Double Rainbow

Main Course:


Dessert:


Mrs. Pony and I can't get this out of our heads. It has invaded our household. It is invading the internet also. Memeness and remixes aside, it's difficult to top the majesty of the original (although the autotune by the Gregory Brothers comes close).

Something Neat That Germans Do

Internet 101

Some of these things may be new, but you'll have seen many of these things before. You won't have seen all these things one after the other, though. Unless you've seen these lists before, I guess.

http://www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com

http://www.youshouldhavealsoseenthis.com/

Compiled by @greg_rutter

For those who, like me, didn't know about AutoTune and Meme...

I thought this was very informative. Thanks Professor Wierd Al!

Internet Meme Generation Discussion

Behold, as these three guys take you on an hour and a half long discussion of Internet meme generation. This isn't just an exploration of the memes themselves--these guys take a serious look at the groups and subgroups where the ideas seem to continually originate from.

Of particular interest is the part early on about 4chan's /b/ imageboard (beginning at about 3:45) Rapid combination and recombination of ideas and content, along with complete anonymity seems to be a recipe for exactly the kind of hive mind we've been talking about.


Warning: This hour and a half long video is an hour and a half long.

Amazon's Epic Day of Fail

Super sorry for the long post, but I think this is one of the most fascinating events I've witnessed on the Internet. In case you missed it last week, here's what you missed:

Amazon's got a sales ranking system that determines what books are found in searches, which appear in in-house ads, and who gets on best seller lists. This all goes a long way towards increasing a book's sales popularity...

While it made the news on April 12, it looks like the first signs were in February, when Craig Seymour found that his memoir of a gay stripper had no sales ranking. When asked, Amazon replied that this was because his book was classified as an "adult product". News really only began to spread a week ago however when people noticed that LBGT books were deranked, en masse. This included an Ellen Degeneres biography, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, E.M. Forster's Maurice, books on gays in politics, self-help LBGT books, a children's book on homosexuality, etc (a community generated list, here).

From the NY Times:

Word of the problem started spreading across blogs and Twitter on Sunday after Mark R. Probst, the author of The Filly, a gay western romance for young adults, posted on his blog that several gay romances, including his, had lost their sales rankings on Amazon. Mr. Probst e-mailed Amazon and got a reply that said the company was excluding “ ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best-seller lists.”

Unfortunately for Amazon the Internet realized that this "adult material" did not appear to include heterosexual content, including such books as Ron Jeremy's Hardest Working Man in Show Business, others filled with Playboy centerfolds, and even a book entitled A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality was still ranked (and is still the top hit if you search for "homosexuality" at Amazon).

So here's where it gets fun: Twitter. Twitter! I had no idea the impact Twitter could have beyond telling everyone what color your poo was in the morning! (nor apparently did Amazon).

The shitstorm that followed started with thousands of Enraged Twitter Users using the #amazonfail thread. This quickly became the top trend in Twitter, beating out Easter and Jesus on the holiday weekend. Here, all the news about the Fail could be found in realtime as everyone repeatedly tweeted about the same pebble of breaking news that they found (probably on Twitter) and wanted to share with others (on twitter). Metafilter, Digg, Reddit, the major news groups, and pretty much any major blog had something to say about it, and proudly the internet united behind our LGBT brothers and sisters!

Meanwhile, Amazon's PR response was this: “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed.”

The Internet, seeing this as being blown off with an inane, half-baked response and more importantly without an apology of any kind, came back with the new Twitter tag, #glitchmyass, as everyone and their dog agreed that Amazon was full of crap. Serious rioting ensued, complete with bombs (A googlebomb), petitions (over 24,000 sigs), open protest letters, calls for public crucifixions, logos, t-shirts, facebook groups, theme music... And of course amazonfail.com was for sale on ebay.

It turns out that while their PR group was high on easter peeps others at Amazon were completely panicking:

By this time, Amazon.com had upgraded the problem to Sev-1... Sev-1 is reserved for the most critical operational issues and often are sent up the management chain to the senior vice president level.

----

...So it's a week later, the books have their ratings back (Twitter kept track of that, too, but I forgot the #tag), and here's what the Internets have come up with:

Official explanation from Amazon: A Glitch

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.

[Note: still no actual apology...]

From an Amazon worker on the inside: The French!

A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.

From the popular internet: A hacker terrorist has claimed responsibility for the event!

Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code"... The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon. I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere ain't so bad.

And still others don't care what caused it, but continue to party up the hate towards Amazon until they officially apologize.

So anyway...

It's amazing how fun it is to be a part of a mob mentality, especially when you're so obviously on the right side! I admit that early Monday (last week) morning (after only a few hours of sleep with a migraine, you see) I may have possibly written an e-mail to Amazon... it could be that this letter might have contained a few phrases such as, "less intelligence than a pile of bricks made from bird feces... demand a public apology... may never buy from Amazon again," and, "...require sensitivity training" (+_+). But I didn't send it. Probably. And of course now in hindsight... yeah this is a huge mistake on Amazon's part, but they're a huge company, and with some serious, complicated technical stuff they have to deal with. An apology is definitely still in order I think, but I can't imagine this was anything really malicious on the inside of Amazon if it hit a bunch of genres the same way... I could see how the Reproductive & Sexual Medicine people might not be as vocal, you see.

Anyway. I just thought that was a fun break from the other break I was taking from studying.

To protect the peace in space, you've got to defeat Darth Vader

From IO9.



Description and partial translation, here. If anyone's got the cantina song... omgpleeezepostokthxbai. ^_^

(Hopefully this isn't Rickrolled yet...)

Edit: i completely missed the cantina song mixed in there and I don't know how. I'm thinking I was still recovering from a cataleptic fit.

The Life of an Internet Meme

Comment by Shaper_pmp of Reddit:

All memes go through this lifecycle:

1. Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny when you do.


2. Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme varies between mildly amusing and hilarious, depending on how it's used.


3. Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.


4. Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.


5. Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

ManBabies

A horrible horrible coworker sent me this horrible horrible site: ManBabies.com

Noteworthy stuff to note

Just a few things I came across while cleaning out saved browser tabs (yeah, that's right):

Big list of scifi. Truly the most useful thing to come out of iO9, but unfortunately they also feel the need to write about scifi porn all the time. While I feel I should applaud this, it really limits their audience and it's getting freaking annoying.

An example of the kind of thing we should be working on right now. But better.

More lego. Some we've seen before, but I love that someone decided to build a model of those giant excavator things. Plus, it's got all of the steampunk Star Wars stuff. Plus I get to add the lego tag.

And finally, geeks partying it out! It's like burning man for non-hippies. I actually did an internship there (Ames) a long, long time ago, and I'm pretty sure I peed behind that building in the 4th image. So this looks like another tradition that's completely been absorbed by internet culture (e.g., booths for Instructables, Spore...).  Not that this is a bad thing, but I wonder if it's actually the same dozen people going to these events over and over again wearing different wigs, and the rest of the net just assumes we're participating by proxy in a wider world, but really, it's just them.