Matching my last post about those annoying anti piracy ads, I’ve found this gem in the depths of the web. A short AMV by Doki Doki Productions. It’s called Plunder Propaganda and it’s a hilarious spoof of the usual ads:

A high quality version is available at AnimeMusicVideos.org (after a free registration you can download each and every AMV on the site, which are tens of thousands).

Another spoof was done by the IT Crowd:

And last but not least, as a reference the original annoying ad™:

While browsing one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) I stumbled upon a sideproject of its author. The project are 3 minimalistic (in terms of design, not content!) websites which have only one goal: to find out The Funniest, The Cutest, and The Fairest pictures of all the internet.
A noble goal you might say, but what on these sites is different than all the other countless funny-picture-websites? Well first of all there are no comments, and not much design around the site. On all three sites you get a white page with a little introduction text and then 2 pictures at random, and you click the one you think the funniest, cutest, fairest. A system in the background registers all clicks and makes a ranking out of them.
And even if you are not particulary interested in the ranking of certain pictures, the sites still offer longtime fun and amazement in those boring hours. And while I really got good laughs out of The Funniest the pictures I adore most are from The Fairest because it shows absolutely awe-inspiring nature pictures.

While you can argue if this is funny…

…you can’t really argue that this is an really fair picture:

There’s good promotion. There’s epic promotion. And then there’s promotion that sways you to take initiative yourself.
The last kind is probably the best one, because when you talk about and think actively about a product, whatever it may be, you are more inclined to remember it than if you just saw an ad on TV while zapping. And “thinking about” brings me back to the topic at hand:

The Thinking Blog is holding a big giveaway to celebrate its first anniverary. The price is a sparkling new, completely waterproof Laptop from RuffPC.

I can’t imagine a better promotion for a blog. Because what do bloggers need? Computers. Better yet, Laptops so they can blog wherever they are at the moment. And if the Laptop is shock resistent and weatherproof that is just a huge bonus.

The only thing you have to do to have a shot at the price is blog about the contest. And even if you don’t win, you get a free link back to your blog from the Thinking Blog, which has according to the site, more than 1600 subscribers and I-don’t-know-how-much daily visits. So it’s a win-win situation!

What are you waiting for?


P.S. The line “a winner is you”, which was voted fifth worst video game line ever, is from Pro Wrestling on the NES.

From the people who claim 300 is a true story, comes the tale of a nations birth (well actually it comes from Adult Swim) - 1776

Cheesy? Maybe. Accurate? Hell no. But funny non the less!

And as a comparison the real 300 trailer:

All it takes is a good or just innovative video, to get the fans going in making their own interpretation of it. And sometimes the mockup of the video is even better or at least more funny than the original, as with this example:

Step 1: Take a rock video

Step 2: ???

Step 3a: Make a similar song and video referencing oversold and former popstars instead of living-on-the-edge rockstars, and use image samples instead of real video footage to make is look poorly done, but focus on the lyrics:

Step 3b: Use the exact same video, but add characters from a game to it, and write a song about the game:

Sometimes people get on your nerves. That is perfectly fine, not everyone will always have a real good time with everyone else. But when your roommates and coworkers become a major source of your frustration, sometimes you just have to vent. And the blog Passive Aggressive Notes is a witness of such actions. The guys over there hunt all the notes that stressted out people write for their neighbords, roommates or coworkers when they are fed up with their action. Such nice notes include:

Oh, how passivly aggressive!

The website Dumb Little Man posted 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches recently.
While most of the at least I have known long enough, they may be new to some not as well-versed with google or boolean operations in general. Anyhow, I still learned a few new tricks to get better results there, like using the tilde (~) for similar words or using double-dots (..) as a num-range indicator.

Lifehack.org wrote about 15 cool Firefox tricks. While half of them, like keyboard shortcuts and making the icons smaller via the view-menu are rather obvious, and at least by my definition, not especially cool, other like speeding up the fox via HTTP-pipelining and limiting Firefox’s RAM usage are really helpful in configuring the browser. In the same vain is the tip for writing Firefox to the harddrive when minimized so it does not use any more RAM at all - that one really is neat!

I am pretty much swamped with work right now, programming the interface and protocoll for our new machine, doing the system administration stuff (as there is always something wrong when Windows systems are involved) so I’ll keep the posts short and witty for a while. But the long stuff will come back too, I promise.

So here’s for now, a name generator that translates your name into japanese kanji, arabic, hindi, hieroglyphs and even Tengwar (elfen script from J.R.R. Tolkien).

Found on the Thinking Blog.

Sometimes you just have to wonder in what order newsstations and newsmags put their respective news. Not that there aren’t enough newsworthy stories happening all around the globe every day, with people (still) getting killed in Iraq, Dafur, etc. and all the political stuff that happens around the clock.

But somehow CNN probably thought it would interest much more people to hear about “Sheryl Crows toilet paper square”, “Heather Mills tumbling out of a dance show” or that a suspect bolted out of a local court room “hollering for mom”.

I never really thought of CNN as one of the best news around, there are lots of better informed ones, and especially more objective ones. But this frontpage just screams “boulevard tabloid” to me:

Found on the Applegeeks Blog

One day I will order a meal at our local McDonald’s like this:

We all knew the Master Chief from Halo was badass. As was Samus Aran from Metroid long, long, before him. Now the time has finally come for the two to battle it out in a big city brawl. And to make things worse the hive is also swarming there.
So much for the “story” of this brilliant machinima. What really made my jaw drop here is the animation which is top-notch. Never before have I seen such fluid and perfectly choreographed fighting in a fan-made game video. There are a few scenes reminiscent of the Matrix action, but other than that it looks very original. As if the fight between Master Chief and Samus wasn’t enough of brilliantly choreographed styling, when the two have to team up against the hive they let hell loose upon them, double-team style.

I just wish that you would actually be able to do all these crazy moves in the video games!

Sorry for not updating in a while but I’m really stressed completely at work since a new project started last week, and we got meetings and stuff all over the place… gotta drive 2 hours to another one tomorrow 6 o’clock in the morning… *sigh*

Anyway, I saw the movie 300 a few days ago, and while I really wanted to like it, the best thing about it I can say is that the action was very cool. Story- and character-wise I would have anticipated more from the creator of Sin City.

But nontheless, this edition of VG Cats is genius, mixing Mario and the probably most-shown-scene from 300:

Found on the great webcomic “Ctrl+Alt+Del”:

And it’s true, Windows Vista does that kind of things to you!

The guys over at JibJab got some great new animations going. As always, they parody political (mis-)happenings. The first one, “What we call the news” shows how TV news humbly started in the ’60s and what they have become today. The second clip “Nuckin’ Futs” is a summary of the events in 2006, sung by children.
Sit back and enjoy the show: