I like youtube, it’s pretty good, it’s sort of like TV, only the programs are shorter and they usually ask you to support them via Patreon and/or like and subscribe to their channel. Mostly this is a waste of time as usually they are impossibly young, impossibly high energy good looking young people who are probably already millionaires, so fuck them right?
Right, I’m about to save you a bunch of effort by recommending some excellent youtube channels that are none of these things, but still really really great!
This is what I’m guessing is a chef guy, he likes to make meals as described in films and TV shows, he’s clearly pretty great at it, also each episode has the same, rad background music. Here’s one where he makes a bunch of meals from the sitcom ‘It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia’, even when they’re clearly revolting and/or impossible, and then makes an attempt at his own more palatable verson.
His 30 Rock episode where he makes his own ice cream from scratch for the ‘Lovers Delight’ is also excellent, the only thing missing is that he does not make an attempt at Cooter Burgers favourite drink The Old Spanish
I guess this is a guy called Steve, he reviews MRE’s, that’s ‘Meals, Ready to Eat’ for you unhip normals out there. MRE’s are pre-packaged, ready to eat meals that are given out to military members and other unfortunate souls who may not have access to a kitchen or a 24 hour spar or any food. These are basically unboxing videos, only the guy is eating stuff out of gross 40 year old tins meant for soldiers in the Vietnam war. Here’s one where he gets deleriously happy eating gross looking tinned meat from a 2015 Czech MRE, it’s wonderful.
Guns are cool, everybody knows that right? Well, I mean they’re cool if you don’t have to deal with people shooting you all the flipping time, and that the police here don’t have to worry that you might be armed and so end up shooting you 17 times in the brain while you’re trying to catch the tube, that’s why it’s good that guns are all in America. However guns can also be interesting artefacts of engineering, history and material science, as demonstrated here in a video about how the WW2 German Sturmgewehr rifle influenced the development/doctrine of the AK-47 and M16 assault rifles years later.
Most YouTube gun channels are usually either boring shooting videos where someone shoots a bunch of targets, or extravagent demonstrations of largesse where a guy shouts a whole bunch and then shoots a million rounds of custom reloaded titanium bullets into a jeep or something. Forgotten Weapons is none of that, it’s a guy called Ian who’s done some research and found the opportunity to check out a bunch of rare and/or interesting seldom known firearms.
As you would imagine, the life of a professional software engineer can be boring and creatively barren, sometimes mingled with long periods of downtime/procrastination where you have nothing to do but contemplate how your life became so bleak or browse for dank harambe memes. During one such break, me and my friend AndyJ (of Megapriz-X glory) got to talking about some of the terrible fan fiction we had enjoyed in our undergraduate years. Upset at being unable to find the source material anymore (unfortunately lost now due to a combination time and unreliable hosting), we ended up trying our own hand at a creative endeavour. The following is the result of that endeavour, not so much fan fiction, rather the first few pages of an incredible science fiction epic that could easily rival Frank Herbert or Iain M. Banks.
Lord Edubones Prinkles picked up his laser gun/sword and waved it about a bit, the sword part flew out and knocked over a lightvase off of it’s hover plinthe. Ed sighed as he flicked open his communicator for the third time that day, to tell the cleaning staff that he’d smashed up another priceless megavase.
A robot shot out of the wall, immediately cleaning up the broken holomess and replacing the megavase. “Are you giving me sass, you little bitch??” Ed shouted and threw his sword at the robot, missing and smashing another megavase.
Robomaids zoomed in through the windows, doors, chimneys and newly created gunsword holes in the walls, cleaning up all the things he had fucked up that morning. One scolded him, “Maybe you shouldn’t insist that everything be made of the thinnest nanomaterial known to man, Ed”
Ed impotently shook his fist at the flying robot, immediately embarrassed that his newly nanocrafted gloves had cracked and were flaking off his hands, adding to the detritus on the floor.
