penny arcade expo just got an order of magnitude more awesome... because of bacon

Sure, I got my ass handed to me in the Soul Calibur tournament, my day immediately turned around when I saw this man in costume. It wasn't just any costume, though. He was a slice of bacon. I just wish I could say I was half as drunk as he was at the time of this photograph.

I think he's making the "shocker" gesture, but it's a bit sloppy. You'll recognize my facial expression as the one I make in nearly every photo. Nonetheless, I'm counting on this doing well over at BaconBuzz.com. Don't let me down, bacon community.

internet pundits approve of the recent reddit announcements -- bacon a deciding factor

You can read about it on the dev blog, but today's announcement went over pretty well.

Granted, my reddit submission didn't do nearly as well as yesterday's about qgyh2. But those 1200+ point story days don't come around too often. I just hope all the attention doesn't have a negative impact on BaconBuzz.com -- the online bacon community will never be the same.

If you're curious to know what the Internet seemed to think about the announcement, here's a quick 'n' dirty list of blog writeups. Thanks for all the linklove, folks:

CNET - Reddit now lets you create your own social news site
Mashable - Bookmarking Gets Distributed; Create Your Own Reddit on Your Own ...
Industry Standard - Custom Reddits get even more customizable
ReadWriteWeb - Reddit Now Fully Customizable: Bring Your Own Design and Domain
VentureBeat - Custom Reddits get even more customizable

-- Don't trust anything these next two say about us, heh (everything else is golden, though) we're owned by the same company --

Ars Technica - Design customization lets you have a reddit of your very own
WebMonkey - Reddit Expands Personalized Features With Skinning, Custom URLs

wrecking bar painted and ready for shipment

You'd be surprised how hard it is to find a "replica Half-life crowbar" online. Fortunately, spray paint is very easy to come by.


I just hope this gets to CERN in time.

npr loves sean tevis, deftly avoids including the word 'reddit'

We've been impressed with Sean Tevis ever since his comic turned up on reddit. I reached out to let him know. Turns out he liked the logo tribute, too.

But we he really appreciated was the outpouring of support not only on reddit, but the Internet at large.


Sean gives a good interview (give it a listen) and patiently explains all those geeky phenomena he tapped into. Despite that, reddit ends up being called a "community publishing site." Where's the love, NPR? It's because I didn't make a contribution last month, isn't it?

The comic is drawn in a style similar to a popular Web-based cartoon called XKCD and uses terms like downmodding (which is when a user in a community publishing site votes to lower another post's popularity) and to the online phenomenon Rickrolling.

Nevertheless, it's great to see Sean continue to get nationwide exposure. I hope his campaign serves as motivation for other non-politicos to get involved in politics. We could use a few more geeks in office.

former colonel-in-chief of the norwegian army has been knighted -- and he's a penguin

Nils Olav is a lot of things, one of them is being a penguin, but now he's also a Norwegian knight. Norway is clearly struggling to find qualified humans for knighthood, so they've settled for the next best thing.

"He loves the attention he receives at the ceremony and takes his time inspecting the troops."

The BBC even covered this event - with video! But they buried the tragic truth about this monumental day:

However, the penguin honoured on Friday is unfortunately not the original Nils Olav.

He died in the 1980s and was replaced by a two-year-old penguin at the Zoo.

Imagine if Sir Elton John hadn't been knighted until 25 years after he died and he had a two-year-old in silly glasses stand in for him. For shame.

Nils, you deserved better.


Thanks to em, dogged penguin supporter, for forwarding me this.

the animal welfare institute clearly isn't paying their graphic designers enough

OK, so I thought it was an interesting coincidence when a threadless shirt design apparently inspired a book cover. Now the Animal Welfare Institute gets into the act with their 2008 spring quarterly.

Just to refresh your memory, here's the aforementioned book cover:

And here's that familiar graphic. I swear this design has been following me around. That, or we're all just getting a little lazier as designers...

how well i'm doing now that my band (breadpig) broke up

Ever since I announced we'd broken up, people have constantly been asking about how I'm holding up. I think I've been handling it about as well as one can. As well as someone who just had their baby stolen away from them and then broken up at the height of its career. That metaphor needs work, but you understand.

I'm looking into some new musical projects, especially motivated by the success our debut album, When Will Then Be Now? has been having on iTunes. I've always wanted to explore the musical arc of the solo bassist. My last few vision quests have been quite promising.

two sxsw interactive panels that need your vote

I've been a proud ROFLCon cheerleader for a while now, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm endorsing Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke. But don't just vote on it, if you're in Austin next March, be sure to catch this panel. It'll be as insightful as it is ROFL-ful.

There's no way I'm missing that panel -- unless it's poorly timed to coincide with mine... (in which case I may still attempt some form of time travel)

You see, I'm moderating a panel called Inside Y Combinator - The YC Startups Speak. It doesn't have the same titular title as Behind the ROFLs, but it should be a good panel. If it's selected, I'll pull questions from InsideYC.reddit to ask the assortment of YC founders. This may appear to be an efficient way to solicit the questions the audience really wants answered, but it's really just so I have to do less preparation.

