geekosystem

At first glance, it would seem that Kickstriker, a website from three graduate students at New York University, is a platform designed to mimic the incredible success of Kickstarter. Digging a little deeper reveals that these projects aren't exactly in the same vein. Of the projects currently on the site, one is for a mobile interrogation unit and another is to help fund the Tibetan militia resist Chinese rule. Essentially, it's for publicly-funded warfare.

By now, you have may have noticed that there are a lot of cat videos on the Internet. It's not simply because people like them, but because the corporate powerhouse Kittywood has been professionally producing nearly every cat video on YouTube. At least, that's what this video would have you believe. While being a dead-on satire of viral videos, the lengths to which corporations will go to make something viral, and hollywood itself, this does raise an interesting question: Is a world where all cat vides are professionally made more or less horrifying than a world where millions of people put an astronomical amount of cat activities to film just because they can? Think about it. (via Neatorama)

Some of today's musical artists just don't seem to understand that it's an honor when "Weird Al" Yankovic parodies one of your songs. Back in 1985, Madonna was canny enough to slip the suggestion to Weird Al that "Like a Surgeon" would be a humorous title for a "Like a Virgin" parody. But her would-be successor, Lady Gaga, humorlessly shot down a Weird Al parody of "Born This Way" called "Perform This Way," according to a posting on Yankovic's blog which documents the bizarre saga. You can read the whole thing there, but to make a long story short, Yankovic sent the following pitch for the song to Gaga's camp:

I’d like to do a parody of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” called “I Perform This Way.” The basic concept is that I, as a Lady Gaga doppelganger of sorts, describe the incredibly extravagant ways in which I perform on stage. Meat dresses and giant eggs would most likely be referenced, but also much more ridiculous made-up examples of bizarre wardrobe and stage production. As with all my parodies, it would be respectful of the artist, while having a bit of fun with her larger-than-life image.

Gaga's camp proceeded to stonewall Yankovic, then ultimately shot him down. (Luckily, he released the audio to YouTube, and you can hear it below.)

Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson have produced a brilliant satirical essay that re-imagines the acclaimed television series The Wire as a 19th-Century serialized novel. It's wonderful, and will give you a reason to use the word "Dickensian" today.

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

You can read the whole essay, "When It's Not Your Turn," over at the Hooded Utilitarian. (via BoingBoing)

As the all-too-public trainwreck that is the The Learning Channel's programming schedule, let's take a sneak peek at what new shows the makers of such vital cultural programing as Sarah Palin's Alaska and Jon and Kate Plus 8. Full disclosure: I will be appearing in an upcoming episode of "Divorce Horse." I'm not proud of this, and pray that my family can forgive me.