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Michael Bay Facts

// June 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal/Blog News

Awesome.

It seems a successor to the ubiquitous Chuck Norris Facts meme has arisen. The target? Action movie director Michael Bay.

In the wake of the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie a stream of Michael Bay Facts has been pouring out of twitter, and as with Chuck Norris Facts, most are hysterical.

Since Michael Bay Facts mock their target rather than revere him (he really is a shitty director, though I loved Transformers: ROTF), and since Michael Bay will never be bad-ass like Chuck Norris, I’m sure this meme will be quite short lived. With that in mind, get them while the getting is good. I see io9 has posted some of their favorites, and I’d like to do the same.

These are some of my favs:

• jbneal: When you fist-pound Michael Bay, your hand literally blows up.
• MattCox: In some states, it’s illegal to say “Michael Bay” in airports or crowded theaters.
• frontierwoman:To clear a hangover Michael Bay straps a grenade to his head and dives headfirst into empty swimming pools.
• burnflores: Michael Bay doesn’t like gum. He chews C4.
• chris7crows: Michael Bay emerged from the womb with a detonator in one hand and a supermodel in the other. His mother then exploded.
• MattCox: Bomb squad was at the library today. Someone returned Michael Bay’s autobiography.
• jpmccu: Michael Bay’s school film project is lost to the world, as it blew up from awesome. The audience ran away in slow motion.
• DJBullock: Michael doesn’t use a camera to film his movies. He burns the movie into the film using the heat of exploding orphanages.
• And possibly my favorite: mrbs: Michael Bay was preceeded down the birth canal by a dove in slow motion. And followed by a column of flame.

It seems Aimee_B_Loved has become the unnoficial queen of #MichaelBayFacts on twitter with a slew of great ones:

• Michael Bay literally fights fire with fire, but insists token minorities do so with clever, urban-sounding comments.
• Michael Bay sleeps on a bed of hot coals and uses bundles of dynamite as pillows.
• As an infant, Michael Bay had to recast his mother because her breasts weren’t big enough for the part.
• Michael Bay uses battery acid as lube.
• Michael Bay purposely edits out “sissy shit” like plot and character development.

And then some people are just Doing It Wrong:

• ABAwesome: There are approximately 94 people in the USA with the name “Michael Bay”
• Flonk2: Michael Bay was adopted.

See my own paltry (at least by comparison) MichaelBayFacts here, and let me know what your favorites are that I’ve missed, or if you think some up on your own, please share them!

Why Facebook Steals Potential Tweeters

// June 11th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // Software and Web Design

I had a brief little convo. with my bff John Nels (who’s an excellent musician: johnnels.sad-machine.com) about Twitter and facebook. Rather than summarize I’ll just paste it here:

John: i know

John: but the do more on facebook

John: right

John: why do it on a site that just does updates then?

What do you guys/gals think? Amirite?

ROFLCON: Lulz From Afar

// April 25th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // the cool, weird, and funny

If you’re like me… then you really need some help, dude. But kidding and warped sense of humor aside, if you’re like me then you a) love internet memes, and b) cannot make it to ROFLCON 2008 *ARRGGG*!

Fear not, dear friends, for you needn’t An Hero nor sit at home alone in the dark all weekend. Instead, you can sit at home alone on the internet, watching live footage and updates and picture from ROFLCON all weekend!!!1SHIFT How fun‽

Sauces include live video from ustream, a flickr pool, twitters, and bright kite. So as not to whore out other’s hard work, go to roflcon.org for the links to these delicious little media morsels.

I’ll be on most of these services as euicho, on and off over the weekend. If you see me on there, say hi!

Twoosh Spotter: A Greasemonkey Script

// November 14th, 2007 // No Comments » // Software and Web Design

EDIT (10/6/2009): Twoosh Spotter is now up to v2.0. I’ve fixed it so that the tweets shown after hitting the “more” button get checked for twooshes, and also fixed a bug where “&” was converted to “& a m p ;” and counted as 4 characters instead of 1.

I recently came across a new portmanteau on Twitter called a “twoosh” (TWitter swOOSH)!

Coined by rentzsch, A twoosh is a twitter that hits the 140 character limit exactly on the nose. This is just one of those fun little oddities that people like to play with, but unless the poster follows up their twoosh with another post pointing it out, the twoosh goes unnoticed by all but the equally twoosh endeared… and those with OCD.

To combat both OCD and unnecessary tweets by users calling out their own twooshes, I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that indicates twooshes called Twoosh Spotter!

Example of a spotted twoosh

Quite simply, Twoosh Spotter places a little swoosh icon next to any twoosh on any twitter page.

It will also display the character count for any twitter in a timeline if you:

1. Right-click on the greasemonkey icon in your status bar and go to “Manage User Scripts”
2. Select TwooshSpotter in the left pane and hit the “Edit” button. This should open it in notepad or your default text editor.
3. Find the line that starts with “var show_count = false;” (line 33). and change the false to true.

Easy as 1,2,3! I debating turning this on by default but it may look a bit cluttered for some users so I went with the sleeker look.

So far this script seems to work great for me, but please do let me know if you find any bugs or strange behavior, or just want to make a suggestion. Also feel free to customize the script to your liking (but do leave mention of me in the source). If you don’t like my twoosh icon you can either make me a better one to distribute (please! I’m no graphic designer!) or just make yourself one and modify the script (replace that huge block of gibberish) to use your own.

To get twoosh spotter, go to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13873.

It’s new, so I’m sure to find issues and update it frequently. If you have any problems, go back to the userscripts page and check if there is a newer version. If not, leave me a comment there or direct-message me in twitter at my username “euicho”.

Now, for those of you who don’t know what greasemonkey is you should definitely get familiar with it, as it is one of the coolest ways to customize websites to your liking. Its a Firefox add-on, and once installed you can install little scripts that add functionality or modify the way a page looks.

If you just can’t be bothered to install greasemonkey you can always use the Twoosh Spotter Firefox Add-On (You’ll have to save it then drag it into firefox to install it), but I suggest using the greasemonkey script instead as it is more light-weight and easier to modify.

Happy twooshing!

Knowledge Is Only a Few Clicks Away

// February 5th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Books, Movies, Music, and TV, Software and Web Design, the cool, weird, and funny

The internet is truly amazing. Check this out:

I was on twitter and read the following on the public timeline (a list of all public updates):

“the song ’so much’ by spill canvas is amazing”

I thought to myself, “I wonder what that song sounds like.”