geekosystem

Jesse Thorn is kind of my hero. My first "editor's pick" here at Geekosystem was his public radio show and podcast Bullseye, and I made it my first recommendation for a reason. It's really something special. When I found out Thorn was doing his talk "Make Your Thing" here in New York, well I certainly wasn't going to miss that. I had a chance to sit down with Jesse before the talk at the Etsy Holiday Pop-Up Shop to discuss making our things, sincerity, and what it means to be a geek.

One of the best webcomics out there is JL8 by Yale Stewart, and it just so happened to turn one-year-old this week. The strip, formerly titled Little League, sets the Justice League where we don't think they've ever been before: Elementary school. Stewart was nice enough to discuss JL8's first eyar, including how he picks which characters to use and why he changed the strip's name.  Hit the jump to check out all of his answers paired up with some of the best strips from JL8's already impressive run.

"Our blades are fucking great." That's the line that first grabs viewers when they watch the video for the Dollar Shave Club, and it was what I couldn't resist goading the company's co-founder Mike Dubin with when I spoke with him. I feel a little bad about that. Anyway, the Dollar Shave Club is looking to revolutionize how you shave your face (or legs, or whatever you want) with the same kind of disruptive startup sensibility that has defined the tech industry.

Submitted for your approval: Standard footage of an on-the-street interview. The setting is mundane. The subject matter is indecipherable. The title is somewhat of a spoiler. What is going to happen? Who knows. But it probably involves a plastic bag. Will it be funny? There's only one way to find out.

Note: hit 6, a few times and notice how the bag makes a perfectly timed cymbal crash for the sentence before it. Then hit 6 a bunch more times and make a techno remix. It's addicting.

In a video uploaded to YouTube yesterday, President Barack Obama touched not only on the Egyptian protests, but on the importance of social media as a part of a universal right to free speech. In a question submitted to YouTube, the President was asked what he thought of the Egyptian crackdown on internet communications. "It is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances." Referring to his State of the Union speech, the president continued saying that, "there are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression...people being able to use social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and to express their concerns."

Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker recently spoke at the Digital Life Design conference where he discussed the movie The Social Network with, of all people, Brazilian magical realism novelist Paulo Coelho. As mindblowing as that match-up is, more pertinent is Parker's comment that while he liked the film, it is "a complete work of fiction."

Keanu Reeves sat down with NYMag's Vulture for an interview about his upcoming indie comedy Henry's Crime, about a toll-booth operator who falls in with bank robbers, goes to jail, gets out, decides to rob the same bank, fall in love with a girl and has to learn to act in a play in order to gain access to the tunnel between the theater and the bank. But all the internet wants to talk about is how the interviewer asked him about the Sad Keanu meme.  Wait - we're on the internet? Ok, here's how it went down:

Logan Hill: You're taking over the Internet. Have you seen all the "Sad Keanu" stuff out there? Reeves: My publicist showed me the photo, but no. There's not one photo. There are millions. You're Photoshopped next to kittens and into Pulp Fiction and next to the cast of The Breakfast Club, and in a million different ways. Have you seen those? KR: Oh, that's funny! No, no, I haven't seen them.

Alan Moore no longer pays any heed to superheroes. In an interview with British music newspaper The Stool Pigeon recently, the creator of the watershed comic Watchmen spoke about the works which made him an international superstar in the comics industry. Despite his stature, Moore is a noted recluse and has insisted strongly on distancing himself from the numerous film adaptations of his work (From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen), which have all fallen short of the nuanced originals. The eccentric writer has now also distanced himself, apparently, from the comic book superhero, "[suspecting] that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight." We've collected just a few of his particularly interesting quotes, including his thoughts on the Internet, the iconic Guy Fawkes mask showing up at protests, and real-life superheroes:

In the year since Imgur was founded by undergrad Alan Schaaf, the minimalist image hosting site has sprouted into a hotbed of online culture, with a dominant presence on social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg and almost 20 million pageviews this past month. This weekend, Schaaf announced that Imgur had added individual user accounts and paid pro accounts. Recently, we swapped emails with Schaaf about the rise of Imgur, the impact that personal accounts will have on the site and its vibe, and -- yes -- his plans when he graduates from college in June: