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

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.

From Engadget:

a duo of researchers at the University of Cincinnati have built a computer program “that is able to get a specific type of joke, one whose crux is a simple pun.” By loading up a database of words and then using relational programming to detect when a pun-involved joke is uttered, the bot can respond by laughing out loud and creeping any bystanders completely out.

Yet more proof, as if any was needed, that the pun in the basis of all humour. Or that puns are the lowest and cheapest form of humour.

Pick one.

Do you have a story to tell? Do you have a video camera, a still camera, or just skill with words?

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