xtex.org

natashavc:

Meta humor: circa 2010

Meta humor: circa 1988

clarification question?
panicked bullshit explanation…?
meaningless comic non sequitur!
fake laughter!
relief.

And while we’re on the topic, some similar but funny bullshit happened on The Onion the other day and then there’s the gold standard, “Truth in Advertising” (2001), which is always worth a revisit.

I’ve been pals with Jon for a couple of years now and he is as gracious as he is talented and funny. Here’s an example: After we recorded this episode I tried to hijack him into doing a quick sketch for Web Soup in the bathroom. I KNOW I KNOW it sounds terrible. Jon, who I later discovered was late for something, was actually going to do it anyway. When I realized (fortunately) that my idea was stupid and I was taking advantage of his time I immediately released him of any further obligation, BUT HE REALLY WOULD HAVE DONE IT.  That’s how far down the niceness hole Jon Hamm goes. That sentence was unintentionally filthy but I would nonetheless like you to join me in a rousing round of applause for Jon right now, whatever else you may be doing.

Incidentally ‘Niceness Hole’ was the name of my anime cosplay band.

Number 5: Jon Hamm

Jon Hamm discusses his lost SNL sketch, Chris doesn’t understand how beards work, Jonah is a star-maker and Matt likes the Dave Matthews Band.

[MP3] [ITUNES] [RSS]

“Zoo Gang Part 10”

Now this is how to spend an Oscar Sunday.

(NOTE: It’s not what it looks like. Get my mind out of the gutter, pervert.)

Now THIS, good people, is the textbook definition of “lemonade” from that irritating saying about lemons. Professional Australian Christiaan Van Vuuren has apparently been placed under strict quarantine due to TB. To cope with the isolation, he started making music videos in his hospital room under the name Fully Sick Rapper.

Good on ya, mate! And let this be a lesson to all of you lazy creatives with no excuse for not making stuff! It’s like my grandpappy always said, “Don’t wait until you get TB to make cool shit.” He was prophetic that way.

Follow Christiaan’s medical steeplechase at @FullySickRapper on Twitter or see his other “keeping insanity at bay” vids on his youtube page.

via @paix120

Grace! Charm! Wit!

Showing up to accept a Razzie right before the Oscars? C’mown! Get outta my heart already!! Sandra, or “Lady Tom Hanks” as I like to think of her, kicks much ass.

I nominate Sandy as America’s girlfriend.

If you’re in LA, direct yourself to the Improv on Melrose tonight, March 6th, for two shows at 7:30 & 9:30. I’ll be headlining with support from a pile of great comics. Come by. Bring your favorite portable electronic device so I can tag it with my name.

Tix and info here.

Aces!

This is the best iPhone text conversation I’ve ever had.

So my very special lady, knowing what joy I got from her Christmas gift to me, went to eBay and bought me this gorgeous relic from Apple’s history.

The Apple III is particularly notable because it was, in fact, a commercial failure, designed, for the first time instead of by Steve Wozniak, by the marketing department intent on creating a premium version of the Apple II for business use. Adjusted for inflation by today’s rates, the Apple III would have cost roughly $11-20,000. One reason for its failure is that Steve had already turned his attention to his new project, the Macintosh.

I love having it around as a museum piece, but also as a monument to what can happen when the market is misjudged, and as a reminder that even the gods can do it wrong from time to time. (And adding to the ill fate of the Apple III, this particular one was damaged in shipping, so you can see a giant emblematic crevice in the disk drive. Poetic.)

But the best part of the whole thing: the CPU came packaged in this gorgeous leather carrying case, with the Apple logo embossed. Just look at it.

Look at it. If you ask me, this thing is worth more than the computer itself. I’m thinking that come late April, I just might find myself using it as an iPad case.

Why is it that with online bill payment systems, the bigger, more bureaucratic the organization, the worse the user experience when I want to give them my money? Isn’t that counterintuitive?

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to keep tabs on how much I’m spending on utilities by manually paying online every month (as opposed to setting up automatic payments). So I’ve had to grow accustomed to a variety of bill paying models.

Without a doubt, the most frictionless is SoCal Gas Company.

I click the link in the email, log in with 1Password, my bank info is already in the system, I click Make Payment and then Confirm, and I’m done. It’s not pretty, but it’s simple, straightforward and it knows who I am.

Above, you see Time Warner Cable, who provides my TV and Internet. They put some money into making it a little prettier, with custom iPhone-style buttons. But then, there are things like dropdown menus with custom interaction that won’t drop down unless you click the disclosure arrow. It gets me every time. And then I have to navigate through three menus to tell it how I want to pay. And worst yet, it doesn’t retain my bank info, so I have to enter that every time, from memory.

And this a brief tangent, but what’s the deal with making a user enter the same account number or email address TWICE? Does that add extra security? No, because if you’re like me, you copy from the first field and paste into the second field. Do most users actually enter then number twice manually, and then, on the off-chance they’ve made a clerical error, even notice that the two long strings of numbers don’t match? That’s pure idiocy, and I’m certain that whatever UX designers include that only do so because they’ve seen it on other sites.

