Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Miley Cyrus

Having seen the Miley Cyrus video, I would like to explain why I found it offensive.

She was dancing like she was drunk. Her "thrusts" were ragged and all over the place. That's fine and dandy for a party at a friend's house, but if you're going to bump and grind on TV, rehearse the act a bit first for crying out loud. The lolling tongue made her look like the image of the badly stuffed lion that surfaces every now and then. It wasn't playful, goofy, sexy or seductive. It was just awkward.




The overall performance made her look like a delinquent 11 year old trying to parody a mentally challenged stripper. Given how Hollywood mucks up the physiological development of child stars, this may be closer to reality than any of us would prefer.

If I were in a position to advise Miley Cyrus, I'd say this, "Honey, PLEASE, do the vamp thing with a bit more commitment. Lil Kim , Madonna and Lady GaGa are good examples. Even though you borrowed Gwen Stefani's hair, I think she may have gone more "sultry" than is appropriate for your new act.

But please, when you go on stage to amp up the sex appeal, have some self respect while doing it. Put some art into the craft. Don't phone in a teenage booty bounce and call it a day.

To Thicke and his song "Blurred Lines," please, no more musical love letters to date rape, OK? Partnering with Cyrus was a wise move on your part, because her dancing distracted people from the rape endorsing nature of your song, but while her act just needs some rehearsal and polish, yours needs to be drug out into the street and shot.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Rotolight Utter Shite

I have no personal experience with Rotolight's products, but their recent behavior has convinced me, and this is just my opinion, that the company is run by feckless fools suffering from terminal cranial-rectal inversion. Popehat covers the details in the article Rotolight Tries To Unring The Censorious Bell. In short, Rotolight filed a fraudulent DMCA complaint, falsely asserting copyright over content that wasn't theirs, in order to silence an obscure negative review of one of their products. By filing a DMCA compliant that asserted copyright they did not have, they committed perjury to illegally silence a critic. They have gone on to compound their error with an evasive non-apoplogy that is little more than a steaming pile of marketing with a side of blame deflection.


The great tragedy of the exchange is that Rotolight turned what could have become a customer service success story into a PR disaster. The rank incompetence of how Rotolight handled this incident is breathtaking. A competitor engaging in industrial sabotage would have been hard pressed to do a better job of destroying their reputation than Rotolight has done themselves.

The key issue is that the flaw being discussed in the negative review was one that Rotolight CLAIMS to have corrected in future versions of the product. They cared enough about the negative review to commit perjury to silence it. Why didn't they care enough to, for example, exchange the older, flawed product for an upgraded one, so the reviewer could repeat the test with the new kit? They could have used the negative review, even engaged with the reviewer, to turn this into a marketing opportunity to highlight advances in their hardware.

Unless, of course, the claim that newer versions of the hardware lack this flaw is another lie. They showed they're willing to lie on a legal document, a DMCA complaint, to commit perjury. Why should their marketing claims be trusted about the flaws allegedly corrected in their products? We know they used legal thuggery to censor one bad review. How many other bad reviews were scuttled by the abuse of the legal system? For all we know half the people who've used the products could consider them utter shite, and we don't know about it because of an active, and abusive, legal strategy by censorship happy scumbags.

This also brings into doubt the positive reviews that can be found online. A company that lies to silence their critics is, in general, not going to be above lying to make their products look better than they really are.

Unless you already have personal experience with Rotolight and like their products, it would be wise to avoid them in the future. There's no way of knowing how good their products really are. Just don't talk about what you think of their hardware. Thanks to Rotolight, your sincerity and objectivity will be in question if you say anything nice about their products.
Rotolight
Cinegear