Allthyngs

When I chose not to become a marketing major at Tulane, I had to accept that I would now never be able to become Don Draper. I wouldn’t say I’m not dashing enough to be a Don Draper doppelganger, but my creative mind is holding me back from being the real thing. For those who have watched Mad Men as religiously as I have in the past few months, you may be looking for more information on the advertising industry. Enter Art and Copy, a new film that “reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time.” Unfortunately, Don Draper will not be included in the documentary, but I look forward to seeing the interviews with the kinds of people that inspired his character.

Find out more at Artandcopyfilm.org

We dat. New Orleans has now been ranked as the longest city in the United States, penis-wise. And fuck you, Grant, because New Hampshire just has some godly ability to win at every statistics polling ever. You’re all liars!

Read more about it at Condomania.com.

My god is this website creepy. The user written stories are best described as adventure-horror. Each one leads you into a crazy situation with one of the “holders” who possess certain “objects”, which could seriously fuck things up if they come together. I know at this point it sounds kinda ridiculous, so I’ll just post the introductory story and let you decide if you want to spend the next three hours of your life reading through every other story on the site. Check it out after the jump (click “read more”). Also, I’ve found this particularly helpful in that it has given me a list of lines that I will never in my life say in any situation, the most important being, “I seek the one who calls himself the Holder of the End.”

Check it out at TheHolders.org

I frequently walk across campus at Tulane with a smug look on my face, taking everything for granted. What we need here is a sniper, someone to keep us on our toes (FBI people please don’t raid my room I was just kidding). Anyway, in this video a village of seemingly nice people inherit a town sniper who with his friendly eastern European accent and deadly accuracy teaches us all a lesson on how valuable our lives are. Check it out after the jump.

I wouldn’t usually post a Youtube blooper video, but this is the first Youtube video that has had me laughing out loud in a long time. If you don’t know who Bill Dance is, which is totally acceptable if you don’t live in the Deep South, he’s a professional fisherman with an extremely boring show where he takes himself entirely too seriously. Check out the video on Youtube, gosh darnit!

There’s nothing like adding up the cost of your textbooks to find out that with the money you’re going to spend you could have bought all the gaming consoles on the market or maybe a hooker. I like to think that, in economic terms, the utility you would gain from having your textbooks is not even close to that of having sex with a high class ho, but then again I haven’t read many textbooks.

Moving on, this article discusses the awful task of putting together a textbook from start to finish and helps us understand why the hell they are so expensive. I had many misconceptions coming into this article, and it smashed nearly all of them. For example, I thought all those ugly people in the front of my textbook actually wrote it. This is not the case. Apparently these fuckers have so much tenure (read: have sucked up to way too many people for way too long) they can take credit for a book they had absolutely nothing to do with. These are also the same people who probably taught classes where they told students not to plagiarize.

I feel a rant coming on, so I’m just going to stop here and let you read the infuriating but overall enlightening article, which can be found at Edutopia.org.

I’ve always been interested in Wall Street, though I hated the movie. Greed IS good, and since Gordon Gecko is getting out of jail in Wall Street 2 and seems to be successful again, I maintain that he did nothing wrong. Anyway, as you can tell from that diatribe, my interest in movies is consistent with my love of the stock market, and now I’m going to be able to enjoy them both… at the same time! That’s right, betting on movies, brought to you by Cantor Exchange and some old dude who is going to rack up some serious cash. The premise is simple: just like in the stock market you can buy, sell, trade, sell short, and cover movies and reap the rewards if your pick is a hit. I’m pretty damn sure that I’m going to be a millionaire, although I was one of the people this article about the exchange mentions who would have bet on Avatar being a flop; which would’ve probably cost me a pretty penny. I should have known though, it’s James Cameron, the man is a god.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to pick the blockbusters, you can read the article in the New York Times and check out the site at Cantorexchange.com. If you want to start practicing, check out HSX.com, where you can bet on movies with fake money.

Mixtapes and DJ mash-ups are an addiction. Luckily for you, I’ve got your next fix and it’s big. The Hood Internet, a DJ tagteam from Chicago, have nearly 150 tracks divided over 4 mixtapes and 2 vs. albums, which I will confidently say are almost all awesome (I’ve only listened to like 20 so if they aren’t all awesome I apologize for my hubris). They mainly do mash-ups with indie rock, which seems to be a new fad lately, but I’m definitely not complaining, it’s fucking legit.

Check them out at Thehoodinternet.com, and check out one of their newest tracks, The Jump Off Intact (Lil’ Kim vs Dam-Funk), embedded after the jump.

I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed Jackass. I also enjoyed Wild Boyz. And Viva La Bam. Sue me, I like watching people do crazy shit. Anyway, Nitro Circus trumps all of these shows. Travis Pastrana, the guy who should have died about 18 times by now, somehow convinced MTV to give what seems to be an unlimited budget to do whatever he and his friends think is cool. The results are television gold, and all the episodes are available here. Also, there’s not nearly as much male nudity or gross out stuff like in Jackass, and the lack of this is always appreciated.

Check out all the episodes on Nitrocircus.com, and my favorite, the first episode, in which Travis Pastrana jumps out of plane without a parachute, a guy misses a foam pit on a motorcycle front flip, and they build the greatest slip-n-slide of all time, is here.

I’m going to take a risk here and say this movie is going to be good. The premise is that a perfect family comes to town and has lots of cool stuff that everyone else wants because, hey the Joneses are the perfect family and obviously a perfect family has all the right material things. Turns out the Joneses are paid to sell these products and are not a family at all, what a twist! Now, I know the plot sounds really lame, but I think if the movie surprises me and pulls off a message about family and materialism and how the American dream is totally unattainable, I’d be more than impressed. I also have a lot of faith in Californication star David Duchovny. More reassuring is the R rating, which gives me the impression that this isn’t just some formulaic comedy. Either way, you, the reader are presented with a win-win situation, because if this movie is awesome, then hey, you saw an awesome movie, and if not you can vent all of your anger on me, a poor defenseless blogger, becuase that’s what the internet is for right?

Watch the trailer after the jump (click “read more”)

As the internet becomes more and more of an uncontrollable behemoth, you’re going to have to start understanding its lingo and culture or you’ll become some kind of nerd or something (switched roles much?). Luckily for your social-life having self, you don’t have to give up any keg stands or drunk chicks to keep up with your lolcatting, rickrolling friends. Just pop open a new tab (command-T or control-T) and type in knowyourmeme.com. There you’ll find explanations for what the hell longcat is, boxxee, and other internet nonsense. Shit dude you got cheetoh stains on your shirt, nah just leave it, you look fly.

Check it out at knowyourmeme.com

You may have already dismissed Kid Cudi as just another auto-tuner, but you should look again (meaning watch the videos embedded after the jump). Kid Cudi may have gotten his big break from Kanye by doing Day n’ Night, but his repertoire includes so much more. With calm beats and fun lyrics, Kid Cudi is coming up in a different way than the average rapper, an issue which he addresses in Man on the Moon. I really can’t do him justice in this short description, so I’ll just let you watch his videos to understand my loss for words.

Diggnation consists of two dudes (Now I use the word dude loosely here. Kevin Rose is a fucking millionaire, but he retains some sincere dudeness) drinking beer and bullshitting, trying their best to hold on to some sort of linear structure while reading top stories from Digg.com and giving their opinions. The show holds my attention week after week and month after month because it feels real. When I sit down to watch Diggnation, it’s just some guys giving me their opinion without an agenda or goal other than entertainment. Anyway, check them out, because it’s entertaining and inspiring that, after 4 years and over 200 episodes, the show is still two likable guys talking about their interests without being monotonous.

Check it out at Revision3.com

I think we’ve all come to the conclusion over the years that people in general suck. In fact, here on allthyngs, we have a tag specially reserved for people who need to be shot. The Autobiography of J.G.B., a short story featured in the New Yorker a few months ago, tells of the last man on the planet after an unexplained disappearance of all human beings. Right, I know, you’ve heard this one before, except this time there’s no Will Smith or vampiric zombies. There’s just a guy doing exactly what I would do if I was the only one left: whatever the hell I wanted. But what the writer so expertly describes is the world without humans, from a human perspective. It just seems so peaceful.

For a look into the world without people, and an extremely annoying ending (trust me you’ll be calling up the author for more), read the article in the New Yorker.

Sometimes a lie is so much more interesting than the truth that you just have to accept it. I won’t give away the video because it’s only about a minute, so watch and be amazed at the immense power of a good story.

You know that girl that constantly pops up on your Facebook news feed with her third album from that one party that’s just a bunch of pictures of her face contorted into seventeen different poses while she holds a roofied vodka Kool-Aid? Yeah, I guess I do mean all the girls in your newsfeed. As it turns out, these pictures might be useful in documenting possible crimes, or at least that’s what the Onion thinks. But either way I don’t think we should be giving the NSA or CSI: Miami any ideas.

This short film comes from a French design firm called Naked Compagnie. Their story is a funny one: In the 1950s, when the United States was experimenting with LSD, the French decided that they shouldn’t be left behind and began putting small amounts of LSD into their water supply. When the French government heard the United States had stopped its experiments, they shut off the valves of their LSD distribution system, though unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) an accident left some of the pipes laced with hallucinogens. When Naked Compagnie began working out of their new office, they noticed that their projects began to take a very creative turn. It turns out their office was one of the last buildings left of the LSD pipeline. As the money began rolling in from artists such as Jay-Z and Mika, who were so impressed with the extreme visuals that they opted to use them in their concerts, Naked Compagnie chose not to report their tainted water supply to the government. To this day, Naked Compagnie continues to produce trippy-ass videos for both cash and the appeasement of the snake monsters that inhabit their office.*

Check out Naked Compagnie’s website at naked-co.com and their channel at on Vimeo

*None of this is actually true. Probably. I mean look at this video.

I’ve been narcissistic enough at times to check Wikipedia to see what happened in my birth year, but I’ve always come away disappointed. The majority of their giant list of things is irrelevant to my interests and doesn’t quite stroke my ego the way that WhatHappenedInMyBirthYear.com does. The idea is simple enough, the story of your birth year is typed slowly on screen, with some algorithm pulling in information. Nevertheless, something about either the way the information is presented or which information the site uses makes the story turns out to be really interesting (if the text is moving too slowly for you, try to close the page and they’ll offer to bring it all up at once). It doesn’t just list random facts but gives a sense of what the atmosphere was in the entire world when you were born. You’ll know what movies people were seeing, how they were dressed, and what shows they were watching (Seinfeld premiered in my birth year), along with many other random facts. The Berlin Wall came down in the year of my birth, did anything cool happen in yours)?

Check it out at What Happened In My Birth Year

Ever wondered if something is “worth its weight in gold?” Ever wondered how much one pound of LSD, enough to blast everyone and everyone you ever loved into space, would cost you? Well evilmadscientist.com has an answer for your curiosity. They’ve taken measurements of the approximate price per pound, gram, etc. of various materials and matched them up against the price of gold and against each other. The results are an interesting mash-up of “whoda thunk its”, for instance, Kopi Luwak coffee, which is harvested from the feces of the Asian Palm Civet, is about the same price as human blood. I just fail to see how coffee beans that a particular animal shits are worth more than a fluid that can receive oxygen through osmosis and pass it around my body, but I guess that’s why I’m not a gourmet.

For more relative prices that will make you think, and probably make you hate people (see price of printer ink vs human blood), read the whole article at Evil Mad Scientist

If you’ve ever played an online first-person shooter you’ve probably been called a noob, hacker, etc. There’s also a good chance that you didn’t deserve to be called such names. All the members of Team Roomba, deserve every name in the book, including the always shameful noobhaxx0rfagloser, but the results of their rigorous griefing (messing with people in online games), is simply hilarious and in the end makes us stop and ask, FPS players, why so serious?

Best Part: Skip to 6:00 for the section of forced trivia games.