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  • The Avengers

    Almer S. Tigelaar 11 / 05 / 2012

    Marvel teased us with the release of this film near the end of various previously released super hero flicks like Captain America and Iron Man 2. This would be the movie that unites all the super heroes from the Marvel universe. Well actually, only those that had not been previously licensed to other studios. Hence, you will not find characters from X-Men, Spiderman, or the Fantastic Four in this movie. Director Joss Whedon brings back fond memories of creative television series like Firefly and Dollhouse, but what does he make of a 220 million blockbuster production?

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  • Hugo

    Almer S. Tigelaar 06 / 03 / 2012

    Hugo is based on a relatively recently released (2007) award winning book by Brian Selznick. It is not surprising that the film rights to the books were quickly sold, and certainly not by the least of directors either: Martin Scorsese. He has a career spanning decades and has directed a string of movies in recent years which I liked, among which are Shutter Island, The Departed and Gangs of New York. However, those were admittedly all in different, less family friendly, genres. So, I went to Hugo hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

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  • How long would it take to read Wikipedia?

    Almer S. Tigelaar 21 / 02 / 2012

    Wikipedia has become the de facto encyclopedia on the Internet. A traditional encyclopedia spans many textbook volumes which would take any normal person ages to read. Few people would likely engage in such an endeavor. However, since Wikipedia is readily accessible: should you take up the challenge?

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Almer S. Tigelaar » Music

Internet Memes

Almer S. Tigelaar 25 / 06 / 2011, 09:00

Internet memes are `cultural’ phenomena which quickly gain popularity and, as a result, rapidly spread across the Web. These usually take the form of images or videos. Although not the first, the earliest one I can remember is “All your base are belong to us”, based on a mistranslated Japanese video game. It became popular to put this phrase in all kinds of photos. An other particularly prolific meme is the so-called Rickroll: hidden behind a possibly interesting link is the video of Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. There is even an 8-bit and an Obama version.

Although I can give many more examples, a friend pointed me to the so-called Nyan Cat, which has recently become a very popular meme. It consists of an animation of a flying cat with a Pop Tart as body. This showed up on YouTube which even changed their video slider to mimic the shape of the cat and the rainbow trail! :


There is also a browser based version that keeps track of how long you have been listening.

The looped tune in particular, of Japanese origin, is an addictive ear pleaser, but one is left to wonder: why?

tags: idle, memes,
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