Do not watch this video from the internet. Don’t.
Mr. Pregnant wants nothing but to eat your children at tea. Don’t watch it.
Archive for the ‘The Internet Effect’ Category
“Buy the slaves and release them.”
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007Could such an oddball but somehow sensible concept have prevented the Civil War? Ron Paul thinks so. After all, every other country did it without a civil war…
Driving from Illinois to Georgia, we saw someone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker somewhere in Tennessee. I didn’t think those existed in real life irlstyles meatspace.
Today the only other place on the street that was open was that huge coffee chain. Dude that is always there was talking Ron Paul with a customer.
Could an internet subculture be much much huger than the mass media portrays it? Yes. Would this be one of those cases? That question is why this is interesting.
Channy Awards 2007.
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007The Channel101 Incredibly Prestigious Achievement Awards happened. They’re pretty good picks. I missed a couple things and it’s awesome to have them dropped in my lap.
If you don’t know what Channel101 is (or Yacht Rock or Classroom), or didn’t know what the Channies are, Channel101 is a democratic faux television station model of video production that is screened in Los Angeles monthly and the Channies are its incredibly prestigious awards.
Yeah, that’s a serious Tim and Eric explanation of Channel101. Seriously. Channel101 was created by the authors of my favorite comic book ever.
Presidential Mood Ring.
Monday, December 10th, 2007The slider on this tag cloud of presidential speeches shows frequency of word usage and obvious trends in big media politics.
The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2007 AD.
Terrorist and Iraq have been the biggest words the past few years (6 years of terrer!), and economy’s been big since the 70s. There’s some very telling things inside these walls of text. It’s like flash cards of four year periods.
Gratuitously overmentioning family for stupid emotional points was invented by Ronald Reagan and crew in 1986! Seriously. It became a buzzword in 1986. It’s only been 20 years. We can overcome the bullshit rhetoric in politics and be real (and still lie about it even). We did it for hundreds of years.
Have a look at Franklin Roosevelt’s third (!) inaugural address (1941) or the social security announcement (1935), or . Those are serious problems. What the fuck do we think we’re doing now? p.s. Those were real speech writers like damn. That shit jerks tears.
(found here)
Pattern Recognition: James Burke’s Crash Course History.
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007If you have the kind of brain aids that makes you constantly need to feed it more things, you might be interested in oddly detailed, guided tours through history. If you’re interested in that or learning how we learned how to learn, you’ll like this:
I know some people could be sensitive and call it dry, but James Burke is a pretty serious cut-up considering his field of study, and I’ve worshiped his books for years. Note that this is part 2 of 5 of episode 1 of 10. This can be a serious fast track to general knowledge of the history of science, and is almost an eerily appropriate primer for skeptical thought and understanding of the scientific process and how it effects history, all under the umbrella of chaos! This is multi-threaded teaching and thinking.
In the closing scenes of The Day the Universe Changed, Burke suggested that a forthcoming revolution in communication and computer technology would allow people all over the world to exchange ideas and opinions instantaneously. Subsequent events seem to have proven him right. His views of the connected nature of history have also been substantiated by recent research in chaos/complexity/network theory.
Essentially anything here is going to be similar or have an even wider berth, but I definitely suggest Connections as it caused a bit of an educational revolution that logically played out to its fullest form on the internet.
The Internet Effect Supplemental: Ron Paul note.
Saturday, December 1st, 2007“He misconstrued my beliefs.” – Ron Paul re: John McCain attacking him at the Republican YouTube debate.
I am amazed at his stickiness. He seems to attract the undercurrent need of prototypical-American freedom in people. He brings up fundamental American issues that effect everyone (and always have), has interesting and different things to say about the junk topics being portrayed as the platform, and can even handle serious modern issues. His statements are all theoretically solid. He interests people that aren’t interested in politics. The dude sounds like Thomas Jefferson.
I’m wondering what kind of insane explosion an internet movement can cause in a real live grassroots campaign.
It’s worth noting I still don’t consider anyone ready to receive votes. I could be convinced though.
Addendum: hahah caught this related thing right after I made this.
The Internet Effect: Last.fm finally goes critical.
Monday, November 19th, 2007This is hot shit.
This is my listening history (via) from the last two years (November 2005 to 2007) of my last.fm records. If you look at the full size version you can see how my phases shift and mutate, and you can see new huge trends like the introduction of a huge variety of post-punk and yacht rock, as well as the Pendulum/Future Prophecies drum and bass explosion.
For this particular graph, red is old things that I have been listening to for a very long time, and the cooler the colors get, the more recently I’ve been playing it. For example, green and beyond is things I’ve started listening to since May of 2006 (when I got the job), the blue stuff basically starts in 2007 after the promotion, and purple things sprout up a couple months ago.
The internet seems to be caving in on itself in a good way. Eventually I will be able to start my college that specializes in study and manipulation of metadata.
The Internet Effect: Canadian sense.
Monday, November 12th, 2007The Internet Effect: Re: Ron Paul.
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007You people out there; you know who you are. You are mentioning Ron Paul in every messageboard reply, in every dumb profile, and in every blogtastical entrifimication. Please stop it. He’s great. We know. That’s enough.
Repeatedly mentioning Ron Paul in everything on the internet is just going to make people react to Ron Paul in the same manner that they react to advertising. People will utter “ugh” and be reminded of the band The Eagles, and they will then proceed to dislike Ron Paul. It will backfire. Don’t overmention Ron Paul. You’re not even Republicans, and neither is he.
Please, internet. I implore you to hear my cries and stop mentioning Ron Paul like you’re some sort of motherfucking balls-deep, black-ops, brainwashing secret forces type of bullshit. You’re not brainwashing anyone or convincing them to vote for Ron Paul. You’re just being repetitive and annoying, and it will effect Ron Paul negatively. You are not tricking anyone.
Sadly, I offer no links to back up these statements about Ron Paul. Like it or not, he’s a serious motherfucker with crazy new old ideas.
Election ‘08 status: Still writing myself in.
The Internet Effect: Trent Reznor namedrops oink.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007Here is a thing about Saul Williams and Trent Reznor teaming up to make crazy shit.
Trent Reznor says he had an oink account. He also says he spent over $5000 on the Radiohead album (In Rainbows), and mentions his intentions to release an album the same way.
He utters zero bullshit in relation to the crazy horrors hidden behind oink’s fabled ewalls.
The Internet Effect: Visions of Web 2.0 – Maps.
Monday, October 29th, 2007There are a growing number of websites that display information about what’s on other websites about other websites aggregating other websites’ links to other websites. Here’s a few nice ones that show websites’s updates being applied geographically to a map (these are usually based on google maps, if not always) in nigh-real-time:
- flickrvision – Shitty pictures people upload, as it happens. See many cats.
- twittervision – This is stupid mini-updates highlighting all the retarded minutia people think is interesting, but you never see in movies (because no one really wants to hear about or see what people do in the bathroom nineteen times a day). It’s called “micro-vomiting.” I like to watch when it focuses on tons of Japanese updates in succession because I can’t even pretend to read Japanese anymore. This is the pinnacle of the short attention span.
- wikipediavision – This one shows wiki updates by geography. See nerds flex.
- This site focuses just on map hack sites. You could say it updated you on updates from updated sites updating their update feeds or pinging the update pongshooter…calling them mashups the entire time.
- This crazy genius even made a (mac-only thus not valid) screensaver that shows what two of these sites display as updates when other sites make those updates, thus e-stalking the shit out of the entire world at once.
- flagr – This is insanity on a level I am having difficulty decoding. I think I might not understand why people want to use the internet to only ever talk about the real world. Maybe my thirst for meta-data is drastically and dangerously above average.
Is it ok for the internet to never shut up about the real world? Isn’t there more than reality, partially because of the internet?
I want to see a map update visualizer thing for last.fm (and possibly newbtube). That’s an official demand.
Ok, I’m going to admit that I am a bit of a fag for maps. Not necessarily these kinds of maps, but I’m saying I like maps. I kept a world map I had to track earthquakes worldwide for a class up for years. We have maps of Mars in our bedroom right now, framed. I used to draw maps and make out with maps and buy map porn. I was on map mailing lists and went to map tournaments and hung out at map bars. I was map-bashed and publicly ridiculed.
This meta-useless (though undeniably awesome) shit was brought to you by Web 2.0.
Update: I’d also like to see tag clouds for youtube, if anyone’s noticed any.
