Found over at Neatorama.

Click to embiggen!

It’s always amusing to see Internet memes show up in mainstream institutions.

Found over at Neatorama where they have images of Obama wins headlines from a bunch of different papers.

Words, unlike for that young man, fail me. Though if Captain Fantastic is happy then who am I to complain. Not that that stopped his grandmother.

Or at least I didn’t think they did. The fact that Target has licensed him to sell Halloween stuff seems to suggest he’s gone mainstream. Not only was I surprised to see Domo all over the place, but a little kid that walked in with us immediately knew who he was and started calling out his name, “Look mom! It’s Domo!“ According to his Wikipedia entry it seems Nickelodeon licensed him in 2006 for 26 two-minute shorts which they just started airing this year. If they were half as warm and fuzzy as the Japanese originals then they were probably a sensation with the kids, as the one child I saw this weekend would attest. And now Target has snapped him up.

Turns out I wasn’t the only person surprised by this as reporter Tom Horgen over at StarTribune.com wrote a big article about him:

In 2003, an American licensing company named Big Tent approached Goda and NHK about bringing Domo to the United States in a bigger way, a deal that eventually led to the Target campaign.

“No, no, no,“ Goda remembered saying at the time, hesitant about Domo’s American fate. Goda was unaware that Domo already had a following outside of Japan.

Today, Goda said he’s excited about Domo going mainstream in this country. But he understands why some of the character’s cult followers might be perturbed.

“It’s really difficult to balance the popularity and keeping the core fans,“ he said.

But after Goda finally saw Domo in his new American setting, he was pleased.

“When we saw the Target store in Portland and saw Domo surrounded by all that American stuff, I was so happy,“ he said.

In fact, Goda has been a fan of American pop-culture since he was a kid. His favorite character? That would be Snoopy, created by Minnesota’s own Charles Schulz.

Like Domo, Snoopy is a cuddly troublemaker and a man of few words. He’s also been a mainstream icon for decades, one that even anti-mass-market geeks like myself have loved.

Earlier in the article Tom brings up the possibility that early fans of Domo here in the states may feel he’s “sold-out” by becoming a mascot for Target:

When underground sensations like Domo hit the mainstream—he also has a deal with Nickelodeon—it can render the original uncool, or even result in cries of “sellout.“

That seems kind of stupid considering Domo was created to advertise a TV network, but I suppose some folks who don’t know his history may fall into that trap anyway. Still it’s kind of neat to see something I’ve been a fan of for years suddenly being popular in the United States. If it makes it a little easier (and not to mention cheaper) to finally pick up a Domo plushie then so much the better.

Fortunately the guy who did make that projected video, Mark Gervais, is selling it on DVD so lesser talented people like me can scare the crap out of kids on Halloween. He uses a simple white sheet, a standard digital projector, and a good sized window. The results look great and are just the right level of scariness that most kids won’t be too afraid to approach your door.

Apparently the message is: You’re a giant walking dick if you play our lottery! Yeah, that should sell tickets.

Found over at Philadelphia Will Do.

Best part of all? No Jar Jar.

Instead of talking about his latest game, he talks about growing up young and nerdy, of being ashamed of his enthusiasm for comic books and games like Dungeons and Dragons. He talks about how the issues dealt with in favorite comics like Spiderman may have made him feel more grown-up than his peers, while noting that he was mocked for his choice of reading material.

He describes his first Dungeons and Dragons source book, read under the sheets in the dead of night, as if it was pornography that he was afraid to be caught with. He describes how the gift of an Atari system one Hanukkah changed his life. “This was my Nerd Siberia,“ he tells the packed auditorium, as they nod in understanding. No friends. Picked on at school. Ashamed of a growing comic book collection.

He shows a picture of Farrah Fawcett. “Believe me, this was the shit back in the ‘70s,“ he says, before changing the slide to a scantily clad illustration. “Me? I wanted to fuck the Scarlet Witch.“ The room erupts.

[...] “After many years running from things I love, it’s amazing to come here and see what Gabe and Tycho and so many others have built together,“ he said. “We are united by a common element, but it’s not the color of our skin or our ideology or politics,“ he went on, his voice rising. “What brings us together at PAX is that we are a giant bunch of fucking nerds.“ The kids sitting to the right of me, wearing Magic: The Gathering shirts and suffering through what looked like hard bouts of acne, almost bowl me over as they rush to stand up, applaud, and cheer. I believe one of them is crying. 

I’m welling up just thinking about it. These are my people.

It’s amazing to me to think of how this wouldn’t have been at all possible without the rise of the Internet. I was lucky as a geeky teenager in that growing up in Pontiac Michigan the schools were large enough that finding other geeks to befriend wasn’t that difficult. It also helped that I decided to run a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on my Commodore 64 starting in early 1981, which pretty much guaranteed I’d hook up with other geeks. By the end of my freshmen year of high school I was fortunate to have a core group of good friends who were into many of the same things I was: video games, computers, Dungeons & Dragons (and a dozen other RPGs), and Sci-Fi/Fantasy books and movies. We spent countless hours hanging out between school and work playing marathon sessions - upwards of 12 to 15 hours at a time on weekends - of video games or pen and paper RPGs. We managed to find our way onto the Internet thanks to some of us going off to college long before it went mainstream in 1996. I can only imagine what trying to access the Net today on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem would be like. There was no World Wide Web back then and we had no idea of the revolution that was to come, but we glimpsed the potential in how it enabled us to contact other geeks from all over the world.

Had you asked me then if I could foresee a day when a couple of geeks would achieve a massive following for a comic strip they gave away for free that would start their own gaming convention that would attract tens of thousands of geeks yearly along with a charity that would raise tons of money for children’s hospitals (they also started Child’s Play which raised 1.3 million dollars last year) I’d have probably laughed at the thought that there were enough geeks in the world to make something like that possible. Behold the Power of the Internet!

I suppose this is a very long-winded way of saying just how much I envy the geeks of today. We would’ve given our left nut for a convention like PAX back in my youth. OK maybe not our left nut, but certainly a leg or a foot. Not an arm though cause we’d need that to work the joysticks.

Are fortune cookies Chinese?

Clearly not. They are arguably more American (by way of Japan), judging by the way that people in China react to fortune cookies — with a mixture of confusion and amusement. As part of research for my book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, I went around China handing out fortune cookies to random people (my bellhop, people on the street, vendors) and recorded their reactions.

Often times, they would put the cookies in their mouth, and then be surprised when they found a piece of paper either in their mouth or in a cookie.

Best line from the short article: “Americans are so strange, why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”

If we didn’t then what would we add the words “in bed” to the end of so we can laugh ourselves silly?

Here’s Professor Duane’s video:

Followed by an equally fascinating video featuring George Bruch from the Virginia Beach police department who basically tells you that everything the Professor said is true:

I’m fortunate in that my dealings with the police have been few and very far between. The last encounter was when I unsuccessfully tried to turn left back in November of 2003 and, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have said much to the police, but I did and I was convicted and fined for “failure to yield to oncoming traffic” despite the fact that the people that hit me were running the light. Granted it’s a misdemeanor traffic accident and not a murder trial, but I probably would’ve fared better had I invoked my right to not self-incriminate. I don’t foresee ever being in a position where I’d be under suspicion on more serious charges, but then life is unpredictable so these videos make for some very compelling education just the same.

Bonus points for the repeated lesson that “people are stupid.“