If you’ve never heard of Chatroulette then this will be a pretty good primer, as well as uproariously funny:

I’m actually quite surprised at all the attention Chatroulette is receiving. As soon as I heard of it I knew there’d be tons of guys broadcasting their dicks to the world — a phenomena I’ve never really understood — because it happens on just about every other video chat network out there as well. For awhile Microsoft’s Netmeeting was a fairly popular avenue for dick broadcasting and that was years ago. I suppose the one big difference here is that you can surprise random people with your schlong for the lulz of seeing their reactions. (I find myself amused that I don’t have to link to a definition of “schlong” but felt the need to link to one for “lulz”.)

I often wonder if there are females out there who do anything similar. On those rare occasions that I’ve ventured into a video chat room of one kind or another I came across lots of guys proudly displaying their wangs for all the world to see, but I can’t recall ever coming across some random female broadcasting her hoo-ha to whomever happened along. Occasionally I’d happen upon boobs, yes, but never a fun basket. Is it just too scary looking at the low-bandwidth resolutions afforded by a webcam or is there some line that most women have decided they won’t cross that most men have long ago left behind in the dust? A question for the ages, I’m sure.

All that said, there are some folks doing some interesting and amusing things with Chatroulette out on the net. Like the guy who dresses up as Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe and tries to find a Valentine:

Then there’s the woman who decided to see what would happen if she fed the incoming video feed from Chatroulette back into itself so when you connected with her it looked like you had connected with yourself. She condensed some five hours of amused, surprised, and confused reactions down into this video:

For those wondering, it took a couple seconds for the feed to cycle back which is why the reactions are a tad delayed.

So obviously there’s more you can do with Chatroulette than just prove to the world that you have a cock and it’s these other experiments that I find much more interesting. Any douchebag can drop his pants in front of his webcam. These folks are being creative.

So here it is: The inaugural episode of The SEB Podcast.

We cover a number of topics starting with Podcasts and moving on to a question from Decrepit Old Fool that we talk about a lot, but never actually answer. That’s followed by tangents galore that are related to DOF’s question by only the thinest of hairs and then a little gushing over the fact that George reads our blogs and some discussion of our religions backgrounds, faith healing, and politics and how we should be the leaders of the world except that we’re too lazy. We close it out with a discussion of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar which may contain a couple of spoilers so you may want to stop listening at that point if you haven’t seen the movie.

The program I used to record this podcast stuck us in separate stereo channels so I’ll be in your left ear and Dave will be in your right if you wear headphones. This turned out to be a good thing in part because Dave’s audio was much quieter than mine and I spent a good part of the last couple of days learning how to use Audacity to try and bring his levels up without distorting the hell out of it. In the end I dropped my levels down to more closely match his so you can turn up the volume and hear us both a little better. It also took a little time to figure out what data rate to save it as to keep the quality up and the file size down. The final file is 56.7 MB in size and will occupy 1 hour and 22 minutes of your time.You can download it directly by clicking here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed here or you can listen to it at the bottom of this post with the built-in handy flash player. Right now it’s being hosted on SEB’s server so I’m hoping that we don’t suddenly kill our bandwidth allowance with it, but we’ll find out soon.

We had a lot of fun doing it and we hope you’ll be at least mildly amused by the results. If you like it then we’ll do more and try to get better at it both in terms of the quality of the recording and in the quality of our discussions. Let us know what you think in the comments.

There’s still some work in massaging the file for audio levels and size, but it’s actually done. We were shooting for an hour and ended up overshooting by about 22 minutes and 36 seconds. The final file size ended up being 37.8 MBs of random babble. I have no idea if any of you will enjoy it, but ***Dave and I had a lot of fun doing it. Now I just need to figure out how to make it reasonable in size and where I’m going to post it. Should I break it up to keep the quality higher or reduce the quality to keep it a single file. I also need to try and raise the volume level of ***Dave’s track as it’s a little low compared to mine.

But it’s done and that’s the important bit and, after a bit of research on the best way to do this, I’ll post it to the site. We didn’t even get through half the questions so we’ve got material for the next one if folks find this one amusing enough that you want more.

Webcomics are a topic near and dear to my heart. While they don’t show up in my sidebar blogroll that’s only because I have a whole separate list of webcomic links I keep in my Google Reader and it would make an already long sidebar list even longer.

The folks at the Washington Post are having a little unscientific poll asking folks to vote for their favorite webcomics and I thought you guys would like to know about it.

Last week, Comic Riffs put out the call by asking: What are your favorite webcomics of the past 10 years? Readers soon responded strongly and passionately (via comments and Facebook and Twitter), nominating hundreds of titles. (For the uninitiated and even for the true fan, it made for a healthy wealth of recommended reading.)

Many of the comics that made the cut were deadlocked — and among some of the worthy titles that just missed the cut were: “Anders Loves Maria”; “Cat and Girl”; “Goats”; “GPF”; “Templar, Arizona”; and “Wondermark” (that excellent exercise in “illustrated jocularity” that had ties to the print world, too, appearing until a coupla years ago in The Onion.).

Now, we’ve got the Big Ballot — and it’s time to vote for your faves as we all narrow this down to a handful of finalists. Balloting will close midnight Wednesday. (And if not all these strips fit your definition of a “webcomic,” feel free to sound off on that interminable kerfuffle, too — some obviously have seen the light of print at times.)

via Comic Riffs – THE BEST WEBCOMIC: It’s time to vote on your nominations….

