is ready for a return to the market.

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a preview box before the release date, and I must say – the box itself is worth the price. It’s very high-quality, and makes a great collectible item for any Ghostbusters fan. Inside the sturdy cardboard package are the world’s first ever caffeinated marshmallows – perfect for toasting over an early-evening flame at Camp Wakonda.  When I asked the creator, Pete Hottelet, where he got the idea to add caffeine, he gave me a thousand-yard stare and mumbled, “It just… popped in there…”

Stay Puft Caffeinated Marshmallows are available now at Think Geek. That ought to hold you over for a while as you wait for Ghostbusters III to hit the theaters in 2012.

And remember:  When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say “YES!”

There’s a category of spoof film that attempts to skewer every cliché of a given genre within the span of about ninety minutes. I don’t feel like I’m going out on too much of a limb by making a blanket statement that they are all horrifically bad and unfunny. You’ve seen the unappealing adverts for these juvenile scatfests many times, and they all have wildly inventive names like Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, etc.

In my correct opinion, only one of these has been done well, and that was Airplane! in 1980 – a send-up of several disaster films from the previous decade.

The above clip makes a nice, racist segue to the real topic of this post, which is a genre spoof film that was made in 1996 called Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. The Wayans Brothers stitched this one together from the 90’s “hood” genre that included Boyz in da Hood, Menace II Society, Jungle Fever, Juice, Higher Learning, Poetic Justice, and South Central.

The movie is stuffed to the gills with cringeworthy stereotypes that can either be interpreted as a provocation of liberal white guilt, or raging self-hatred. It may be unfair of me to only offer two possible interpretations of the film’s humor, but this is my blog, and I can get all binary on y’all bitches if I want to, heard? Also, I’m trying to get to the images quickly so I don’t lose yo simple ass.

One way to maximize the amount of gags in Don’t Be a Menace was to create a ton of fictional brands which functioned as mini-jokes. For example, everyone in da Hood drinks St. Dies, a spoof on the St. Ides Malt Liquor brand which was heavily marketed to the black community in the 80’s and 90’s.

Then there are the fun breakfast cereal brands, Weedies and Tricks.

Also, we have some new additions to the fictional video games gallery: Gang Fighter (the Hood version of Street Fighter) and Rodney’s Ride – a cabinet game in the police station in which players score points by viciously beating a black man with their digital police clubs.

There are also a couple of fictional movies, like Black to the Hood and RoboPimp 3. Note the bonus Cult 45 poster in the background (a not-so-clever take on Colt 45). Wasn’t that one done before?

But the one that was actually a bit heartbreaking was da Hood’s convenience store – Forties and Nines. A bit close to home for those who grew up in low-income/high crime parts of town, and can clearly remember seeing liquor stores and gun shops within yards of each other.

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
- Oscar Wilde (author, aesthete)

“The map is not the territory”
- Alfred Korzybski (philosopher, founder of the science of general semantics)

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)”
- René Magritte (painter of The Treachery of Images – pictured above)

Somewhere in the ethereal nebula of words that are yet to be born is the term that fits into the center of this Venn diagram:

And that term is what I would use to describe the Human Facebook Default Avatar photo project:

Painting a real person in order to make them resemble the symbol for a person. It’s plastic surgery drawn out to its ultimate conclusion.

This project may be implying that one’s two-dimensional social networking persona and their real-life personality are about as similar as a map is to the territory it represents.   That would lead to the question – how many of your online “friends” are people, and how many are simply representations of people?  And to take it a step further – do our Facebook profiles lead us to become two-dimensional caricatures of our multi-faceted three-dimensional selves?

I’ve showcased demakes and retrofictionalized video game mockups here several times (1, 2, 3 times, to be exact). A close cousin of these phenomena is the the Vintage Ad for New Products gag – which, when done well, is a tremendous amount of fun.

Here is a recent set by Moma Propaganda, a Brazilian ad agency.  Thanks to the Murketing Tumblr for the find:

There are also a ton of these over at Worth 1000:

The license plate 2GAT123 is the equivalent of phone numbers that begin with 555. It’s a reserved number that many states set aside for exclusive use in film and television production.

You can spot the license plate in these films:

• Traffic
• L.A. Story
• Go
• Mulholland Drive
• Role Models
• Beverly Hills Cop II
• K-94
• Eve of Destruction
• Pay It Forward
• The Perfect Nanny
• The Animal
• Crazy/Beautiful
• Training Day
• National Security
• S.W.A.T.
• Harsh Times
• Be Cool
• Waist Deep

And in these TV shows:

• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Justified
• Lost
• The X-Files
• Modern Family
• Beverly Hills 90210
• Charmed
• Chuck
• Dark Blue
• John from Cincinnati
• Life
• The Mentalist
• She Spies
• Sleeper Cell
• Two and a Half Men

Another place you can spot this license plate is on the back of my Dodge Neon. That’s right. I checked, and the number was totally available in Florida.  Naturally, I leapt on the chance to stake my claim as the alpha nerd of the Sunshine State.

“Pics or it didn’t happen”, you say? Well, feast your gooey little orbs on this:

With thirty-five billion dollars of funds at its disposal, the Hatherton Group brings together a family of companies devoted to defense and security. Hatherton is proud to stand at the forefront of the struggle against terror.

There are several conspicuous product placements in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer…

… however, once you portray a real company – in this case Halliburton – as implicit in war crimes and murder, you have to change a few letters in the middle of the name in order to cover your own ass. Legally speaking, of course.

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The Parallax View (1974), is part of the “Conspiracy Trilogy” of director Alan J. Pakula, who also directed Klute and All the President’s Men. While the film received mixed reviews, the above video montage is a classic piece of paranoid film history.

A great essay was written by Robert C. Cumbow for Movietone News shortly after the film’s release. It’s entitled 13 Ways of Looking at the Parallax View, which is pretty clever, as the definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer. The term is derived from the Greek parallaxis, meaning ‘alteration’. From the essay:

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of The Parallax View emerges only upon retrospective reflection: we as viewers never see the Parallax Corporation as a threat to ourselves or even to our national security. We see it only as it defines itself: a large, faceless, anonymous corporation. This image, together with the big-business architecture, is Pakula’s metaphor for the threat of the dehumanizing corporate entity in American life, which may well be destroying freedom—personal as well as political. The degree to which that process may already have set in is left to us to measure, and we are given the means to do it through glimpses of a written Parallax entrance exam and the entirety of a visual response-test, both immediate enough to have the viewer gauging his own reactions and wondering if he is potential assassin material.

There’s a real Parallax Corporation that I neglected to mention in my earlier entry When Good Companies Choose Evil Names. They’re apparently a provider of call center software. The founder of Parallax, Mark Kelly, is now retired, and couldn’t be reached for comment. But a corporate representative I spoke with assured me that Kelly was definitely not influenced by the film when choosing the name for his company. He also assured me that the company was in no way affiliated with the recruitment of political assassins, and that I would be well advised to steer clear of that line of questioning for the remainder of my life.

Needless to say, I’ll be checking under my car for the next year before putting a key in the ignition.

Also, Parallax Coporation is the name of a neo-electro music group with a couple of kickin’ jams. Listen to (Searching for a) Cybernetic Lover from their album Cocadisco: