Wednesday, February 02, 2011

How to Sell Your Koala Meat? (How Amazon led me to The funniest, most ingenious satire cartoon I've seen in years)




Chalk up another indebtedness to the eerily intuitive Amazon recommendation machine. Scanning through replacements for my Twin Draft Guards to help keep some of the overpriced heat in the house, a link came up for a book by an author that I'd never heard of. I almost bought it on the spot just because of the title 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides) (and because it was cheap at $7.72 as a pre-order). The laugh was immediate and guttural that I had to look into the author Matthew Inman and hope that this wasn't another I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell or something.

Mr. Inman seems to have quite a following as the driving force behind TheOatmeal.com, a home for humorous, well-thought out very visual blog posts. Clicking on the latest one, I couldn't stop laughing. Here's a sample from "How To Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less":



Maybe it's my own history working for about a decade on a ridiculous online website that was full of these type of shopping cart mistakes and errors and this final page of advertisements after the actual purchase is exactly the type of thing my boss insisted on doing and bothered the shit out of me. It just seemed cheap and cheesy. Inman's comic is so on point and informative in a memorable way. The image above is just one small piece. The slide regarding those ridiculous "captchas," the squiggly words you have to type in just about everywhere these days.

Clicking around the site some more, the quality of work on the site
is excellent. It seems that I'm late to the party but posts like the shopping cart, 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee, and How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell among others are just hysterical.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

GoDaddy needs to read this.