Most inappropriate use of stock images - EVER

This was posted here by Alex in early 2005. It's so wrong. So horrendously wrong and inappropriate that it actually made me LOL -- out loud. Surely by now they must have realized that the pictures aren't appropriate for a website about the death of children, and made changes.

uh . . . no

Lorne Kates

Completely inappropriate! They use a mix of serif and sans serif fonts on the same page. Don't they know that's the #1 leading cause of underage suicide? =(

leonardo_

I don't get it... Why not show a happy child? I think it's pertinent.

What picture do you want? An actual picture of a dead child? No, no, of course not, but at least make them look sad and abused?

(I guess what's most wierd about this one is that the text says "teen" but the picture is of an eight-year old..., so there is that. I'd prefer they show a happy teen.)

Lorne Kates

@_leonardo_ said:

I don't get it... Why not show a happy child? I think it's pertinent.

Mentally read that block of text in the voice of a eight year girl in pigtails with a pony smile jumping for joy.

Yeah.

@_leonardo_ said:

What picture do you want? An actual picture of a dead child? No, no, of course not, but at least make them look sad and abused?

There's any number of stock photos they could have used to convey "sad child". Silhouette of kid sitting on porch, knees drawn up, head down, implied sad and depressed look, staring off into cloudy sunset.

[url="http://vi.sualize.us/nicanio/silhouette/?page=2"]Two seconds on Google Images comes up with this page[/url]. Sure it's not stock, but it's that easy to find, it should be trivial to find something similar in stock photos and/or easy to license images.

[img]http://cdnimg.visualizeus.com/thumbs/d0/f6/d0f6ef97c4449eec47c70c5c4da8cd77_m.jpg[/img]

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@Lorne Kates said:

@_leonardo_ said:
I don't get it... Why not show a happy child? I think it's pertinent.

Mentally read that block of text in the voice of a eight year girl in pigtails with a pony smile jumping for joy.
Yeah.
@_leonardo_ said:
What picture do you want? An actual picture of a dead child? No, no, of course not, but at least make them look sad and abused?
There's any number of stock photos they could have used to convey "sad child". Silhouette of kid sitting on porch, knees drawn up, head down, implied sad and depressed look, staring off into cloudy sunset.
Two seconds on Google Images comes up with this page. Sure it's not stock, but it's that easy to find, it should be trivial to find something similar in stock photos and/or easy to license images.

The picture is perfect - he's even burning in the fires of eternal damnation for his mortal sin of suicide.

leonardo_

I'll say no, thanks, to your picture of a sad and lonely child.

Ads for diet foods show skinny people, or at the very least fat-people-turning-into-skinny people.

It's not like they didn't think of this. Their logo itself is people jumping, even though they have "death" in the name. They're being positive/optimistic even when faced with a terrible subject. You focus on the ones you can help, the successes.

mikeTheLiar

@Lorne Kates said:

Completely inappropriate! They use a mix of serif and sans serif fonts on the same page. Don't they know that's the #1 leading cause of underage suicide? =(

I know, right? Weird thing is our designer fucking loves to do shit like that. Half the page in Georgia, half in Verdana. I don't get it.

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Great, user I was replying to deleted his post, so my reply gets eaten by CS? Awesome feature!

The odd juxtaposition of content and imagery causes both to become especially poignant to normal human beings. Here we have a bright, cheerful girl full of promise and potential, and now we're forced to examine her personal mortality. It's all the more tragic for how vibrant and full of life she seems. It doesn't seem like the desired result.

How about we don't put any photography on the child death webpages? Or something abstract like memorials with flowers or candles or something.

blakeyrat

@Lorne Kates said:

Mentally read that block of text in the voice of a eight year girl in pigtails with a pony smile jumping for joy.
Yeah.

Is that something you're supposed to do when you see stock photos? Like if I'm reading a newspaper article about pets and they use a stock photo of a great dane, I'm supposed to read it in Scooby Doo's voice?

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@blakeyrat said:

@Lorne Kates said:
Mentally read that block of text in the voice of a eight year girl in pigtails with a pony smile jumping for joy.
Yeah.

