humor

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's … Read more

Privacy advocates should take note of an effective way to avert the prying eyes of Google Street View: the lowly plastic bag.

A block of College Road in Fairbanks, Alaska, along with portions of Minnie St. and Third St. show what a driver would see only if wearing a plastic bag on his or her head. As Google Sightseeing observes, you can tell what it is by the fact that it says "plastic bag" on the inside.

So now perhaps we know which scheming multibillion dollar search engine is behind San Francisco's ban on plastic bags.

First came Flickr video on Tuesday. Then came the anti-Flickr-video outcry on Wednesday. Now there's the anti-anti-Flickr-video outcry.

This last movement takes the highly facetious form of Flickr's new We Demand Donuts group. "If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts!" the group's manifesto states. "Join the group and invite all your contacts. We will make this the biggest protest group on Flickr and force them to give us free donuts!"

There are some subtleties here, but given the timing, it's … Read more

The title of this post was inspired by Deadspin commenter BlastItBiggs.

After April Fool's Day, it got horribly gauche to practice the art of "Rickrolling"--tricking people into watching the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," or surprising someone by playing the corny pop song. The goofy Internet fad was so utterly overblown on 4/1/08 that the Web seemed to collectively agree that nobody should ever subject anybody to it again.

The New York Mets, however might have to deal with it for a little while longer.

Innocently enough, … Read more

Update 7:40 p.m. PST January 6: Thanks to alert reader OneGB for supplying the origin of the clock. The central design may look like a bungled biohazard symbol, but it in fact is another three-nine reference, the "hurricane" symbol of a high-IQ organization called the Triple Nine Society. The group also sells Triple Nine aprons, mugs, bibs, underwear, and other whatnot at CafePress.com.

Math enthusiasts who don't want to move totally into the digital realm might appreciate this analog clock.

Each number is expressed as a calculation involving three instances of the number 9. … Read more

Greenpeace might want to save the whales, but it's not above giving them silly names.

The legendary environmental organization, as part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition campaign, is tracking humpback whales in the South Pacific via satellite tags and hoping to gather data that will help protect them from hunting. To humanize the massive cetaceans a bit, Greenpeace International is also holding a whale-naming competition in the form of an online poll. It appears, looking at the site, that a number of "winning" names will go to the array of whales being tracked.

Among the 30 … Read more

Let's just say this Superbad flick, which opens August 17, is pretty highly anticipated. Comedy fans are psyched because it's produced by Judd Apatow of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame. And geeks have been equally pumped to see teen nerd icon Michael Cera, formerly of Arrested Development and more recently of the CBS Web series Clark and Michael, doing what he does best--spending long durations of onscreen time acting as awkward as possible.

So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere was decently enthusiastic when the crew behind National Lampoon heir apparent CollegeHumor threw an advance screening … Read more

It's not Friday, but we'd like to pretend it is. So here you go: left over from last week's E3 Business and Media Summit, two representatives from Gamecock Media learning how to ride a Segway Human Transporter while wearing makeshift chicken outfits.

It's just really kind of awesome.

Ever since Friday night, I've been staying away from the Apple store just down the road. And the company store at the Apple headquarters down the road in the other direction, just in case they have the things too. And the two AT&T stores I drive by on my daily commute.

Basically, I'm just staying at home when I'm not at work. And when I am at work, I stay away from the water cooler.

This minimizes my risk, because seeing an iPhone in person might be bad. For my wallet, anyway.

The problem is … Read more