But the worst worst offender (it should come as no surprise) is my health insurance provider, Blue Shield of California. Until a few months ago, they didn’t even have an online bill payment system. I’d literally call customer service every month and give the rep my credit card number. Then, finally, the fire under their ass got hot enough that they built one. And I went to use it. And it was UNUSABLE. Didn’t seem to know who I was, or what to do with me, even thought I’d made an online account and everything. So I called customer support and they told me, “Yeah, we’re getting a lot of calls like this. You probably shouldn’t use that yet because it’s got a lot of problems.”

I feel like a kid who walks into a store holding a wad of cash and none of the sales people want to help me. It’s 2010, and the web should not feel like that.

“Ironing techniques by professional craftsmen (shirt)” - プロの職人によるアイロンがけテクニック(ワイシャツ)

This short instructional film showcases unmatchably masterful ironing technique that we’d all do well to learn from, but it’s also one of the most absorbing, delicious demo videos I’ve ever seen.

via Joel Zimmer, from a series of similarly beautiful instructional videos at Garra.jp (WARNING: ALL-FLASH and Japanese)

A plucky New Zealand manufacturer is about to start selling jet packs to people for $75,000. So far no license is required and they can propel humans up to a mile in the air at 60 mph.

Statisticians expect millionaire playboy deaths to go up 112%.

via GOOD Blog

atsween:

Twitter: The Criterion Collection

What if Twitter… came to life?

We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.

This is what they gave us.

We hope you enjoy it.

@poeks & @sween

Yes, just fantastic. Thanks to Jason and Jen. And special thanks from me to @biorhythmist, who is an inspiration to us all but mostly me.

Tonight on Web Soup, THIS GUY happens.

Tune in for the new season at 8PT/7CT right after Attack of the Show on G4! New segments, new night and a bigger studio so accusations of larger laugh track will abound! Plus, vaginae!

Web Sooooooooooooooooooup!

Number 4: Rob Huebel & Motion City Soundtrack

Rob Huebel (Human Giant, Children’s Hospital) finds a dog, Motion City Soundtrack plays a song, Jonah has a fake last name, Chris drinks out of a bowl and Matt likes the Dave Matthews Band.

[MP3] [ITUNES] [RSS]

I have seen a lot of music videos in my lifetime. I was there when MTV started. I remember Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing, and MJ’s Thriller, and I can say without exaggeration THIS IS MY NEW FAVORITE MUSIC VIDEO. The Mouse-trappy Rube Goldbergness of it all. A triumph!

I guess EMI smartened up and let them make their vids embeddable again. Smart move. This one is go to blow up like Vesuvius.

Well done, chaps!!!

via @EvilQueenBeryl

“Lemonade sketch” from Your Bad Self

This one from the Irish sketch show Your Bad Self makes me laugh. You like to laugh, don’t you? You like to [laugh], don’t you?

I’ve only ever heard a couple of covers of Hard ‘n Phirm songs but this one may be my fave.

via @JesseFromCanada

SHAKEDOWN!

“I’m wearing a bow tie right now, and it looks great.”

-

Jesse Thorn, my pal and partner needs no time to recover from some utterly classless attack from the proprietor of a fairly popular I’m told web comic.

Dirty pool, Penny Cartoon.

These photos were taken this past weekend while I was doing stand-up at the Punch Line in San Francisco (btw, thanks to everyone who came out–the shows were friggin fun!). They are all the product of Hipstamatic, a super kick-ass vintage camera app for the iPhone. Nerds have been swooning over this for the last couple of months, and now I see why. It allows you to swap lenses, flashes and films to create Mad Men era-looking images. It’s $1.99, and with in-app purchasing of extra lenses and whatnot, you’ll spend about $8 total, which is still aces in my book.

LET ME BE CLEAR: I don’t claim to be a photographer. I’m just a dude who travels a lot and takes craploads of pictures. This app made that more fun. Things like flash burn, saturation and worn edging were all products of different lens, flash & film configurations. In some cases I took the same pic with different settings just to test the range of image processing. Also, I did my best to keep anything too contemporary out of the shots to make them look authentically old.

And no, they are not paying me to say these things. I don’t even know who “they” are. I’m glad we resolved this. Wanna grab a pizza?

SIDENOTE! The original Hipstamatic was a toy camera created in 1982 by two graphic designing brothers in the Twin Cities who were tragically killed before they were able to mass produce it. Only 157 were made. Read more about that here or visit the surviving brother’s tribute blog, The Great Hipstamatic 100.

SIDESIDENOTE! The song in the slideshow is called “Stratus and Cumulus” and is from a late 50s album of science songs produced by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. One of their other songs, “Why Does the Sun Shine?” was covered by They Might Be Giants for its eponymous 1993 EP.