BREAKING: www's

breaking: nick denton fires himself, replaces website with bag of tears

Gobbles

emily gould and choire sicha left gawker, jakob lodwick left vimeo.
i'm moving to sf, and your sister and I are on good terms.

murray's new status message - the internet quit. it's moving on to bigger and better things. 5:45 PM

Impossible Is Still Nothing.

So they went ahead and did it. Someone was going to. The phrase that Aleksey Vayner made popular, and was the point of so much ridicule, is now the title of Adidas' new advertising campaign: "Impossible Is Nothing."(Update: "impossible is nothing" has been a slogan of theirs for a while now. I just caught with of the most recent press release and iteration of the campaign. Ta-da) Vayner, if you don't remember, is the enterprising young Yale student who attached a video to his resume when applying to the investment banking firm UBS.

The New York Sun does a thorough job of summarizing it:

"Mr. Vayner identifies himself on his resume as a multi-sport professional athlete, the CEO of two companies, and an investment adviser. The video depicts him lifting a 495-pound weight, serving a tennis ball at 140 miles an hour, and ballroom dancing with a scantily clad female. Finally, Mr. Vayner emerges enrobed in a white karate suit and breaks six bricks in one fell swoop. Between athletic bits, Mr. Vayner takes the opportunity to opine on success. After being described in the opening lines of the video as "a model of personal success and development to everybody," Mr. Vayner says, "Failure cannot be considered an option." He adds: "To achieve success you must first conceive it and believe in it. Remember: impossible is nothing."

But "Impossible is Nothing" as an ad campaign, on the internet, is nothing if not hard to take seriously -- intentional or not. Adidas's effort here is actually kind of heartwarming (regretfully). In the spots, athletes narrate animation which depict their own struggles with adversity -- as athletes (weaknesses becoming strengths, etc.) Its both touching and fitting, especially in the case of Aleksey Vayner. From the official
press release:

“With this campaign we get a glimpse of the athletes not at the finish line, but rather at a pivotal point in their journey,” explained Eric Liedtke, Senior Vice President Global Brand Marketing, Adidas Brand.

Vayner made a pivotal mistake making that video. Instead of an inspiration, he's proved nothing more than a media punching bag. And fun.


[via ]

Technosexualready Been Done

in this awesome video Seth Aylmer interviews the founding technosexualicist, owner and proprietor of technosexual.org who, as it turns out, is quite pissed about the Calvin Klein piece.

Much on the web is recycled and re-featured. This stuff comes and goes in cycles, and thats to be expected when things like permalinks make permanent record of all content on the web. But this trend, as written about in the New York Times is just weird. Essentially, in a ploy to attract the demographic known as "millenials," Calvin Klein is reaching out to the generation defined by technology in a not-so-subtle way. A quick blurb:

“We have envisioned this as the first fragrance for the technosexual generation,” said Mr. Murry, using a term the company made up to describe its intended audience of thumb-texting young people whose romantic lives are defined in part by the casual hookup.

About a year and a half ago Gizmodo was writing about this (which inspired Seth Aylmer to make this video for Current.tv). Others were, and are still writing about it.

What bothers me is that beyond usurping this term and this culture for their own marketing needs, Calvin Klein has gone out and bought the fucking trademark.

Last year, the company went so far as to trademark “technosexual,” anticipating it could become a buzzword for marketing to millennials, the roughly 80 million Americans born from 1982 to 1995.

Now they own a term that has been used, popularized, filmed, forgotten, and now remembered -- in association with a brand. Its both wrong and clever.

[via THE WHOLE INNNERNETS]

Choire Sicha Returns

Word on the street is that King Denton will be welcoming former editor Choire Sicha back to the Gawker empire tomorrow. It wouldn't be the first time he's re-opened the gates to an alum, but it would be the first time for anyone to return after a significant absence. When Denton canned Nick Douglas and then let him back, it was on a columnist basis (or whatever diggbait is). Sicha left as the "editorial director" and returns to do... what?

[update] YM has the dirt, as usual, and points us to another former Gawkerite's New York blurb. Oxfeld says Mohney's weathered hide has been discarded for the less ragged (but sufficiently angsty-er) former editorial director. Quite sad.

A moment of silence please

"..."
[via a mouse]

Surfboard Dwarfed By Denton's Head, Others Frightened

I'm not going to spend alot of time with this one. Firstly, its embarassing that I'm this big of a web troll, and secondly this is just weird. So I'll just lay out my path. Kottke links me to a bit of BuzzFeed press over at Oliver Ryan's CNN Money blog . Having never read this little gem I go ahead and google the authors and find myself to a flickr page and a seemingly defunct domain (among many other things.) I ended up here, at Nick Denton's head and I'm done now. Its weird. Seriously, look at it.

Close yer tag, ahole: an exploration in commenting execution

So this happened. And it was ridiculous. Many other instances of a tag-for-all have happened elsewhere in the gawker media sphere... Lockhart Steel and Kiddler (or whatever his name is) have yet to ameliorate the problem. They're happy as clams to let one tag ( italics, for example) run through the commenting section -- affecting every piece of text after it. And generally, its been a funny and oft ignored phenomenon. So when I was reading Consumerist's little writeup on commentinginvitegate (the one where Maltron got ahold of a couple thousand gawker invites) and noticed the tags had been running wild again, I thought it only pertinent to jump right in...

I mean its an invitation, isn't it? RIGHT!?

So, per my recent runningwildness as prompted by the Deadspin takeover of gawker, I messed around a little bit, teased Popken, and then -- appropriately -- got axed.

I didn't even know it until I saw this:

4. i don't know where else to say this: narnia got executed over at consumerist. he was a motherfucking institution. i bet this was about gawkercommentinvitegate.

Thank you Genevieve Yorke, I didn't think anyone cared.



[UPDATE: http://www.gawker.com/news/gawker/welcome-to-gawkspinderdome-211352.php#c577541]

Charlie Roses - $44 a Dozen

What do you get when a PBS personality affiliates himself with a business mogul's enterprise, but only as a favor to a good personal friend?

Well, first of all...media coverage (and meta media coverage) but then, of course... a response.