geekosystem

"'At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him.' - A guy who works at Twitter." --Designer Dustin Curtis, Twittering about Twitter. No idea if a) Curtis made up the quote with humorous intent or b) he really spoke to a Twitter employee who was joking or c) it is 100% totally real, but there is a grain of truth in any event. Update: Curtis has confirmed to Gizmodo that "that the tweet is not a joke, but it was told to him by the Twitter employee." Update2: Hah! Curtis again: "'Most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts.' -- The guy who works at Twitter." (via @dcurtis | Dustin Curtis' webpage)

Justin Bieber has 4.5 million Twitter followers – and this weekend we saw what happens when you get on Bieber’s bad side. He might tweet your phone number.

In a since-deleted Tweet, Bieber wrote “everyone call me 248-XXX-XXXX :) or text.” The number belongs to Kevin Kristopik, a Detroit teenage hacker who was messing with Bieber’s friend and successfully retrieved Bieber’s phone number.

Harry Partridge, creator of the screamingly funny Saturday Morning Watchmen, has given a Timmy-toothed Justin Bieber the Saturday morning cartoon he deserves. Wait till you meet his nutty gang of pals!

Our friends at TDW spotted this horrific chimaera on last night's episode of E! show The Soup: Justin Bieber and Sir Ian McKellen fused together.

To quote H.P. Lovecraft:

Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic — tentacled — proboscidian — octopus-eyed — semi-amorphous — plastic — partly squamous and partly rugose — ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained.

(via TDW)

I love Parry Gripp, I love Spaghetti Cat, I love television, and I hate Justin Bieber. Well, three out of four ain't bad. This latest Parry Gripp number serves as its own pitch for a television series, and I, for one, am sold. Justin Bieber and Spaghetti Cat fly around the world in a balloon, taking down the bad guys kung-fu style.

The votes are in on the Justin Bieber My World Tour contest: With a grand total of 659,141 votes, North Korea has won the illustrious honor of a visit from Bieber. Why the question mark in the headline, then? Blame the spoilsports at the North Korean embassy:

Sins of a Solar Empire vs. Justin Bieber (Double Jump) 27 Huge Hamburgers (Urlesque) Inside the Mind of an Anonymous News Site Poster (Boston.com) Kim Jong-il Looks at a Radish (The Telegraph) The Goofiest Masters of the Universe Toy Commercial (Points of Articulation) World Cup: England vs. Algeria in LEGOs (SportsGrid) ThinkGeek's Best Cease and Desist (ThinkGeek) (pic via Tsaoshin.)

If you cheered when Twitter's new trending topics algorithm shanghaied Justin Bieber this past week, this could be for you: The good people of Free Art & Technology (specifically, Greg Leuch) have put together a Firefox add-on and a nifty Javascript program (click link to test it out) that let you black out the name and visage of the 16-year-old Canadian pop star, who seems to inspire some of the strongest divided reactions of any 16-year-old Canadian pop star on the planet. Titled "Shaved Bieber," Leuch's handiwork blacks out the word "Bieber," the phrase "Justin Bieber," and image files containing "Bieber" in their names. The perfect cold-turkey cure for Bieber Fever and BieberRage alike.

In an afternoon that will forever live in infamy, Twitter was hit with a crippling double whammy: First, word got out about an easy-to-exploit bug that let you force anybody to follow you on Twitter. Then, as the bug quickly led the likes of Conan O'Brien and Oprah to unwillingly follow hundreds of random people, Twitter took the dramatic steps of temporarily slashing everyone's 'follower' and 'following' counts to zero and banning new follows entirely as they fixed the bug and wiped out illicitly obtained followers. They've since reversed these measures, but boy, did people tweet about them while they were underway. Many of the Tweets were less than inspired -- of the "i feel like a looser, im actually sad about this :(" or "haha, i have as many followers as ashton kutcher" varieties -- but some great stuff emerged as well. After the jump, ten of our favorites: