Segues: Sometimes, The Tech News Gets Weird — That’s Techweird

Each Segues  column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said “King of the Segues”. Actually, it said “King of the Segways” and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.

A variation of this conversation happened in the Techcitment office, real and virtual, today.

Being confused old school

“Check this weird story out.”

“That’s bizarre. That can’t be real. Is that real?”

“It totally is. I’m not sure I’d call it techciting, but it’s certainly interesting.”

“It’s weird. It’s techweird.”

And thus was born the word techweird, a word that can only come to describe tech stories that are interesting more for their strangeness than for their cool factor, breaking news importance, trending technology movement, or any other reason. It applies for when you see tech news that simply makes you do the RCA dog head tilt. For some reason, I’ve discovered an odd amount of this type of news lately. I’m not sure if I’m just on an odd, personal techweird news kick  or if fate has decided I need to see more stories about nudist web coders, Latin American dictators ruling with a digital hand, and anti-pervert vigilantes at San Diego Comic-Con. Either way, I’m here to give you a taste of the bizarre, the abnormal, and the plain “huh?” news I see on a regular basis with these techweird stories.

“Web-Coders — Nude Girls only”
Chris Taylor of Nude House doesn’t believe in the need for subtlety or wearing clothes at work. The proclaimed naturist has placed an ad in Craigslist UK calling specifically for nude female web coders.

From Nude House’s website, the ad reads as:

We need a number of nude female web coders to work on preliminary web pages for customers using the toolkit of facilities we provide them. The work is totally dependant on the customers having a need but you never meet the customers and they will not not know you are nude. We will pay you £1,500 each month for 5 full days per week. You should be a practising nudist.

I need your cv (resume), a photograph and an idea of what experience you already have of nudism and your experience in sales.

You will be totally nude at all times in the Nude-House office. Write to Chris@Nude-House.com

Taylor’s reason for female-only web coders  is easily enough to figure out, but he further reveals himself and his creepy “company policy” through his “process of recruiting staff”. Early into his explanation of what the company does (it sells a software called Move Your Mouse, which “enhances” pictures on a customer’s website by placing “hotspots” on them for pop-ups involving text, more images, and websites), how much he expects his employees to sell, and what sales staff are expected to do before being allowed to enter the Nude House lies this little gem: “I am not looking for exhibitionists, male gays, swingers or voyeurs.” The call out against “male gays” is a bold, if not inappropriate, move on his point, but the stab at trying to claim legitimacy by saying he doesn’t want exhibitionists or voyeurs is laughable when he’s also specifically putting ads out for nude female web coders. Maybe he felt the urge to seek workplace diversity when 20 naked British guys showed for the web coding position during the first run of the ad. However, it seems Taylor has made similarly creepy job ads like this before and has even had others create their own Craigslist ads in response. Watch out, perverts, there are eyes on your prying eyes.

Comic-Con Creeps
The comic book news, gossip, and rumor website Bleeding Cool published a story today about a man going by the tail-on-the-donkey pseudonym of Comic-Con Pervs on Twitter and Tumblr. His mission is clearly enough stated on the Tumblr site.

While at the con, I’m going to be on the lookout for the dudes I see every year, who essentially wait for girls in tight pants or short skirts to come by so they can shove camera phones up their asses and click away. I hopefully will catch the dudes in the act and post their photos here.

Every year, Comic-Con stuffs its booths with what’s called booth babes, women who dress in scantily clad clothes to lure people over to look at whatever’s being sold at that booth. However, there are also plenty of men and women who cosplay in elaborately crafted costumes that take real skill to pull off. The “Comic Con Pervs” don’t tend to care about the meticulous care put into creating these outfits, that some of these girls are just trying to earn a few bucks, or the women were convinced by their significant others to pose in skimpy versions of known (or unknown if she’s promoting a new book) characters. The phone-camera-picture-snapping guys simply want to cherish their ogling memories and do so with a quick shot of a girl’s ass or chest in the hopes that no one catches them forever saving an image of their fictional crush come to lusty life. What’s funny about this news story appearing on Bleeding Cool is that the site says it will  “not so much pull back the curtains of the comic book industry, as give you a series of upskirt shots.” Rich Johnston, Bleeding Cool’s owner and creator, might want to take another crack at the site’s own description.

Digital Dictator
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez isn’t exactly known for allowing others to have power without his say so (on the topic of if he should resign from the post he’s held since 1999, he said, “I am a President held prisoner, that I haven’t resigned and I will not resign.”), and he’s not going to let a little thing like cancer stop that mentality. For the last week, the pint-sized dictator has used Twitter to govern the small Latin American country remotely while he receives cancer treatments in Cuba. He doesn’t mention his chemotherapy treatments — even though he does thank Mexican leader Felipe Calderon for his good wishes during recovery — and instead informs his over 1.8 million Twitter followers of his decision to name a public park after Venezuelan military and political leader Simon Bolivar, the expenditure of $113 million for public housing construction programs, and generally cheering for the Venezuelan soccer team. Chavez is ruling his country 140 characters at a time.

Techweird’s mascot

That’s only a small sampling of the techweird news we see regularly here at Techcitement. The world is full of more news of the abnormal, and a not small portion of it is related to technology. With tech seeping into every part of our lives in a kaleidoscope of expected and unexpected ways, the ways in which we use technology — for good, bad, and the weird — is endless. We wonder here if you’d like to see techweird become Techweird, a regular weekly feature where we report on eyebrow-raising, head-tilting tech oddities. Let us know if you do, and the column will make its first official appearance next week. Weirder things have happened.