Along with your vote, I'd love some feedback either here or on Hacker News.

defcon highlight: iKat - tested and verified - internet kiosks beware

Of all the Defcon presentations we saw, this combined a badass release with a solid presentation (though a bit excessive in its build up) and the bonus of being able to test it within minutes of the talk ending.

Behold iKat, the interactive Kiosk Attack Tool. So simple that any n00b can break into any Internet kiosk and get to a command prompt within a minute.

I'm not sure how the sticker got on there, but behold cmd.exe -- open and waiting. I have a feeling they'll be blacklisting this URL (ikat.ha.cked.net) soon...

destructoid loves the cern crowbar idea, feelings mixed about reddit

As word of reddit's gift to CERN spread, the Internet unanimously championed our campaign to save the world. And then Jim Sterling at Destructoid wrote about it.

A Reddit user, however, has considered the far reaching implications of this device [wrecking bar], and fears that a real-life resonance cascade, as seen in the events of Half-Life, could occur, leading to Headcrab incidents the world over.

The comments were amusing to say the least. Here's our favorite around the office:

Me thinks Redzie isn't familiar with the alien...but he will be!

a parade of reddit ads

I've been running some of these as house ads on reddit and others on various CondeNet properties. A few were made specifically for Conde Nast brands; I think they'll be obvious.

I'll post all the clickthru rates once I've got the data.

impressive visualization of traffic sent from various social news sites

This didn't do as well on reddit as it should have (more proof that even a member of team reddit has no advantage over anyone else) but I'm going to give it some more love here. I think this was a great find, David.

The image below really doesn't do it justice at all. Click onward and have a clean pair of pants standing by. I feel like this would even make Tufte say "Whoa." He'd probably also sound just like Keanu, too.

internet rallies behind reddit's wrecking bar for cern

Breaking! Fark joins reddit's world-saving mission.

Even the digg community is hopping on the bandwagon. John Kershaw of RipTen acknowledged just how important this gift to CERN will prove to be:

With just a few short weeks remaining until scientists cause the end of the universe turn on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva and kill us all begin answering some of the biggest physics questions around, it took the brains of social news site Reddit.com to realise that the LHC was lacking one vital piece of safety equipment; a crowbar.

David Utter at WebProNews marvels at the resourcefulness (and awesomeness) of the reddit community:

The time for all of this to come together took roughly a day. There are few forces stronger than an unleashing of geek creativity and humor. Except, of course, for the LHC. And mysterious briefcase-toting men.

Oh, we're going to include a photo of the G-Man just in case. You're welcome, world.

If you ever doubted reddit's ability to change the world, now's the time to repent and come into to the alien's open arms.

randall munroe is good at drawing maps from memory

(If this doesn't make any sense - read this reddit post first)

Yes, it's true. Now it's been revealed to the world.


That's Europe and some of northern Africa, done from memory at Diesel Cafe in lovely Somerville, MA.


This is the angry fist of Massachusetts and some New England love -- all over my PAX reservation. Randall Munroe also doodled that Escher-esque thang, not M.C. Escher.

I currently have no plans to auction this on eBay. I'd like to use it to get into the Penny Arcade Expo first.

great idea, reddit -- the crowbar for cern/lhc has been ordered

This sounds random enough to be a breadpig project, but in fact, the reddit community has yet again inspired something marvelous. Upon learning that the Cern lab would be recreating the ill-fated Black Mesa project, Mad_Gouki thought it'd be prudent to send them a red crowbar for the pending alien invasion. Chris knows a few fellow physicists working at the lab, so we'll do our best to get this in the right hands. Let's hope they have someone there named Gordon Freeman who knows what to do with it...

Look, it's not even a "crow bar" -- it's a fucking wrecking bar. Check back here for updates as I get this bane of headcrabs painted and shipped out. In the meantime, leave some ideas for notes to include in the comments.

yesterday's logo - inspired by an intrepid redditor who... ventured outside

David forwarded me this great link about a redditor who, after seeing a gorgeous photo on the site, put on his hiking boots to go see it for himself.

This impressed me, because it proves that reddit not only has a positive impact on user's lives, but one so positive that it motivates them to go outdoors. Well done, Benjamin, I wish I could say the same about myself. This header is in your honor.

Hopefully he won't goatse me for this...

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alexissucks.com

More than likely inspired by this popular piece of feedback fail, Joe Peacock of JoeThePeacock.com launched a similar Weebly-powered offensive against me.

You'll notice that http://alexissucks.weebly.com/ bears a striking resemblance to http://meghansucks.weebly.com/. Isn't there enough anger in this world, Joe -- why did you have to bring that frozen baby penguin into it?

Ah, nothing quite like reliving middle school... only this time, I'm not in the band.

I'll also use this time to announce that after that massive traffic boom, I decided it was time to put up some Categories of Fail for people to browse the fairly large selection of feedback I've accumulated thus far. Check it out.