Tag: humor

Categories
Found

Apple Easter Eggs Still Exist

I was digging through some tech notes this morning for work to find some help with this authentication problem I’m bumping into, and I found this gem in the localizatition section of “Authorization for Everyone”:

> With this right specification you will see that, when prompted to authorize, a user who prefers English over Australian English will see the message “You must be authorized to do alpha.” while a user who prefers Australian English over English will see “Strewth! You must be authorised to do alpha.”. For Australians it’s very important that every sentence contains an expletive (and that “authorised” be spelt with an ‘s’).

It was a needed laugh on a crappy day. Carry on.

Categories
Reflected

The 2005 Valentine’s Anecdote

First, a little backstory, not really important but funny regardless:

Back in December, Katie’s birthday fell on a Saturday for once. Traditionally, I’ve ordered flowers for the day of her birthday, which normally falls within the context of the work week. But this year, it didn’t, and I got a joking call from Katie at about 10 AM: “What, no flowers?”

This made me feel tremendously bad, despite planning to pick them up on her birthday proper. A few calls later, we had hashed out some sort of weird understanding, where if I WERE to get flowers, there was a particular place near my office she wanted them from. A freak building evacuation provided a good opportunity to get over there, at which point I put in an order for a dozen roses and some orchids. When the guy taking my order said “it’ll be this big” and waved his hand above his head, I didn’t really pay much attention to this fact. But lo and behold, the arrangement was ridiculously huge, to the point where Katie almost hurt her back bringing it back to her desk. Additionally, I’ve been told it was so aromatic that a number of her coworkers wanted to inflict pain on me once their allergies stopped.

So, as for Valentine’s Day:

Knowing this florist has their shit together, I expected full well to be able to go into the store and pick up something, if not be able to get delivery. Happily, when I came in the door at 9 AM and asked if they could take one more delivery, the response was very much in the affirmative. We went to work putting together a nice arrangement (pink roses, purple fill), and everything was going fine…until one of the staff looked at my card and went “Wall Street? Uhhh…I think you might’ve missed the delivery van for that one.”

Everything came to a standstill, in a weird sort of time-freeze moment. I took a second to ponder how, at 9 AM, I’ve missed the delivery window for the entire downtown area, but I let that thought pass. I raised my brow and said, “If there’s no way you guys can deliver it, could I come back at lunch and pick it up so I can run it down there myself?”
Time resumed, they said sure, I paid the charge, and went off to the office. I made a point of not calling Katie, knowing that she was expecting flowers but not with any idea as to when. I knew I could take all of my lunch hour to get down to Wall Street and back, since I wasn’t eating today – had to save room for what would be a ridiculously large dinner.

At lunch, I took a package that had arrived with Katie’s V-day gift (the Katie fanclub will be amused to hear it was another handbag she had picked out), and trekked out of the building into a very cold rain, without an umbrella. I made my way to the florist and picked up my order. Annoyingly, it was still in a vase from the original assumption it was going to be a delivery – this made it very unweildy to carry both the package and the vase, but I trekked on west trying desperately to find a cab. I lucked out after a block and a half and we shot down towards Wall Street.

When I made it into Katie’s building, the guard on duty was more than willing to call up and say she had “a delivery in the lobby”. So this is what transpires:

I see the elevator open, and Katie looks very happy and is walking towards where I’m standing. I recall she looked at me at least a few times.

I say, “Hi!”

She responds, “Hi.”

I think, “That’s really weird, was she expecting me?”

When she gets about three feet away, she dead stops, eyes still focused on the flowers and the package.

She blinks.

She turns and looks at me for half a second.

She puts her head down on the reception desk and starts laughing – she had completely missed the fact that her husband was standing there with the flowers.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Categories
Explained

A Guide To GET IT?!?!

There exists, in my very warped sense of humor, a particular brand of joke called the Get It joke (often capitalized and followed by alternating question and exclamation marks, as above.) Thankfully, there are other people with related senses of humor, so I cannot say that this bizarre type of joke is limited to myself. However, in the hopes of explaining it to the rest of the world, I’ve opted to formalize the specification for just what defines this oddball humor.

What is a GET IT joke?

The concept of a Get It joke is the unintentional use of a phrase that has a secondary connotation to the audience it’s being said to. This is largely prevelant in the Bemani community, and is carried out with song titles or specific terms relating to the games. Thus, to “get it”, the audience would recognize the Bemani reference, and chuckle to themselves.

An example

<BemaniKidA> Hey B, did you hear about what happened at The Break this weekend?
<BemaniKidB> A, I was the one who told you that story.
<Remy> GET IT?!?!

(In this instance, I am pointing out the use of the term “I Was The One”, which is a song by good-cool. If you were not aware of this even before I was explaining it to you, I will warn you now – it only gets weirder from here.)

Proper Form Of A Get It

There are, in fact, two forms to this style of joke. The most common use is the third person style, as above. The joker will loudly interject a “GET IT” at the appropriate time in the middle of the conversation, as close to the line of text as possible. If it’s been a few lines, it often helps to paste the text, draw an ASCII arrow at it, and write the GET IT on the same line.

There is also the first person form, or the “pre-emptive” get it. In this instance, you intentionally slip a Bemani reference into your regular conversation. To indicate that you have already “gotten it”, procedure dictates that you capitalize the song title in question.

Acceptible Get It References

Song titles are okay from any Bemani title. More credit is given for obscure songs or clever catches, but if you delve too far into obscurity (picking songs off Mamba A Gogo, for instance) will lead you to no one getting it.

Bemani artists are acceptible, under the same guidelines as song titles.

Other terms, such as grades or characters, are generally frowned upon unless they are extremely witty. For instance, me just saying “extreme” in the last sentence is not acceptible for most people. However, were I to say “too deluxe”, that could be used successfully.

Proper Response

If the Get It Joke is truly great, standard laughing is the norm.

If it is merely average, however, the common response is “HURHUR” or some variation thereof. HURHUR may also be used in the joke itself to pre-empt the response process entirely.

In the event of a real life Get It, physical violence is always an option no matter the joke.

Get It Wars

In cases of extreme boredom, users on IRC may break out into a fight of pre-emptive Get It jokes. These are often tensely fought and will sap your faith in humanity if you witness one.

Ground rules:

  1. Any user may enter or leave the war at any time.
  2. Participants are required to converse as normally as possible whike making at least one pre-emptive joke per line of chat.
    Exception: Users calling each other on violating the rules do not need to make a joke. Of course, if they can, no harm is done.
  3. No single reference may be reused in the same war.
  4. There is no explicit winner, although a participant who can carry on the most regular style of conversation while implementing witty and well-timed jokes will be allowed to feel good about themselves for winning something so silly.
  5. The war ends when all participants grow bored.

Errata

* The invention of GET IT jokes is generally credited to Ukyo, who was banned from #ddrfreak for making so many of them.
* The most common back and forth series is “Man, do I have a HEADACHE”, with the response “Then take some TABLETS”.
* GET IT jokes should not be confused with references to “truly”, “carried out”, “a fantastic”, or “the pinky is extended”. These are all a different inside joke.
* Again, get it jokes are NOT limited to Bemani references. They can be used for any pun-related word play at any time. But what’s the fun in that?
* A warning: If you invoke too many GET IT jokes, you may end up with a condition where you will start catching them in every day life and your brain will be saying GET IT?!?! to itself. This is a horrible, horrible condition that the medical research community is only beginning to look into. There is no cure. Please, don’t let Getitis happen to you.

(If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this, you may be thinking, “God, does this guy have a life?” If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, it should come as no SHOCK to you that I don’t.)