Over the last few weeks, I’ve been passively looking for the identity of the Afro-Ninja. I posted a $50 question on Google Answers, but it didn’t turn up anything for several weeks.

Tonight, I finally got an answer! Edward Shen informed me that it was Mark Allen Hicks, a stunt man auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly.

Edward works with people who know Mark, and one friend saw him come out of the audition “pissed off with a bloody nose.” Looking at his IMDB photographs, it’s clear this is the same guy. Compare for yourself.

Now, can someone get me in contact with Mark? I’d love to ask him some questions about the video.

In the last few days, Mazda started a new viral marketing campaign in the unfortunate style of “Raging Cow.” Take a look at HalloweenM3, a Blogspot weblog supposedly written by a 22-year-old New Yorker named “Kid Halloween.” (Update: The blog was taken down, see details below.)

With little effort, it’s clear this was designed to promote the new Mazda3 model. The clues are obvious: links to videos featuring the Mazda3 (here and here), the HalloweenM3 username, and rich media hosted at Rackspace, an expensive dedicated hosting provider. Plus, Mazda has tried the viral marketing thing before.

But this is the most half-hearted attempt at viral marketing I’ve seen, especially in light of recent web efforts like the elaborate I Love Bees and Be More Chill campaigns. Four entries in a Blogspot blog isn’t very impressive.

One interesting point is that this entry claims to have recorded the Mazda commercial off the Manhattan Neighborhood Network public access channel, and several seconds of MNN footage are edited into the beginning of this video clip. I wonder how MNN would feel about being exploited for commercial use by Mazda. (I e-mailed them to find out.)

Thanks to Witz.org for the tip.

Update: Autoblog has some thoughts about the campaign.

October 22, 2004: The blog was taken down! Fortunately, Yahoo has a cached copy. And you can still view the user profile and videos.

The blog world is freaking out about Jon Stewart’s incendiary appearance on CNN’s Crossfire today, in which Jon calls hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala “partisan hacks” that are reducing the level of political discourse in the country. (Here’s the complete transcript.)

My friend Phil was quick to post the complete appearance on his BitTorrent server, and my other friend Leonard is hosting the direct download. (It’s good to have friends with lots of bandwidth.)

Watch the video now, and watch Leonard’s bandwidth graph skyrocket! The 36MB WMV looks and sounds great, so don’t bother downloading the 97 MB version.

So I noticed these incoming links from Technorati, all of which appear to be from automatically-generated Blogspot weblogs. They all appear to steal entries from a legitimate Typepad weblog, The Last Minute. I’m guessing this is another attempt at gaming search engines, but I can’t figure out the details. Take a look at the sites and let me know if you have any theories.

http://digitalvideo.blogspot.com/

http://digitalvideoediting.blogspot.com/

http://appleg5.blogspot.com/

http://homestarunner.blogspot.com/

http://thelastminute.blogspot.com/

http://ipodjack.blogspot.com/

(I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to help promote their Pagerank.)

Update: The creator of the cloned sites contacted me… He was experimenting with techniques for improving the Pagerank of his own website. He now understands the problems with this sort of cheating and promptly took them all offline.

It may not be Episode 3, but the Star Wars Kid makes a cameo in Tony Hawk Underground 2. (Thanks to Dan Beckett for the tip and original video clip.) Update: Here’s a high-quality video of the appearance with audio, thanks to Erik:

tonyhawk_starwarskid_high.wmv (WMV, 5.5MB)

Here are instructions for finding him, courtesy of Travis Ogdon:

“On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it’s one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you’re now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves.”

October 13, 2004: Joe Ford confirms that you can unlock the “Geeky Kid” character by beating the all goals in all levels in Easy Mode. They don’t refer to him as “Star Wars Kid,” which indirectly answers the question about whether he was compensated for his likeness. (He wasn’t.)

October 14, 2004: The THUG2 SWK video was featured on G4TechTV’s Screen Savers show yesterday. Erik has the video of the Screen Savers appearance. No mention of my site, and they mistakenly assume that Ghyslain was paid for his appearance. Tacky!

The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera is one of the the best mashup remixes I’ve ever heard, a fluid blend of classic and modern hip hop with Queen’s epic catalog. Please don’t miss the last track, Question.mp3. It’s like a plunderphonic call to arms against bad copyright law.

The official site is having bandwidth problems, so I’m mirroring the entire album, as individual songs and an uncut 110 MB MP3.

As far as I can tell, nobody has listed the sample origins online yet. I don’t have the time to locate the short samples, but here are most of the primary sources. If you can fill in any gaps (in bold) or have any corrections, leave a comment!

September 24, 2004: The sample list is almost complete, except for the source of the vocals in Stop.mp3. If you can identify the artist and song, please let me know. Found! Shane did some expert Googling and identified the sample as Looptroop w/Chords & Timbuktu, “Heads Day Off.” [MP3, 6.4MB]

Continue reading “Kleptones, "Night at the Hip-Hopera"” →

Last year, I wrote an entry about karaoke songs on Usenet, focusing on the oddball subgenre of indie and alt-rock karaoke. Well, a year later, not much has changed… Here are some of the recent hipster hits found in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke:

Modest_Mouse_-_Float_On_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Yeah_Yeah_Yeahs_-_Maps_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Franz_Ferdinand_-_Matinee_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

The_Streets_-_Dry_Your_Eyes_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

The_Streets_-_Fit_But_You_Know_It_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Snow_Patrol_-_Spitting_Games_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Jet_-_Cold_Hard_Bitch_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Badly_Drawn_Boy_-_Disillusion_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Which raises the question, is there a big overlap between karaoke fans and indie-rock fans? I can understand requesting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” at a karaoke bar, but Franz Ferdinand?

As predicted, many of the Athens 2004 Olympics events are being digitized and uploaded to the Internet. The quality is good, often ripped from HDTV and international sources. (Many of the clips are from Brazilian television, with commentary in Portuguese. Those darn Brazilians again!)

To judge the video quality, here’s a sample clip of yesterday’s controversial judging of Russia’s Alexei Nemov, in which the audience’s vocal protests shut down the Men’s Gymnastics High Bar Finals for a full ten minutes.

Video: Alexei Nemov – Male Gymnastics High Bar Finals (Sample) (.MPG, 25MB)

Like Yahoo’s Most Popular, there’s an emphasis on women’s beach volleyball and women’s gymnastics. But many other events are represented, as well. Below is a list of every event posted to the alt.binaries.olympics Usenet newsgroup since the Olympics started on August 13.

Continue reading “Olympics 2004 on Usenet” →

The Assembly demo party in Helsinki is one of the largest geek gatherings in the world, where thousands converge to watch and compete in graphic demo competitions. (View the panorama photo from last year’s event, with over 5,000 attendees.)

This year, the winner of the “Browser Demo” category was Mooncheese, written in pure Javascript and DHTML. Several classic real-time demo effects are represented, such as copper bars, tunnels, voxels, Mandelbrot zooms, and various vector effects. In Javascript!

You can view the Mooncheese demo mirrored locally on my server, or download the source locally.

It works well in Firefox 0.9 and Internet Explorer 6, but not Safari. Read the release notes for more information.

As part of my ongoing interest in Metafilter statistics, I was curious to see which sites Metafilter users link to the most.

From a complete dump of Metafilter’s front-page post database back to July 1999 (thanks, Matt!), I extracted the unique domains linked from each entry and added them all up.

The Top 50 results are below, proving that the NewsFilter moniker isn’t too far off. (Or you can view the entire list.)

Continue reading “Metafilter Sources” →