Violet Blue and Boing Boing Debacle

Filed Under Geek, Internet, News, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Websites |

For those that don’t know, Violet Blue is a well-known sex educator and Boing Boing is one of the most(?) popular blogs on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Violet Blue’s posts getting pulled from BoingBoing, there’s more than enough press out there about it. Even the LA Times picked up the story. I don’t want to get into a long post about my thoughts on the matter, but I did want to share something I thought worth sharing.

I setup VioletBlueVioletBlue.net to house all of the Boing Boing posts that had been “unpublished”. These posts are all taken directly from archive.org where the old versions of the posts are kept. Boing Boing publishes their stuff under Creative Commons, so I am redistributing their work with attribution. I wanted this content to remain around and in a form that is easily locatable, i.e. not buried in archive.org’s wayback machine. If you have a blog post that previously linked to the post on Boing Boing, then feel free to link to its equivalent on VB2. These posts aren’t getting unpublished any time soon.

If I missed anything or made any mistakes on the site, please let me know. I make no claims to being perfect by any means.

3 Comments

Filling an office with packing peanuts, how to fake it

Filed Under Funny, Geek, Pranks |

Office filled with packing peanuts

I’ve always wanted to do the packing peanuts prank at work, but it’s usually prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Then I came across this page. A quick trip to the UPS store to purchase 28 cu ft of biodegradable packing peanuts (cost: $65), office supply store for paper and tape ($12), and a few beers later we were quite successful. The difficult part was that the offices here have a glass corner, so we had to setup some boxes inside to hold the paper in place, but in the end I think it really adds to the effect. Our coworker explained his thoughts when he came in the next morning as: “Oh my… they didn’t? no, they couldn’t, it’d take to much.. no, no way…”. For added effect we locked his door so that he couldn’t immediately confirm that it was a fake front. All of the reaction, a fraction of the time and cost. I love a good April Fool’s prank. There are a whole series of pictures of the whole process here (my photos) and here (photos by Mike Morris). Credit must also be given to Cristian Mueller and Mike Morris for being a part of this. Seems like three people are perfect to pull this off.

An Instructables on the simple procedure
More geeky pranks

4 Comments

The MacBook Slow

Filed Under Funny, Geek, Pranks |

Don’t want to have to wait for your MacBook Slow Air? You can get the world’s thinnest laptop on eBay right now!

Leave a Comment

Remote Control Bus Stop Rave Flash Mob

Filed Under Fun, Funny, Interesting, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Video, sf0 |

Oh sf0, you are responsible for so many great things (not to mention me moving to San Francisco). What’s the next best thing? Oh, a sequel to the great Remote Control Bus Stop Rave Flash Mob? You’ve got to be kidding me! I’ll be there!

No idea what I’m talking about? Here’s the video from the last one:

And here’s the task that was posted on sf0.
And here’s info for the one this Friday:

Greetings fellow humans!

This Friday, September 21, starting at 9PM, there will be a remote control bus stop rave flash mob. Someone set up a music rig (hidden in the eaves of the bus stop) that goes off when someone sits in the bus stop or walks in front of it. Join the mob, it will be fun. Watch this youtube video of a previous bus stop rave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktm-LxCoe_I

WHERE:
- Bus stop at the corner of Haight and Fillmore in SF (headed west)
- CLICK HERE to see a map

WHEN:
- Friday, September 21, 9:00 PM

WHAT TO DO:
- When the music and lights start, go to the bus stop and dance.
- When the music stops, vacate the bus shelter,
- Be friendly to passer-bys and locals. Encourage them to dance.
. Eventually, as the night goes on and we all become more intoxicated, this will evolve from a flash mob into a more of a bus stop rave.

Bring your friends. It really is a lot of fun to party in bus stop that has its own sound system.

I give it 15 minutes, but dammit, those will be 15 good minutes of fun.

1 Comment

Social Engineering to Feed the Homeless

Filed Under Funny, Pranks, Social Engineering, Video |

via The Art of the Prank

Leave a Comment