No more lolcats in tech presentation, plz

37signals.com

6 points·bdotdub··6 comments

DHH likes to complain pretty much about everything!

Now because of that in my next presentation I'll use LOLdogs.

BTW, I love Federico Mena FAIL!s in his presentations.

Oftentimes, the people complaining about everything are the people classy enough to recognize how many things are worth complaining about.

Do you have a link to one of Mena's presentations?

http://www.gnome.org/~federico/#conferences

Document-centric GNOME is pretty good.

I find this odd coming from someone who is known for highlighting profanity in presentations - which seems at least as much of a gimmick as a LOLcat.

Not that I care - I enjoy Rails and generally find DHH a fine speaker when I've seen him at RailsConfs - but it does seem mildly hypocritical to me.

Swears aren't a gimmick. They're a part of the English language.

When DHH tells a hypothetical person to fuck off, that carries certain undertones. We're all aware of those because it's part of the English language. Same with him calling a product a piece of shit. If he said "This product is severely lacking," that means something difference than "This product is a piece of shit."

I don't know where this taboo against professional swearing comes from, but curse words are a natural part of the English language and should be used as such.

Meanwhile, using LOLcats says nothing good about you. "Hi, I'm immature enough that while you're supposed to regard what I'm saying, I still think that text attached to cats is funny." "Hello, I missed the meme bandwagon and I'm catching up three years later." I would respect somebody using "All Your Base" more than I'd respect LOLcats, and that's not saying I'd respect AYB at all.

Mark-Jason Dominus proposed a different gimmick, long before LOLcats were invented:

http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide024.htm...

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