Results tagged “internets”

Having been blogging for a few years, I've developed a few annual traditions. This one's a favorite: Warning you off of lame April Fool's jokes on the web. Every year, I get called a curmudgeon, or lambasted for having no sense of humor. And every year, the jokes online get lamer and lamer.

I'd mentioned that Your April Fool's Day Joke Sucks two years ago, revisited the idea last year, and have been proud to have been joined in my assessment by luminaries such as Joshua Schachter and Andy Baio in taking a critical eye at this sort of thing.

The exception, of course, is if you're doing something truly hysterical or on a magnificent scale. But I fear we won't run into too many of those.

Maybe I'm just a pushover, but I felt like there was something very charming and sweet about this video of a school project that I found on YouTube. It's a restaging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise during the time period of the original Star Trek series. Kirk as Caesar, Spock as Brutus, some Señor Wences-looking thing as the alien bad guy, and "We emptied out the garage" as set design. I love it! Especially since it features Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round", which was released well before these kids were born. (And yes, Star Trek went off the air decades before they were born.)

I find it oddly reassuring that kids today, with access to iTunes and the ability to make (pretty decent-looking!) green-screen starfield affects at home, are also still clearly having fun making goofy home movies with homemade costumes. I sure hope their English teacher gave them an A.

If you wanna see more, check out the outtakes and bloopers.

What makes lolcats appealing is that it's simultaneously obscure and accessible. It's an inside joke told in an online lingua franca, but with a bit of effort anyone can become an insider.

"An in-joke used to be constrained by geography and who you knew socially," says Anil Dash, occasional lolcat critic and vice president of Six Apart, which creates several popular blog-software programs. "This is a very large in-joke" that blurs the old distinction "between Net geeks and the normals," he says.

I've seen some bloggers put up media quotes on their sites as examples of their credibility and expertise. I've already got the ridiculous photo of myself at the microphone up there, but thanks to my most recent appearance in the Wall Street Journal, I am sorely tempted to put "occasional lolcat critic" on my sidebar. Whatcha think?

Interesting. About a year ago, I wrote Pardon Me For Being Forward, which got a pretty decent amount of traffic. I've still never gotten it forwarded to me by someone who thought I'd appreciate it, though I know people who have. After seeing it pop up as a link on a community site I frequent, I went looking for references to it.

The first one I found was Forward, at a British site. They omitted my line "God is a hoax." in the interest, I assume, of good taste. I had put that in there specifically because I thought it would prevent a lot of people from forwarding the rant as too offensive. They also substituted the Ken Ardley Playboys for the Star Wars Cantina Band.

I have no idea who the Ken Ardley Playboys are, and I'm too lazy too Google them. But I'm fascinated to think of these little bits travelling across the pond and being rewritten into something less funny and less offensive. Particularly because this U.K. version keeps the reference to the IRS, peculiarly.

I just wish I could've watched the path that little tossed-off rant took on its travels around the world.