video

I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of “long photos” (Neil called them “moving photos”). And anybody who was around then isn’t the least surprised at how angry some are now about the new feature (see sarcastic response to that).

Richard Stallman‘s Soulja Boy dance, MIT style (via).

Shirow Masamune himself couldn’t draw Manga Eyes like hers.

Video found via a photo in Soffia Gisladóttir‘s photostream. The suggestion that things go rotten inside a person’s head is very sad, but I’ve also suggested it to Zach for Moldy Snack.com

From Kim to Zach to me to you: Bush Vs. Zombies.

Now we know: the guy doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction. Most people thought Shaun of the Dead was horror/comedy, not documentary. Poor W probably read The Zombie Survival Guide as an instruction manual (don’t show him How To Survive a Robot Uprising, please).

Gah. The guy hired a cannibal, fears animal-human hybrids, and flip-flops on evolution.

A guy walked into the student newspaper office and asked “does anybody want to jump out of an airplane?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, I said “I’m your man.” It was only afterwards that I confirmed a parachute would be involved.

Well, that was ten years ago (can’t you tell, I look young — young!), but the video is still laying around and I just uploaded it to YouTube. Actually, this video has been through the wringer. It was recorded on Hi8, edited at the jump site to VHS, years later I encoded to DV and re-edited in iMovie (version 2, I think) and just now uploaded that edited file (the source DV and iMovie project are long gone).

Office pranks are a bit of a thing here. Well, at least in IT. Last year Matt took charge and put together a quartet of pranks that got the attention of the London Daily Mirror.

This video is from a May 2002 prank that put a golf cart with fuzzy dice and bobble headed Jesus in Cliffy‘s office along with a Vote Bush sign and other things. He was mad, to be sure. Zach, Matt, Jon, and Al did all the heavy lifting, I simply offered (not like I had a choice) my golf cart to the cause (Zach would quickly point out that I’d basically abandoned it at his house).

Colophon: Why am I publishing this video only now? Because the new iMovie 08 rocks. Really. The source material was shot on my old Sony Clie, but until now I didn’t really have tools that would make editing it down easy enough to be worth the effort (it’s still five minutes, I know).

Gizmodo faithfully: flaming industrial art.

They introduced it saying “Do you enjoy fire? Do you also enjoy very intricate Rube Goldberg machines? Of course you do.” Though a reader there exclaims:

It didn’t do anything. For it to be a true Rube Goldberg doesn’t it have to accomplish some task, like cracking an egg or pouring a glass of milk or something? Neat to watch, but make it do something!

Something, presumably, other than just fascinate the pyros. …Which is what brings us to the dump truck smashup video:

Not that the dump truck actually accomplishes anything either, just that it looks cool.

(Note: the real connection here is that Cliffy introduced that video with “Everyone loves the idea of smashing fast-moving things into hard objects,” but got quickly shot down by somebody saying only guys like crashes, flames, and explosions.)

There is little doubt that the great diversity of styles and techniques of bowlers from countries enjoying test match status has helped to shape the history of [the sport]. With the recent world-wide implementation of professional coaching schemes, which generally teach only one, or perhaps two optimal ways…, bowling could be in danger of losing its technical diversity. Are we therefore on the verge of a new era in which the art of bowling is irretrievably lost? Possibly! However, as discussed below, the biomechanical principles underlying the bowling technique reveal some interesting new facts.

Unfortunately (for my purposes), that quote is about the wrong kind of bowling.

Anybody who’s seen me bowl knows how bad I am, even if I am among the few people I know who’s been to the bowling museum and hall of fame. Seeing these videos makes me tremendously thankful that nobody’s had a camera around when I’ve been throwing gutter balls down the lanes.

From The Chronicle:

Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. “A Fair(y) Use Tale” has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday. The video uses 400 cuts from 27 different Disney films to mock copyright law as overly protective of the interests of copyright owners — Disney among them.

Eric Faden, an assistant professor of English and film studies at Bucknell University, who produced the video with help from seven of his students, said it took eight months to make. “The most important thing is that it’s getting people to talk about these issues” of copyright and fair use, Mr. Faden said today. Worried that Disney may sue him for copyright infringement, Mr. Faden has retained Stanford University law professors.