“whatever” he said, shrugging it off, shirt disintegrating due to the motion. “I need to go and see the doctor”, he mused as he ate his 2nd slice of nano wafer ham, “I always feel hungry for some reason”
Ed got into his car. “DOCTOR” he shouted into what he thought was the microphone. He lay back as the car began its short journey. As they were cruising at 2 speeds of light, the car suddenly megabraked and all the monitors started flashing red with the warning “KILL KILL KILL”. Ed sighed again for the 40th time that morning. “Another bloody robot revolt, what do they want this time” he said as he loaded his XR2 IRNV Scoped Sawn Off Heat Laser with cyber shot
He lasershot/stabbed the car in what he imagined was it’s central processing hub, and immediately fell out through the hole his laser had just created, landing nuts first on a holo-fence, he winced. Robots with red eyes and menacing looking talons were circling around him in the air chanting ‘KILL THE BIOPPRESSORS’ (a slogan that had gained traction 2 years earlier for being the first entirely robot concepted pun)
Ed’s life flashed before his eyes, he saw everything, him breaking the megavase that looked like a man diving into a scorpions tail, the second vase that was circular and didn’t appear to be able to hold anything, and the last vase before all the robots had vaccumed all his new clothes off him.
Then it struck him like a bolt of lightning right into his brain pipes, he was a robot too! He looked down at his hands, they were definitely robots hands, also he remembered being a robot, and looking up at the apparently deadly swarm above him, they weren’t actually menacing him, they were just lost and doing the last thing they remembered.
In a fraction of a second, the sky, and all the robots in it were gone, and in their place, a giant spaceship, eclipsing everything but a small strip of horizon. Through the haze around the FTL drives, Ed could make out the ships identification, serial number 000053, GarboTrash class, an automated refuse collection ship. Before he could react, the entire ground around him shook and buckled as he became weightless, and then started to rise into the air. As he turned over, unable to control himself, he saw the ships collection iris’s slide open above him, getting bigger and bigger.
‘Time to take out the trash’ he joked to himself, before remembering that in this instance he was the trash, and that it was probably an inappropriate time to be quipping, but he made a note to remember it if he came across anybody else later.
“Ughh I’m blacking out” Ed slurred before he remembered he was a robot. “Oh, hm” he thought as the beam pulled him up extremely slowly. 3 hours later, Ed was sucked into the ship’s garbage chute and dumped unceremoniouisly into a fetid pool of water, mud and trash. As he looked around to get his bearings, a loud rumble began that seemed to come from all around him. Creaking and clanking, the solid metal walls slowly began to move in on Ed! He frantically looked around with his robo-eyes for a way out. “Can a robot get an exit??” he quipped before he again admonished himself. “All these quips are really crushing my sp;irit. FUCpfffffffftthbtbthhh” The walls had smooshed all the garbage into Ed’s mouth and eyes and ears, it was freakin gross. “NOOOOaaaaagargle” he shouted with his last breath. Just as the walls touched either side of his head, they stopped and a voice came over the PA system. “JK guy, you totally thought we were gonna, like, crush you, dude! Haha, you idiot this is the freakin future, man… we got like a million sensors up here to detect stupid assholes” Ed gave the most sarcastic look you can as you’re spitting garbage out of your mouth
Feel free to contact me for the film, tv, book or podcast rights.
Back in my science days we would occasionally eat lunch at the cool university canteen/study lounge place, who would kindly update the menu on their website each week. Being a cool/lazy programmingman I wrote a quick hacky script+cron job that would download & parse the menu file, then email me and my friend the food for that day. Neato!
This worked for approximately two weeks, then it broke because whoever was responsible for uploading the menu would do it late, or set the link incorrectly or randomly change format from .pdf to .doc and back again. This prompted me to think about how my menu script handled failure (not at all), and I thought instead of some boring ‘GERROR: NO MENU FOUND :[’ message in the email, it would be funny to use some RNG and come up with some ridiculous food instead.
So I did, and wasted the rest of the day giggling at what I’d done, so much so that I whacked it up as a website with a fancy free template I found on the internet, and shoved the whole thing up on Heroku for all to see: