Unlikely Words » the internets

Shit X says to Y random video idea generator

aaron cohen — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:37:58 +0000

You've seen, by now, the Shit Girls Say video that has spawned countless other videos of common/stereotypical things people of one group say to people of another group. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Hey, I'd really like to make one of these videos." NOW YOU CAN. With the "Shit 'So and Sos' Say to 'So and Sos' Video Random Idea Generator" you are mere moments away from your very own video idea. Click the button below to get your own idea TODAY!

So now you have your own video idea. Go out and make us proud! If you liked your video idea, share it below. Thanks to Andy for some help with the code.

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LOL

aaron cohen — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:52:21 +0000

Square is hiring all the best Silicon Valley talent, not Twitter, Zynga, or Facebook. This is good because I hope they put the companies that manage credit card transactions out of business. I actually did laugh out loud at the reaction.

Our recruiter does not give Square perfect grades for its recruiting, however. She insists the company is making a big mistake hiring so many Ruby on Rails developers, who tend to be 'hipsters with neckbeards.' We asked a source close to Square for his reaction to this concern, and he said, 'LOL.'

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Why? Because you’re a cow. Now shut up and consume your content.

aaron cohen — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:16:32 +0000

Kent Brewster's on Facebook's design changes, or rather people complaining about them. Shades of, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold," but a little more in your face. Props for posting it directly to FB, too.

Dear people who whine about interface changes on Facebook:

Unless you are paying money to advertise on Facebook, you are not a Facebook customer. As far as Facebook is concerned, you're not even a human being. You are one of an infinite herd of cows. Facebook (and its faithful ranch-hand Zynga) spreads a thick layer of content for you every morning, you chew it up all day, and they milk you for your lovely creamy clicks every night.

Sure, you might have been calved on the nearby Yahoo or MySpace farms, and you might someday slip under the pasture fence to the greener grass of Google+, but in the end ... you're a cow. Moo all you want about how Facebook went and moved the damn salt lick again; they're not going to listen.

Why? Because you're a cow. Now shut up and consume your content.

Via Joshua Nguyen / Dens

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It’s true

aaron cohen — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:15:27 +0000

Al Swearengen doesn't like anything, and Stellar.io knows this.

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Open letters to Bon Jovi

aaron cohen — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:07:25 +0000

Steve Jobs isn’t the problem here. The music industry is the problem—too many bad songs are the problem. It’s the reason the audience doesn’t roar when you talk about playing a new track or two that were added for a re-release of your greatest hits. If your greatest hits were from the last three years, imagine how much money you’d be making on album sales even beyond your touring.

In a letter from Jeremy Horwitz to Bon Jovi who recently said "Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."

Via

But then I also went back to look at all of the Open Letters to Bon Jovi I could find:

An Open Letter to Bon Jovi (Regarding Setlists)

An Open Letter to Bon Jovi (Regarding Palestine)

An Open Letter to Bon Jovi (Plea for Tickets)

An Open Letter to Bon Jovi (Crush Review)

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Making a living on Youtube

aaron cohen — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:40:00 +0000

Reading an article about how much money Rebecca Black made as a laughing stock of the internet and saw this nugget.

At 30,000,000 views, that lands Black and Ark Music Factory $20,000 – a 1000% return on investment.

Is that true? Google needs to monetize those views better.

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Random Facebook pages showing up in my feed

aaron cohen — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:07:16 +0000

The other day, I noticed a few items in my Facebook stream that I hadn't "Liked". I figured it was a glitch of some sort. Then it happened again today. I went and looked at my pages and there 10 or so pages I was subscribed to I'd never seen before and would never subscribe to. For instance, I found myself a fan of Phil Fischer, a Christian musician that just completed The Tea Party Song and is asking his fans for $113K so he can get it played on Christian radio. I emailed him to ask if he knew how I had ended up liking his page, and will update when I hear back. If you check his Facebook page, this seems to have happened to other people as well.

I couldn't find much else online about this happening to other people, except for this post on Facebook support. If this happened to you or you see any other info about it, let me know because I'm curious.

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Foursquare 3.0

aaron cohen — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:03:10 +0000

All along it seems like Foursquare has been trying to make it easier for everyone to make their own Feltron Annual Report. I'm OK with that. It's certainly what I like to use about it. Looking more closely in my account a couple months ago, I found the Stats page which says it's inspired by the Feltron reports. 3.0 described here.

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Newsweek

aaron cohen — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 02:36:57 +0000

I've been traveling and I saw the George Clooney Newsweek in the airport. Cripes... At what point does it get downgraded from a magazine to a pamphlet? I remember thinking that merging a website losing about $10 million a year with a magazine losing about $25 million a year didn't seem like a good idea... I had a couple tabs opens of articles I was going to link to about this whole thing, but I lost'em all a couple weeks ago and then forgot about it until I saw Clooney's mug staring back at me from what looked like a comic book.

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How to hire an SEO expert

aaron cohen — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:59:14 +0000

This is the standard against which all SEO experts should be measured. If your SEO consultant isn't a rapper you're really not spending your budget the right way.

Via Videogum, thanks Adam.

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Pets are Superheroes

aaron cohen — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:37:10 +0000

Pets are Superheroes is a new project Chris Piascik and I put together (check out our sweet domain, petsaresuperhero.es). Pet owners love their pets, and now they can give them the superhero treatment in an original drawing. We're really excited about getting this off the ground, thanks for helping us spread the word!

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Downgrading my iPhone 3G from iOS 4 to iOS 3.1.3

aaron cohen — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 21:23:50 +0000

In September, I made the mistake of upgrading my iPhone 3G from OS 3.1 to OS 4.0, making the phone a lot less useful and losing visual voicemail as a feature. (I had a big event coming up and Eventbrite told me their app would allow me to scan tickets with my phone. I said, "Really? It will work on a 3G running 3.0?" They said, yes, really. The event was looming and I needed to test the app ahead of time and so when it didn't work with 3.0, I upgraded to 4.0. Come to find out, the scanning didn't work on a 3G at all. Thank you, Eventbrite.) Since I upgraded, my 3G has been beset with some minor and major issues that make it much less useful than before. Some tasks, like browsing are usually OK, but Safari sometimes takes a while to load, other tasks like using Google Maps go from horribly slow to completely useless. Foursquare check ins can take minutes. The phone app stalls a lot when trying to make a call and, most importantly, visual voicemail does not work at all. I can still get voicemails, but there is no notification of their presence.

Yesterday, at Tim's suggestion I decided to try downgrading my phone. It did not go as planned. Recboot didn't work the way it was supposed to, and at one point, my phone was a brick for an hour. Immediately after downgrading to 3.1.3, I was left with a phone that didn't have any of my data, but did give me visual voicemail. The back up I made before starting was gone so I used a back up from 9/17 running 3.1.3.

The phone functions as it did then, much faster on Foursquare and Google Maps, and tethering works again. This would all be wonderful except I again don't have visual voicemail. I'm opposed to wiping it clean and starting over because I don't think I'll be able to download working versions of the apps I use.

I'm going to try to hang on for the iPhone 5, which will hopefully come out in July. Any ideas? Would jailbreaking the phone give me visual voicemail back?

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Update: Visual Voicemail is back after 4 months. After trying to reset the settings, I removed the AT&T Profile in the Profiles section of the Settings (I think Settings ---> Network Settings ----> Profiles). I restarted the phone after that and some test VMs I'd been leaving the last couple days showed up. I guess I don't have an excuse for not calling you back now.

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2010 Year In Review

aaron cohen — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:58:13 +0000

Continuing a tradition from 2008 and 2009, here's a look back at 2010 featuring some of my favorite posts on Unlikely Words and other stuff I did. Consider clicking through to see some things you might have missed.

