Archive for February, 2013
| Newer Entries »The Virtue of Shellfishness: Weebl’s Greatest Hits
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 7, 2013 by admin in Music
Thursday, February 7th, 2013Do the surreal creations of Cyriak, SecretAgentBob, and Weebl constitute a genre? Who cares. Watch hours disappear as you watch clip after one minute clip.
Somewhere in the surreal realm between the audiovisual creations of Cyriak (who brought us cows & cows & cows, Baaa, and Welcome to Kitty City) and the musical animated storytelling of SecretAgentBob (who brought us Charlie the Unicorn and Ferrets) lies the repetitiously brilliant creations of mr weebl (we’ve included a few of these videos below). Is this a genre? I can’t decide. The musical portions of Cyriak and Weebl’s clips seem to reside somewhere in the microgenres of Bitpop or Chiptune, but to be honest, I decided to stop keeping track of microgenres ten minutes after I first heard the term back in the early nineties. So we’ll just let these offbeat creations be what they are. We’re focusing on Weebl today, because in spite of having the largest volume of work of the three on line by far, I personally didn’t know who he was until today, when I ran across Shrimp Glockenspiel. Why are internerds so shellfish with their clever links? Once I paid a little more attention, I quickly realized I was familiar with his NSFW Amazing Horse and Narwhals; I just didn’t realize he had such a huge body of work. You’re likely to either love Weebl (British flash animator Jonti Picking ) or hate him. His 200+ YouTube clips have received tens of millions of views, but his TV ad for Yell 118 247 Directory Heaven earned him the honor of sixth most irritating ad of 2009. Which I guess is actually a positive assessment when discussing TV commercials. Below are what I’d consider weebl’s “greatest hits”. If you actually like the music itself, he has hundreds of tunes on Amazon
I Have a Deep Dark Secret
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 6, 2013 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013And when I decide to share it, you can rest assured I won’t do it on the upload site MEGA using the Silent Circle app on my iPhone.
If I sold you a lock and key for twenty dollars, and told you that no-one in the world would be able to unlock it except you, would you believe me? Probably not. And that’s the analogy I keep thinking of as a result of the recent launches of two services that are supposedly going to revolutionize privacy and file transfers. You may have already heard of one of these services; the infamous Kim Dotcom whose MegaUpload file sharing empire was taken down when he was arrested last year launched MEGA last month. One of the cleverest things about the new service is probably the hilarious domain name “mega.co.nz”, because the basic idea behind MEGA is simply that, as they themselves put it: “All files stored on MEGA are encrypted. All data transfers from and to MEGA are encrypted” adding that “unlike the industry norm where the cloud storage provider holds the decryption key, with MEGA, you control the encryption“. This is all fine and dandy from a basic technical standpoint, but what about the human element? As the hilarious XKCD five dollar wrench gag points out, there’s a level where massive encryption simply becomes irrelevant. I mean, it wasn’t only the technology that tripped up alleged Anonymous member Higinio O.Ochoa when he got collared by the FBI, it was pride. And his girlfriend’s breasts. And it wasn’t rubber-hose cryptanalysis that allegedly broke LulzSec leader Sabu, it was the threat of never seeing his kids again. So – including human nature as an element in the equation, could you logically trust a guy who looks and dresses like this to be selling you a trustworthy product that only has your best interests in mind? Likewise with a service that was getting some spin yesterday called Silent Circle. No, not the band Silent Circle
Via XKCD
If This Page Gets One Million Likes I Won’t Shoot a Kitten
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 5, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Our roundup of the dreaded “plea for Likes” meme.
Of all the insufferable things that Facebook has done to poison the inflection of online communication, I think we can all agree that the “Like” button has done more damage than emoticons, chat speak, and the “reply all” button combined. Remember when it was new? If you were one of the people who immediately stopped sharing actual thoughts on the first day, doing things like “Liking” my mother’s obituary, I just want to say: I hate you. The more articulate amongst us of course resisted for months, realizing that resorting to the Like Button was yet another step toward the brain dead consumer world uncannily prophesied in the movie Idiocracy
So if a “Like” really serves no purpose as a communication tool – having simply become a Pavlovian response that releases you from an obligation to use your brain for a second – what value does it have? Well, some would argue that it has a value of $3.60, but that’s clearly preposterous. It’s obviously not a reliable form of currency; even if one is able to manipulate that Like into some kind of real conversion, the value varies tremendously based on the quality of that conversion. If a person who regularly buys Luis Vuitton luggage “Likes” something, that’s worth a hell of a lot more than someone Liking a picture of your cat wearing a piece of bread on its head. And while there have been studies which demonstrate that Likes correlate with web traffic, there are two problems there. One is – as anyone who operates a website should know – that getting ten thousand visitors from Reddit in one day typically has less cash value than getting TEN visitors with whom you have any kind of relationship. And the other is the redundant and/or useless nature of that data. Okay, “Likes” correlate with page views. Duh. But this only tells you something about the Facebook users who visited the page. And I don’t know about you, but the most influential people I know aren’t avid Facebook users. Hmm. Maybe I should finally kick the Facebook habit so I can become one of them.
In any case, enough Like hating. Below are the worst and best desperate pleas to be liked that I could find. The winning plea is at the very bottom. Read the rest of this entry »
Can You Write Stupid?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 4, 2013 by admin in Comics
Monday, February 4th, 2013Try your hand at writing stupid, with the “Up Goer Five Text Editor”, which limits you to the thousand most commonly used English words.
 The Original |
This may be the most stupid thing you read today. Why? Because I am using only words that are in the ten hundred most used words. Why? because I’m trying out the up goer five word making thing. If people tell you that you use too many big or strange words, maybe you should give it a try too. It’s easy to stick to the ten hundred most used words if you’re talking about simple stuff like I am here, but things get a little harder if you are trying to explain stuff like the things that brain strong people do or movies. Interesting that the word “movies” is in the top ten hundred but not the word that I had to call “brain strong people”. Under here is one try a guy did at doing this about brain strong stuff. Probably the funniest shot at it was the first one on that funny computer pictures place. A piece of it is on the left. I still have one question. Why the hell is “goer” in the top ten hundred most used words? Read the rest of this entry »
Where Are Your Torches & Pitchforks? Why Aren’t You Mad As Hell?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 1, 2013 by admin in Popular Media
Friday, February 1st, 2013The 1976 film “Network” may offer some insight. You see, the world is a business, and if you don’t like your job in it, you better get a new one.
The other day I had a conversation with a few friends in which we were sharing our collective befuddlement regarding the epic new levels of American Apathy. We agreed that it was hard to understand how people could seem so unconcerned about things, and ran through the typical list of things that people should be enraged about but aren’t. Things like the Bush administration lies that mired us in war, their reckless deregulation that contributed to the bailouts, and the banskters arrogant behavior after the bailouts, when they paid themselves bigger bonuses than ever. Or our presumed “good guy” Obama, who was elected on promises of reform and transparency, but who started the deceit before he was even elected, by reversing himself on public campaign funding and voting for FISA. And then proceeded to maintain Bush-era secrecy and tax cuts, uphold the Patriot Act, keep Guantanamo open, and create a health care plan that benefits the insurance industry more than the insured. And then added a whole NEW level of hostility abroad, with drone attacks and the “surge” in Afghanistan. Or the entire culture of modern American governing itself, which sneers at honesty, integrity, and the collective good as naive concepts, primarily so it can comfortably perpetuate its pervasive bribery and grift system under the epically misleading term “lobbying”.
That’s just the short list; also discussed were the outright crimes of big Pharma, health care, the energy industry, the military industrial complex, corporate media, and the new industries and agencies built around creating a surveillance state. As is typically the case in discussions like this, the sources of information Read the rest of this entry »