Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker If I give you some money, would you take your clothes off? Now that's what I call premium service. This is just my personal fantasy, of course. I wouldn't really stop passers-by and ask them to remove their apparel. Not since the restraining order, anyway. As I wander along my local high street, advertisements glare at me …
Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.
The last time I went shopping for new clothes, I spent some time carefully searching the racks of T-shirts for something with an interesting design but where the company's logo wasn't prominently displayed. It's harder than you might think to actually find such a thing. At one shop which shall remain nameless because it's nobody's business but mine that I shop there(0), I eventually bought one that still had the logo, but the logo is *below* my belt-line, and therefore not visible(1).
(0) Why do you think I'm spending so much effort to not have a visible logo?
(1) I'm not one of these scruffy youfs who think It's OK to go around with their T-shirt hanging out of their trousers. Now get off my lawn!
This is exactly what I do. They are all black "fruits of the loom" T-shits from ebay. I even went as far as to cut out the inside label on one, but then kept putting it on the wrong way round, so decided the tolerate the internal labels.
BTW - I also buy 25 identical pairs of socks at a time. So much easier to pair them up after washing day, and I never have more than one odd sock hanging around.
It's the sock grinding mechanism in the dryer that takes them. I contend that accurate machine vision systems have secretly existed since at least the 80's. How else does the dryer know to eat one of each pairs of socks?
I though I would outsmart the dryer by doing what 'Persona' above mentioned and buy all the same socks. But alas the dryer still has an apatite for socks.
Where do you think all of that lint in the filter comes from? There's no way all of that is just coming off of your cloths, right?
Gildan tees for me. Nice fit and they are often used for tour t-shirts so they can't be too bad. I do have to park my conscience down the road whilst ordering them, given where they're probably made. When it comes to socks and pants then I push the boat out for 'performance wear., but the labels are hidden from view
They want the brand name displayed to show they have arrived and/or are a member of a group....Not buying a shirt, buying status. "Conspicuous Consumption" is the name of the behavior.
I think that's two separate behaviours. Buying for group identity (eg a music group, campaign, political et al) has a degree of logic, even if you and I don't do that. That's not conspicuous consumption.
Buying to show a commercial brand identity, now that's conspicuous consumption for those who want the brand name and are paying top price. I've got a few tee shirts with the maker's name on them - but as others mention, it can be difficult to buy a good quality plain tee shirt - and TBH, plain colours accentuate whatever's underneath, so unless you REALLY don't care, or you have the body of a god, there's some advantage in a pattern, any pattern.
Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.
Took me AGES to find a baseball cap without a logo. I don't want to *pay* to advertise someone's product, and I don't give a crap about sports of ANY variety, so that's right out too. You want to GIVE me a cap with your logo tastefully and discretely placed on it? It still depends on the product, but if you'll give it to me FREE, then I'll take it (could use one I don't mind getting scuffed up and soiled).
Did someone mention Tommy Hilfifif(n)gerer?
Have some William Gibson:
She's gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten sick.
Should have known better.
How she responds to labels.
Down into menswear, unrealistically hoping that if anyone might have a Buzz Rickson's it would be Harvey Nichols, their ornate Victorian pile rising like a coral reef opposite Knightsbridge station. Somewhere on the ground floor, in cosmetics, they even have Helena Stonestreet's cucumber mask, Bernard having explained to her how he'd demonstrated his considerable powers of suasion on the HN buyers.
But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing.
Less warning aura than usual. Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball.
When it happens to Cayce, it's her psyche.
Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she'd thought she was safe now. They'd said he'd peaked, in New York. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would have been drawn. It's something to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it's pure reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil.
A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head.
My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph
Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready−to−wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hil−figer event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn't know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.
She needs out of this logo−maze, desperately. But the escalator to the street exit will dump her back into Knightsbridge, seeming somehow now more of the same, and she remembers that the street runs down, and always her energy with it, to Sloane Square, another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. Laura Ashley, down there, and that can get ugly.
Remembering the fifth floor, here: a sort of Californian market, Dean & Deluca lite, with a restaurant, a
separate and weirdly modular robotic sushi operation humming oddly in its midst, and a bar where they served excellent coffee.
"Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo."
I remember, back in the dim and distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I finally became old enough to get my first part time job and could afford to go choose and buy my own clothes and suddenly realised why mum would never accede to my demands for Wrangler or Levi jeans. What a rip-off!!! And they expected me to display their advertising too!!! Bastards! I never did get a pair of Lees although ISTR I did once own a pair of Wranglers when I was still 26" waist. That put me of "brands" for life. I may be more likely to look at brand names when buying if in my mind I feel I can expect better quality or service, but I'll still balance that against the price when comparing with similar products.
With the weather reminiscent of my misbegotten youth, I have taken to wearing sunglasses as I wander about town (only during daylight hours - I am definitely not "cool" enough for the sunglasses at night look). One unexpected advantage is that the polarized lenses cause the electronic advertising boards at the many bus stops to fade into darkness. No risk of an autosomal compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst induced by an overly flashy perfume ad from me....
I do surreptitiously check for Rowdy Roddy Piper lookalikes, just in case.
polarized lenses cause the electronic advertising boards at the many bus stops to fade into darkness
Which is an issue for me - I wear glasses and recently got some that self-darken in sunlight and come with a spiffy set of polarisied magnetically-clip-on sunglasses for use when behind glass (such as in the car).
The issue is that, with said clipon sunglasses in place, I now can't read the in-car displays. Sure - the speedometer is old-fashioned analogue but pretty much everything else is displayed on one screen or another - all of which seem to get mostly blocked by the polarised sunglasses attachment.
So, ot's a choice of "drive with my eyes mostly screwed up"[1] or "drive without all the fancy stuff". Being a techie I, of course, selected the first option.
