It's never a good sign when the most interesting thing about a viral video is how they spent their money. "Possum Death Spree 2" isn't so much a sequel to the first as a do-over with a slightly brighter color palette: scientist warns of melting permafrost, killer possums unleashed, lots of blood, some tame T&A, the end. Oh, and also, the production is carbon-neutral, which means that one startup bribed another startup so they could......

Here's a Moment Of Zen for you: local company YouTube has indicated (.pdf) in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by Viacom that it intends to call fake news hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to testify in pre-trial depositions about uploaded clips from their Comedy Central shows (Comedy Central is owned by Viacom). Do you swear that your testimony is the truthiness, the whole truthiness, and nothing but the truthiness? It's unclear what......

There's only one thing better than absorbing nerdy cultural texts, and that's becoming a nerdy cultural text of your own. Voting on the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge launched today; over the next month, a ton of fan-made Star Wars films will duel to the death to attract the attention of our local birthday-beardo, George Lucas. Winners are announced May 27 on Spike TV (corporate sibling of Atom Films). We adore Chad Vader, of......

First Viacom didn't want their stuff on YouTube. Then they did. Now, once again, they don't. So some poor schmos at YouTube are looking at missing the Super Bowl as they have to pull clips from Viacom shows. The guesstimate for the amount of clips on there is about 100,000. ...

So here's how the story goes: plucky, fresh-faced tech geeks put together some new web gizmo that quickly becomes one of those things everyone loves. Plucky, fresh-faced tech geeks quickly make a lot of money for doing something that doesn't make a lot of money, but is based on their potential for money. But since plucky, fresh-faced tech geeks run the company themselves with no affiliation to any of the Big Boys, Big Boys slowly lick their chops and move in for the kill, either by buying them out or by competing against them. Say goodbye to plucky, fresh-faced tech geeks and say hello to evil media conglomerate. Why do we bring this up? Because it's happening to YouTube....

It looks like all those Comedy Central videos are back well most of them, on YouTube as Viacom and Google worked something out. And so ends the battle that led to a thousand blogger rants. ...

Remember back to the giddy days of Napster? Remember how everything could be found online and for free and everyone did nothing at work other than download their favorite songs? Remember how there was a feeling that as great as it was, it was not meant to be as it was just too gosh darn great and how when it all came to a crashing end (thanks, Lars), we all somehow knew it was inevitable? Why are we bringing this up? Because YouTube is now running into problems. Sometime over the weekend, YouTube's new overlords, Google, took down clips from Viacom related shows. Big whoops, right? Wrong. The first things that were taken down were clips from Viacom owned Comedy Central. Which means we'll no longer be able to post clips from the "Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" or "South Park". That sucks. There are still videos on there but not nearly as plentiful as there was before. And since they're all supposedly going down within days, no time like the present to show off the "South Park" episode that makes fun of us San Franciscans (see above). ...