This year, I had the incredible honor of guest editing Kottke.org (TWICE!), and that's about all I've ever wanted to do on the internet. With Scott, I created 815 Sentences About Lost, a project where I got 108 people (some of whom you've heard of), to write a total of 815 sentences about Lost. I made 2 Keep Calm posters: Fried Clam and Curry Prawn and Keep Calm and Fuck You ooo ooo oooo. Here's my offering to the Miracles meme: Fucking Beignets. Chris and I recapped Mad Men all season with original drawings and thoughts. Lastly, I stepped up my food game by producing and promoting some events like, Ice Cream Showdown!, the 2010 Boston Bacon & Beer Festival, and Guacaholics Anonymous. Here's an I Write Like Analysis I did before I Write Like fell off the face of the earth.

Even though it was 2009, I'd be remiss not to mention the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, which continues to bring in a lot of visitors, and the success of which was a giant surprise. Thank you, Snooki. To celebrate the final season of Lost, I watched Season 5 and transcribed Everything Hurley Said, Everything Sawyer Said, and in my first piece for Esquire.com (WHAT?!), Everything Locke Said. Later in the year, I did Everything Tracy Jordan Said.

I loved this picture of a guy biking upside down, this infographic showing Mars' failure at the Olympics, this picture imagining an after-school brawl between Calvin & Hobbes vs Christopher Robin and Pooh, and this picture of Kermit and Jim Henson.

Remember: Don’t Be Diculous, Kitten Thinks Of Nothing But Murder All Day, and
anything unrelated to elephants is irrelephant.

Someone took the time to calculate Charlie Brown’s Baseball Statistics, while someone else compared Massachusetts voting data to Netflix rental patterns to find that Cities That Voted for Scott Brown Like Paul Blart.

I liked The Pig & The Butcher, a video of Vadim the butcher breaking down a pig. The Red Sox traded for Bill Hall in a salary move more often seen in the NBA. Remember how big curling was at the Olympics or the I Can Walk Like A Penguin commercial from when you were growing up? "No, wait, there's an invisible monkey" was my favorite commercial this year, even though I'm not sure it even aired.

You know who impressed me this year? Surprisingly, Jimmy Fallon. The History of Rap with Justin Timberlake, Jimmy Fallon, and the Roots was really well done, as was this trailer for an imagined movie where Boo Boo kills Yogi for the reward money.

The Humpty Dance turned 20, Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride is even older, and my street flooded again.

Peyton Manning’s Interception Quote was great, and so was this Randy Moss Remix, this trailer for the fake Commando: The Musical, and this soccer save.

I liked, and posted, a lot of biking and skateboarding videos this year, this one of bikers jumping into a pond was fun, while this video of a 23 Year Old Guy Learning How To Ride A Bike was exactly what you would expect.

Manute Bol may or may not have had a hand in popularizing the phrase, "My bad", and 3 new new dinosaurs were discovered.

This video of the little kid from Back to the Future III is creepy, as is this death spiral of ants. This dad telling his son he wasn't a single lady was hilarious, and why Saturn has a ring is related. Did you know Mexican Coke might not actually be made with real sugar?

Here's a picture of Bears Riding Horses, an Investigative Look at the Nitrous Mafia (you should check this out), a picture of Danzig carrying kitty litter, a list you don't want to be on, and Bill Simmons’ List of Comedy MVPs Since 1975.

Happy New Year, everyone! What did you like?

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Twitter as Information Network

aaron cohen — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:39:53 +0000

Mike Champion with a really smart look at the problem of Twitter as "information network". Basically, it's difficult to find Twitter accounts that Tweet only about subjects that interest you, which then creates a lot of noise. I think this might be one reason celebrities and brands are so popular; people are more inclined to find the non-basketball related musings of their favorite basketball player interesting because it's their favorite basketball player! Mike uses the example of being less interested in the non-Ruby related musings of Ruby hackers... Until Twitter makes it more possible to follow interests, rather than accounts, it'll face this challenge.

Twitter is increasingly being described as an "information network" rather than a social network or "fun-like-ice-cream" novelty. That seems accurate, but the challenge is that Twitter is currently designed like a social network. Even with its innovative asymmetrical following relationships what you follow on Twitter are accounts [1] not "interests". As a result, it is difficult to consume information effectively and to tweet for disparate audiences.

PS Congrats on the baby, Mike and Sam.

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What does it mean to be ‘fully human’ online?

aaron cohen — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:16:43 +0000

In general, moralizing sucks. It gets especially annoying when cultural commentators talk about how much society has changed, for the worse, with the advent of technology and the internet. Ezra Klein:

So if you're someone who likes to spend Saturday in a quiet room with a good book and a long time to think about it, you might find Facebook unnerving. And Zadie Smith and Ross Douthat do. Sometimes, I'd guess, we all do. Conversely, if you're someone who likes people but has trouble meeting them, or gets shy in unfamiliar social settings, you probably don't think the Internet has made you less human.

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A life in updates

aaron cohen — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:21:06 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about the lack of smartphone/internet/Facebook use by the main characters in contemporary movies and books (I may not have mentioned internet or Facebook or movies, but I meant to). In a discussion that followed, Nick mentioned the idea of a story told entirely in Facebook updates. Almost as if on queue, this video from Maxime Luere. An entire story told through status updates. Well done, too.

Via TDW.

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Power of the internet

aaron cohen — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 02:50:35 +0000

Tom Scott recently gave an Ignite talk at with an extremely disturbing, but not surprising parable on the power of the internet. In Flash Mob Gone Wrong, information spreads quickly to create a flash mob outside a London apartment leading to a riot. It's the best video I watched this week.

Via Urlesque

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On McDonald’s burgers not aging

aaron cohen — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:03:00 +0000

You have let me down, internet. Earlier in the week, a to do was made about the artist Sally Davies and her series of 137 daily photographs of a McDonald's Happy Meal. The upshot is that McDonald's Happy Meals when left out on the counter don't really change much (as most food wouldn't in a low humidity environment). There's supposed to be a big shock.

Let me tell you, reader, there was. The first time I saw this story. On March 3rd of this year, BabyBites.info posted a photo of their year old Happy Meal (2 weeks later, BoingBoing posted via Consumerist). Three weeks after that, Sally Davies started her daily photo project. I don't know if Sally Davies was inspired to start her project after seeing any of these stories, but even if she wasn't I can't be the only one who remembered we saw similar pictures 6 months ago. It's not even like this was last year. I'm going to go take a minute, you get back to me when you want to share original stuff I won't care about 5 minute from now.

Updated:
OK, OK, people have been leaving McDonald's burgers out forever. Jason reminded me of this, while Hubs reminded me of this Supersize Me bonus. And we must never forget one of the original internet experiments, the stinkymeat project.

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Song of the Summer 2010

aaron cohen — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:07:55 +0000

I saw Click Track refer to Cee Lo's Fuck You as the song of the summer. I'd agree, but on the other hand, I don't remember the last Song of the Summer I liked. Maybe it was that Kevin Costner song from Robin Hood.

Also, I finally had a reason to make a Keep Calm poster.

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“Pop-culture Houdini”

aaron cohen — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:41:04 +0000

In the latest issue of Fast Company, there's a profile of Alex Bogusky, the advertising genius behind some of your favorite viral campaigns of the last campaign. Bogusky, not surprisingly, didn't like the the profile and annotated the article on his Posterous. This is the one of the better uses of the internet, publicly responding to exactly what you don't like in an article. On the other hand, I can't tell if the original article or the response makes me want to throw up more. The profile makes Bogusky come off as something of a douche, and the annotations makes him come off as a defensive douche. Maybe he's nice in person.

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