Thanks Mike for bringing this to my attention: Hottest Heads of State list. Top of the list?
Yulia Tymoshenko Prime Minister of Ukraine
Obama is #15. Putin in a wifebeater is #24. There are 217 heads of state listed.
Seen on True Chip Till Death: the True Chip Awards Invite. The video’s only a minute and it’s good for a laugh if you’re a nerd:
Seen on Language Log. There’s a movie called Exit Through the Gift Shop — about street art disasters, mostly not relevant to my interests. However, the tagline is:
How awesome is that?
I heartily recommend the short story Searching for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder, published the other day on Tor.com. Four pages. Ten minutes of reading, fifteen max. You won’t regret it.
Ten years after my parents died, my therabot, Bob, informed me that I should seek help elsewhere. I blinked at his suggestion.
"I’ve already tried chemical intervention," I told his plastic grin. "It didn’t work." I scowled, but that did nothing to de-brighten his soothing, chipper voice.
Seen on True Chip Till Death: Shnabubula covers Bit Shifter’s "Reformat the Planet" on piano.
Normally I don’t care much for covers, nor for analog instruments covering digital songs, but this is really good.
Seen via Planet Debian:
I am passing on a message from my daughter Shailaja. She would like you to go here and vote for computer engineer. (Or news anchor if you want to annoy her father.)
What will Barbie do next?
Via Peter Swimm: a fascinating interview with the creator of Kobe Bryant Deathmatch Fiction.
A quote from the Kobe Bryant fanfic in question:
We chose to have our fight to the death in an abandoned factory in China. I flew over in my private jet and made sure I preserved my vital combat energies by abstaining from totally consensual intercourse with my perfect-10 stewardesses.
Instead, I reminisced about other NBA superstars who I have killed in action: Mel Turpin, Joe Barry Carroll, Benoit Benjamin, Stanley Roberts, Arvydas Sabonis, Mike Giminski, Bill Wennington and Edward Martini, who is not technically in the NBA or a superstar but a male nurse I mowed down in an unsolved hit-and-run homicide.
It’s fairly short (five minutes of reading?) so you might want to go read the whole thing (then again, maybe not). Lots of fascinating thoughts in the interview on the nature of fanfic and "serious literature". Also be sure to check out the Dirk Nowitzki fanfic, linked from the article.
Via Suzanne, an article about Lukeywes1234, a meme that had completely passed me by. Some of these videos are quite fabulous.
People were posting mashups of his videos and tributes to the kid. It was all classic, random YouTube idiocy. And then YouTube did something inexplicable: They yanked down Lukeywes1234’s channel.
Now if there’s one thing you should know about nerds, it’s that they don’t take too kindly to anyone smothering their self-expression. Lukeywes instantly passed from mere blip of the week into Internet legend. The tributes became more hyperbolic and Wagnerian.
Each meme illuminates something about 4chan. This one, like the crusade against the Church of Scientology, seems more and more like revenge memeing.
