Wow Just Wow [ONN Edition]

By any criteria—Melding Of Found And Filmed Footage, Make-up, Concept, Jokemedy, Audio Mixing, Pacing—this sucker is brilliant.


Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

A Very Good Piece Of Economic Analysis

I don't really have it in me, today, to write more than that about this.

Read Tom Scocca On Jonathan Safran Foer's New Nonfiction Book [If You Like To LOL]

Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please. [via the Awl, honestly just read the Awl every single day]

In Your Face, Unwarranted Influence, Whether Sought or Unsought, From The Military-Industrial Complex!

I was incensed a while back by a particularly lame SNL cold open where Fred Armisen's Obama rattles off the lack of accomplishments so far. (It hasn't even been a year.) GITMO may still be open, but less flashy positive developments are under way:

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

[Via the NYFT,B's!]

PSA: "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" Are Probably Going To Scam You

This Goes Out To All My Friends Who Routinely Invite Me To "Zombie Gangster Vampire Bite Them" or Sign Up For Some Other Mind-Numbing App On Facebook: Your credulousness is going to lose you money and is, in fact, a large part of Facebook's lazy, dishonest revenue stream. Just listen to Gawker's Ryan Tate:

[S]ocial network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

[Via Valleywag]