Reviews – Page 57

Vote for South Park!

photo credit: otherthingsSouthParkStudios.com – the official website of award-winning TV series South Park – has been nominated for a Webby Award in Entertainment (Humor) category! The Webby Awards are the ‘Internet-equivalent’ of the Oscars, previous winners being the Who’s Who of the online world. Webby Awards is famous for its acceptance speech rules: the acceptance speech by any winner must be no longer than five words. (I believe the rules may be changed to make it ‘140 characters’, IF Twitter finds a business model AND becomes a sponsor of the Webby Awards.) I wonder what Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going to say when (if) they win this award.

SouthParkStudios.com can also win a Webby People’s Voice Award. (One set of Webby Awards is chosen by a jury, another set is based on votes from the general public who vote online on Webby website.) You’ve time to vote till 30th April, and then the results will be declared on 5th May. So all South Park fans (and even if you aren’t a fan) please go and vote now for South Park! If you don’t, I’ll come over to each one of my readers who doesn’t vote and kick them squaw in the nuts.

SouthParkStudios.com is beautifully designed and offers a lot of ‘stuff’ for fans too. You can watch complete episodes of ALL shows online, watch shorter clips (embed them on your site even), create your own South Park avatar, download ‘crap’, discuss with others on forums, get behind-the-scenes news, […I’m running out of breath now…], ask questions directly to the creators of the show…[drops due to exhaustion]. My point is, there’s a LOT on the site – and it’s definitely funny.

I’ll leave you with a joke from a recent South Park episode Fishsticks (it only works with guys):

Q: Do you like fishsticks?
A: Yes
Q: Do you like putting fishsticks (pronounce as ‘fishdicks’) in your mouth?
A: Yes
Q: Then what are you, a gay fish?

RAPPER KANYE WEST WAS PARODIED IN THIS EPISODE AND HE WROTE A RESPONSE ON HIS BLOG IN ALL CAPS. In the episode’s climax, Kanye West has an epiphany and realises that he’s a gay fish. That whole song was sung by Trey Parker. Listen to complete, uncensored version of the song Gay Fish by Trey Parker (so hilarious!).

I’m seriously. Just go and vote for South Park.

PhotoSoup

My rating of Yahoo! PhotoSoup: 9.5 / 10

I’m down with viral fever right now, missing out all the action at OSSCamp Delhi happening at IIT Delhi. I surfing aimlessly at Yahoo! Research stumbled across insanely fun and addictive game they’ve made called PhotoSoup.

The concept is childishly simple. You go to the PhotoSoup page and choose between one of two options – ‘playing’ with photos from a user you know (or your own), or enter a tag. PhotoSoup then throws up fourteen Creative Commons Attribution licensed photos (from Flickr) tagged with that tag. Your task is to find tags other than the one you specified in a word grid and which are also used in at least one of the images. For example, if the tag you search for is ‘color’ then you’ll be shown photos tagged ‘color’. Now one of those photos may be using the tag ‘red’ or ‘orange’ too, and that’s what you have to find in the word grid. Click, drag and release across letters to select them. As and when you pick out correctly tags which are used in the shown images they get grayed out. But hurry! You’ve only 60 seconds from the time of the puzzle loading to solve it.

Yahoo! PhotoSoup — Hey, I only chose this tag for writing this post because I knew the photos thrown up would be interesting.

While solving the puzzle if you want a better look at a picture to guess what tag might have been used with it, mouse your cursor over the photo. Once the game is over you can click on any photo to see it properly on its Flickr page. You can enable ‘hints’, which will show the word / tag you need to search for beneath the photo. The grid can be quite challenging, because words may be placed horizontally, vertically or diagonally – and even backwards in any of the orientations.

The only flaw I found was that searching for the same tag shows the same photos again (that explains the .5 points less than a perfect 10 in the review score), so replay value for the same tag is low. It would have been more fun if the photos served in PhotoSoup were randmized. And it’s an amazing way to discover exquisite photos while playing word games! Besides, this certainly has potential as an educational tool given that work is done for adapting it for a school enviroment.