Joker's Last Laugh
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
I will be the first to say:
I don’t get it :(
“I will be the first to say:
I don't get it :(”
Lock= Rock
the= the
Taskbar= Casbah
The Clash wrote “Rock the Casbah”. It’s an awesometacular song from an awesometacular band. Hope that clears things up.
Yeah, every time I play with my taskbar all I can hear in my head is
Lock the Taskbar!
Lock the Taskbar!
(search on youtube for “rock the casbah” if you don’t get it)
Very cute.
Useless Personal Anecdote: The original video was filmed here in Austin, TX. One of my co-workers attended UT back then, and was having a beer on the front of his frat house when a Cadillac rolled past, with a sheik, a rabbi, and a camera crew in it.
His buddy even asked, “Is this some kind of joke?”
That evening, while standing in line outside the Clash concert, they saw the sheik, rabbi, and camera crew again, but didn’t make the connection until much later.
This is truly uncanny – I made this last week. Not that I thought I was the first to think of this, or anything.
http://tinyurl.com/ajr74f
The shareef must LOVE this.
@4 (Telas): That’s amazing. Strange that they filmed it in the States, being an English band and all that.
Strange I always thought Duran Duran sang Rock the Casbah.
That was just awesome.
@Julian – IIRC, the Clash video features some oil rigs at some point, so it was probably easier to find them in Texas than in England.
Great. Thanks Telas.
Now I’m going to spend the next 15 minutes watching this Clash video over and over again, trying to pick out Austin landmarks in the background.
Leslee
Yet again the internet hivemind strikes and reveals that that really crazy thing I do isn’t really all that unique.
I love misheard lyrics, your ears can be confused by your eyes reading something. My favorite has always been
http://cornonthekabob.ytmnd.com/
@ LintMan: I’m pretty sure there are quite a few oil rigs in the North Sea. Maybe they were touring in the U.S. or something?
@Wil K: yes, but the rigs in the North Sea probably wouldn’t conjure up any Middle-East/desert imagery, which might have been what they were going for. Though looking at the video now, it’s hard to say if that’s what they had in mind.
Watched it twice without sound before realizing what was going on.
For every song by Nightwish there are three with misheard lyrics
The rigs in the North Sea are, well, in the North Sea.
As in, they’re in the middle of the ocean.
Ouch. I remember how I felt like the biggest dork in the world when I first sang it in my head so many years ago. I guess there’s always someone dorkier than you who goes and puts up online what you just kept as a shameful whim.
By the way, Youtube must have made the cosmic designers of the English language sorely regret that time they said: “Oh, let’s not be uptight, they should be able to pronounce words pretty much any way they want to”.
Presumably they used Texan oil rigs since they’re out in the desert and the song’s alluding to resisting oppression (of music, no less!) in the Middle East.
As opposed to, say, resisting oppression in the middle of the ocean.
Did someone say “YouTube” and “mispronunciation”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUIJ27v1_T4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH8gtrD4_C4
My work here is done…
Prepare to ROFLCOPTOR.
I’m not kidding:
http://dustfilms.com/literalvideos
Literal music videos. The songs have been re-done with new lyrics being sung to the action that is happening on screen.
Ex: Billy Idol, White Wedding
“Wow! Now I’ll tap my foot in, leeatther paantttsss”
Doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. “Casbah” and “taskbar” don’t sound the same the way I speak.
I just spent a few minutes trying to identify the Austin landmarks. Unfortunately, Austin has changed so much since this was filmed, that it’s hard to recognize anything from the 80s.
Pretty much the only scene where you can see the real city was outside the concert hall, and that’s been so paved over in the last 20 years it doesn’t look anything like it anymore.
I hate to spoil a joke by asking for it to be explained, and I do get the similarity in the phrases “Lock the Taskbar” and “Rock the Casbah”, but . . . as someone who doesn’t use Windows very much, I don’t understand the underlying reasons for locking the taskbar. Is this something that comes up a lot in Windows-land? Clearly there’s something about the Taskbar that bothers people, and it can be fixed by locking it . . .
(Also: Dustfilms’ literal videos are hilarious!)
@Bizarre: True enough, “Casbah” and “Taskbar” don’t sound the same, but “Rock the Casbah” is infamous precisely because the mangled pronunciation of Casbah, and what people have been interpreting it to mean.
As for why the video was filmed in TX, it must be because they wanted to have an armadillo in their videos because dillos are cool…
On another note, if you like ABBA and programming, there is always “Gimme a manual after midnight (to make those bugs go away)”…
It’s been years since I was able to look at the taskbar right-click context menu without thinking of this song.
@DaveMC: The taskbar can be dragged to different edges of the screen, or made taller so it takes up multiple rows. The amount of space available for shortcuts on the Quick Launch section can also be resized. Locking the taskbar prevents you from accidentally making these adjustments.
There’s a Rush song called “Fly by Night”.
In that song, there is a lyric that goes “ship is a commin'”
I had a friend in high school who was a big Rush fan. I had another friend who insisted that the actual lyrics were “Chicken Mcnuggets” (it’s the same number of syllables).
Blows were exchanged on more than one occasion.
@Tizzy: I meant even more so, in my case. I’m Australian – taskbar is “tarskbar.”
I’ve argued many times over the Kasabian lyrics to ‘processed beats’ (i think) were he says ‘the troops are on fire’ – i’m convinced he says ‘the CHIPS are on fire’ oh well i’m probably wrong. It was me dad who spotted the rock the kasbah / lock the taskbar thing a few years ago. I got bored today and googled it only to find out many others have spotted it. well done. Serioussly i can’t beleive some losers don’t get it, – there isn’t much to get, pretty basic really!