cow porn on every virgin america flight

I was reminded of this on Monday when I settled down in my seat for this afternoon's Virgin America flight back to SF. They've got a "welcome to this airplane, here's how it works" video that's actually tolerable. In fact, it's the best I've seen thanks to a creative hand-drawn style and a good sense of humor.

To that latter point, check out what the bull sitting beside the matador is reading.


See that? It's a magazine with OLE on the cover and a cow udder on the back.


That's right, it's a bovine titty magazine.

The artist probably didn't expect anyone to notice it, but I guess I was just that interested in my pre-flight movie. Kudos, Virgin America. Somehow I feel like an American carrier would find this little gag too raunchy.

Point this out to the person beside you on your next VA flight and you'll look really observant... or odd.

business of software conference was a great success - pierre even took home a macbook air

I can't thank Joel Spolsky and Neil Davidson enough for putting on such a great conference. Granted, I was only able to stay for the first day of it, but if that was any indication, day two could have been presented entirely in Coptic and it still would have been interesting.

Be sure to catch up on what you missed on the Business of Software wiki and keep your eye on Neil's blog for video and future updates. I do hope you two will do this again next year.

I should also divulge that I'm a bit biased, as this was the first conference I came back from with a prize. Well, I didn't win it, exactly, but Pierre Francois did. Admittedly, whereas the rest of the presenters opted for intelligent, helpful presentations, I chose something much less useful.

Pierre Francois (of 74 Signals) gave a Pecha Kucha presentation (that's 20 slides with only 20 seconds a slide - also not pronounced like you think) entitled Keeping it Real: Starting, Running, and Selling a Web 2.0 Startup. A number of folks asked me to put it online, so you can find it all at 74 Signals, including the very first Pierre talk from 2006. I'll blog about the video of this most recent presentation once it goes live. I've also been advised to create t-shirts. We'll see...

The audience voted it the winner and Pierre walked away with a brand new MacBook Air that he loves almost as much as he loves himself, which is saying a lot.

wtg, metallica

This is not the Metallica from a decade ago; I'm happy you guys learned your lesson. Don't worry, you're not unforgiven in my book. Maybe for St. Anger -- that album really sucked.

The new album sounds pretty good, though.

a hot, new (and frothy) reddit called cappuccino

Meet Cappuccino. No relation to the drink I'm effetely sipping right now.

There's a new web framework in town with all the sex appeal of your favorite Apple apps, but for producing those desktop-caliber apps in your browser. The YC team behind 280North stopped by the reddit office to give us a sneak peek and we were all quite impressed.

They launched it last week to much fanfare, which you can find here on their reddit. It'll be fun watching this project evolve.

Don't worry, they're not eligible for our Raise a reddit competition. But you probably are -- there's $7,500 in prizes up for grabs, so lay off the Spore a bit and get to growing your reddit.

michael arrington loves feedback fail!

See what I did there? It's not true, but I crafted an attention-grabbing headline.

The actual piece just consists of an email he received as a "tip" from a concerned TechCrunch reader who was dissatisfied with the coverage. Not for legitimate reasons, but merely to plug his own startup. So Michael indulged him. This startup has a promising pitch, from John the tipster himself:

Its [sic] the first dating service in the world that allows you to meet and date real celebrities as well as find people who bear a facial resemblance to the love of your life.

Michael, I know we haven't always seen eye to eye in the past, but I'm just happy to know that we all share in the joy that is feedback fail.

more great reviews of lolmagnetz, one even confirming the death of english

The Modern Materialist has the best LOLmagnetz review I've read yet:

What ever happened to the ambitious Emily Dickinsons of our generation? The Bukowskis, Plaths, Whitmans, and Miltons? When did the English language itself devolve into missplaced [sic] consonants and smiley faces?

Perhaps the English language officially died at the time when LOLMagnetz became available.

Indeed, we've won a great victory against the English language.

The forum readers of Badger and Blade approve, after rabidpotatochip posted a link and great little review. I kid you not, the first response was simple and emphatic:

full of win!

If that (and the downafll of the English language) wasn't enough to convince you, the profits from LOLmagnetz are donated to the SF SPCA to ensure there will be future generations of pets to be LOLified.

Get your LOLz on and post your LOLmasterpieces at LOLmagnetz.com.

thinkgeek + lolmagnetz = full of win

LOLmagnetz just went on sale at ThinkGeek. They're apparently selling well and a slew of sites (including Mixx?!) have been spreading the word.

A few other sites (non reddit competitors - hehe) also appreciated the LOL-ramifications of this innovation. ThisNext, Kaboodle, and the Swedish Fascination.se -- I salute you all with a mighty glass of lingonberry juice.

And the most exciting news of all, LOLmagnetz.com is now online, entirely thanks to the hard work of Chris Slowe. Once you've got your LOLmagnetz kit, photograph some of your creations and submit them to this reddit-powered site for fellow LOLfans to vote and discuss.

banner day for popcuts

Disclosure: This startup is in Y Combinator.

I'm consistently impressed with this company. The founders are diligent and earnest, but I could say that about most YC startups. They don't even have a mascot (wtf, guys?) but they do have a clever revenue model. And now they're getting some love in the AP.

In case you don't want to read the whole thing (but you should), here's a blurb:

Being a trendsetter can be pricey. As any fashionista or gadget hound knows, the latest frocks and tech toys don't pay for themselves. But a new Web site is trying to make it profitable for music lovers to stay ahead of the curve — by paying them when other people purchase MP3s they've bought.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that they also gave Breadpig the band an early entry into the PopCuts artist library. Sales haven't quite taken off yet, but we're giving the maximum amount possible to our early adopter fans. Get in on the ground floor.

wisdom of crowds? internet pwnage on wired

Sure there's a Wookieepedia, but when Wired asked its readers to plot the Star Wars galaxy, the Internet stepped up to the challenge. Doomeru was able to capture this screenshot before it was taken down.

He also pointed out that, judging from the aliens, I have a feeling the reddit community was a bit involved...

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...

>

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.

reddit is creating link zombies

Remember everyone, aim for the head.

David forwarded me this PopSickleStrip comic a couple days ago; he needed to explain it to me, as it doesn't jibe with zombie canon (brains <> links).

i love the smell of madelines in the morning - smells like, a proust questionnaire

Dharmesh Shah (of OnStartups fame) just posted a Proust Questionnaire he asked me to fill out. I completed the quiz in the allotted time and got a "B+".

He also confessed something that I plan to remind him of for the rest of his life:

alexis and Steve Huffman begat reddit (this is the first time I've used the word begat in a sentence -- it feels good). reddit sort of begat OnStartups.com (my startup blog) by driving a bunch of traffic in the early days and helping build that crucial initial readership. OnStartups.com sort of begat HubSpot (my current marketing software startup). So there you have it. alexis begat reddit begat OnStartups.com begat HubSpot begat my plan for global domination.

Read it here if you're curious about my first real job, favorite manager, or just want to know what a Proust Questionnaire is. It's also proof that well-placed bribes really do pay off.


Bonus! The biggest reason why I prefer using a lowercase "a" is that I find it aesthetically superior to the uppercase. I just wish I could make that shape with a pen.

i love amazon, let me count the ways

Reason #458

With Amazon Prime shipping, I came into work today to get a copy of Soul Calibur IV delivered right to my office. No waiting in line for me. Now if only they'd kept Necrid around...

critical mass outside our office

There I was alone in the office last Friday evening when a parade of bikes began riding along Third St. I snapped this picture out of one of our windows. Almost makes me wish I had a Segway so I could join the civil disobedience in the lamest way possible.

all the way from Singapore, iLead coming to the reddit hq tomorrow

iLead, a group from the University of Singapore, is touring Silicon Valley on a study mission and they'll be visiting us tomorrow.

In a blog entry that called us "the company with one of the cutest icons" (well played), the iLead team announced their upcoming visit to our Soma offices.

To me, Reddit is a cool site to obtain the latest news items from all over the globe. My personal favourite? The ‘controversial’ tab that provides links to the most controversial news items.

I knew I wasn't the only one who liked that controversial tab...

Anyway, I'd developed a relationship with some students there after attending a conference at NUS during the summer of my junior year at UVA.

This turned out to be quite a fateful trip, as it's where I decided I was going to start a startup after graduating. It was on that trip that I emailed Steve and told him my plan and that I was going to need him in order to pull it off.

