What's been occupying too much of my freetime ...

THE GREAT KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY - Okay, so it's not the Korean news agency. It's a guy in Austrailia. Whatever. The feed, as far as I can tell, is repeated ala the actual site.

@shhdontellsteve - We've all had that one bad roommate. The one we secretly stewed over. Why not vent the anger on the Internets?

Interesting: The Internet makes us smarter, futurist says

Who would have thought watching Keyboard Cat 100 times could make you a brighter person?
Not me. But hey, I'm not arguing.
Check out this interesting article posted in The Atlantic by futurist Jamais Cascio.
The premise is basically this: For centuries we've relied on Mother Nature to make us smarter, but now thanks to cool new information sharing tools like the Internet we've got more data at our fingertips than ever before. Many scientists are using this to jumpstart new scientific disciplines, develop new medicines and basically make us more awesome. And as Artificial Intelligence continues to develop, many believe it will eventually pair off with the hive mind of the Internet and usher in a new age of human illumination.
That's the theory, anyway.
I still don't understand how things like this are making me any smarter.

RELATED: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Viral Flashback: L.A.R.P.

That's "Live Action Roleplaying" for all of you with a social life.
I can't believe I hadn't thought of featuring these videos sooner. Enjoy.

Internet: Unplugging in the Information Age

In about three years, I've watched 4,726 videos on YouTube.
But wait, it gets worse.
The 4,726 views (which isn't really that outrageous, is it?) are relegated to one measly account.
I've probably got about half a dozen user names on there -- and they've all got ludicrously high statistics too, I'm sure.
Only meta-consciousness in charge of the Net knows exactly how much time I've whittled away on that damn site. Thankfully, he's not talking.
That's good news. Because honestly, if I saw hard numbers telling me how much time I've spent surfing YouTube, I'd probably swear off the Net forever. And we can't have that, can we?
Of course not. We're members of Generation Y, the folks who've taken ownership of the Internet and transformed it into a new forum for American culture. I take my life 140 characters at a time, thank you very much.
But maybe we shouldn't be thinking like this.
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt begs us to meet real people and go outside, it might be time to listen.

"Our goal is to have you be as attached as possible," Schmidt said. "But know where the off button is. It's possible to spend your life inside the computer.
These tools are enormously powerful. Use them, then turn them off. . . . Life is the people around you. Talk to them."

Earlier this month, the LA Times filed an interesting piece on the so-called "Blackberry Babies" -- tracking a group of teenagers who went without cell phones and iPods.
The week felt like a lifetime.

"I can't stand it," [10th-grader] Cesar Rodriguez wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. "I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!"

The article continues ...

Andres Lopez told me he'd been so bored he went to a barber and had his shaggy locks shorn, "Just to fill the void."

Jose Alvarez said he had tried Pilates and something even more exotic: "I cleaned my room."

Mario Canaba was turned so upside down, he actually played with some of his mother's day-care kids, but described the experience in a single word: "Painful."

Angie Gaytan lost track of the days and had a strange episode of disorientation in which she found herself staring at a piece of chicken.

"I felt weird and out of order," Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television.

Rodriguez, confessing the media fast was "the hardest thing I have ever had to do," drank a lot of water, like a man trying to make it across a desert. At his lowest point, trying desperately to kill time, he accidentally broke a lamp.

"I was playing soccer in my living room," he said.

But hey, at least the kids were being creative. They actually started pursuing some new hobbies. One even took notice of the adventuresome world found right in her own backyard ...

Daniel Romero read a book for the first time this year.

Lopez actually communicated with an uncle during a rare conversation about swine flu, politics and history.

Jenny Corona connected with her autistic brother, and, to her utter amazement, read an entire Harry Potter book in four days.

Without her headphones blocking out the real world, Flor Salvador heard strange chirping sounds.

"I didn't know we had birds!" she wrote in her journal.

The moral of it all? Unplug, dammit. You might just discover something new and exciting.
Heck, you might even meet some new people and not want to spend 12 hours a day glued to your computer. Crazy, I know, but it just might happen. And don't worry if your YouTube stats drop or you lose a few Twitter followers, if you're able to hear the birds birds again, it's worth it.

BOOKS: Internet and the Publishing Industry

I know, I know, the Internet and its effect the publishing industry has been hashed and rehashed with a side of stirred tomatoes hundreds of times.
Yet Gordon Van Gelder, editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction still doesn't seem to get it.

In a recent interview with Tor, Van Gelder talks about the relationship between online and printed fiction and calls out several noted SF/F writers including John Scalzi, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, arguing that while these three succeeded in building strong online communities and translating that online base into printed sales, hundreds of other authors failed.
It's a simplistic argument that ignores one main point -- Scalzi, Stross and Doctorow work hard on their Web sites and **gasp** their fiction is actually pretty damn good.
Check out Scalzi's none-too-happy response to the interview, where he addresses some of Van Gelder's comments, particularly the idea that Fantasy and Science Fiction would suffer horribly if it gave away printed copies for free.

Scalzi writes:

Moreover, I’m not 100% impressed with Gordon’s logic regarding how giving away 42,000 copies if F&SF would be the financial ruin of the magazine. As it stands now, it almost certainly would be, but that’s because the magazine’s in an ill-advised format for advertising and appears from the outside to rely significantly on its subscription base for revenues. But it’s entirely possible that, in a format that was actually ad-friendly (and with an ad sales staff that knew how to work it) F&SF could give away copies and make revenue in other ways, primarily through ads.

Scalzi continues:

The problem I have with print people blaming the Internet for their troubles is that blaming the Internet allows them to ignore — and indeed, actively avoid – taking responsibility for their own acts that have contributed and are contributing to their current bad times. This happens with all print media, but SF is really hot on it. And it’s bunk. Long before the Internet could have been an active threat, subscriber numbers at the science fiction magazines were dropping. If the Internet is a dire threat to them now, it’s in no small part because they made themselves sick enough to be picked off by one major threat or another, and it just happens it will be the Internet that will deliver the coup de grace (in fact it’s rather more likely it’ll be problems with magazine distributors, but hey, why not blame the Internets anyway?).

I’ve no doubt Gordon will note that his real world issues as a publisher are more complicated than I’ve made them out to be here, and I’ll grant this is almost certainly correct. But at the end of the day SF magazines are where they are today not just because of the Internet but because a series of choices their publishers made, reaching back decades, some of which do involve the Internet but many more of which do not.

Internet stuff aside, Van Gelder does get a lot of stuff right. He's right when he says the Internet lends itself more readily to innovative marketing models rather than publishing models, but Van Gelder has to realize the two are not mutually exclusive. That, I think, is the biggest ideological problem in the publishing industry today.

Internets: Lip syncing kid goes mainstream

Looks like YouTube senstation Keenan the Lip Syncing kid is on the fast track to fame. For weeks, this teenager (yes, he apparently is a teenager) sang his way into all our hearts with stirring renditions of tunes like "What Hurts the Most" and "Homecoming."
Apparently these videos were enough to land him a spot on WGN 9 broadcast in Chicago. Uh ... neat?
I really don't know what to make of this kid. Sure, the videos are hilarious, but I literally get physically uncomfortable after watching them for more than 20 seconds. Let's face it, the kid's one hell of a showman, but he's also creepy in a very, cave-dwelling urchin kind of way ...
At any rate, the WGN video is fantastic and cuts away just before I start getting scared.
ADDED BONUS: The guy at the weather desk clearly has no idea what the hell's going on.
Check the video below below, it's sure to put a smile on your face!

WEB: Remeber Geocities?

I certainly do. Back in 2001, that site was ground zero for all my crappy .gifs, tiled backgrounds and boring Web sites. Scary to think how 2001 seems like ages ago now.

Anyway, here's a link to that and six other WONDERS OF THE WEB, with a winner that's justified, but not likely to surprise you.