[1] Acute myopia seems to have made my eyes much, much more sensitive to bright light. It does have the plus side of enabling me to see well in the dark though.
Polarized lenses work by blocking horizontally polarized sunlight, which preferentially reflects from low flat surfaces like water and asphalt. ALL polarized glasses do this. If car displays are being blocked it must be because they emit primarily horizontally polarized light.
If that's true, why are the manufacturers doing this? Could they not have chosen to make screens polarize the opposite way, or is there some technical reason that isn't done?
If car displays are being blocked it must be because they emit primarily horizontally polarized light. If that's true, why are the manufacturers doing this?
Inherent in the LCD and LED technologies that underlies the displays. I suspect that it would have been better to used the sort of e-ink displays like on a Kindle for car use, but those don't allow the sort of glitzy colours, high contrast and brightness, and high res, fast changing graphics that attract marketing people like a milk bottle top attracts a magpie.
Car makers should have been kept away from all forms of user digital interface by law, on pain of death. I can't think of a single thing they've improved through these things, and many things are now harder to control, more poorly implemented, and demand more attention for the same result. Car controls used to be (mostly) a masterpiece of carefully thought through control logic and ease of use. They've now thrown half of that away just to offer garish displays and levels of interaction that simply aren't needed in a moving vehicle.
> Even if LCD does inherently produce polarised light, it doesn't stop the manufacturer turning the display 90 degrees.
That's true, but I agree with the vehicle manufacturers that a sideways mounted LCD screen is going to look a bit out of place when all the other switch gear is mounted in the upright orientation.
/Ah, my lab coat
@ridley: "turning the display 90 degrees."
From memory (and I can't check this right now, as I'm work, and it's pouring with rain, so I didn't bring sunglasses with me) the LCD panels in most kit are offset at 45º, but that blocks enough light to vertically oriented polarising lenses to make them look pretty dark. Still doesn't answer why it's 45º and not vertical though. Perhaps viewing angle,.....
LCD: yes. LED: no...LCD works on the principle of polarisation by the liquid crystals and require light passing through. LEDs just emit (non-polarised) light themselves.
For basic LED displays, yes, but the increasingly common OLED and AMOLED displays usually incorporate polarising layers, as do some high contrast LED displays.
LCD screens that don't black out when you're wearing polarised sunglasses do exist. They use circular polarising filters, like the ones in passive stereoscopic "3D" glasses that work regardless of their angle relative to the screen. And yet, there are cars being manufactured with linear polarising filters on their LCDs even today.
The probability of having problems with polarised sunglasses appears to be inversely proportional to the price of the car, but shame on car manufacturers for still designing cars that don't work properly when the technology is available to avoid it.
Just wait a few years until middle age then you need a bright light with everything.
Or reading glasses/bifocals.
Bright light causes the pupils to contract, which increases the depth of field. More depth of field effectively reduces the minimum focal length of your presbyotic eyes.
I'm severely myopic and middle aged, but I am also fairly photophobic. Bright lights and me do not mix well, and I have written a bunch of times about how the white backgrounds that are endemic in the computing world hurt my eyes. And if that is not enough, my night vision is terrible too. I got all of the downsides but none of the benefits!
So this is really off topic, but I had some of those clever self-darkening lenses at great cost. Less than a year later the prescription in just one of my eyes radically changed. Guess what? You can't replace just one of these lenses you have to replace both at twice the cost! Why's that? Because the manufacturer refuses to do a single lens ("we can't guarantee the same colour or speed of lightening/darkening").
Do not buy (regardless of the brand which may, like the T shirts, be on display for all to see)!
@sorry:
For some of us this is a biannual thing. Taking care of what eyesight we retain is for some of us worth the expense. My SO has a degenerative eye condition that is accelerated by overly bright lights. It may be a few years yet before we get grands, and she really does want to see them.
"Do not buy"
Or at least wait until your eyes stop changing. Years ago my employer decided to fit us out with safety glasses, prescription if needed. Being short-sighted and astigmatic I got the prescription glasses. I always thought it was suspicious that on every re-test I needed a slightly different prescription - and possibly it was. But now my prescription hardly, if ever, changes but if I hunt up one of those old pairs of safety glasses that were worn for just walking around* are now ideal for close-up work.
* When I wanted to examine something closely I took them off. Now that doesn't work either, I can't focus as close-up as I used to.
"The issue is that, with said clipon sunglasses in place, I now can't read the in-car displays."
I just spent two days trying to find a pair of non-polarised sunglasses that were cheap and cheerful, sort-of aviator style (I snapped the arm off mine). I ended up with a pair for a fiver from a local shop after trying all the more obvious places only to find that if I was a woman of a child I would have an enourmous range to pick from, but as a mature male, in the middle of summer, their's almost no choice at all if they even have any in stock.
I, like you, discovered that polarised glasses and LCD type display don't mix well when I bought my first SatNav years ago.
I once purchased some polarized sunglass clip-ons at one of those mall stores specializing in sunglasses. I couldn't understand why they seemed to bother me and even give me headaches until I looked at an LCD display while outdoors and wearing the clip-ons. One lens blocked the display while the other passed it. The two lenses were polarized in different orientations - one vertical, one horizontal!
This isn't exactly new. Nobody buys a Rolex because they need a watch, they're paying Rolex to create a fantasy for them in which they imagine they participate. High street retailers have just spread the idea downmarket. And Facebook will now do it for your for free (for some definition of "free", some assembly required).
Really? I thought that people buy Rolex as either an advert for "Hey mug me please?" or as a method of moving wealth around the globe in a hurry, The recently arrested Malaysian PM Najib Razak was found to have over 400 Rolex watches in his house in case he had to run .. obviously not quick enough this time.
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