Pubic Static Void Man

From cougarfang: NEW TAIWANESE INTERNET MEME TEACHES HUMANS TO LIVE FOREVER MAKE RAMEN IN UNDER THREE MINUTES.

The lyrics are in Japanese and the subtitles are in Chinese, making it bewilderingly incomprehensible to anyone who understands neither. :D

I'm reminded of the part in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where the holographic librarian explains the concept of memes to Hiro using an ancient Sumerian bread recipe as an example. It may be a self-propagating thought virus, but it's a useful self-propagating thought virus!

(Does anyone who has read that book, or Richard Dawkins's 1976 book on memetics, find it creepy when a bunch of nerds start chanting "badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom" in unison? DEAR GOODNESS WE'RE ALL INFECTED)

BONUS VIDEO: This is the trippiest Super Mario Bros. tribute I have seen in a while. Gratuitous Obama cameo ftw!

CAN I HEAR YOU SAY RYYYYY-DUH

(RYYYYY-DUH!!)

DANSEN.

This happened at 10:15 this morning. My office didn't evacuate, which, in retrospect, was probably not a good thing.

I'd be outraged if it wasn't so amusingly insensitive. What the hell were they thinking?

Internet conspiracy theorists are already smelling a cover-up. While I am not one to lend Internet conspiracy theorists any credibility, I worry that this time they may be right, if only because the DD's cover story is so ridiculously inept. From the evidence, I'm guessing it was a poorly conceived Air Force training exercise, or some kind of emergency false alarm.

(ps. 4/27 NEVAR FORGET)

From ece_drihten:



Believe it or not, this is by the managing editor of Kotaku.

(edit) no it's not

Irish Power Rangers! Just as cheesy as actual tokusatsu!

The dialogue is clunky. The CG is worse. The team is a warrior, a rogue, a ranger, and a cleric. The power suits are color-coded enchanted suits of armor, there's a new toy tie-in almost every episode, and the Megazord is a dragon. THIS IS AWESOME.

Some fanboy has recorded the entire series on YouTube, which you can watch here. Joy!

(also, "WHAT FAERIE TRICKERY IS THIS?" is the new "wtf")

I'm sorry. I know I should be offended, because it's racist, and blatantly so--the knee-jerk defense of "blah blah blah RACE CARD, obfuscating REAL ISSUES, etc." doesn't apply here, given her choice of words--but this is just so adorably naive.

Video footage below (read the article first for context):



I want to give her a smile and a warm cup of tea and a long friendly chat about the history of Chinese immigration to the United States. Provided I can bring myself to stop laughing.

(Don't bother reading the comments section, though--it's the usual gallery of self-righteous asstards from the Internet. Asstards to the left! Asstards to the right! Asstards on the front page, volleying and thundering, storming with snot and smell...)

whut

Hey guys! Here's an idea for a completely insane postmodernist novel. There's this dude, see, in the Netherlands or some other quasi-socialist Western European country, who's the great-grandnephew of crazy sunflower saint Vincent van Gogh. He has his great-granduncle's passion for art and his great-grandaunt's ideological zeal (Vincent Van Gogh's youngest sister was an early feminist), only he doesn't have a revolution to fight in or a Gauguin to quarrel with. So he goes into filmmaking, gets a feel for the political zeitgeist, wins a few film festivals, and after 9-11 and the surge in North African immigration in the Netherlands he discovers his ideological nemesis in--get this--radical fundamentalist Islam. In between writing scripts for popular reality shows he writes angry, unapologetically racist Strom Thurmond-meets-Hunter S. Thompson screeds for radical blogs and right-wing magazines. He throws his weight behind the ill-fated war in Iraq, and manages to incense the ire of the entire civil rights movement by releasing a film equating all of Islam, not just the radical right, with terror, violence, and misogyny. He's made a lot of enemies now; he's made a reputation as an iconoclast and a self-proclaimed "village idiot," lots of publishers are rejecting his stuff and folks in other countries are making noises about wishing he'd go away. He's gone ideologically off the deep end, going from testing the boundaries to sprinting as far past them as he can go. Folks are telling him to take it easy, think things through, cut back on the vitriol and lay off the smack (literal smack, which he uses with unapologetic aplomb). But he's too far gone, now, he's too far off the deep end and too in love with his own rhetoric; he's found his voice and his movement; he's smoking absurd numbers of cigarettes and downing liquor like Kool-Aid; he's writing furiously. He's in van Gogh mode, now; he's made a name for himself, stirred the hearts of a people with ominous and vaguely familiar incitements to hate and violence; he's lived up to his heritage in this horribly twisted way. He's become the voice of a generation. And then an angry kid who hero-worships al-Qaeda shoots him dead. And that kid leaves his own literary mark on the world, an angry clash-of-civilizations call to arms knifed to the back of van Gogh's lung. Murdered with a poem! And so van Gogh is killed by his own furious desire for self-expression, by the power of art for which he lived, killed by the bigotry for which he lived, a martyr to both free speech and the enduring spirit of hatred and intolerance in his time. Despite all the controversy around his life and work he is honored as a hero. His countrymen bury him with a bottle of liquor and a pack of cigarettes. In a twist of irony bound to confuse generations of future art history students, who already struggle with getting their late nineteenth century painters mixed up, the monument his supporters erect in his honor is titled The Scream. Brilliant!

If you thought, "Kevin, there's no way you're smoking enough crack to have thought of that," you're right. All of it actually happened.

I sort of used to listen to Megadeth. By sort of I mean I got a couple songs off somewhere, I don't know where from (Napster? someone's mix CD?)--it was good angry headbangy music for when I was in that kind of mood. Now I'm glad I don't.

Why? Because Megadeth is full of shit.

In 2007, Megadeth released an album called "United Abominations." That's hardly surprising in itself--metal bands have long employed deliberately offensive language, imagery, or album art to generate controversy and earn anti-establishment cred. Often it isn't even so much a set of definite political assertions as much as a ploy to piss people off. (Who really gives a shit, anyway, as long as the music is loud and tight and face-fuckingly hardcore?) That's what metal does, and I can kind of respect that. But the weird thing about "United Abominations" is that it actually does make a coherent political statement. It condemns the United Nations for, among other things, orchestrating 9/11, manufacturing WMD evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, and plundering poor countries in the name of humanitarianism. In short...it's Bill O'Reilly.

Yes. This was 2007, when the Bush administration was coming under fire over Guantanamo and the waterboarding scandal, and popular support for the Iraq War was plunging, and there was evidence of the Bushies cutting funding for research that was turning up evidence for a link between global climate change and global warming--and Megadeth chose to attack the U.N. as its Oppressive Authority Figure of choice. (Which, I remind you, Bush trampled all over to get his war in Iraq, when the U.N. tried to stop him--anyone who was following the papers back then knows that's why the left opposes the war in the first place.) The band sided with the radical right at a time when the radical right was employing every dirty trick in the book to squelch the opposition, and chose to attack instead what was possibly the only international check against one of the most authoritarian presidencies in American history. And it framed its position as an anti-establishment, anti-Orwellian screed against the Man.

This from a band that previously produced an album titled The System Has Failed.

whut

Now, of course, the U.N. has more pressing issues to deal with than the opinions of some has-been anarchist-turned-libertarian metalhead. Like, oh, preventing terrorist attacks, shooting down bullshit WMD evidence from the CIA, and stopping First World powers and Third World warlords alike from plundering humanitarian aid. But Mark Goldberg, a U.N.-sponsored (but otherwise unaffilated) blogger who usually writes about things like AIDS prevention programs in Africa and peacekeeping in Haiti, was so offended that he had to write a line by line rebuttal. This rebuttal is amazing. And not just because I agree.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine responded:

"Whether my facts are right or wrong, and whether you agree with me or not, I know I have (my fans') support most of the time and that is all that matters. I would rather feel right and be wrong with the semantics or facts in the song and have expressed my right to free speech, than to feel wrong and be right and sit back, like the rest of the cowards of the world, not saying anything."

Now doesn't that sound familiar? Goldberg thought so too. He commented that there's a word for what Mustaine describes--and it's this one.

Metalheads leaving comments on Megadeth's site are saying the usual left-wing fight-the-power catchphrases in support, like "it's a good thing there are alternative media sources telling us the TRUTH about the suits that control the WORLD!!!111" Alternative news sources? What, like Fox News? Or post-9-11 CNN? Omg so edgy. Seriously, even IndyMedia is not going to back up Mustaine on this one.

Big Brother is a friend of the people. Big Brother will stand with you against the oppressor, Emmanuel Goldstein. Big Brother will lynch anyone in a suit, regardless of whoever really controls the power.

Metal is dead, guys. Even if you ever honestly believed it represented the little guy, screaming out against the thousands of injustices a single monolithized oppressive entity doles out on a daily basis for the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo, this song proves that it no longer represents you. No, Megadeth hasn't sold out to the Man. It's much worse than that. Megadeth is the Man.

Of course, I'm just saying that because I'm obviously part of the global conspiracy to make America less awesome. I mean, here I am in New York and I have a U.N. flag hanging on my wall. WHAT'S UP WITH THAT HUH