For whatever reason, I’m struggling with my writing schedule at the moment, and changes I’m trying to make haven’t worked so far. Thus, this week all I have is another video:

Either I’ll figure it out and proper articles will start appearing regularly again, or I’ll have to reconsider the schedule entirely.

Sometimes, jokes need explanation; TV Tropes says you’re not supposed to explain the punchline, just the context, but in the case of this joke the two aren’t really separable. Furthermore, this one requires a great deal of broad knowledge in order to make sense; more breadth of knowledge than any other joke I’ve encountered so far. This became clear to me in my relating it to American friends; I didn’t notice the amount you need to know for it while I was living in Ireland[1].
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I fear my occasional mirror dialogues may have a similar emotional arc to this video:

Cinema’s Greatest Mirror Pep Talk from FilmDrunkDotCom on Vimeo.
Created by Oliver Noble for FilmDrunk.com. For more information, including full list of movies, see http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2011/07/new-supercut-cinemas-greatest-mirror-pep-talks.

Newspaper headlines from The Simpsons:

Via waxy.org: the most awkward 404 page.

Maybe it’s shooting fish in a barrel, but I thought this was well done:

That’s not an ironic title, or one referring to some fictional work—Government Attic has secured the release of the NSA’s writing style guide, and BoingBoing cleaned it up, so that you can now find it on Scribd.

I love the fact that it includes a section instructing NSA writers not to use “bureaucratese”.

I think this is great:

Personally, I don’t think Turing would have been too impressed; also, could your thinking the bot is human in a case like this be considered a test failure on your part? That brings up one of my favorite rhetorical questions: “what do we do with humans who fail the Turing Test?”.

(This reminds me of my less-funny-but-possibly-still-amusing Dialogue with Eliza.)

With the end of the world apparently approaching fast, here’s a mashup of disaster scenarios:

Eclectic Method – The Apocamix from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

Via the last psychiatrist, here’s the fantastic speech that Patton Oswalt gave to graduating seniors at his old high school. I think the beginning is funny, but the beginning isn’t really the point, as you’ll see when you read it.

The year is 2011, and sophisticated AIs carefully watch for arbitrage opportunities, tracking/correlating/analyzing vast amounts of data at split-second speed to keep ahead of their competitors even in comparatively small arenas.

That, or overly simplistic scripting that seemed clever when it was written fails to take certain conditions into account, leading to the $23,698,655.93 (& $3.99 shipping) book.

WHEREAS, hundreds of years have passed since it might have been excusable for any reasonable human to believe in the power of attempting to telepathically transmit thoughts to imaginary beings in the hope that these beings will alter conditions on Earth; and
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This is the summary:

• Local comic/musician goes to elementary school, plays song for kids.
• A friend of his videotapes this, both the performance and the kids’ (positive) reactions.
• Musician and friend later come back to empty classroom and record him performing a song with graphically sexual lyrics.
• Musician edits two sets of footage together to make it appear as if he sang the sexually-explicit song to the kids.
• Musician then puts edited version on YouTube and plays it at a local club’s comedy night.

Clearly the title of the post gives it away somewhat, but what do you think happened next?
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Here’s March’s companion to last November’s compilation:

This week’s gun-related amusing-but-disturbing short is—not, not “Tune for Two”, although in truth that’s probably better—“Wanna See Something Cool?”

Don’t believe me? Check out “3eanuts”.

Bits of this are just hilarious. The Pac-Man ghost-eating sound is probably my favorite.

The year is 2011, and sophisticated AIs carefully watch trends and track/correlate/analyze vast amounts of data to inform sophisticated maneuvers in the global markets.

Or, well, maybe a bunch of dodgy scripts are doing clumsy sentiment analysis on various volatile and imprecise social networks and rumormongering news services, and they can’t tell the difference between Anne Hathaway and Berkshire Hathaway.

Just in case you needed more evidence, here’s a particularly good demonstration that the drug war is racist and classist: “Mitch Daniels’ Disappearing Felony”.

Also, you really shouldn’t miss this proposal for a new illegal drug classification scheme.

I might have to read The Last Ringbearer, a Russian parody/response/fan-fiction piece set in Middle Earth around the end of the War of the Ring. See also: “Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) DVD, Part One.”[*] and Bored of the Rings.

This is a post about humor, taste, rape, offensiveness/offendedness, and limits on discourse, all centered on a three-panel webcomic about video games.

It’s rather long; I meant it as a tighter, more abstract, discussion of the points above, but got pulled into a lot of the specifics as I went through them.
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