disalarming

Seeing as today is the 2010 World Cup final (GO NETHERLANDS!), here is a hodge-podge of what I’ve learned about soccer/fútbol and the World Cup in general from the 2010 World Cup.

• Soccer/fútbol players must moonlight as actors, because I’ve never seen such childish, petulant drama on a sports arena. (Granted, I don’t watch a lot of sports.)
• Speaking of drama, the French national team… a theater troupe of actors if there ever was one!
• Vuvuzelas annoy everyone except South Africans, apparently.
• FIFA referee calls are controversial at best, downright awful at worst.

My Brazilian soccer/fútbol player name is… MANDERTO!

This pie chart sums up the rest of my lessons from the World Cup, courtesy of Cracked:

And now, all talk of soccer will go quiet on the U.S. front until the World Cup in 2014!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Last night (or early this morning, technically), my roommate and I decided to go on Chatroulette, a “service for one-on-one text-, webcam- and microphone-based chat with people around the world.” Basically, users are paired randomly for webcam-based chats. Users have the option of disconnecting the current chat if desired by clicking “Chatroulette Next” (also known as “nexting” someone). It’s an endless stream of making random connections with strangers from all over the world in an attempt to… well, I don’t know. Make new friends, I guess?

Most of the reason why I went on Chatroulette was to see what all the fuss was about. My friends that have been on Chatroulette have a variety of opinions about the site. One friend, who had only been on the site once, saw no nudity or masturbation during her entire Chatroulette session (which, for anyone who knows anything about Chatroulette, is quite a feat). Another friend of mine Chatrouletted with Jessica Alba, and another did with the Jonas Brothers. Personally, I wouldn’t mind Chatrouletting with Ashton Kutcher!

I also felt like Chatroulette is something that everyone has to try at least once, especially if you’re in college. So, I threw caution to the wind and spent an hour on Chatroulette, typing and talking and viewing and nexting until I had seen more than enough of what Chatroulette has to offer.

Unfortunately, I did not see any celebrities. I did, however, talk to some nice boys from Canada, England, and France, but the majority of what I saw was penis after penis after penis, mixed in with plenty of masturbation. Now that I have seen enough random penises and strangers masturbating to last me a lifetime, I definitely won’t be going on Chatroulette again anytime soon!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been in a perpetual state of stress because of a project I am working on and will undoubtedly continue to be stressed until the deadline passes at the end of this week. So, in an effort to both ease my nerves and bring some laughter into everyone’s day, I decided to share this awesome clip.

Alice posted this gem on her blog a while back and now it’s my turn to repost it and share with everyone. I just finished marathoning Merlin season 2 over winter break, and my gosh, how I heart Bradley James and Colin Morgan (who play Arthur and Merlin respectively).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpOhLFVN2Y

LOL, what hilarity. They’re both so awesome :D

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I hate Walmart. Like, I hate Walmart with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. My hatred for Walmart stems not from the people that shop there, but from the policies Walmart employs with their workers, company policies, and general state of existence. I have only been to a Walmart once in my life as I make it a point never to go in one if I can help it, and the one time I went inside one I felt like a little piece of me had died.

But anyway. As much as I dislike Walmart itself, I will say that there are plenty of very, very… well, interesting people that shop there. People of Walmart catalogs all of the very unusual, outrageous, and just plain weird sightings that occur in and around various Walmarts throughout the country. I’m not even sure what to make of some of these photos, but I will say that I am very wary of entering a Walmart ever again in fear of encountering these people in real life and having no idea how to react to the situation!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Readers who want to ask me any question and have it answered can comment on this post. I’ll be answering all questions on October 18!

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been reinvented many, many times. Seth Grahame-Smith added zombie revisions to it in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it’s also been retold in a Facebook version.

Now, there is a Twitter version of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Complete with @replies, #hashtags, and DMs, “Pride and Twitterverse” retells the classic tale of Lizzie Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in tweets of 140 characters or less!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

In light of last Thursday’s DDoS¹ attacks against Twitter, LiveJournal, and Facebook (apparently Blogger was also targeted too?), the website Down for Everyone or Just Me? was very handy to use when checking whether or not these outages were experienced by everyone or if it was just my computer being iffy before news was released that the cause was a DoS attack.

Basically, Down for Everyone or Just Me? checks to see if the site is up and running and will tell you whether the site is experiencing actual downtime or if it’s just your ISP/browser/computer that can’t view the website. I’ve been using it more often than I’d like to as of late as it seems the quality of my internet connection has decreased in the last few months, but it’s much more convenient to use Down for Everyone or Just Me? rather than frantically asking those on Twitter whether or not others can see a site I can’t load in my browser!

1. Distributed Denial of Service. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Everyone knows what “the American dream” is, but frankly, I haven’t heard anything on the news in the last year or so that remotely resembles the American dream. Who knows if it even exists anymore? It seems like the American dream has turned into the American nightmare, as illustrated in this graph [source]:

The American Nightmare

If that just isn’t totally and completely depressing regarding one’s prospects for the future in the “adult world,” I don’t know what is.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I love word/tag clouds, I’m always playing around with the one I have on this blog as well as my personal LiveJournal. So, imagine my delight when I stumbled across Wordle, a word cloud generator!

Wordle lets you generate word clouds from whatever text you input into the generator. The more frequently a word is used in the text, the bigger the word will be in the word cloud. You can also pick what fonts, colors, and layout you want your word cloud to have. I input the URL of this blog as the source of text, and this is what it gave me:

Wordle

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Everyone that enjoys partaking in mind- and behavior-bending substances has probably been guilty of sending a text that they wished they hadn’t sent the next day. Usually these texts are embarrassing for the sender, but hilarious for the recipient, and Texts from Last Night brings all of these texts together – the nonsensical ones, the humorous ones, and the downright disturbing ones! Here are a few of my personal favorites:

(407): i went to disney world today with my friends, met snow white, then saw her later at a bar. she is naked next to me in her bed, passwed out. when you wish upon a star… [source]

(301): i thought she was just hairy. i didn’t know she was also a man. [source]

(386): That girl really should ne nicer to her vagina. It’s not a playground.
(954): Apparently hers is a theme park. [source]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

While procrastinating instead of studying for my final exams, I came across the Textorizer, a nifty vector generator that vectorizes images with text. You can customize the amount of strokes used in the vector, the stroke threshold, and the height and width of the generated Textorizer image. You can also choose what text is used to sketch the image. The overall look is very nifty, and Textorizing images is incredibly addictive!

I chose to Textorize a photo of the Queen of Hearts from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Here is the result!

Queen of Hearts

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.