Alas, we won’t be able to make it to Oslo this September for JavaZone 2010, but we’re fans of their promos: After last month’s faux indie movie trailer for Java 4-ever, about a young man who can no longer hide his suppressed love for Java from his orthodox .NET-loving family, they bring us “LadyJava.” Now, Lady Gaga references are on thin ice thanks to sheer overuse, but this gets a pass for the sheer density of nerd puns and for the fact that it doesn’t seem particularly to care about faithfulness to Lady Gaga.

The opening line, “I wanna program like they do at Oracle,” does take on an added layer of irony considering recent events.

The use and history of “Spoiler Alert” (The Awl)

Lady Gaga kidnaps Commissioner Gordon (The Onion)

Madden ratings czar on how he became Madden ratings czar (SportsGrid)

Dos Equis guy bigger than Old Spice guy? Say it ain’t so (FastCompany)

Cat gives birth to dog, says Russia Today (TFT)

“My son is a meme?” (news.com.au)

How to rebuild your attention sp (LifeHacker)

(title image via That Will Buff Out via TDW)

The combination of Anime and American teenagers has produced a number of things we might be better off without. The suffixes -chan, -hime, and the word baka used without discrimination, not to mention an extensive new genre of slash fanfiction, and now: dangerous contact lenses.

The New York Times reports on a new trend among young girls in America: circle lenses.

Lady Gaga’s wider-than-life eyes [from the Bad Romance video] were most likely generated by a computer, but teenagers and young women nationwide have been copying them with special contact lenses imported from Asia. Known as circle lenses, these are colored contacts — sometimes in weird shades like violet and pink — that make the eyes appear larger because they cover not just the iris, as normal lenses do, but also part of the whites.

Some girls are wearing them every day, like “mascara or eyeliner.” The problem is… they’re illegal to sell in the US and many doctors think that they are harmful to the eyes. The eyes that are wearing them, we mean.

Read on...

Woot acquired by Amazon (TechCrunch)

Grandfather performs Lady Gaga, hilarity ensues (Urlesque)

Craigslist “For Sale” ad hall of fame (Nerve)

Brace yourself: Mark Millar’s working on an Old Man Logan sequel (Robot6)

Jason Robert Brown wins the hearts and minds of copyright fraudsters (Jason Robert Brown)

Will Verizon’s 4G network be better than Sprint’s? (DVICE)

“People are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.” (A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz)

(title image via ComicsAlliance)

It’s official. The 2010 World Cup is the biggest thing to ever happen to the internet, ever. According to Akamai.com’s Net Usage Index, net traffic on the first day of the World Cup surpassed the former leading event (Barack Obama‘s presidential election victory) by 30%.

Some of the inevitable consequences of this have been noticed by internet users. Twitter, for example, prone to hiccups on a good day, has been flying the Fail Whale to and fro.

The Globe & Mail reports on one strange side effect of the increase in traffic: a twitter campaign to save a rare Brazilian parrot. So rare, in fact, that does not actually exist.

Yesterday, Comics Alliance’s Chris Sims at once destroyed and showed his appreciation for Bluewater’s recently released Lady Gaga comic, calling it “not very good” as a biography, given the river of randomness that runs through it, but admitting his respect for writer Dan Rafter, who defiantly refused to phone it in, as easy as it would have been to do so.

Dan Rafter is working with the underlying themes that people like about her music and the way she presents herself: glamor, identity, the lure of fame, the malleability of gender, irony in modern society. It’s a first-year psychology textbook, yes, but it has more to do with Lady Gaga and her success than knowing she went to NYU, and it’s presented in a way that actually layers it into a fictional narrative. And that makes it easily the smartest biography Bluewater’s produced.

So. Humoring the possibility that you are on the fence about purchasing such a thing, our sister site Styleite has assembled a few snippets from the comic that may either pique your interest or have you headed for the hills.

[Styleite]

This is highly speculative, but it’s just to weird not to mention.

Lady Gaga might be in an episode of Dr. Who. According to Gareth Roberts, scriptwriter for the show,

She is no stranger to dressing up and would be more than a match for the Doctor. It would be a great coup to get her.

This past weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jim Henson, and there really aren’t any words to describe the effect that his art has had on the lives of people all across the world. Sesame Street, the longest running children’s show in history, is still teaching the ABCs; the Muppets are enjoying a resurgence on YouTube, a medium they were practically born for; and even Fraggle Rock is out on DVD and has its own comic series. Disney, after a six-year indecisive lull, is finally making good on the Muppets as a brand.

A new Muppet movie, ambitiously titled The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever, is in the works, and I have high hopes for Jason Segel‘s writing. There are many ways I could give tribute to Mr. Henson, but I’m pretty sure that the video montages, nostalgic reminiscing, and philosophic treatises are already out there for the Googling.  So I am going to talk about the Muppet movies.  The good ones, and the not so good ones, and what differentiates them.  Here’s hoping the next one is among the former!

So: After endless anticipation, Lady Gaga‘s music video for “Telephone” is here, featuring Beyonce. True to form and expectation, it’s really weird: In a good way, though, IMO.

For one thing, “Telephone”‘s nonmusic/music ratio rivals Martin Scorcese‘s 18-minute music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad”: the thing is nine-and-a-half minutes long, with about three minutes of highly stylized female prison drama and Lady Gaga naked-making before you hear a single note.

But then… there’s the stylization itself. Lady Gaga told E! that “There certainly is a Tarantino-inspired quality in the video;” while there are other influences swimming around in there (we’d like to propose Twin Peaks), the Tarantino shines through the most.

You may recall that Beyonce’s “Video Phone” started off with a reference to the slow-mo walk in Reservoir Dogs; where’s the Tarantino in “Telephone”?

For hard-core Rock Band players, the world is about to get much brighter: Starting this fall, Inspired Instruments will release the ‘You Rock Guitar’ and will consequently bring an end to all your digital guitar woes.

A hybrid digital guitar and gaming platform with three modes—Music, Game, and ‘You Rock’— The You Rock Guitar can be connected to an amplifier and used as a real instrument, or plugged into your game console to play Rock Band. And by console, we don’t just mean your Playstation or Wii. We mean all consoles. By virtue of a removable cartridge, you’ll be able to wirelessly communicate with any system you, or your friends, may have. Let the competition truly begin: