Politics 2: The great unwashed...

That's the swing voter, but also the general public at large. Most people are so confused and bewilderd by the modern world, they let themselves be influenced by whatever random concept of order politicians suggest, but never promise. Some people vote for the same party their entire lives, or large chunks of it, without ever reading a party program or a newspaper or watching the news. These people's polutical opinions are formed entirely from visual cues, conversations with equally ignorant people and vague ideas about where a party is on the spectrum vis-a-vis their own uninformed opinions. Scared out of their minds and bored and frustrated with the long and complex stories you have to follow to make sense of the world, they're easy prey for manipulative pricks that put on some bullshit persona to win the right to boss them around: I give you the general public.

Better pranks on Chatroulette!

Chatroulette has already evolved from a pretty random concept to a great place for messing with strangers, but nobody buys the girls taking their tops fake videos anymore, and honestly who wants to see a bunch of guys jerking off anyway? It's the priceless reactions when your fake video cuts out and you get an embarrased guy stumbling for the computer with his pants around his ankles. This guy really makes the most of the it, just reaction shots all of the time. His antics are fine, but the reactions are just great. I love the fact that so many people seem genuinely happy to see an unconvincing tranny dancing to Lady Gaga.

I can't stop watching the Venture Bros.

This little scene just about encapsulates what I love about this show. The total failure of almost all of it's characters at almost everything. The violence, obscure Nerdy references and dead baby comedy would be enough to keep me entertained, but there's very little replay value in it. I just can't get enough of the failure, though, it's just incredibly endearing. I found out recently that the show has a rabid fanbase, and that doesn't surprise me. Everything about it is pitched to the kind of people who care passionately about something weird and it just fills the void perfectly. It's pretty much the same gimmick X-men used, finding the right one-size-fits-all metaphor for a whole generation of people. This show is perfect for the disillusioned nerd of today. Combining Nostalgia and existential dread with snarky pop-culture humour, it catches the flavour of the times better than anything else at the moment.

Super Mario Torture

I loved Super Mario World on the old SNES. It was the first videogame I ever tried to finish, on the first console I owned. I can still easily play the first half of it on muscle memory alone. I earned that through months and months of frustration. Honestly, I'm crap at videogames, but I literally have this game memorised. This video is a complete delight for everybody who remembers playing that game. Endless invisible blocks at inconvenient locations, impossible jumps and more random horror. But what makes this video even better is the fantastic player doing the run. The whole level is designed to stretch the limits of what is possible for a player to do, and somehow the guy manages to do it in 30 lives or so, amazing.

Don't go in there 4: Ghost in the Machine

You wouldn't think that a place like Hollywood, considering how much technology they need to make a blockbuster, would have such a luddite perspective on these things. But apparently, every type of new technology is going to kill, maim or embarrass you. You can't even make a phone call without them tracking you, except when you're the killer, then you can't be tracked, because of string of nonsense that doesn't even resemble real life problem. Technology can do whatever you want it to do in the movies, and apparently the public want it to make their lives incredibly dangerous and absurd. Or embarrassing. The number of films where a relationship blossoms online belies real world figures, but it does indicate that writers know how to recycle the plot from Cyrano de Bergerac. Here's a great NPR story about the guy who makes the flash graphics for fake hollywood computers.

All of human knowledge is editable

Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia where there are more pages about secondary characters in the uk sonic the hedgehog comic then of main characters in medieval history. But that's the reason it's great. If you thought I was going to go the other way with that first sentence, so did I. But triviality is the spice of life. Too many people, academics mostly, complain about it's unreliability, without acknowledging that it's no more unreliable than a printed encyclopedia, or newspapers, documentaries or any other kind of information really. The only real difference is in a perceived accountability, the idea that at least the publisher of a book or newspaper can be sued for providing false information. But that rather depends, the manipulation of information is becoming incredibly transparent these days, to the point where previously rock solid faith in the printed word is crumbling. A true concensus reality is just around the corner and wikipedia's older pages show what kind of shape that will take, veering wildly between opposing extremes and eventually consolidating as nuance.

Castles in the Sand

How the mighty have fallen. It's funny at first, but you begin to realise after a while how horrifyingly ephemeral the internet is. For all the concern over data floating around as search results forever, i.e. those embarassing photo's you don't want your boss to see, the real horror is the total randomness of what stays popular and what doesn't. Can you imagine having spent a good portion of your time on acquiring friends on a social networking site that becomes irrelevant? Now that the internet is here to stay, maybe it's time some serious architecture and institutions are built that manage to last until this global communication network goes the way of the dodo.