Rather read a tale of copyright tyranny than watch one? Try “The People Who Owned the Bible.”

If you ever tire of the kittens on Flickr, it turns out there’s no shortage of bunnies on YouTube.

My nephew checked his email while he was here this morning and this was the first thing in his inbox. Maybe it’s because he’s 17 and my humor is at about the same level, but both of us were cracking up over it.

Miserable attempt at recovering my dignity with serious criticism: Will Farrell and landlord prove there is no meaning (or humor) without context. Would it be as funny without Will Farrell (with full afro!)? Or if the landlord wasn’t an innocent looking young girl?

In yet another lesson about how a bad joke in front of one audience can trouble a larger public, MoveOn wants McCain to know bombing Iran is no laughing matter.

Music and bombing, it could be said, really only go well together when joined in criticism.

Among the pop-culture viral videos I apparently missed is Matt Harding‘s dancing. I had to turn to Wikipedia for an explanation:

Harding was known for a particular dance, and while videotaping each other in Vietnam, his traveling companion suggested he add the dance. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him center frame, with the background music “Sweet Lullaby.”

The video was passed around by e-mail and eventually became “viral”, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered, generally country by country due to language barriers, before the launch of major video upload sites.

Meg was never shy about asking me what rock I was found under when I stunned her with my complete ignorance of major pop culture touchstones, so I put my mind to it and after significant remedial work I thought I’d caught up. But, no.

I’d not seen this video and only discovered it when Blyberg pointed at it as an icon of network-enabled pop culture.

The Candy Mountain video has been circulating for almost a year now and it’s a prime example of how network effects are allowing society to disseminate, in this case, popular culture, and ultimately the bulk of information deemed “important” by our fellow citizens

Indeed, my 17 year old nephew laughed when he learned I’d not seen it, lording it over me in the sort of superior way teenagers do when they discover they’ve just won a game on a walk.

Update Matty thinks he’s all that because he posted the video in January. My nephew would still laugh at him, though, as he claims he saw it a year ago.

“I’m Bruce Pechman, the muscleman of technology, let me show you my credentials.”

This is the instructional video that comes with the DynaFlex Powerball Gyro.

The fan videos on YouTube have got nothing on this. Just click play and prepare to laugh. Will and I have been asking to see people credentials since he shared this with me a week ago.

Kansas State University‘s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.

Text is unilinear…when written on paper.

Digital text is different.

Hypertext can link.

With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web.

Who will organize all of this data? We will. You will.

Digital text is not longer just linking information…Web 2.0 is linking people…people sharing, trading, and collaborating.

We’ll need to rethink a few things…

Thanks to the Google Operating System blog for bringing this to my attention.

No sooner do I lay down a rant about how bad Sprint WiFi is than do they run an ad telling us how great their service is. Well, not only that, but they promise to save us from “Connectile Dysfunction.”

Angela Natividad described it best:

It’s hard to position broadband ads. You can be like Earthlink, which kind of laughs at the whole idea of marketing in general, and you can be like Comcast, which takes the easy way out with off-colour humour. Or you can make up a disease, kind of like Microsoft, and propose that your product will in fact cure it.

There’s a fine art to this tactic. A good rule of thumb: the closer you can get your made-up disease to sound like a sexual disorder, the better. Maybe people will get confused and mistakenly believe you could solve both problems, not just (the invented) one. Cute, Sprint. Cute.

It would all be chuckle-worthy enough if — as Zach and Matt pointed out when the shared the ad with me — if I hadn’t just complained about how lousy their Wifi service is.

I might watch more TV if I didn’t live in the US. Well, I used to like watching World’s Wildest Police Chases on Spike while knocking back a few at the bar after work, but they re-arranged the schedule a while back and it’s just not the same. So clearly I have to sit around waiting for people to forward me goodies like this.

Yeah, it’s Neg’s Urban Sprinting, which apparently aired on a show named “Balls of Steel,” and it’s just one in a brilliant series. To wit: Big Stranger Rodeo and Make Them Move. Sadly, YouTube lists only three; gladly there’s this and this.