Anthrocon: It’s Like WWDC, But With More Animals, and No iPhone Announcements, and Not Like WWDC At All

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 1:11 PM on July 1, 2009 in Miscellany. Comments Tags: , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/hJ

Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the entire economy of the city of Pittsburgh is sustained by about 3000 crazy people wearing tails. Once again, I will be one of them.

This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:

I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.

Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.

See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.

What If Mahmoud Ahmedinejad Were A Tarantula?

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 12:29 AM on June 16, 2009 in Filmmakery. Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/X2

If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet lately, you’ve probably heard that there’s been a lot of violent reactions to the likely-fraudulent Iranian elections (If you rely on television or newspapers to hear about current events, then you have an excuse for not knowing). While the streets of Tehran are filled with protesters and trigger-happy police, the pressure is on other world leaders to make a choice: acknowledge Ahmedinejad as President and condone his totalitarian tactics, or walk away from negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

This tense situation leaves a burning question in the mind of everyone in the world: what would this situation be like if the disputed Iranian President were a tarantula?

This femto-length film is my attempt to answer that question:

The Fact That I Find This Deeply Satisfying is a Testament To How Sad My Life Is

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 1:35 AM on June 8, 2009 in Miscellany. Comments Tags: , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/Yi

Plankhead post ranked right below YouTube Help when Googling "As a result, your video is blocked everywhere except in these locations"

PreThinking.com Article on iPhone Smasher Accidentally Creates Lol Image

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 10:15 PM on June 7, 2009 in Commentary. Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/VG

Palm Pre-enthusiast blog PreThinking has posted an article about a first-generation iPhone user who got a shiny new Palm Pre. Now he has no more use for his iPhone. Instead of coming up with a better solution, such as selling the old phone to someone who might want it, the man smashes it with a hammer:

Happy Palm Pre owner smashes his old iPhone...Pre Thinking.

PreThinking added their logo to the image, as is common practice in the interblogosphernetwebs, where anyone can take your image and claim it as theirs unless you put some form of identifier on it. For what this man did, the phrase “pre-thinking” is coincidentally appropriate.

[PreThinking via Gizmodo]

Dear Newsblogs: Learn To Punctuate

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 5:50 PM on June 6, 2009 in Commentary. Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/Qj

This article on TechCrunch is a perfect example of why some people still don’t take Internet journalism seriously. Have a look at the first three sentences:

Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off.

Three sentences in, and writer MG Siegler — a man featured in the New York Times at one point, according to his bio — has already misused both the em dash and the semicolon. Perhaps this is an attempt by Siegler to sound intelligent through the use of esoteric punctuation; both sentences call for the use of commas.

Yes, I know, I’m being a grammar Nazi, and relatively few people care about this kind of thing. The problem, however, is that punctuation communicates ideas that words alone cannot. Letters represent the sounds we make when speaking; punctuation represents the pauses we make in between.

If you think it’s limiting to have only 140 characters to express a thought, try eliminating 90% of the English language. If people stop caring about proper use of punctuation, it will lose its meaning entirely. This will destroy a writer’s ability to communicate voice; without the range of punctuation we have available to us, it’s impossible to read anything as if an actual person might be speaking it. It’s not eliminating 90% of the English dictionary, but it’s certainly eliminating 90% of the spoken language.

Of course, this may be a by-product of the questionable literacy of Internet users. Perhaps very few people still know the difference between a comma, em dash, semicolon, or paragraph break, and thus it no longer matters; every writer is the same to people who don’t know how to read for voice.

To be fair, none of my English classes ever mentioned proper use of the em dash or semicolon; if I recall correctly, I learned both through a combination of my father and Wikipedia. So, yes, this is a complex, deep-rooted problem with all sorts of causes and effects. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.

Okay, now I’m going to finish reading that TechCrunch article.