Good Morning Internet

So instead here are three four videos.

Update: If, for some rea­son you’ve deprived your­self of the joy that is Futu­rama, I added a fourth recap video that should get you up to speed. Because I love you.

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This semes­ter, I’m tak­ing a class on elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. As part of the class, we set up blogs. No big sweat for me, but I was sur­prised how many peo­ple in my class didn’t really know what a blog was, and a lot had never tried to set one up.

Some­times I for­get that my Tweet­ing, blog­ging, pod­cast­ing friends and I are a small frac­tion of Inter­net users. It’s nice to get a real­ity check every now and then.

I decided to write my blog about the future of elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. We are allowed to write about any­thing we want, but I thought I’d try my hand at some­thing more focused than I’m used to, just to see what happens.

So, if you’d like to fol­low along with my thoughts about the past, present, and future of pub­lish­ing, I invite you to check out Dinosaurs and Fire­works.

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First of all, Mash­able and TechCrunch are too busy los­ing touch and being need­lessly judg­men­tal, so I’ll say what they both should have said: Con­grats, Dana and Tracy!

On Novem­ber, 21st, fel­low Mary­lan­ders Dana Hanna and his bride Tracy got mar­ried. At the alter, he whipped out his cell and updated his Face­book sta­tus to “Mar­ried” and blasted out a quick tweet about get­ting hitched. He handed his wife her cell and she got in on the fun, too. Dana and the min­is­ter were the only ones in on it, so it was a big sur­prise for every­one in atten­dance.

Okay, it’s geeky, but it’s also a sweet ges­ture. His tweet reads, “Stand­ing at the altar with @Tra­cy­Page where just a sec­ond ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #wed­ding­day” See? Sweet.

Yes­ter­day, tech blog­ger and semi-professional dick Michael Arring­ton shared the YouTube video in an arti­cle with the snarky title, “Really?” Com­menters chimed in with, “Nerds!” and, “Weirdo nerds!“

Mashable’s cov­er­age is also sus­pect. Jen­nifer Van Grove writes, “While all of us at Mash­able are very avid Twit­ter­ers and Face­book users, updat­ing our sta­tus at the altar might fall out­side our com­fort zone.” You’ve got to be kid­ding me. You guys make a liv­ing cov­er­ing every aspect of social media, and the unique and fun ways in which peo­ple take advan­tage of them. When did you decide you were qual­i­fied to make judge­ment calls?

Some of the com­ments on Mash­able are really harsh. “If I were her, I would have smacked him. That’s also so rude to their priest and the guests in atten­dance.” As noted above, the min­is­ter was in on it.

Another com­menter writes, com­pletely with­out irony, “There are some ethics that an intel­li­gent and well-mannered per­son should respect. The per­son in the video is an obsessed, social net­work­ing addict.” Yes some­one wrote that com­ment on a blog that focuses on social media and social net­work­ing in order to call some­one else a “social net­work­ing addict.” Pre­cious.

There seems to be a sub­text of reli­gious out­rage and enti­tle­ment here. A Mash­able com­menter just can’t let it go, and posts the same re-worded com­ment almost a dozen times. “Houses of God aka churches, are not places in which in the mid­dle of ‘sacred cer­e­monies’ you pop out your mobile phone and tweet or Face­book about it.” What is this, the six­teenth cen­tury?

Hanna has also caught some seri­ous heat on Twit­ter. I’m scratch­ing my head about how this can be inter­preted as any­thing but a fun, über-geeky stunt.

So let me get all of this straight. Michael Arring­ton and Jen­nifer Van Grove, peo­ple who make their liveli­hoods writ­ing about the nerdi­est of nerdy tech news, along with their nerdi­est of read­ers who are nerdy enough to post nerdy com­ments on their nerdy posts have the audac­ity to sud­denly look down on a nerdy stunt? And the peo­ple who learned about it on sites like Twit­ter, Face­book, and YouTube are declar­ing this some­how out of bounds? Really?

It’s insane what peo­ple choose to get worked up about.

Hanna puts it best in a tweet he posted last night. “To all the crit­i­ciz­ers of my video out there ques­tion­ing my san­ity: You don’t get it. I was hav­ing fun at MY wed­ding! Loosen up, have fun!“

Word.

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Over the past few months, I’ve devel­oped a fairly siz­able obses­sion with men’s cloth­ing. I think it had some­thing to do with mov­ing. Sort­ing and pack­ing my clothes forced me to take a long, hard look at how I dress myself every day. There were a few things I recently pur­chased that I’m proud of, but there’s still quite a lin­eage of cloth­ing, espe­cially shirts, that date back to col­lege and that I still some­times wear. The full hor­ror of this becomes increas­ingly clear to me the closer I get to my thir­ti­eth birth­day. So, I’m try­ing to learn as much as I can about style and fash­ion in order to grad­u­ally give myself an upgrade.

Is this a nor­mal thing for men to expe­ri­ence? The twen­ties are almost offi­cially over, and I want to have a respectable wardrobe to match by the time I get there. Sure, I have a few nice shirts I wear to work, but I think I have a long way to go.

My recent inter­est in men’s style has led me to sev­eral fan­tas­tic blogs and sites. Yes­ter­day, I dis­cov­ered Put This On, a blog and video pod­cast hosted by the excel­lent Jesse Thorn and Adam Lis­agor. They call it “A web series about dress­ing like a grownup.” Nail, head.

The site is very infor­ma­tive and clev­erly writ­ten, and the first video episode is packed with fan­tas­tic tips and info on denim. It’s a must-watch for the guys, and a must-watch sug­ges­tion all the ladies should be mak­ing to the guys in their lives.

I’m hooked and can’t wait for the sec­ond episode. Here’s the first one for your view­ing info-tainment:

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo

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A strong thun­der­storm tore through last night and left us with an over­cast sky. It’s a dis­mal, muggy morn­ing with fallen branches lit­ter­ing roads and lawns. A van parked under a tree down the street from my apart­ment had its roof rack severely bent by a fallen limb. I felt bad for them, but it could have been a lot worse.

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Yes­ter­day, in the span of an hour, the clouds parted, the sun warmed the Outer Banks, and my Inter­net con­nec­tion was repaired. I went for a walk on the aban­doned, wind-swept beaches of Waves, North Car­olina. Along my walk, I encoun­tered an odd, yellow-orange shape pro­trud­ing from the sand.

When I got closer, I real­ized that it was an over­turned hot tub that had either washed up on the beach or been dumped there by some thought­less local. Either way, it has an odd and inter­est­ing shape, so I took a pic­ture with my phone and sent it to Twitter.

My friend Sam was the first to sug­gest it looked like a giant cake. And you know what? She’s totally right. Other peo­ple on Twit­ter unan­i­mously agreed, so I thought I’d share the odd­ity here.

So, enjoy this over­turned hot tub that looks a lit­tle bit like a sponge cake with plugs that look like it was once hooked up to the Matrix. You prob­a­bly won’t see another one of these today.

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