darkpanda

Did you read the comic continuation? There’s an official season 3 in comic book form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_Season_3:_Civil_War

Techstars is a start up accelerator. They’re pretty well known in their niche with accelerator/incubators all over the place.

Back in the day, I drew this image in whatever the MS Paint equivalent was in KDE:

https://boingboing.net/2006/11/02/hilarious-piechartvi.html

And posted it to the Awful Forums in a thread about funny charts. It blew up and I didn’t notice for years. The joke itself came from something I found in an issue of Toro, which was a sort of Maxim-style men’s magazine that was published in Toronto for a few years. If anyone could ever track down some issues of that magazine they might find the original joke, or at least my original discovery of said joke. The joke itself is probably even older. All I did was draw that exact image, and then a zillion imitators were spawned, but like I say, I was oblivious until like 5 years later when it showed up in an actual presentation I was attending.

Memes spread differently back then, as stuff like Reddit and 4chan were just getting their footing. Email was still a primary carrier, along with a handful of popular sites like Boing Boing and maybe Slashdot.

I think my favourite outcomes from this image were

• seeing the chart appear in the documentation for Google Charts where it was used as an example of some advanced features of the pie charts modules. Edited to add: actually it wasn’t Google’s documentation proper, it was a blog post by Matt Cutts who was a Google dev for years. That’s at https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pacman-graph-in-google-chart-api/. I was thinking it was the actual docs.
• an ironic copy of the chart where the data is represented as a bar chart instead of a pie chart.
• just seeing all the stuff that came out of it, like the alternative drawings, the t-shirts, the posters, all the merchandising, merchandising, merchandising. The image has also literally appeared in print in at least another magazine, in a Finnish newspaper. Just do a Google image search for “Pac-Man pie chart” and you’ll see all kinds of nonsense.

All from a little image I did for the Awful Forums nearly 20 years ago based on a little image from a flash in the pan men’s magazine from Toronto.

That’s my claim to internet fame. But… ironically, I have like no proof. You can find the thread that the original image appears in, but for some reason the specific page that it appears on and the specific comment is missing, along with like a few dozen other comments from that thread. You can see the comments leading up to the image and the comments afterwards talking about how it has been picked up by Boing Boing and some other sites and has effectively become a meme, but the actual comment itself is missing. This wasn’t all that uncommon back then — the Awful Forums had their share of technical mishaps, and data went missing from time to time, so it’s not all that unexpected.

Boing Boing and Wil Wheaton are perhaps the two most responsible for its spread, and a few years ago I had a chance to talk to a Cory Doctorow at a tech conference and we spoke about the image and I confessed that I hadn’t been quite the comedic genius that could come up with that ironic chart, but that I did draw the actual image itself. I just wanted to get that out there I guess.

I sort of happened to me once. I created an image and posted it eons ago (2006), got a few laughs, then promptly forgot about it. A few years later, like five years after the fact, I was following along with a PowerPoint presentation at some work thing and there was my image in the middle of it. Apparently the image had become an office favourite and ended up spawning a bunch of similar images, then t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, all sorts of things. I started seeing the image in things like the documentation for Google Charts, and in other presentations. It was weird. The image blew up and I had zero idea it had happened. It spread via Boing Boing and Wil Wheaton, believe it or not.

I can only take credit for the image itself, as the joke itself came from a magazine I had read at a dentists office.

So yeah, I can totally see it happening, ‘cause it borderline-happened to me.

K&R for life

They went in the other direction and just made 10 a little bit louder.

Depends on the situation. Sometimes they only find out that the planet they’re beaming down to is actually a 1920’s mafia planet or a Nazi Germany planet after the fact once they get there, and then it’s like, “Bones, Spock, and also random Crewman, we’ve just beamed down to a mafia planet, we need to get some proper clothes before we’re spotted. Oh no, we’ve been spotted, beat these mafia guys up and steal their clothes quick before we’re spotted again.”

Although to be fair those sorts of episodes actually didn’t involve time travel, since they were other planets that for some reason or another became entire planets of mafiosos and Nazis, but the prime directive still applied.

Better not tell them about daemons I guess.

As a Canadian, I’ve been hoping for a Stan Roger’s biopic but I know that’s pretty niche. He was a folk singer who started making some waves when he died in a cabin fire on an Air Canada flight coming back from Texas to Canada in 1983 when he was only 33. His songs became part of the Canadian music tradition, as he generally wrote songs based on Canadian topics and issues. Most recently there were some fun clips of Stephen Colbert asking some guests if they knew any of his songs, like Michael Buble (who as a Canadian did indeed) and Jack White (who somewhat surprisingly also did, but is less surprising when you know that two of his grandparents were born and raised in Nova Scotia). Stan’s brother Garnett Rogers wrote a phone book-sized memoir of their time on the road touring that has plenty of material to pull from, and I always figured it would make a great music biopic, at least for Canadians. Our own Walk the Line or Ray.

I once fixed a bug in credit card payment form because someone had gotten some formatting character screwed up and used a capital M in some place where a lower case m should have been. Since it was a payment system they couldn’t take payment for a while whilst that was screwed up. I was contracting there and happened to notice it. Sometimes all it takes is one character.

You mean the Enterprise D?

Big bad from Insurrection. Played by F. Murray Abraham. Goes by Ru’afo. Into face stretching.