Ruin The Links

Did Millennials Ruin the Olympics? I know it's hard for older people (like the kind of people that run TV networks) to wrap their mind grapes around this but younger people just don't sit down in front of the TV as much as previous generations did. It's not a matter of getting them to tune in, it's a matter of taking the content to where they are. I mean, I'm too old to know where they are but I know they're out there. Snapchat maybe?

Former NBC Analyst Dwight Stone Calls It's Track & Field Coverage a Disgrace. Former employee calls out old boss is hardly a surprise, but I love that Pole Vault seems to be right at the forefront of the track and field discussion. Pole Vault hasn't been this relevant since Sergei Bubka was breaking the world record every 2 weeks.

The Four Women Saving Wrestling. First off, that's a fantastic illustration, top notch work by GQ. Secondly, this is a great article about the current state of women's wrestling in WWE. It sucks that it's taken so long but we're finally at the fireworks factory. Bayley's debut to the main roster on RAW last night was probably the highlight of the show and definitely got the biggest reaction from the crowd. I know this might sound crazy but when you give the audience a reason to care about something, as opposed to relegating it to pee breaks between the "important matches" people will actually care about it. Crazy huh?

13 New Marvel Cosplay Variants. In theory I really like these Variant covers, but in execution many of them don't have very interesting backgrounds or dynamic poses. The photos and costumes look a little amateurish. Maybe it's the trade dress? I don't know what it is exactly, I just know that as much as I like cosplay I'm not shelling out 9.99 for any of these.

Closer Links

No Man's Sky: The Kotaku Review. It's really hard to find a review for No Man's Sky that is able to separate the crashing of the hype train from the actual experience of the game. This Kotaku one does a pretty good job. Some might argue the review is a bit to generous. You could probably claim they're in the pocket of BIG VIDEO GAME but they're owned by Gawker so I'm pretty sure Hulk Hogan runs everything now.

A Closer Look At The Overwhelmingly Sexist Coverage Of Female Olympians. NBC's coverage in particular has been garbage. Yes, most of the sexist stuff has come from print and digital media but just the overall experience of watching the Olympics has been super sub par. Just a couple days ago there was one of the best Pole Vault duels in Olympic history, it ended with the hometown kid setting an Olympic record and the crowd booing the snot out of the French champion until he broke down and cried. NBC spent all of 3 minutes on it. Worse those 3 minutes were spaced throughout 4 hours of coverage. They didn't need to dedicate hours to it but 10 or 15 minutes dedicated to just that event would have done wonders. Of course the final was between a Brazilian and a Frenchman so I guess I can see why NBC wasn't interested.

One day NBC will learn that people from other countries can have interesting stories. In an international competition it's not a bad idea to actually address the rest of the world. If for no other reason than to put a face on the opposition. They're so focused on telling a "good story" they forget most stories have a good protagonist and antagonist.

I know the fact that they tape delay everything is a big hot topic but I don't care about that. I'd rather they show everything in primetime. If you want to watch events live you can find them on the internet or one of the other dozen channels they have. For me it's the almost zero effort, paint by numbers approach they've taken to the games. They could have just replayed their coverage from 2012 and I'll be no one would have noticed.

The Door to Hell, Turkmenistan. Cool little imgur gallery to someone's trip to the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan. If you've never seen or heard of this it's basically a mining accident turned eternal fire pit. It's pretty cool.

Comics Creators of 1995 Predict the Future! Wow, don't ever say that creative types aren't smart. A couple of these answers on what comic books will look like in 20 years are shockingly accurate. Doug Moench in particular with his prediction of an digital distribution model is eerily accurate.

Everything's Fine, Nothing To See Here

Algae blooms are a perfectly normal part of swimming. I swear every other time I take my kid to swim lessons the pool is green and they're just running a local community pool. These big time Olympic venues pretty much have unlimited resources to make sure little Johnny Croatia isn't going to go to the hospital every time he does a half pike twist.

In fact I hear this is a plan on the part of Rio, every day the pool is going to be the color of one of the Olympic Rings. Next up Yellow!

Uninhabitable Links

Tara Strong Rocks The Harley Quinn Cosplay At SDCC. This is noteworthy due to the fact that Tara Strong is the voice of Harley Quinn in the Batman: Arkham video games. She also does voices for Teen Titans Go and My Little Pony. It's also noteworthy because she is not unattractive.

More Cosplay for SDCC to come later this week!

Official: Yahoo snapped up by Verizon in $4.8 billion deal. Yikes, it wasn't long ago that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for like $43 billion and that's down from the nearly $110 Billion it was worth back in 1999. Outside of my parents and my wife's parents and probably your parents, I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo regularly. Wall street sees this as a win for Verizon because they've been able to acquire a bunch of content for not very much (It should be noted that Yahoo paid just over a billion dollars for Tumblr alone two years ago). I sort of see this as a loss for the internet as a whole. It's just another case of an internet provider becoming heavily invested in the content business, which is a blow to net neutrality.

Rio Olympics Athletes' Village Declared "Uninhabitable". These beds are too small! Also the toilets don't work, the power lines are all exposed and the whole place smells like gas. Other than that everything is just fine in Rio!

The Astounding Herrera's magic tricks in S03E15 of King of the Hill ("Sleight of Hank") are animated realistically. The people behind King of the Hill really di put a painstakingly impressive amount of detail in to the Magic tricks performed in the Sleight of Hank episode. Man, King of the Hill was just the best show. I have a couple seasons on DVD. I really should go back and watch those more.

Plywood Olympics > Regular Olympics

So this is what we're doing this weekend, right? I have all kinds of scrap wood laying around and a costco sized bottle of ibuprofen I haven't opened yet. What's the worst that could happen?

How Olympic Athlete's Bodies Have Changed Over the Years

Here's a quick little youtube clip that I found enjoyable. It's basically two and a half minutes on how we've been breading bigger faster stronger Olympians over the last 100 years. Unless of course you're a female gymnast, those we're breeding tinier and tinier. Soon all gold medal winning gymnasts will be under 4 feet tall.

Michelle Jenneke does stuff

Hey Kids, remember 6 months ago when the Olympics happened and the internet made a huge deal about which athletes were attractive and which weren't and bleacher report had slide shows of top 25 Volleyball players you want to bang and then someone posted some video of Australian hurdler Michelle Jenneke dancing before a race and everyone went crazy and there were tons of posts about her even though she wasn't an Olympian?

Well The Chive remembers and they did a video with her. It's pretty funny and by that I mean that she's pretty and I laughed when the guy tried to eat pancakes with nunchucks.

Merry Christmas everyone!

David Wetherill is much better than I at Table Tennis

Here's an incredible table tennis shot from the 2012 London Paralympics Games. This is much cooler than anything I saw at the regular Olympics, seriously where's Bob Costas and Ryan Seacrest when something interesting actually happens?

Guardians of the Links

Rumors of the Plot of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Rob over at Topless Robot has a fantasy that Guardians of the Galaxy will focus on Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers). It won't, it'll be Vance Astrovick or Star-Lored, but it's a nice dream to have.

You can finally play as the '92 Dream Team. I still don't know how anyone in their right mind can think that the 2012 olympic team would beat the '92 dream team. I'll even spot you that Kobe and Lebron are better than Jordan (which they aren't), Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley would slaughter the 2012 Olympic Team on the inside. Tyson Chandler and Kevin Love would literally be dead. Christian Laettner could still carry everyone's suitcases and fetch gatorade.

From Altair to iPad 35 years of computer market share. Interesting numbers here, once you get past 1992 it's basically IBM clones and nothing else. The Mac peaked with a 10 percent market share in 1992 and is down to what 4 percent, 5 percent? Amazing.

The 60 Best Things Found In MTV's "House Of Style" Archives. A. don't pretend you didn't watch house of style. B. in 20 years this is exactly how over sized sunglasses and skinny jeans are going to look.

Impressed Links

How You’ll Watch the Olympics in 2016. Ugh, I swear if I hear more about this mythical Apple TV I'm going to puke. However, The rest of this article is right on track (pun!). By 2016 NBC will have cleaned up it's on-line streaming, monetized the shit out of it (in a way that works this time) and might even open it up for non-cable subscribers. If NBC learned one this this time around it's that they can put events live on-line and still murdalize every other Network in the ratings.

Dick Ebersol Continues NBC’s Stream of Out of Touch Retorts. Of course that doesn't mean the internet as a whole has to stop hating on NBC right now. It's 2012, the fact that they couldn't get a HD stream on-line that worked is pathetic. You would think their online presence would have been enhanced when Kabletown Comcast bought them.

McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, And Kyla Ross Are Not Impressed IRL. Oh McKayla Maroney, I'll miss you most of all.

The surprising, stealth rebirth of the American arcade. Oh man, I want to go to an arcade so bad. Sitting on my couch slogging away at Skyrim side quests just isn't the same as putting your quarter up on Street Fighter II. Maybe Donkey Kong can be an Olympic Event by 2016. Could it really be worse than Dressage?

The Lonely Man's Olympics

In celebration of the 2012 London Games, The Lonely Man has developed his own Olympics. I'm pretty sure I could destroy his tie tying time. I was one of like two kids who knew how to tie his own tie for the 8th Grade banquet.

BTW, I'm on vacation this week so... hopefully you really like this post.

Better Links

6 Reasons the Olympics Needs More Bears. I would definitely replace Bob Costas with a brown bear. It's funny, a lot of people are complaining about Ryan Seacrest being added to the Olympic broadcast but I think Bob Costas is WAY worse. At least Seacrest knows he's just there for shitty personal interest stories, Bob Costas carries himself like he's the grand gatekeeper for all things Olympics. F that guy.

Why Yes, Those Claw Machines Are Rigged, Says Arcade Operator. Ok, now this is fascinating. I always knew those claw machines were rigged but I had no idea how. Read this before you drop another 50 cents at Randy's.

‘Renegade', Might Be The Greatest Show Ever. No, no it isn't. Acapulco HEAT has it beat hands down.

This week in youtube commenter outrage: The sexy athletes of the summer Olympics. Youtube commenters are both the worst and the best all at the same time. Long story short, some english magazine put together a video of attractive athletes being attractive. Some of the comments it received are epic.

Reach for the Gold

Not to be outdone by Nike, Hostess has developed their own set of Olympics themed inspirational commercials. This features pole vaulting and twinkies.

True story, I have done this exact vault before... many, many times.

Men Throwing Rocks with the Other Hand

In honor of the Olympic spirit, here's a video of men throwing rocks with their off hand. It's fantastic.

Silver Medal Links

The Hater’s Guide To The 2012 London Summer Olympics. I love The Olympics but I also love people making fun of things that shouldn't be taken so seriously. "There's only one good track & field and that's Konami Track & Field. Real track & field is a drugged-up freakshow." No one denies this!

NBC Claims Opening Ceremony Was Too “Complex” to Stream Live. To be fair there was some weird symbolic nonsense going on in the opening ceremony that I probably wouldn't have gotten without the commentators help. Of course I didn't need to be talked to like I was a nine year old either. Middle ground NBC?

#NBCFail: Network’s Olympic disaster earns global social media mockery. NBC's broadcast of the London games is pretty much getting killed on twitter, facebook and tumblr. I'm pretty sure even the two guys left of friendster are upset with the live feeds. As much as us internet hipsters can't believe it, Nielsen ratings are still king. It's not really in NBC's best interest to broadcast events live, yet. Maybe in 2016 I'll finally be able to watch 8 hours of uninterrupted pole vaulting just like I could in 1992 with the wildly underated NBC ppv triple-cast.

The 11 Best US Olympian Twitter Accounts. Hope Solo is kind of a jerk, right?

Olympic Trials with Kurt Angle

Olympic Trials with Kurt Angle - watch more funny videos

In case you missed it (and honestly I hope you did) former amateur wrestler, gold medalist and current professional wrestler Kurt Angle tried to make the US Olympic wrestling team this year. Turns out 15 years of letting guys like Brock Lesnar hit you with a chair had taken it's toll and he had to drop out due to injuries.

Of course that didn't stop his gold medal dream...