Rule no. 1: Catch the first Pokemon you encounter in each route/cave/whatever and nothing else. If you fail to catch it, too bad, continue onwards. Rule no. 2: If your Pokemon faints, consider it dead and release it. In 2010 a 4chan user posted
these rules for making Pokemon more of a challenge, as well as a short comic on his exploits in a world where Pokemon can die. The "
Nuzlocke" comic became wildly popular, spawning dozens of elaborate offshoots in
comic and
story form.
[more inside]
posted by melissam
on Dec 3, 2011 -
15 comments
Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities: We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction
p of randomly distributed
committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value
pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time,
Tc, taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.
[.pdf] [more inside]
posted by troll
on Jul 26, 2011 -
56 comments
Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
Canadian horror flick
Pontypool (
trailer) is a modern zombie tale quite unlike any other. Loosely based on a
dense, complicated novel by Tony Burgess and
inspired by Orson Welles'
War of the Worlds, it tells the story of Grant Mazzy, a grumbling yet likable radio host (played by veteran character actor Stephen McHattie) whose penchant for
philosophical ramblings gets him booted from Toronto to the sleepy winter pastures of Pontypool, Ontario. One bleak morning, as the outspoken Mazzy chafes against no-nonsense producer Sydney Briar,
disturbing news begins rolling in of a series of
bizarre and violent incidents sweeping the town. Trapped in their church basement broadcasting booth,
Mazzy, Briar, and intern Laurel-Ann Drummond struggle to understand the odd nature of the crisis and warn the wider world before it's too late. But this is no ordinary virus, and they find their efforts may be causing far more harm than good. You can watch the film on YouTube horror channel Dead By Dawn (
1 2 3 4 5 6 7), but if you're pressed for time you can also experience it in its more logical form: as
a one-hour BBC radio drama voiced by the original cast. And after the credits, make sure not to miss
the film's playful non-sequitur coda.
posted by Rhaomi
on Feb 25, 2011 -
49 comments
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
Bacon Cat in the New York Times With the presidential race heating up and the financial bailout package passing Congress on Friday, the New York Times thought this was the perfect time for a hard hitting look at
straight, single men who own cats. So of course they wanted input from author John Scalzi, who by virtue of the fact that he is married, is not single. He does own
Bacon Cat though.
posted by COD
on Oct 4, 2008 -
46 comments
StupidFilter is a work in progress which aims to
recognize online stupidity programmatically.
Keep in mind we grade stupidity on a scale of 1 to 5. Someone might get a 1 or 2 for a comment that used no punctuation, whereas a comment consisting of nothing but text message abbreviations with a dash of LOLLLLL thrown in for good measure would probably rate a solid 4 or 5. There is a certain amount of subjectivity, and our software is aware of that; scoring will be normalized to eliminate excessively generous or harsh estimations of stupidity. Read some examples of "the tyranny of idiocy" in their collection of
Random Stupidity .
posted by amyms
on Oct 18, 2007 -
69 comments
If you enjoyed
Supermarket 2.0, you'll love
brgr, aka
Burger 2.0! Yes, it's your basic "if your hamburger were like a website/web celebrity/software product/tech company/buzzword" schtick, but
some of them are funny. My faves [inside].
posted by wendell
on Aug 26, 2007 -
14 comments
At the beginning was the noosphere. The existence of a "sphere of ideas", beyond the "sphere of life" (biosphere) and the "sphere of matter" (geosphere) was apparently first postulated by the pioneering Russian-Ukrainian geochemist
V.I. Vernadsky. Vernadsky thought not only that the biosphere had entirely reshaped the geosphere, but that the burgeoning noosphere of interconnected thought would ultimately change the biosphere just as much.
French jesuit and paleontologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin took the concept and
ran with it...(more inside)
posted by Skeptic
on Nov 28, 2006 -
24 comments
Dog Poo Girl : "A woman and her dog are riding the Seoul subways. The dog poops in the floor. The woman refuses to clean it up, despite being told to by other passengers. Someone takes a picture of her, posts it on the Internet..."
posted by starscream
on Aug 11, 2005 -
104 comments
Christian Video Games set to make comeback? Tired of destroying the same old cliched monsters, day in day out? Want to engross yourself in a more morally sound, Religious video game experience? Well if the Christian gaming community has their way, we'll soon all be playing them (or at least a few % of gamers):
"As believers in Christ, we pray that God will be glorified through our work and that each of us draw nearer to him as we develop and grow as a business," the Christian game company says
posted by 0bvious
on May 24, 2005 -
57 comments
New Year's Tradition: Banishing Words (yes, I've done this before) L.S.S.U has been making lists since 1976, but after all the censorship battles of the last year, they probably should be using less threatening terminology than "banished". Still, most of the terminology in this Hall of Shame list certainly deserves to be discouraged, derided and degraded.
Of course, Creative Deity Matt Groening does his own annual list of
Forbidden Words, and some webhead has developed a cool webtool:
The Forbidden Words Flagger.
posted by wendell
on Dec 31, 2004 -
31 comments
William Safire on "the izzle": "
And now, in the pages of The New York Times, there it is — a word modified with the ubiquitous izzle. Some clever Times copy editor, for a June article about Chrysler's new 300C sedan, created the headline, "Fo' Shizzle, That Big Bad Chrysler Really Does Sizzle". So now that the gray lady herself has been izzled from the inside, is it time for everyone to wish one last fond farewizzle and shed the shizzle? (MTV interview mentioned in the article is
here.)
posted by taz
on Sep 21, 2004 -
33 comments
Harvard's Institute of Politics has created a short
test to measure where your political beliefs fit with college students across the country. You better sit down for this one:
I am a Traditonal Liberal ! From Secular Centrist
Matthew Yglesias. Take the test and see where you fall on the brightly colored chart.
posted by y2karl
on Apr 16, 2004 -
66 comments