I dug up the old email a little while back. I swear I don't normally use that many ellipses in my emails -- I think I was just a little too excited.

Looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow. Bobbleheads shall be distributed.

i'm (pierre francois) speaking at joel spolsky's business of software conference

This is going to be fun. I was pleased to learn that I was accepted as one of the 8 finalists to speak (perform?) during the Pecha Kucha portion of the 2008 Business of Software Conference in Boston.

I didn't know what Pecha Kucha meant either, so here's a synopsis:

The speaker gets 6 minutes and 40 seconds: no more, no less. You submit exactly 20 slides. Each one is shown for exactly 20 seconds and then flips automatically. At the end, even if you're almost done and just have one more thing, the mic cuts off and you sit down.

It seemed like just the thing for Pierre Francois, Web 2.0 guru. We haven't seen him since BarCamp Boston a couple years ago, but he's got a lot to say (in exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds) about starting, running and selling a web 2.0 startup.

Thanks for the opportunity -- Pierre shalln't disappoint. He's genetically incapable of anything less than 110%.

safety first in bangkok

Liz sent me this poster from a restaurant - yes, a restaurant - in Bangkok. They take safe-sex practice very seriously.

baby antarctic penguins being frozen!

Skeptics of climate change, it's come to this: frozen baby penguin guilt.

the reddit alien eats xckd's multi-colored poo

Here's the proof. A response to this recent XKCD comic.

interview with adam fuhrer, the arbiter of cool

Adam (noname99) has been one of our top users for a long time. As a result, he was named an wizard of buzz by the Wall Street Journal -- all before his thirteenth birthday.

So when he asked for an interview to post on his blog, I was happy to oblige. Plus, he even asked about breadpig. How could I say no?

rental cars are totally negotiable at the counter, who knew?

Thought I'd share this revelation I had over the weekend. At the counter of the Dollar rental car of Oakland International Airport, I was offered the chance to upgrade from my mid-size to an SUV.

I laughed. Why would I just want to pay for more gas to drive a vehicle that would never leave asphalt? She said I had a point.

Undeterred, the sales rep. offered a convertible.

Well, we were going to be doing some scenic driving around Yosemite and Tahoe, maybe it would be fun with the top down, I thought.

"Maybe... How much more would it be?"

She punched in some numbers and quoted me at $280 for the week. I guess turning 25 was worth it. But on a lark, I thought I'd haggle -- make my Armenian relatives proud.

"I'll give you $200. That's such a rounder, prettier number."

OK. She typed away on her computer and through some combination of black magic and Midi-chlorians, arrived at a daily rate that would be < $200. The final total turned out to be $185.

"Thank you!" I cheerily replied as I did a little jig that thankfully was obscured by the counter.

I wish I'd known this back during our startup days, so I thought I'd pass this along for you to try out during your next trip out to Sand Hill Road.

All that said, Zipcar still reigns supreme in my book, despite being haggle-free; three years sans car ownership and I couldn't be happier.

summing jenny 8 lee up in one word (one number would have been too easy)

New American Media aims to "expand the news lens through ethnic media" -- and now I've played a small part in the lens expansion.

My friend Jenny 8 Lee has a delicious book, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which I've been lucky enough to see since it was a humble proposal on her laptop. It's come a long way and brought her quite a bit of success and attention on what's already been a remarkable career. She's shared the fun with plenty of her friends, including at an event she had in New York, which I attended a little while back.

There, plump with dim sum and Tsingtao, I got the chance to sum Jenny up with one word:

But even if her nom de plume were bereft of that lucky number, chances are that Lee would be no less memorable. “Effervescent” is how Alexis Ohanian, designer of the book's blog and co-founder of a news sharing site, describes her. Occasional appearances in gossip columns and multiple mentions on meta-media website Gawker.com paint her as a social butterfly with the uncanny ability to charm anyone who crosses her path. This assertion is more true than not. She constantly invites people into her home, even if they are near-strangers, and even though it's New York City, where it's possible to befriend someone for years without ever stepping foot into his or her residence.

Many years ago, then just a wide-eyed startup founder looking making Chinatown bus trips into New York from Boston, I was one of those folks she graciously invited into her home. I'm not ashamed to say that I spent more than a few nights on her sofa; New York is a great city to couchsurf through, especially when you're a salary-less startup founder.

yourweek getting some love from all over the internet

This most recent write-up in Citizen Tube best summarizes just what we're aiming to do with YourWeek. We'll see if we get there, but the second taping I just watched (yes, version 2.0) is another step in the right direction.

The recently-waterboarded Christopher "Believe me, it's torture" Hitchens provided some great footage in his interview with Rich and Michelle. It made the rounds on a variety of right-wing blogs: LittleGreenFootballs and Hot Air got lots of discussion from a video with such choice soundbites as "If the GOP were a dog, it should be shot."

A few other sites blogged segments, including Primetime Politics and Wired Science (re: Frankenmeat).

And we had the help of the talented designer, Callie Peck, who created a couple house ads for us to run:

Stay tuned for an update about whether or not the show gets picked up...

the 1 way you need to attack shyness

Inspired by this recent article, I thought I'd sit down and compose my secret for talking to people. I've been lucky in that I've never had a problem with shyness, (edit: largely, I believe, because I've had this mentality since as early as I can remember - only with less profanity. Despite being someone who thinks Meyers Briggs tests are a joke, I'll mention that I'm only a borderline "E") but I think this is sound advice.

It worked with Paul Graham the first time Steve and I met him in Cambridge after his reading of How to Start a Startup. He courteously accepted my offer for a drink in exchange for hearing our startup pitch.

This was before Y Combinator, mind you, so I suspect this would be much harder to pull off with his current schedule.

Unfortunately, this didn't work with Scarlett Johansson in the lobby of the 4 Times Square building -- I couldn't think up anything clever in time and didn't want to be "that guy."

Nonetheless, I still feel like this has served me exceptionally well over the last twenty-five years:

Everyone eats, shits, and dies*

Remember that, we're all equal, so what are you waiting for?


*Not to be confused with "Everyone eat shit and die!"

the college of arts & sciences (uva) is renaming their alumni magazine and reddit is helping

The original title, Arts & Sciences, needs to be replaced and they're tapping into the UVa alum network for a new name.

Submitting and voting end on July 10th, so get your entry in now and harangue everyone around you to vote it up. If you're the winner, you'll be credited in December's issue and be given the keys to Monticello.

OK, that last part isn't true, but the bragging rights alone are nice.

reddit does economics

The economics reddit community has grown quite nicely since we opened up user-generated reddits. As a result, they earned a customized reddit logo. I flashed back to my ECON 201 class at least thrice during the creation of the logo. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Supply and demand curves will probably haunt me in my sleep tonight.

technical difficulties at justin.tv today, but the alien visits israel

Instead of a talk from Pierre Francois, we ended up playing a LAN game of StarCraft. Yes, I got pwnd. I really need to work on my mid-game Zerg strategy.

Hopefully Pierre will get another chance for a tech talk, but in the meantime, here are some photos of Inkling's Adam Siegel rocking his reddit gear in the Middle East.

Here he is in Israel, representin' in a state park after some cliff climbing.
And here's another reddit alien in front of a ruined Jordanian tank. Our mascot had nothing to do with that.Aside from being the co-founder of a fellow Y Combinator company, Adam's a pretty cool dude. He even let team reddit crash at his place once.

pierre francois is back! on justin.tv

After a long hiatus since his last public speaking appearance, Pierre is back to share his web 2.0 wisdom.

Come visit the Justin.tv office today @ 5:30 (there'll be pizza @ 5) if you're in SF or just tune in to HackerTV.

one advantage to having bizarre (and rotating) 404 messages

Sometimes people will blog about them. This was the case with AK over at MyDigitalLife.

These 404 aliens are pretty ancient relative to our site's lifespan, but I'm happy new users are discovering them (tho, that also means they've done something wrong -- or we have). I guess I'm ambivalent about it.

Anyway, here's his favorite - the sunken forehead reddit alien:

Discover them all!

we have a winner!

With all the TechCrunch speculation surrounding our party invite, I ran a poll of my own for readers to guess our big announcement. Sure enough, someone figured it out (though, I really do just like penguins -- Tux is just one of them).

Reddit is going drink the linux cool aid and go open source, which will be free, as in beer ;)

Right on, David W. You're the winner of a limited edition reddit open source t-shirt in the size of your preference for being the first person to guess correctly (and hours before the announcement).

Here's a picture of Jeremy modeling said shirt (he's not included).

I'll also offer to replace the TechCrunch shirt a lucky TechCrunch reader won with one of our open source shirts. Just email me.

when in doubt, just ask reddit

It's a simple formula I recently used to figure out a custom logo to give the comics community. I had no idea what to doodle and thought Bill Watterson deserves better than a modest alien homage. This is something I've been doing for redditor-created communities that have taken off.

Fortunately, the comics community had plenty of ideas. I ultimately went with a comic panel look suggested by irrelevantnotch.

Oh yes, that's "fightin' Splashy" in there.

redditors do some alien doodling of their own

Thanks to qgyh2 for pushing this my way.

A redditor named (I'm not making this up) JewStyleKungfu submitted a link to a reddit alien modeled in Blender.

Not to be outdone, Manthrax submitted his own:

My amateurish stop-motion video starring the alien peaked over 10K views on YouTube, yet I feel the next one I do should be using Blender. Watch out, Pixar.

open sourcing reddit, as explained by the alien

Haven't heard yet? reddit is now open source.

I was asked to create some kind of video starring the alien to explain the announcement. Not that I have any experience in video production. Stop motion was harder than expected thanks to having a bobblehead instead of an action figure. Nonetheless, I'm still pretty happy with it.

what's techcrunch so curious about? i love penguins

This has been well documented over my last three years of blogging. Nonetheless, check out the TechCrunch coverage our party invite got.

Like I commented, I believe I should have included a breadpig -- that would have really confused people.

Since TechCrunch is offering a shirt for whomever guesses correctly, I thought I'd match the deal on my blog and give one of the shirts we've made in honor of tomorrow's event.

i love it when reddit is the source of apple gossip

Lookie, ZDNet sources reddit in a recent blog entry about Snow Leopard -- I'm not going to send a takedown notice, though....

Meanwhile, reader Mythic on Reddit last week said he had interviewed at the Apple team working on Open Computing Language. He offered more information on the scope of Apple’s work:

I think it’s more than that. I interviewed with Apple’s GPGPU group (they do have several people working full time on this stuff) a few months ago and got the impression that OpenCL is intended to abstract over a variety of cards and computing platforms. So you could write your program once in OpenCL and be able to run it on an ATI card, an NVIDIA card, or just your multi-core CPU. More interestingly, you could run it in tandem on your GPU and CPU with some sort of adaptive load-balancing performed automatically. I have no idea how much of this actually made it into Snow Leopard, but it’s a cool idea.

clips from yourweek (reddit-powered tv news) are online

re-posted from dev blog

I'm pleased to report that the long-awaited Internet release for the pilot of YourWeek is now upon us.

Watch it now (more segments will be uploaded throughout the day).

Now, we were a bit handicapped in putting this together, because we couldn't properly notify the community of a television news show that didn't exist yet, but producers were able to find popular stories from the reddit corpus to report on. If YourWeek gets picked up, we're expecting every week's show to be shaped by your feedback on what you think matters.

The five of us know remarkably little about television production; we're incredibly grateful to all the folks at PBS for bringing this concept to fruition. Hopefully there'll he more reddit-powered television in our future.

in san francisco this wednesday night? reddit has an announcement to make (with free booze!)

Come join us this Wednesday, June 18th, from 6:30 to 8:30pm at Swig (561 Geary St) in downtown San Francisco.

There'll be plenty of beer, miniature hamburgers, and something else even more intoxicating and delicious...

Please remember to RSVP by emailing redditRSVP@wired.com.

even if spore never gets released, at least reddit aliens have already been created

I'm not the only one looking forward to Spore's release (and also still somewhat skeptical that it'll ever happen), but I've yet to create my own version of the reddit alien. Fortunately, some enterprising redditors went ahead and did just that with the Spore Creature Creator.

But it turned out p337 had already made a Spore-version of the reddit alien, which happened to also be my favorite.

And thus it was immortalized in today's reddit logo: