Posts tagged “nsfw”

David’s War Story: The Well-lit Redhead

David Bacon is a UX Designer at Telstra Health in Melbourne, Australia. He shared this story at the UX Melbourne Book Club (see video of the group discussion here).

Standing in front of a house in a quiet suburban street, my phone buzzed and a text from my note-taking partner popped up: “Sorry can’t make interview, something urgent has come up.” We had spent the past week researching allied health professionals who worked from home. This was the fifth or sixth interview, I doubted my colleague would be missing much. I knocked on the door. It opened and a burly man with a soft gaze greeted me in a thick German accent, “Hello, I’m Herman”.

Herman the German invited me inside and led me into his home office. Against the wall was a treatment table. Adjacent to that was a desk with a large computer monitor and in the middle of the room were two comfortable office chairs. Herman gestured for me to sit down and small talk commenced.

Herman had just returned from a visit to Germany and for the first time in nearly forty years he had visited his childhood home. Positive muttering and a small nod of my head was enough encouragement for Herman to spin his chair around and bring up holiday photos on the large monitor behind him. As he gave me a personal tour of castles, forests, and medieval villages, I started to become anxious. I didn’t have a lot of time and there was a lot of ground to cover. Yet Herman was so obviously pleased to be sharing these personal stories, I feared that interrupting the holiday slide show might sour his mood.

I asked Herman if he had studied in Germany before coming to Australia and with that, he turned his back on the computer and faced me. As Herman talked a screen saver flickered to life on the monitor behind him. Photos of forests and castles that would not have been out of place in a fairytale drifted by. Herman proved to be an insightful and honest interview subject.

After a few minutes of Q&A, the photos of natural beauties gave way to photos of natural beauties of another kind. A lovely brunette wearing just a smile drifted across the screen behind an oblivious Herman, who sat with his back to the screen. The images were like classic seventies centrefold pictures: soft focus, demure poses and wave perms. They were the kind of pictures a nosey younger brother would find hidden in his older brother’s bedroom.

As Herman spoke, brunette after brunette drifted behind him. My mind started to race, there was nothing in any how-to-interview-users blogs or books to prepare me for this. “Hey look, a redhead!” I thought to myself, losing some of my concentration.

I wanted to hit pause but I also wanted to keep the interview going, Herman was a great interview subject. To bring attention to this would cause immense embarrassment to this gentle man. What if he turned around? I didn’t know how much longer I could keep my focus. I have a terrible poker face.

“Hmm, that redhead is particularly well lit.”

When at last the castles reappeared on the monitor, my brain relaxed slightly. I asked Herman to show me an example of how he organised his notes on his computer. He spun around and showed me. I can’t remember much of what happened in the remainder of the interview. As Herman walked me out, I handed him his incentive and he invited me to come back anytime.

I walked to my car and collapsed into the seat. I had just survived a potentially awkward situation and importantly, I had not negatively impacted Herman. The relief was extraordinary. But there was this nagging thought. Had I really done the right thing? What if the well-lit redhead popped up when he is treating one of his clients? Should I have mentioned something? When is it okay to intervene? I don’t know if there is a right answer but as a person far wiser than me recently told me, asking these types of questions is what’s important, not finding the answer.

ChittahChattah Quickies

Kenny Powers Takes Over K-Swiss [Fox 9] – A hilariously audacious video, by shoe-purveyor K-Swiss, depicting a fictional reality where their company is now run by Kenny Powers, comedic douchebag athlete from HBO’s “Eastbound and Down.” In brainstorming sessions we encourage our participants to come up with bad ideas as a way to feed the creative flow. Here K-Swiss reveals all their bad ideas – more bad ideas than you thought possible, not through a leak of a secret company PowerPoint but in a deliberate marketing campaign. This is some ballsy corporate culture. I don’t care what kind of edgy ad agency put this together, a lot of people at K-Swiss signed off on it and they’ve got to have enormous confidence to be able to toy with the image of the company so aggressively. I don’t know a lot about any K-Swiss precursors (so let me know in the comments!) but I’m suitably impressed with this. It’s very funny, very NSFW, very confident, and actually seems very authentic (i.e., the pitch is pretty low-key and doesn’t get in the way of the funny). It begs the question for all of us, “How willing would you be to pretend to poop all over your brand, in service of your brand?”

Kenny Powers - K-Swiss CEO video (Uncensored)

This Year’s Virtual Model

Not new, but new to me: Lands’ End Virtual Model, allowing people to shop online for clothes and see what the clothes would look like on a person. The idea is that the person is you, the shopper, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between projection onto a mannequin (digital, even) and projection into a mirror. The person in the mirror is us. It doesn’t approximate us, it looks exactly like us and it naturally moves in response to our every movement. The virtual model is clumsy in comparison.

I think the whole notion of seeing the clothes in context is (including in combination) is brilliant, but I think the conceit (and it really is just that) of presenting this us a projection of us is completely wrong. Looking in the mirror is the gold standard and this breaks that badly. There’s a lot of customization (just like an avatar builder) of height, weight, body type, skin tone, hair style, etc.

So I started with
model1

Umm, hello, body image norms?

and eventually customized him/me/it to end up with
model2

Umm, is it weird to post this? It’s virtual, but the concept suggests this approximates what I look like in my underpants. I can tell you not to worry, it really doesn’t, but the idea seems a bit transgressive, because of the level of accuracy we expect from representations. A photograph isn’t me, but carries a certain truth. Also don’t worry, no actual underpants pictures of me are coming up in this post either.

As for the virtual me, I think we’ll feel better if he/me has some clothes on!

model3

Frankly, I think this Simpsons avatar is more true version of me, even though it abandons reality, it also offers a kernel of truth and overall feels more accurate.
simpsons

Update: maybe the avatar isn’t meant to be a model, but instead an effective salesperson?

Neologism du jour: Google pr0nrank

I may not be the first to air this idea, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Google pr0nrank refers to the number of Google Image Search pages it takes to reach a NSFW/dirty/titillating image for a given search term.

winston churchill is 48; an image of a bodily organ near a face appears on the 48th page of results.

aficionado is 1. The first row of results contain suggestive bikini ladies.

In neither case, of course, was I expecting to find such images.

A range of uses for Skype


You may want to click that image to see it larger. It’s a list of adult-themed chats available on Skype. I’m sort of surprised I never heard this mentioned before. Of course it’s being used for that, upon reflection. I’m sure I could find something about it in Google, but I sort of got curious today and was rewarded with a rather funny list of Skype usernames.

Meadow pr0n (NSFW)

This post is Not Safe For Work (or children). Please move on!

Just the other day we went for a walk with the dog in the flower fields near our house. I was fairly startled to see bits and pieces of an adult mag (i.e., nudie) strewn semi-artistically through the area.

Click on any of the pics to see ’em larger in flickr – you can even select All Sizes in flickr to see the picture in somewhat more full resolution. See these images on flickr here.

blair.jpg
This had a Blair Witch aspect to it. A sculpture-like thing.

closeup.jpg
Close-up view of the pr0n-eating tree

grass.jpg
Topless in the grass.

puncture.jpg
Punctures in this page suggest that it at one time had resided in some branches, but now lay sadly inverted in the leaves.

bud.jpg
Budweiser? Perhaps this is a clue!
impaled.jpg
Impaled…on a branch.

nature.jpg
It’s nature’s way.

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