The Digital Ben McKenzie guides the viewer through the Wonderful World of Wikis from his secret Cave of Thought.
Aug 162007
Aug 112007
A friend just brought this magazine to my attention, and I am stunned that I haven’t come across it before. Nerds Gone Wild is the creation of Melbourne writer Mia Timpano.
It’s a magazine that you can buy in the store. You can also download it for free as PDF. The latest edition features Daniel Kitson as guest writer.
I’m in heaven.
A few weeks ago, Simon Barber laid the clicky-linky smack down when it came to keyboardless navigation of Internet marvel, Wikipedia.
Viewer Bec wasn’t impressed. She laid down a challenge. And, like a Phoenix rising from… well, Parkville… he showed that he still has what it takes to navigate the vast sea of information that we call Teh Intarwebs.
A few weeks ago, Dan Walmsley visited his Alma Mater, University High School (a.k.a. “Uni High”. The name is an historical anomaly; Uni High is not some crazy-ass hybrid of University and High School).
Uni High is home to one of Australia’s first accelerated programs for gifted students. Dan Walmsley interviews the staff, teachers and students in an effort to find out the benefits and drawbacks of putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room.
Aug 092007
Not long ago in a galaxy that’s quite close by, an evil tyrant and his cruel henchman terrorised planets with devastating literary subterfuge.
Only the Planet Nerd team stood in their way. Reduced to a skeleton crew by a galactic plague known only as “I’m too busy this week”, our valiant heroes struggle to fight the galactic menace, while also producing family-friendly infotainment – ENTIRELY USING HAND-DRAWN ANIMATION.
- Wince as they barely manage to squeeze a cogent narrative out of University High School’s Accelerated Program
- Cheer as they reduce the Six Wikis of Separation to Five
- Shrug as they blatantly pad the episode with popular content from previous weeks
All this and more in this week’s Planet Nerd!
Aug 092007
Following on a grand tradition of biting off more than we can chew, this week we animated the between-segment bits.
If you ever got up early on a Saturday and wrapped yourself in a blanket to watch cartoons while your grandma brought your weeties and milk, then this is for you.
Aug 092007
Not long ago in a galaxy that’s quite close by, an evil tyrant and his cruel henchman terrorised planets with devastating literary subterfuge.
Only the Planet Nerd team stood in their way. Reduced to a skeleton crew by a galactic plague known only as “I’m too busy this week, fuck off”, our valiant heroes struggle to fight the galactic menace, while also produced family-friendly infotainment.
- Wince as they barely manage to squeeze a cogent narrative out of University High School’s Accelerated Program
- Cheer as they reduce the Six Wikis of Separation to Five
- Shrug as they blatantly pad the episode with popular content from previous weeks
All this and more in this week’s Planet Nerd. Watch it. Channel 31, tonight (Thursday) at 10pm or Saturday night at 1:30am. The fate of the galaxy depends on it.
Signing Off
Captain Dan Walmsley
Aug 062007
Once in a generation a film arrives which redefines what it means to be a series of images rapidly shown one-after-the-other on some kind of display surface.
It’s Aussie. It’s Star Wars. It’s… well, just go watch it. It’s worth it just to hear one Jedi should to another “You SON of a BITCH!”. And it’s made right here in Melbourne!
Aug 062007
The Internet is a strange old beast. It’s a random agglomeration of the contributions of millions of individuals. There are both the visible contributions – for example, an image or song or movie. Or the less visible but no less important contributions, such as the strengthening of pathways to useful or entertaining information by participants in social networks, through tagging, commenting or just plain generating traffic.
Yet, despite the complexity and randomness of these millions of individual contributions, occasionally a meme emerges. A sort of super-thread. The first one I remember is “Mister T Ate My Balls“. A few years ago, we had “All Your Base Are Belong To Us“. And now, it’s Lolcats.
The best part of these super-threads that arise on the internet is that they give ordinary people a kind of creative hook. Just as 70s punks proved you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument to make music, so these internet-based pop-culture cults have shown that you don’t need to be a graphic designer to make a compelling image.
And with that, I give you the latest brilliant permutation of the lolcatz phenomenon. Lolpresidents.
Aug 052007
There are few things more satisfying than realising you’ve won the respect of people you admire. So it was with this glowing mention from Mawson’s Hut, a java programmer who has the good taste to prefer IntelliJ IDEA over NetBeans as a Java development environment.
Thanks Mr. Hut!
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