Is that something you're supposed to do when you see stock photos? Like if I'm reading a newspaper article about pets and they use a stock photo of a great dane, I'm supposed to read it in Scooby Doo's voice?

Ruicide, Rhaggy?

@_leonardo_ said:

I don't get it... Why not show a happy child? I think it's pertinent.

What picture do you want? An actual picture of a dead child? No, no, of course not, but at least make them look sad and abused?
(I guess what's most wierd about this one is that the text says "teen" but the picture is of an eight-year old..., so there is that. I'd prefer they show a happy teen.)

Maybe if you put the text a little closer to the picture.

Lorne Kates

@blakeyrat said:

Is that something you're supposed to do when you see stock photos? Like if I'm reading a newspaper article about pets and they use a stock photo of a great dane, I'm supposed to read it in Scooby Doo's voice?

Not always, but there are factors that make it seem like the subject of the photograph is meant to be the narrator, or a represntative subject. Think about all those stereotypical ads... Father Cleaver guy in smoking jacket, sitting in armchair, looking meaningful at the reader, to an ad about how a man isn't truly awake until he's had his early morning shave and whiskey. That ad is in that narrator's voice.

When the accompanying photo is extremely closely related to the subject being discussed, the entire purpose of the photograph is to draw a relationship between it and the text. Some stock photos are just throwaways or enhancements. A story about an adoption drive will be accompanied by a stock photo of a kitten.

But if it's a story about fire prevention, accompanied by Hooty the Firefighting Owl, sure a shit you're meant to assume Hooty's talking that text to you.

@blakeyrat said:

Like if I'm reading a newspaper article about pets and they use a stock photo of a great dane, I'm supposed to read it in Scooby Doo's voice?

Doesn't everyone?

Ben L.

@El_Heffe said:

@blakeyrat said:
Like if I'm reading a newspaper article about pets and they use a stock photo of a great dane, I'm supposed to read it in Scooby Doo's voice?
Doesn't everyone?

The remainder of this thread will now be read in the voice of whatever you imagine Mitch McConnell's voice to sound like before actually hearing him.

dkf

@Ben L. said:

The remainder of this thread will now be read in the voice of whatever you imagine Mitch McConnell's voice to sound like before actually hearing him.

He talks like Scooby Doo?

I'd rather read in the voice of one of the following people (in no particular order):

Yeardley Smith
David Attenborough
Ellen McLain aka GLaDOS
~~Gordon~~ Morgan Freeman
Carl Sagan
Samuel L. Jackson, motherfucker!

PJH

@dkf said:

@Ben L. said:
The remainder of this thread will now be read in the voice of whatever you imagine Mitch McConnell's voice to sound like before actually hearing him.
He talks like Scooby Doo?

From a random youtube I found of him, it'd take forever to get anything read. I can write long-hand faster than he spoke.

For those of you who 'read in voices' (I rarely, if ever, notice that I do; but then I learnt the principles of speed reading at an early age) - do you do that with all written text, or just some depending on genre/context?

dhromed

@_leonardo_ said:

They're being positive/optimistic even when faced with a terrible subject.

Look, you are one of the clouds in the crowd here.

dhromed

@PJH said:

do you do that with all written text, or just some depending on genre/context?

Pretty much always. There's a generic voice in my head with various tones of speech in case I don't know the actual person's voice.

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@PJH said:

@dkf said:
@Ben L. said:
The remainder of this thread will now be read in the voice of whatever you imagine Mitch McConnell's voice to sound like before actually hearing him.
He talks like Scooby Doo?
From a random youtube I found of him, it'd take forever to get anything read. I can write long-hand faster than he spoke.

For those of you who 'read in voices' (I rarely, if ever, notice that I do; but then I learnt the principles of speed reading at an early age) - do you do that with all written text, or just some depending on genre/context?

Some, depending on genre/context. If it's technical/informationall material the voice adds nothing, and I dispense with it. If it's poetic, the voice is everything. In fiction, it adds flavor. If I'm proofreading it helps call out grammar problems (but masks eg homophone substitution, which I don't do often).

e4tmyl33t

@Zecc said:

I'd rather read in the voice of one of the following people (in no particular order):

Yeardley Smith

David Attenborough

Ellen McLain aka GLaDOS

~~Gordon~~ Morgan Freeman

Carl Sagan

Samuel L. Jackson, motherfucker!

Man, I need to find a way to make my internal reading voice be that of Carl Sagan without me concentrating on it. It'd be like watching Cosmos no matter what I'm reading!

DaveK1

@Lorne Kates said:

underage suicide

What's the legal age for suicide in your jurisdiction, then?

Lorne Kates

@DaveK said:

@Lorne Kates said:
underage suicide
What's the legal age for suicide in your jurisdiction, then?

Hard to say. It's based on the metric lunar calendar.

da_Doctah

@e4tmyl33t said:

@Zecc said:
I'd rather read in the voice of one of the following people (in no particular order):

Yeardley Smith

David Attenborough

Ellen McLain aka GLaDOS

~~Gordon~~ Morgan Freeman

Carl Sagan

Samuel L. Jackson, motherfucker!

Man, I need to find a way to make my internal reading voice be that of Carl Sagan without me concentrating on it. It'd be like watching Cosmos no matter what I'm reading!

When I'm reading the rants on this forum, I have a tendency to start hearing them in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried.

@da Doctah said:

When I'm reading the rants on this forum, I have a tendency to start hearing them in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried.

Has anybody ever done a usability study on the Linux CLI interface? What the fuck? Did they not even READ their own directions? Because it's fucking gibberish, and I'm like one step in. Christ. Anyway, you're going to probably not believe me, but I when I was going through this, I genuinely didn't make the connection that when they said "a the following line" they meant "a line described in one of the two text boxes below this one" or something sane, so I got stuck at this point.

Oh shit it doesn't end there, it didn't actually install because ONE OF THE FILES WAS A 404 ERROR!!! All this fucking pain and it doesn't fucking work. Oh and by the way? When it says "run apt-get update" it really means "run sudo apt-get update" because GOD FORBID YOU LEAVE OFF THE MAGIC WORD fuck you fuck you fuck this fuck everything

You get something squished down to about 30% of your screen real-estate, surrounded by grey-overlayed controls that are unusable so WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF SHOWING THEM RATHER THAN FULL SCREEN? Godfuckingdamnit, Gmail. I didn't want to spend my afternoon writing ANOTHER Stylish userstyle to fix your fucking stupid UI decision to fuck up things that have been working and stable since the inception of webmail interfaces! Seriously, I will pay loads of real, fake money for someone to put together a screenshot compilation of webmail interfaces from around 1995 to present day, just to show that things HAVE NOT FUCKING CHANGED because that is what ever single user is used to

.

I had to go to YouTube to be reminded what what Gilbert sounded like.

It was a good thing.

Edit: NSFW, but if you see YouTube clips at work with sound turned on, you deserve whatever shame falls upon you.

dhromed

@e4tmyl33t said:

Man, I need to find a way to make my internal reading voice be that of Carl Sagan without me concentrating on it. It'd be like watching Cosmos no matter what I'm reading!

I would like, tooo.. recommennnd that sentiment.

mikeTheLiar

@El_Heffe said:

@da Doctah said:
When I'm reading the rants on this forum, I have a tendency to start hearing them in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried.
Has anybody ever done a usability study on the Linux CLI interface? What the fuck? Did they not even READ their own directions? Because it's
fucking gibberish, and I'm like one step in. Christ....

...

It all makes so much sense now.

Lorne Kates

@El_Heffe said:

Stuff

Oh, boy. He's cracked. He's gone nuts.

@El_Heffe said:

@_leonardo_ said:
I don't get it... Why not show a happy child? I think it's pertinent.

What picture do you want? An actual picture of a dead child? No, no, of course not, but at least make them look sad and abused?
(I guess what's most wierd about this one is that the text says "teen" but the picture is of an eight-year old..., so there is that. I'd prefer they show a happy teen.)
Maybe if you put the text a little closer to the picture.

I am taking these fine 'shops hostage to post on 4chan, where their genius will be appreciated to its fullest.