Here Are the 10 Best Bits From Robot Chicken’s First 10 Years

From "The Emperor's Phone Call"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "The Emperor's Phone Call"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the 100th episode.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the 100th episode.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Quicksand"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Quicksand"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III Special

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III Special

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the Simpsons' couch gag that the Robot Chicken team made

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From the Simpsons' couch gag that the Robot Chicken team made

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Starbucks Origin"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Starbucks Origin"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Our Newest Member, Calvin"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Our Newest Member, Calvin"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Apocalypse Pony"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Apocalypse Pony"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Voltron Got Served!"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Voltron Got Served!"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Delicious Gummy Bears"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

From "Delicious Gummy Bears"

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 10 years since Optimus Prime faced the most dangerous Decepticon of them all: prostate cancer.

OK, not really. But on Feb. 20, 2005, Robot Chicken premiered—and with short stop-motion bits like Optimus’ medical scare, introduced the world to its very off-kilter take on pop-culture-steeped comedy. TV hasn’t been the same since. (The episode also featured Rachael Leigh Cook doing a “this is what happens to your brain on heroin” bit.)

“I don’t think we expected to make it past a few episodes, let alone the number of years that we had,” says co-creator Matthew Senreich.

A lot of that success might have something to do with the fact that the show’s launch happened to come at almost the exact same time as the arrival of YouTube, where many of its sketches have found life well beyond their air dates. We’re not sure if you know this, but sketches, animation, and absurd comedy are kinda popular on the Internet, and while Robot Chicken did well enough on Adult Swim, YouTube helped make it a web favorite. (There have been times when the videos were taken down, but many of their best offerings still have more than a million views.)

That popularity led to Robot Chicken running for seven seasons and nearly 150 episodes, but it was a couple seasons into their run before the creators realized they might have staying power. “We had a realization in our third season that we were actually getting an audience,” says co-creator Seth Green. “So we were like, ‘Hey, people are listening, what do we actually want to say?’ So we try really hard to make it out of love and appreciation for all these crazy things that pop culture yields us.”

In honor of Robot Chicken‘s 10th anniversary, we asked the show’s creators for their 10 best—and often most viral—sketches.

The Emperor’s Phone Call

This sketch, about Darth Vader checking in with his boss Emperor Palpatine, came from the brain of writer/producer Doug Goldstein, who wanted to address the absurdity that Vader essentially destroyed the Death Star but didn’t face any repercussions. “In Star Wars, Darth Vader is kind of a big thug of a bad guy, then in Empire Strikes Back he’s kind of running the whole show,” Goldstein says. “He’s telling folks what to do; he’s hugely important. And I’m thinking, ‘In Star Wars, he’s the only survivor from the Death Star, how did he possibly spin that into getting a promotion? How did he come out of that looking good?'” The sketch, in turn, got the Robot Chicken team a promotion from a different kind of Emperor: George Lucas, who enjoyed the sketch and invited them to Skywalker Ranch. “I still have the bathrobe,” says Green, “which I found out was one of the five last bathrobes given out on the Ranch.”

Delicious Gummy Bears

This sketch about a self-cannibalizing gummy bear is the Robot Chicken sense of humor in a nutshell (or bear trap, as it were). “It really distilled our comedic sensibilities down to 30 seconds,” says writer/producer Tom Root. “Everything cute and cuddly from our childhood has horrible violence committed against it.” But it gets its signature sound from actress Michelle Trachtenberg. “I knew for a fact that she had a horror-movie scream, so we cast her knowing she would give us this scream,” says Green. “She was behind glass in the recording booth and she warned the board op, ‘This is going to be really, really loud.’ I think she blew out the mike. It was traumatic to even watch it performed.”

Starbucks Origin

Ever wonder why the original Starbucks logo looked so, um, perverse? So does Seth Green. “When you really think about it, what were they trying to pull with that logo?” he says. “It’s bananas.”

100th Episode Finale

This entire episode led up to a crescendo the team invented to “use that scene from The Protector,” says Senreich. Also, “we wanted to so something epic with the characters we created over the previous 100 episodes.”

Our Newest Member, Calvin

This might be the Robot Chicken episode that’s inspired the most Comic-Con costumes. Pretty much everyone wants to be “Fumbles,” the world-class sniper who gets an unfortunate G.I. Joe codename and goes ballistic on the Joes. “For whatever reason it got a big fan following,” says Senreich. “Lots of people dressed as Fumbles at Comic-Con.”

The Simpsons Opener

The opportunity to do a Simpsons opening came after a few of the Robot Chicken team met Al Jean and Matt Groenig at an Emmys after-party. “They just basically let us do whatever we wanted to do,” says Senreich. “It’s been very nice getting to know the Simpsons guys.”

Quicksand

There’s just something funny about watching a giraffe die in quicksand (their necks are so long!). It’s a LOL-yielding bit that came from occasional Chicken brain Dan Milano. “One of the jewels that just came right out of his head was the five stages of grief as acted out by a giraffe,” says Root. And his colleagues weren’t the only ones who found it funny. “There was this weird thing where for a long time we were on YouTube and then Adult Swim yanked all the YouTube clips to put them on their own web site,” Root adds. “Before the big cull, the giraffe had millions and millions of pageviews.”

Apocalypse Pony

If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode My Little Ponies, this would likely be the result. (Just as Saint John the Evangelist intended.) “That was one of the episodes I got to direct,” says Green. “It was really early on in our entire program and it is one of the things I am most talked to about.” In case you’re wondering, they did pursue the idea of actually making Apocalypse Pony toys with Hasbro, but it never came to pass, unlike the End of Days. But, like the New Testament itself, Green says “I’ve seen many art pieces inspired by it.”

The Opening to the Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III Special

Senreich says this one is unique because “it was the first time we licensed music—a rare treat for the show. “We’re on an Adult Swim budget,” he says, “so licensing music is not something that we’re able to do that often.”

Voltron Got Served!

This sketch was made thanks to a homebrewed edit of street dancer videos found online that the animators replicated using their foam Voltron. The team says it set standards for what they could do in terms of writing their own music and making impossible-seeming ideas happen. “You can sort of see the ripple effect,” Green says.

Probiotic toxin fights coldwater disease in rainbow trout

The rainbow trout is a work of art and diner's delight. But when the freshwater fish falls prey to Coldwater Disease, its colorful body erodes into ragged wounds and ulcers. The bacterial infection can kill up to 30 percent of hatchery stock and causes millions of dollars in economic loss.

After 15 years of research, scientists at University of Idaho and Washington State University have found a simple and effective method to combat Coldwater Disease using some of the trout's own intestinal bacteria as health-giving probiotics.

They also showed that the probiotics work by secreting a toxic protein, which does not harm the fish but does kill the Coldwater Disease organism, Flavobacterium psychrophilum.

Douglas Call, professor in the WSU School for Global Animal Health reported the findings in the publication, Applied and Environmental Microbiology in January. The study was funded in part by the Western Regional Aquaculture Center and the Idaho State Board of Education.

"Coldwater Disease is the number one bacterial illness affecting U.S. trout aquaculture and to a lesser extent Coho salmon," said Call. "Once an outbreak starts, the only way we've had to treat it has been with antibiotics."

"The problem with antibiotics is that they can lead to bacterial resistance and also contaminate the water and soil," he said. "Only two antibiotics are approved for use and one, florfenicol, is particularly nasty and persists in the environment for a very long time."

Call said the probiotics could be a cheap and effective alternative to antibiotics -- and welcome news to the global salmonid aquaculture industry whose annual production tops out at more than $13.7 billion.

How does it work?

Kenneth Cain, professor and associate director of the Aquaculture Research Institute at University of Idaho, recently discovered the probiotic, a now patented strain of Enterobacter species called C6-6.

Probiotics, broadly speaking, are live bacteria and yeast that are beneficial to your health. Lactobacilli bacteria, for example, are commonly used in yogurt and livestock feed to help promote disease resistance and overall health. Cain said probiotics are commercialized for use in European fisheries, but have only recently been considered for U.S. aquaculture.

To find the C6-6 probiotic, Cain and his colleagues painstakingly searched through 318 strains of bacteria from the GI tracts of trout until they identified those that could kill the Coldwater microorganism. He chose to examine the trout's native gut bacteria because such strains were able to survive in the fish's digestive system.

Subsequent field trials showed significantly reduced mortality rates from the disease in fish that were fed strain C6-6, but as is common with many probiotics, the scientists really didn't know how it worked.

Call, an expert in bacterial molecular biology, collaborated with WSU graduate student Carla Schubiger to pinpoint the mechanism that makes the trout probiotic effective.

"We found C6-6 produces a toxic protein called an entericidin which inhibits the Coldwater bacteria," he said. "It could also present new opportunities for treatments against closely related pathogens."

Plus it's economical.

"The bacteria that produce the entericidin are fast growing, cheap to produce and easy to put on food for the fish -- all the attributes of an ideal preventative treatment," said Call.

A combined approach

Although Coldwater Disease occurs in the wild, Cain said it is most prevalent in commercial trout and salmon hatcheries where crowding and stress lead to frequent outbreaks -- a point of concern for Pacific Northwest growers.

Idaho trout farms produce about 75 percent of U.S. and nearly 50 percent of the worldwide trout harvest. Neighboring Washington State leads the nation in production of trout eggs, a commodity sold to hatcheries around the globe.

"It costs the Idaho trout farm industry and Washington aquaculture facilities over $10 million each year to combat Coldwater Disease," said Cain. "Controlling it will take more than one tool."

Cain recently patented a vaccine for the disease that is in the process of being licensed. He and Call agree that vaccinating fish to prevent Coldwater Disease followed by the feeding of probiotics to limit its spread would be beneficial.

Thanks to the discovery of the C6-6 entericidin, Call said he is hopeful for regulatory approval and commercial licensing of the probiotic as well.

"If C6-6 is as effective as our research is showing, it will reduce disease losses for fish producers, improve animal welfare and reduce the demand for antibiotics in aquaculture."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Washington State University . The original article was written by Rebecca Phillips. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Take 15 Minutes and Play Clickhole’s Hilarious Text Adventure

Clickhole

The Onion’s web-content parody site Clickhole has continued to kill it since its launch, and it’s not afraid to do some extensive long-form humor as well. If you enjoy Choose Your Own Adventure books or graphic adventure games in general, do yourself a favor and take 15 minutes to play through The Mysterious Shadows of Skullshadow Island .

How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul

Larry Washburn/Getty Images

I shut down my Etsy store in November.

I’d been a seller since April 2006, less than a year after Etsy first went into beta. I was in my first job out of journalism school, and making cards and journals was a creative outlet and a way for me to score some extra money. I’d been selling stuff on the side at craft shows for a few years at that point, part of a larger wave of modern crafters who met online and inspired each other to start businesses.

Etsy debuted at just the right time: Indie craft shows had started popping up around the U.S. in the early 2000s, but running your own online store was a complicated task. (My “store” at the time encouraged buyers to mail me money orders.) Most of the people who joined Etsy in those first few years were like me—independent crafters who were already at least somewhat established IRL—and the quality of the goods on the site was generally high.

Things have changed in the past decade: Indie craft has grown from a close-knit subculture to a giant economy that influences trends in big box stores. And Etsy has grown from a startup built by crafters and for crafters to a juggernaut on the verge of an IPO. The most recent success story of a mom making a million dollars a year isn’t what it seems. In practical terms, scaling the handmade economy is an impossibility. So while Etsy maintains a hipster façade, they lost their indie cred years ago.

Grace Dobush

Grace Dobush is a freelance journalist in Cincinnati, where she writes about design, tech, politics and culture. She also organizes an indie craft show and wrote the Crafty Superstar craft business guides. Follow her @gracedobushtogo.

I have to acknowledge this: Modern craft would not be as hot as it is without Etsy or something like it. Like book authors who hate Amazon’s policies, crafters who hate Etsy find it hard to leave because of the site’s immense traffic and generally positive public reputation. Just before the Christmas rush, I finally put my money where my mouth is and shut down my shop. My reasons for leaving the site aren’t unique, even though casual shoppers and potential investors have no idea of the drama going on behind the scenes. Here’s my beef with Etsy.

A Bigger Market Isn’t a Better Market

There are more than 30 million items listed on Etsy right now. That popularity is, of course, great for Etsy. But new hobbyist sellers, desperate for clicks, often price their products so low as to make real profit an impossible dream.

And that popularity isn’t good for shoppers, who have to wade through pages of crap to find what they’re looking for. Searching for “mermaid” in the wedding gown category of Etsy returns 1,299 results, ranging from a $6,882 gown made by Project Runway’s Leanne Marshall to dresses for less than $200, one purportedly handmade lace dress going for $65. (For those who aren’t up to date on their fabric prices, the materials to make a wedding dress alone would cost at least $65.) A friend and I recently discovered we both always sort results by highest price when we’re searching on Etsy to see only the serious sellers. What other e-commerce sites can say the same?

Etsy needs casual crafters to keep paying the 20-cent listing fees and, if any of the items sell, the 3.5 percent transaction fees and any additional payment processing fees. (See “She’s Making Jewelry Now.”) Etsy doesn’t disclose its finances, but it facilitated $1.35 billion in sales in 2013, which adds up to more than $47 million in transaction fees, not counting listing or payment processing fees.

Resellers Are Rampant

That Etsy began allowing manufacturing partners in 2013 underscored the reseller issue that has plagued the site for years. The Marketplace Integrity, Trust & Safety team—which has the unenviable task of policing sellers for adherence to Etsy rules—is unable or unwilling to weed out sellers of mass-manufactured goods. And having sellers who are able to move nearly a million dollars of product a year is great for Etsy’s bottom line.

Sellers have been dissatisfied with Etsy’s policing of mass-manufactured items posing as handmade for a long time, but the site hasn’t seemed receptive to their concerns. An Etsy staffer I met a few years ago dismissed sellers’ questions about Chinese resellers as “kind of racist.” The snark site Regretsy (RIP) was one of the few big gathering places where sellers and shoppers could voice their frustrations with the marketplace. Any kind of “calling out” of accused resellers or bad businesspeople on Etsy’s forums is usually acknowledged by an admin shutting down the thread with “I’m going to close this up now.”

Etsy Has Homogenized Indie Craft

From the beginning, Etsy has pushed the “quit your day job” storyline. The fact is, the majority of the people selling on Etsy aren’t running their businesses full-time, and the idea of quitting your day job is a manic pixie fever dream. If you want to make it big on Etsy, you don’t necessarily want to make things that fulfill your creative dreams; you just want it to get onto the front page and sell like hand-felted hotcakes.

The Etsy affect on craft trends is striking. At the San Francisco edition of the Renegade Craft Fair in November, I was struck at how most things look like the homepage of Etsy, pinnable, pretty things. (See “Put A Bird On It.”) It’s so incredibly boring. How many pieces of geometric jewelry with a pop of color can the earth bear? Will we ever see hand-drawn logos without antlers and arrows? How much barn wood must we salvage to atone for our crafty sins?

Successful Businesses Leave Etsy

The biggest secret is this: Makers who have what it takes to succeed—good product, a good marketing plan, a pricing structure that compensates everyone in their supply chain fairly—don’t really need Etsy for long.

Etsy is the fifth most-visited marketplace site in the U.S., after Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Best Buy. But for that visibility, sellers have little autonomy in the store’s design, and are subject to the site’s rules, fees and design. A customer complaint can freeze your payment account. An accusation of copyright violation can freeze your store or shut it down entirely.

For a full-time crafter, that’s too much of a risk. Successful makers of a certain size eventually move to e-commerce platforms that give them much more flexibility and control for fewer fees. If you’re working in high volume or high price points, using a customizable ecommerce platform such as Big Cartel or Shopify massively reduces your fee obligation, as I outlined in a comparison chart.

I see the recent policy changes Etsy has made—allowing third-party manufacturing partners, entering the wholesale space—as last-ditch efforts to keep super-successful sellers using the site. But successful handmade businesspeople weren’t waiting for permission from Etsy to hire help or get into wholesaling. They grew out of the site and took their wares elsewhere.

The David Has Turned Into Goliath

At its outset, Etsy was a powerful tool for makers, by makers. We were a bunch of Davids, fighting back against the big-box Goliaths with artisanal slingshots. Founder Rob Kalin came up through the same online craft forums that me and my crafty cohorts did, and we were making a revolution.

In the past few years it’s become apparent that Etsy is the Goliath. Indie craft’s whole purpose from the outset was to meet your makers and consume conscientiously. Now, when you ask your friend where they got that cool “Weekend at Bernies” cross stitch sampler, they’ll tell you, “I bought it from Etsy”—the maker’s identity is secondary, if noted at all.

I’m not pessimistic about handmade culture at large: Maker culture is thriving independently of Etsy, and it’s easier than ever for crafters to run independent online stores. I prefer to sell my wares (and buy my presents) at local indie craft markets and in curated bricks-and-mortar shops that reflect the flavor of their communities and encourage real relationships between makers and buyers.

The bottom line is this: Etsy needs crafters more than crafters need Etsy.

Norm MacDonald’s Twitter Marathon Last Night Was a Fascinating Look Behind the SNL Curtain

Comedy Central

As you probably knew from your DVR’s sad creaking noises, Saturday Night Live‘s 40th anniversary special on Sunday lasted well over three hours and roped in several dozen of the show’s most famous cast members, as well as other celebrity cameos on stage and out in the audience. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers have already shared stories of the epic afterparty, but last night another former Weekend Update anchor decided to share a little more.

Over the course of more than two hours, Norm MacDonald took to Twitter in order to document the week he spent back around Studio 8H, in the writers’ room helping with sketches and just hanging out with his son, awestruck at the talent assembled. Most enlightening is his recounting of how he, Lori Jo Hoekstra, and Tonight Show announcer Steve Higgins went about writing the raucous Celebrity Jeopardy sketch. MacDonald digs into his own philosophy on the sketch’s place in SNL history, and difficulties with casting the third podium, dating back to the first time it aired. The best tidbit about Sunday’s incarnation: Kenan Thompson wasn’t the original choice to play Bill Cosby at the end. (Kenan was great, but if it had gone down as Higgins envisioned, it would’ve been an all-timer.)

Norm being Norm, he goes off on a few tangents—Mike Myers’ work ethic, Bill Murray’s golf habits, and Rob Sheffield’s ranking of every SNL cast member in Rolling Stone—but eventually gets back to the point. It’s a fascinating glimpse at how even something as totemic and highly-promoted as a 40th anniversary special couldn’t be a meticulously organized program. Like every episode since 1975, the blowout celebration was in danger of flying off the track right up until Fallon and Timberlake went on the air.

Pinterest Eyes $11 Billion Valuation with New Round of Funding

Pinterest may soon join Uber and Snapchat in the elite class of startups valued at $10 billion or more.

According to The Wall Street Journal—citing anonymous sources—the company is discussing a $500 million round of funding, which would value Pinterest at $11 billion.

Pinterest declined to comment on the WSJ report. But such a valuation would be a huge leap from the $5 billion valuation it received last year, indicating growing faith among investors that Pinterest’s recent dive into the world of digital advertising is working.

Pinterest has been one of the last holdouts of the digital advertising space. It only opened its Promoted Pins tool up to advertisers this January, after vetting it with a select few advertisers last year. Those tests showed that users weren’t as opposed to seeing ads on Pinterest as they have been on other platforms. In fact, they enjoyed the ads so much that they shared them on their own Pinterest boards, expanding advertiser reach by an average of 30 percent.

If the new round of funding is any indication, it seems these initial tests have persuaded investors that Pinterest stands a chance of being a formidable competitor to existing digital advertising platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The valuation also reflects Pinterest’s grand ambitions to transform the platform into the No. 1 place to discover new things. Looked at from that angle, Pinterest could be classified as a search engine, not for finding a specific piece of information, but for stumbling upon information you might want.

Plenty of people already use Pinterest for that exact reason — to find recipes they didn’t know they needed or DIY projects they never knew were possible. Last week, Pinterest announced a partnership with Apple to make discovering new apps from the sea of options in the App Store a little easier.

All of this amounts to every advertiser’s dream: having direct access to a group of people who are actively browsing for new things to buy and do. According to the Journal’s sources, the funding will help flesh out this business model, as well as help Pinterest expand internationally and manage its explosive user growth.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon Have Forever Changed Computer Networking

JR Rivers once built networking hardware at Google. Now, he’s remaking the networking game for the rest of the world. Photo: Wired.com/Jon Snyder

Google, Facebook, and Amazon don’t sell networking switches. And they never will. But they’ve forever changed the way others sell them.

Networking switches are those things that send data across the massive data centers that drive the internet and the world’s private computer networks. Traditionally, big American companies like Cisco and Juniper dominated the switch market, selling rather expensive hardware that ran their own proprietary software.

But as Google, Facebook, and Amazon expanded their online operations to unprecedented sizes, the traditional gear didn’t really suit them. It was too expensive and too difficult to program. So they went to Asia for a simpler breed of networking hardware.

Basically, they arranged to run their own custom software on gear built by Asian manufacturers. At first, they kept these efforts on the down-low. And many dismissed the practice as something only the giants of the net would ever do. But now, the market is following suit.

Today, venerable hardware seller HP announced that it’s now selling “bare metal” networking switches—basic gear that anyone can load with their own software. That may seem like small news, but it represents an enormous shift in the hardware market. HP is following in the footsteps of both Juniper and Dell, another major hardware seller, in offering such switches.

“It’s all happening much faster than I thought,” says JR Rivers, the CEO of Cumulus Networks, a startup offering software for running box switches—software that will also be offered by HP.

For a brief time, Rivers helped design networking switches inside Google, and now, he’s directly pushing the same basic ideas to the rest of the market. Dell also sells the company’s software, which is based on the Linux open source operating system. Google built switches that it could load with its own networking software and modify as need be, and Cumulus lets companies do much the same.

Just last week, Facebook revealed that it’s now using its own switches and its own software inside its data centers. And Cisco downplayed the news. “Eight of the 10 largest Internet companies in the world are Cisco customers,” it said in a statement sent to WIRED. “Facebook has unique requirements that they are addressing with their own development.”

But the idea behind Facebook’s gear is hardly unique.

It’s not a complicated idea. It’s the same model that PCs and computer servers have used for so long, and it only makes sense. The hardware and the software are separate, and you can mix and match and modify as you see fit. It’s just that in the networking world, the idea was long overdue.