Calvin and Hobbes

Start the week with a smile.

Zero Punctuation

I know, I know. Really, look, we're sorry. We're only three guys with day jobs here, so you can't expect us to keep up with everything truly fantastic that comes along on the intarwebs. Still, we do try to find the funny, and when I stumble across something like this a year and a half into the run, I'm embarrassed.

Anyway, Zero Punctuation is a fantastically hilarious series of video game reviews narrated by a UK native with a slight Australian accent using very simple animation and very elaborate curses at 400wpm.

Example: "The game is so pretty that if it were in prison, it would be the bitch of every motherfucker in that place faster than you could shout 'Andy Dufresne!'"

Here's the Zero Punctuation review of Crysis.



Props to Chris at Sooper Delishus for the link.

Why Did You Want to Know.. Exactly?

The site is called Fun Advice. From all appearances it looks like the idea is to mix the usefulness of a search engine with the fun of a social networking site. Think Yahoo Answers, How Stuff Works, Answers.com -- things like that.

A site where people ask questions, and other people help out.

Like this week's question.

Oh Bjork, Oh Bjork, Oh Bjork

Because today is assuredly someones birthday, which should immediately remind you that they're smoking cigars, he's got a chain of flowers and sows a bird in her knickers -- here are two things that you'll be violently happy to have looked at and/or listened to.

#1. The Bjork Song
#2. Diddy Calls Bjork on the Phone

Doodle Doodle Dee, Wubba Wubba Wubba.

Theater Rage

I thought it was just me.

In an effort to prop up the movie theater market, there's a company proposing super-swank theaters that will charge $35 admission.

This Ain't It Cool talkback nails exactly what's wrong with movie theaters these days. Instead of offering sushi and plush seats, apparently all real movie fans want is to watch the movie without louts of every stripe ruining it.

Pretty much every comment ends with "and that's why I don't go to theaters anymore."

No Big News Here -- The Internet = High School

Remember when you'd have to do some silly book report or whatever and end up in the school library, only to find that every schoolkids primary resource for research "The World Book Encyclopedia" has been ..shall we say annotated by another student (or yourself, depending on the situation) in ball point pen to include several kinda bad words, drawings of the Metallica logo, and circles around the boobs in all of the color prints of Renaissance art?

That tradition will probably never die, but as time marches on it's apparently spread beyond the dusty shelves in the back of your Alma Mater.

Case in point, the ongoing battle happening between those who are trying to maintain the underlying ideology of Wikipedia, and those who would prefer to replace pictures that are supposed to depict famous historical figures with MS paint drawings of penises.

While I'm well aware that it's not a 100% reliable source, I'm still among the many that consider Wikipedia a valuable resource when trying to find out more information about a given topic. Usually I'll drop in on it when I'm trying to get an idea of what something I'm not familiar with is, or if there's a better resource available on the web to read about whatever it is that I'm curious about.

At the same time, whenever I'm lucky enough to trip across one of these "edits" of the Internet encyclopedia it's hard not to laugh just a little bit at them, even if the whole practice seems kinda juvenile.

Wikipedia is so vast though that at least in my personal experience these incidents are far and few between. You hear about them all the time, but the Wiki faithful are apparently pretty quick about removing potentially offensive things from the site (which when you think about it might have something to do with it happening so much).

Anyways, today while looking for something else I came across a watchdog site of sorts that apparently was designed to track which pages on Wikipedia were getting the most views/updates (possibly for the purposes of trending current public interest) but has more often than not become a storehouse for tracking (and ranking) which pages are vandalized the most.

As an added bonus, it links to information regarding the vandalism -- which probably wasn't intended to become sort of an encyclopedia of the vandalism itself, but sorta becomes one anyways.

Long story short, if you weren't among the lucky ones to see the period of time where the entry in Wikepedia about Keanu Reeves included this piece of info:

"Reeves has one full sister named PENIS JEEVES (born 1966 in Beirut) who was diagnosed with erectile dysfunction in the early 1990s. Additionally, through his mother he has a half-sister named Karina Miller (born 1976 in Toronto) and through his father another half-sister named Emma Reeves (born 1980 in Hawaii)."

Well, now you can see what it was like.

I think I found this interesting because as a former middle school teacher, one of the things I had to be wary of was kids copying things verbatim from the web to use in reports I assigned. This was something I was guilty of myself (except that I was copying from The World Book) back in the day -- with the added advantage that I could easily tell that copying the things scribbled on the pages of the book in ball point pen probably wasn't a good idea.

A kid copying and pasting things from the web doesn't always have the same advantage. And while I can't say I've ever had a student hand in a report telling me that Keanu Reeve's sister was named PENIS, it's not that much of a stretch to believe that it could happen.

Anyways, an interesting time waster if you need it.

PS -- I also suspect these were the kinds of files that the principal was looking to dig up from the archives during that one scene from The Breakfast Club.

Re-recommending

I know we've recommended Sooper Delishus before, but Chris Keating's comedy site is getting even better. His homage to Gary Gygax is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.

Your assignment: spread the word. You can say you've been reading it since the beginning.

PhotoshopDisasters

Because really -- who wouldn't rescue a three-armed damsel in distress?

While I can't really consider myself any kind of power user, it was hard not to be entertained by this great little blog pointing out some of the worst print and advertising photo-manipulations currently floating around the world today.

Fashion magazines get the prerequisite skewering, but some of the best entries here are pics from newspaper articles that have been badly (and in many cases blatantly) doctored.

Enjoy!

The Corbis ReadyCam

Here's a cool one -- A site where you can download, print, and then build your own pinhole camera, designed exclusively with images and illustrations from the Corbis library. The designs are way cool and apparently they really do work (although you might need to set aside a little free time to get a pic out of one).

* Go! Not Included

Mad love to unmuse for the link.

Cherry Blossom Watch

This is what it's all about: cherry blossoms at Brooklyn Botanical Garden. No matter how crummy and gray the winter's been, this will make you feel great to be alive.

Right now the first flowers are appearing. When everything's in full bloom at the beginning of May, the Festival starts: traditional Japanese dance, J-pop, the works. Visit if you can.

The Peeps Show II

The Washington Post ran a contest last year for the best diorama using Peeps. This year's contest drew more than 800 entries. Here are the best. Number 3 is my fave.

The Friday Smile: Hey Guys, I Got This Edition

Okay team, huddle up. It's tourney time, and that means I should be giving you a rousing talk about team work. The conspicuous lack of the letter "I", the basic run down of linked chain physics, you know the drill.

I should tell you to stick together, whether it's celebrating your supposed heritage, staying healthy, intervening in times of trouble, or just generally looking out for each other.

But let's be serious. We know who is going to carry the load. It's pretty clear who is going to drive us deep into this thing, even if his game is pretty limited*.

Just get the ball to Monster, and get out of the way.



----
*Sorry for all the video posts, kids... but it's not as if I had a ton of help. :)

We Highly Recommend Watching Closely

For the record, I didn't.

A Message for Hex

Please, (don't) think of the LOLcats.

It's Recess, Are Your Kids Safe?

Don't Forget to Pretend You're Irish!

Happy St. Patty's, everybody!

NSFW Sunday: Just Say No

On the outside chance that Amy Winehouse is a regular visitor to this site, we offer these little words of advice:

Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

Not so much NSFW because of anything overtly obscene, but more because some things you just don't want your coworkers to know you're watching.

The Friday Friday Smile Smile: Hug Me Edition

It's called the Friday Friday Smile Smile this week because I missed it last week, and I figure this way I'll get all caught up. I know there are many out there who enjoy this little feature, and I apologize for not keeping up with it as much as I should, but things have been a little rough in Hexland lately, and to be honest, there's really only one thing that's gonna fix it.

I need a hug.

Not just because I was trying to order some new furniture online and the site started freaking out.

Not just because I haven't seen any returns from all that money I invested in the Hell's Angels Navy fund.

Not because the firewall at work won't let me watch these great geeky videos.

Not just because 10,000 B.C. sucked out loud.

Not because apparently I'm a crappy Cellist.

Not just because I think we've already posted that Webspeak Bullshit Generator before and I didn't realize it until just now.

Not because I'm undead.

Not because I can only really think of this number to like 4 decimal places, which is really sorta lame for someone who claims to be intelligent.

Just because hugs rock.

Happy Pi Day!

3/14 - The logical day to celebrate everybody's favorite transcendental concept relating the diameter of a circle to its circumference.

Which makes it the perfect time to post this video, which is one of my favorite net finds EVER:



And for Hex, the "You're the Man Now Dog" treatment.

The Web Economy Bullshit Generator

A little dated perhaps, but still a good way to help cool off if you have to deal with crap from coworkers and supervisors who tend to load up on corporate weaselspeak to help absolve themselves of any sort of insulting qualities that their statements might carry.

All you have to do is push the button and you'll be presented with an easy-to-use yet utterly meaningless business statement that will help you think out of the box with the kind of customized cutting edge paradigm shifting descriptors that make all the executives swoon.

Also might make for some funny pick-up lines when you think about it.

Regardless, it's a fun little time waster that will help you repurpose your end-to-end convergence so you can optimize cross-media architectures and extend your strategic markets.

Huzzah.

The Cello Challenge

Guitar Hero, Schmitar Hero -- this is a real challenge. According to the Berlin Philharmonic, there are a million or so possible tones that a Cello can make. Considering the fact that most music is based off a 12-tone system, that leaves a lot of room open for something to go kinda wrong.

The idea here is really simple. Drag your mouse back and forth in rhythm with the bow-strokes the player uses during the song. If you get it right, you get points.

Get it wrong, and you'll definitely know.

10,000 B.S.

Let's be really clear here: we do NOT highly recommend 10,000 B.C. To be fair (though we don't have to), we haven't seen Roland Emmerich's latest effects-laden assault on logic.

However, we have been reading the reviews to learn exactly how bad it is.

Reviews from the New York Times and Ain't It Cool News used these surprisingly similarly descriptions:

"Sublimely dunderheaded"
"Blissfully retarded"

Smart money says other reviewers will have similar reactions. If you find one, leave a comment.

When the Geekospheres Collide

So it probably comes as no surprise that as a contributer to HRTotM, I'm a movie geek. I like easter eggs, sequels, interesting director/screenwriter pairings (or the even more interesting director/screenwriter/studio collaborations), you name it.

It's also probably not a big stretch to imagine that I'm somewhat into the indie rock. It's part of the reason I got satellite radio, and it dictates some of my daily time wasting.

A little bit more difficult to convey is that I'm a huge graphic design nerd. My first real "holy crap I need a JOB job" job was a at low-rent weekly advertising paper where I did my best to elevate the full color sheets for used cars and mobile homes that ran alongside the classified ads. This led to loads of general interest about the craft itself, and now I'm a huge billboard critic and expert font-spotter.

The following video from the band Justice (who did that crazy t-shirt sporting "Dance" video that ran amok several months ago) manages to seamlessly weld indie rock (by virtue of their label status), movies, and graphic design.

I've watched it four times, and the song isn't even strictly "my thing".




OMG OMG OMG UPDATE: My geek has died and gone to heaven.

Star Wars title sequence, in the style of Saul Bass. Now this is even strictly MY THING.

America's Newest Hit Makers (well, Hit Triers, anyway)

BBC 4 is airing a documentary tonight about a failed attempt at assassinating Mick Jagger... by the Hell's Angels.

Just to be totally clear here: Trying to assassinate pop stars, NOT recommended. Spending a few moments with the mental picture of fully leathered-and-chained Hells Angels trying to reach Long Island...

in a boat...

during a storm...

giggle giggle

HIGHLY recommended.

Besting Furni

HEMA is a Dutch department store. You can't order anything on its product page and it's in Dutch, but go there and...give it a second.

NSFW Sunday: The Birds and The Bees