Conan O’Brien’s internet usage came around only after years of failed attempts at starting a career in real-world entertainment. He had brief stints as a writer for The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live before landing a gig as host of an obscure late night talk show called Late Night. O’Brien flirted with real success when he was promoted out of that bleary late-night/early morning vacuum into his dream job as host of the Tonight Show. O’Brien quickly found that position to be ill-suited to his dedication to quality and originality; he was fired soon after accepting the job.
It was only after these many years of struggling with the hardships of the real-world entertainment industry that O’Brien finally found his place, and it happened to be on the internet. On February 24, 2010, O’Brien got a Twitter account, and his career took off with immediate and explosive success. At last, O’Brien had found his place.
Conan’s Twitter is a stunning piece of internet humour done right. He posts with an unobtrusive reliability, and always has something amusing to say. Take, for example, this early message: “This morning I watched Remington Steele while eating Sugar Smacks out of a salad bowl. I was naked.” Now that’s good writing.
O’Brien’s latest spark of creative internet genius was to announce the first person he would follow with his account, Michigan resident Sarah Killen. His wit drove thousands to her humble Twitter account, and she has quickly gone from 3 to 11 000 followers. That’s the power of real internet celebrity.
Conan O’Brien, Shufflingdead salutes you for being one class act.
When a conversation takes place on the world’s largest internet message board, people listen. Combined with fervent nationalism, the results of a little trash talking can lead to all out internet war.
A South Korean group recently launched a massive denial of service attack on Japan’s almighty 2channel, causing an estimated $2.5 million in damages. The attacks came in part as a means of celebrating Korea’s March 1 independence day, but also as a response to criticisms made by the anonymous posters of 2ch regarding Korean Olympic figure skater Kim Yu-Na.
Most of 2ch’s servers are located in the US, and the site’s hosting company is looking into having the attack investigated as cyber terrorism by the FBI. Responses to the attack have ranged from the expected Japanese internet counter-invasion to the establishment of a relief fund for victims of the Chilean earthquake.
Freedom hater Steve Jobs has reached out with his unforgiving, money-encrusted fingers and snatched a whopping 5000 apps away from the iPhone app store. The apps were deemed “sexually inappropriate” after Apple further restricted their already Orwellian store rules. Here are the new guidelines Apple has added for app submissions since the mass removal:
No images of women in bikinis
No images of men in bikinis
No skin
No silhouettes
No sexual connotations or innuendo.
Nothing that can be sexually arousing
No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content
In other words, you can no longer use your iPhone as a portable masturbation assistant, calling into question the already shaky grounds of the device’s usefulness. If you need something to jack off to on your bus ride home from work or school, and don’t have a Jobs-esque design fetish, I guess you’ll have to get a Droid.
Well people, Adobe Photoshop is officially old. In fact, two days ago it turned 20, and the entire world is celebrating.
Photoshop 1.0 was release February 18, 1990 for Macintosh exclusively, coded and developed by brothers John and Thomas Knoll. The first Windows version came out in 1992. Since it’s humble release, Photoshop has exploded into an indispensable app, forever changing the world of photography, drawing, and design.
Adobe’s Photoshop is the industry standard with no serious competition in sight. Photoshop is also probably one of the most pirated programs in existence (The full version of CS4 will set you back $699 US). For cheaper or free alternatives, check out other titles like GIMP or Paint.NET
Check out this video interview after the jump, featuring Photoshop co-founder John Knoll, as he takes us on a journey through the lifespan of Photoshop.
Last week’s Interneter was LisaNova, a YouTube celebrity who parlayed her early start in vlogging into a successful internet career, far surpassing anything I’ve ever done. This week’s Interneter is her buddy and compatriot in being better than me, Philip DeFranco.
Philly D’s path to wealth and stardom kicked off in 2006 with the birth of his first YouTube channel, sxephil. I’ve never understood that name, is he straight edge or something? Well anyway, he quickly started churning out celebrity-gossip and stupid-news rant videos, and has now amassed over 900 000 subscribers. Phil has used the success of that channel to branch out into additional channels, including joining and then leaving that “TheStation” thing all the cool kids on YouTube are or were a part of.
DeFranco’s power knows no bounds, he now brags that his internet income exceeds $250 000 a year, and was voted Wired’s Sexiest Geek of 2008 by his loyal minions. I was a regular viewer of his show for awhile, but got sick of his shtick about the time he snuck in a little “blame the victim” commentary during the Rihanna-Chris Brown fiasco.
Philip DeFranco, Shufflingdead salutes you for filling us with hateful jealousy.
Yesterday, the internet declared war on the government of Australia for its continued efforts to “protect” its citizens from the terrors of small-breasted women and other such nastiness.
If you been following the various Australia stories on Shufflingdead over the last couple weeks, then you know that the Australian government hasn’t been too kind to its own citizens lately when it comes to the internet. The Aussie government has gone to war against, of all things, small breasted women in porn, in addition to a lot of other fun freedoms I had previously taken for granted.
Now, the internet’s version of the Super Friends, Anonymous, is taking arms against this sea of troubles, with “Operation Titstorm.” Wednesday and Thursday have been harsh for the government, with a massive denial of service attack occurring across their websites. This includes parliament’s website receiving 7.5 million hits a second at one point. Anonymous promises to follow up this opening volley with “a shitstorm of porn e-mail, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices.”
Anonymous sent out e-mails to Australian media warning of the impending attack, and stated:
The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.
Congratulations Anonymous! Shufflingdead stands with you in this noble quest for justice.
I just logged into Facebook as a means of procrastinating at work (by work I mean my basement from which I update this site) and found the layout had been changed yet again. The new layout streamlines navigation a little by moving requests, messages, and notifications up to little tabs beside the Facebook logo. Other features have been made easier to find with a re-worked left side-bar. The news feed can now be navigated be viewing either top updates or the most recent ones. This introduces YouTube-esque games of whoring for comments and “likes” in order to boost the visibility of your updates. It’s an especially useful/abuse-able and welcome change for shameless self promoters with websites like myself.
Overall, the changes are an incremental improvement, but not especially shocking or revolutionary. Expect your friends to be whining about it non-stop for the next week before they get used to it, just like they have with every other layout change on every website ever.
The changes come with the sixth birthday of Facebook, which has become a ubiquitous social-networking website for everyone worth talking to. Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook to meet girls, has bragged that this week also marks Facebook membership crossing the stunning 400 million mark.
This week’s Interneter is YouTube superstar Lisa “LisaNova” Donovan. She came to prominence in the early days of YouTube when all you had to do was exhibit the smallest modicum of talent to become a giant internet celebrity. Shufflingdead actually began on YouTube about the same time as LisaNova, but lacked effort, talent, and passion. She’s parlayed that lucky start using her incredible promotional talents into a wildly successful career which spans both internet and real life stardom.
The LisaNova channel on YouTube has nearly 400 000 subscribers, and features mildly amusing clips of Lisa parodying celebrities like Sarah Palin and Keira Knightley, and performing skits featuring original characters like “Affirmation Girl.” She also participates in videos on other YouTube channels like TheStation, which increases her visibility and what I imagine to be sprawling personal wealth. The various participants of TheStation channel form a core of YouTube celebrities who like to think they are cool and judge others for their coolness, preventing those who are independent, and thus most cool, from ever achieving success and popularity.
Lisa has garnered such great attention that she even managed a short stint on MADtv but quickly disappeared from the show after four appearances. It’s still more than I’ve managed to achieve in my woeful internet life.
LisaNova, Shufflingdead salutes you for giving us something to be jealous and spiteful of.
Yesterday, I reported that Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata had a good laugh about the iPad. Now, Jobs is getting a little wound up about everybody mocking his new device, and doing a little heckling of his own.
In a town hall with his employees, Jobs started an angry rant against Google, unhappy that they were invading his company’s smart phone turf. Ever the showman, Jobs capped off his tirade with “This don’t be evil mantra: ‘It’s bullshit.’” “Don’t be evil” is Google’s informal corporate slogan.
Jobs’ iPad has received a lot of criticism for not supporting Adobe’s Flash, and now he’s let people know why it doesn’t. He feels “they [Adobe] are lazy… they have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it… Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy.” He added that Flash will soon be dead with the rise of HTML5.
Not willing to take things lying down, Adobe has thrown up a collection of what iPads trying to access Flash encrusted sites might look like on their blog. Until Adobe’s blogger got in a bit of trouble for it, this collection included a slice of Bang Bros. The implication, of course: you can’t look at porn on your iPad during meetings, so don’t even bother with the thing.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who has successfully taken over the world with his company’s Wii and DS video game devices, took the time to have a good laugh at Steve Jobs and his magical iPad.
Speaking from an undisclosed location, Mr. Iwata chided the iPad tablet as being nothing but a bigger iPod Touch, and added “there were no surprises for me.”
Iwata went on to claim that 3D gaming is not the future, downplaying the investment Sony has made in 3D TVs. Having thoroughly destroyed Sony on two fronts this generation, Iwata probably has a better grasp of what consumers want.
March 6th, 2010 by 
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