Notice: PTTBT is a satire site, and should not be taken seriously unless you enjoy involuntary electric shock therapy. The site has not been updated for some time. For more up-to-date entertainment please see our mothership at 1889.ca.
Well, the holiday season is upon us, and that means it’s time to support the Child’s Play charity, run by the fantastic gents at Penny Arcade. Since last year’s nude tap dancing webcast was a bit of a bust [rimshot!], we here at PTTBT have decided to try a new approach for 2007: we’re going to pimp out our website.
Here’s how it works: click the button on the sidebar to donate (all proceeds go to the charity). When donating, enter a word or phrase, and then a URL you want it to link to. We will then integrate your word or phrase into the content of a story at PTTBT, and link it to the URL you provided. You buy your keywords based on frequency, at $5/use. We reserve the right to take several weeks to execute large orders, or words relating to math.
And the catch? You have to make your magic word something odd. Remember, we’re going to have to seamlessly blend it into whatever we’re writing, so if you write “spotted flamingos in heat”, that’s going to be much more painful for us than “George Bush”.
We realize this will break the semantic web, but think of the children, won’t you?
So if you’re game, clickez-vous on the donate button, and then watch us squirm.
It may not have hit home yet, but the writers’ strike in Hollywood is about to claim its first real victim. And despite his past accomplishments in this area, it’s going to take more than Justin Timberlake to fix it. Yes, my friends: Sexy is going away.
Think of it: your average TV show is, due to government regulations, stuffed full of extraneous dialogue and plotting, when in fact the only reason anyone tunes in is to see good-looking actors pose jauntily for the camera. Some shows work hard to disguise it (Law and Order), some embrace it (Las Vegas), and some think they’re cleverly doing both, but aren’t (Heroes, season 2). But the fact remains: you can’t legally make TV without a writer coming up with a reason for Kate Walsh to be dancing naked for five minutes.
Now, because those very scribes are on the picket lines, all these shows have ceased production, and come January we will be robbed of our flimsily-plotted primtetime soft-core porn. What are we to do? Luckily, Wired magazine’s intrepid editor, Chris Anderson, has provided us with the ultimate solution: the Long Tail. And no, it’s not quite as dirty as it sounds.
The theory goes like this: your average episode of Lost (where Kate inexplicably strips to her underwear to perform some menial task like fetching coconuts from a tree) is at the peak of the graph, where all the “hits” are. This is where we are used to getting our sexy. This peak is going away. Forget about it. Move on.
Instead, ask YouTube to show you the Sexy Long Tail, and you’ll find gems like these:
Love in the Stone Age
It’s not the narration or the mind-blowing soundtrack that pulls you in, it’s the lavishly-designed costumes! This is what Al Gore invented the internet for! Oh baby!
Crouching Tiger’s Tail
This excellent montage demonstrates how the web has evolved from a place where you look at hundreds of pictures of beautiful women on multiple web pages, to a place where a select few of those images are chosen by a stranger and crammed into an over-compressed video to help heighten your enjoyment. If only ABC could learn to do the same, we’d have been spared Brothers and Sisters.
Coconuts
And what list of “sexy” would be complete without this gem?
Yes, the Long Tail of Sexy has a wealth of opportunity for those willing to sacrifice the odd brain cell to the greater good. Don’t take this strike lying down! Take it sitting down, in front of your computer!
With the new WGA strike underway, killing shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for the foreseeable future, one might think the world was coming to an end. Luckily, out of the depths of our misery comes a familiar face:
Let us pray he sticks around for the duration of the strike.
What a morning already! Via the article on Slashdot comes an article on GamePolitics.com about how Jack Thompson is trying to get Halo 3 declared a public nuisance! Basically, he wants to use legislation (aimed at closing down brothels and rowdy gambling joints) to stop a video game from being released. I can understand why… there’s always been a very real danger of kids dressing up in armoured suits and shooting aliens with sci-fi weaponry, and THIS GAME MAKES IT SEEM LIKE FUN!
Bastards. Those Bungie guys… what were they THINKING? Alas, poor Covenant… I knew them, Horatio!
The thing in the article at GP that doesn’t actually work for me is this:
More troubling by far are the long term implications of this action. Thompson apparently feels emboldened to invoke Florida’s public nuisance law against any video game he desires to target. That is the essence of censorship and the video game industry cannot allow it to continue on any number of grounds – legal, moral or creative.
I would have to say that the video game industry needs to let ol’ Jacky-boy have his fun, because the only thing that will finally shut him up, is for him to ruin his credibility so often that no news organization will print his name ever again (nay, not even when reporting his inevitable disbarment), and he can reflect upon his life with a lonely bottle of whiskey as the world goes to pot around him. Or something like that.
But my point is: don’t try and shut Jack Thompson up. He is his own worst enemy, and it’s much more entertaining to see him dig his own grave.
You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
It’s a good sentiment, but I wonder how much damage has been done. A lot of people said he should have said that at the start of the fiasco, so the statement almost smells like reading from a script.
I point the admins of Digg to my article on this very subject. It’s not just for small sites. Big ones geet knocked over with just as much ease.
I think it’d be fun for some MIT System Dynamics student to do up a simulation model of this phenomenon and make it public domain, if only so that other Web 2.0 owners can get a better sense of what kind of damage their somewhat-reasonable actions will cause them.