Several of my favorites made the list: PVP, Penny Arcade, Sinfest, xkcd, and, surprisingly enough, Jesus and Mo. Another surprise was the fact that the amazing Wondermark did not make the cut. It was tough picking out my favorite, but I had to go with the one that got me started on reading webcomics, PVP, even though Scott Kurtz said he wanted PVP votes to go to Penny Arcade. If I could have voted for all my favorites I would have as those are the only ones I tend to read. The current front runner is one I’ve never read called Least That I Could Do and, while I hold no animosity towards said author, it is slightly worrisome that some of my favorites haven’t even gotten a percentage point in votes yet. Not that they have to win, mind you, but it would be nice if they had more than 0% of the vote.

So if you enjoy participating in pointless Internet polls that really don’t prove a damned thing then head on over and see if your favorite is on the list and then vote for it whatever it happens to be. You will have done your part in nothing of any consequence at all and can feel good knowing your small effort will result in the Washington post getting more traffic on a single entry than they probably have any right to get.

… I’m going to build house where all the door handles will be like this one:

Click to embiggen!

Just to watch people get creeped out about them.

Via Crunch Gear.

Been meaning to blog about this one for awhile now and I keep forgetting to do so.

Couple of weeks ago I got a package in the mail hand addressed to me in a most festive way. Opening the package produced a post card with an amusing picture of a cat and a short message from Kitty Savant wishing me a Happy Whatever Occasion Day and mentioning something about putting the “fun in feminist”, I think. Not sure as I’m in class waiting for the lecture to start and I don’t have the post card in question in front of me.

The package also contained something wrapped in a bit of cloth which, when I unwrapped it, appeared to be… a tampon. I believe my immediate reaction was along the lines of “What the hell?” That prompted my wife to turn and look at what I was holding in my hand and ask what it was. I said that I thought it was supposed to be a toy tampon because it looks like a tampon, but it was made out of terry cloth with a shoestring tail and was stuffed with something. Anne looked at me and asked, “Who’d you piss off?”

It was at this point that Melvin, the official SEB cat, who had been laying in his favorite spot on our desk, suddenly took an interest in the object and proceeded to yank it out of my hands and attack it with a fury that clearly indicated it was stuffed with catnip. At this point I was pretty sure it was a cat toy, but I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to resemble a tampon or not so I dashed off an email to Kitty Savant and asked.

As it turns out, yes, it is supposed to look like a tampon and, yes, it is a cat toy stuffed with catnip. It seems Kitty’s own cats had a habit of getting into her stash of real, and more importantly, unused tampons and playing with them. So she did what any regular reader of SEB would do and made her cats catnip toys that look like tampons so they’d leave her real ones alone. Given my twisted sense of humor she figured I’d appreciate one as well and it did make me laugh when I first saw it. The cats love it and have already made a mess of it such that I’m reluctant to take a picture of it to put on the blog. Not to mention that I don’t have it with me as I am currently sitting in my ISA Administration class.

I think it’s a hilarious cat toy and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kitty Savant ends up turning them into a profitable enterprise in the not too distant future. Imagine a whole line of women’s feminine products replicated as cat toys available at your local Pet Smart. How awesome would that be if, for no other reason, the conniption fits it would set off in all the humorless people that came across them! All of which just goes to show yet again that I have the best people in the world reading my blog.

God’s a busy fellow, but he does feel he’s been neglecting giving his creation more one-on-one face time so he’s created a webpage where you can Chat with God Online. Somehow I don’t think it’s really God that you’re chatting with as my conversation with him sounded like it had been outsourced to a foreign call center full of retarded George W. Bush clones with a poor grasp of English. All typos are God’s:

God: Hello! What is your name?
You: Les

God: Les, nice to meet you! Are you a man or a woman?
You: Shouldn’t you already know that? For that matter, shouldn’t you have known my name?

God: I think I should.Your purpose is that matter should not you have known his or her name.
You: Um… what?

God: And?Are you surprised?
You: Surprised? No. Confused? Yes.

God: Do you want to continue talking about Lizards?”“? Not?No I never get confused.Far out.
You: Have you been smoking pot again?

God: Once more? We are not doing any testing at the moment.
You: Who said anything about testing?

God: ELIZA.
You: Well that explains everything.

God: Interesting. “” explains everything ? I get .
You: You’re like trying to talk to a brain dead monkey.

God: Interesting comparison, and probably true.
You: I think I’m done now.

God: Right now? Why? Next topic?
You: I don’t think I can handle anymore divine wisdom today.

God: Ah. Oh you don’t, do you?
You: Goodbye.

God: Thanks for chatting, Do Not You Know.

Yeah, that seems like a poor imitation to me. Either that or God has a serious brain injury he hasn’t recovered from.

I have no idea how good a stock broker E*Trade is, but Anne and I both get a big kick out of the talking baby ads they air. They had a new one for the Super Bowl this year and it was OK, but no where near as funny as the “outtakes” they’ve posted to YouTube:

I love the crying baby that says he wants to punch the economy in the face.

… he might look something like this:

Click to embiggen!

Note how weary he looks from having the knock some common sense into the overly credulous populace.

Made using Marvel Create Your Own Superhero found via Neil’s World.

I first wrote an entry about this back in 2003, but it wasn’t embedable back then. Now it is and it’s still just as fun to play with as it was then. It plays music right off the bat so I’m sticking it after the jump.

Be sure to let the scene play out to see all the different things that can happen and then shake the shit out of it. It never gets old. Never.

Makes me laugh in an evil way that frightens my wife and various small children.