http://videosift.com/video/Mommys-Little-Helper

The first instance I could find of a sifter (DeathCow) welcoming overlord(s).

( 9 AND A FUCKING HALF FUCKING YEARS AGO, OMFG)

Like, I know Simpsons "brought it back" in the 90s from a 1977 B-Movie, but still...

That's a Mr. Meeseeks, a species of temporary helpers which can be produced by a Meeseeks Box, and exist only until the task they've been given is completed. In this case the alien in the background probably wanted to win at pachinko.

But don't worry, Mr. Meeseeks don't mind popping out of existence. In fact, existing is painful to them, so they're very happy to get it over with.

Extra info from YT : "Helpers were bubbling air from compressed air bottles into the pool to ease surface tension. Yet, he failed in hitting that spot but went away without injury. It is reported that at a first glance they suspected a pelvis displacement which luckly couldn't be confirmed."

I was providing a more "technology tailored" way to fool us and how it might create a great magic trick. I also love magic tricks that make use of self-created "magical" devices (his vest counts towards what I'm talking about).

As I mentioned there are probably quite a few ways to do this trick and I wholeheartedly agree with you that the most likely way the majority of this was done was via misdirection and cues. As it is true with almost everything, the simplest answer usually is the truth.

I however, became interested with he kept moving his hands (and the "cards") to the same spots or moving them, repeating, the same movement over and over again right before the "change" or flip occurred (with other things as well like the smoke--and yes, I know it was more than likely misdirection--but, sometimes smoke is just smoke ).

That is what made me think of a scanner (mostly because I'm a computer/engineering/physics hippie and I have seen scanners that can be made to look exactly like that mat; but I also have learned a bit of magic, with that instead of becoming an amateur magician I instead learned about magic and it's history instead). But, like you said and I also said above in my comment, this all can/could be done through many various schemes. Using differing ways of that same scheme/idea, the same mechanics and/or devices, with sleight of hand and a lot of misdirection (very well done too, simply because there was so very much of it needed--which Penn & Teller commended him on in their own way).

His jacket for example is obviously HIS engineered creation. It has a lot of hidden and secret functionality; in fact it may have been the underlying foundation that allowed the whole trick to work so well (you never know just what exactly is the magician's biggest helper in many tricks). That is what I love, personally, about magic is the engineering and love--the workmanship--that can go into it. Every great magician definitely has that engineering facet to their personality; they all know how to create a device that gives them just what they need. I've seen so many magical devices and how they were used and how they're made as well and I must say, it is a terribly interesting thing to learn about and see done. Sometimes you have devices made just to perform one extremely small function, just to add that little bit of "panache" to a trick...

Every magician--good and average--however do have or need one thing in common no matter what, and this refers to what you talk about (and this magician may be leagues ahead of others, making all tricks completed in that same manner seem simple and mundane compared to what he can accomplish with the exact same, extremely fundamental, aspect to magic; pulling off tricks that almost all magicians would believe to be impossible using such a standard fare of abilities and methods): agility and sleight of hand. With this comes the uses for that "god-like" speed and manipulation. Use that with engineered tools (not necessarily what I mentioned--the scanner, printer, and ink method--but, things easier to craft and more likely to be used like his vest) and it can suddenly make any of the simplest tasks (or even tricks that other magicians perform) we do everyday, extraordinary if not miraculous.

I thought I'd add my idea, because I like to figure these tricks out as well; as I'm sure many of you are as well.

Overall, if I was Penn and Teller, I'd be most impressed with his ability to keep his showmanship intact while obviously needing great concentration on the trick at the same time--not to mention he keeps showing superb sleight of hand the whole time.

So many magicians are just amazing to watch. The tools they create (which can be so complicated that you'd never believe that someone would create such a thing or something fairly complicated to complete one very easy task) sometimes never let their presence be known--if done right. But in other cases you know there is "something" helping the magician, but you can't begin to imagine what exactly he has created or what exactly it is accomplishing for him.

I do wish they'd give us a general idea how these tricks are performed, without destroying the "magic" involved. Just tell us general things, like "misdirection and a magical device", etc... They don't need to explain it into it's minutiae.

I'll always love magic and the amazing use of the mind and the body to create illusions grand and small (or "magic" that just tests the limits OF the mind or the body; feats, as it were).

When the body and mind work together in perfect unison to create such wonderful uses of sleight of hand, feats, and "magical" devices...these are the type of people that will continue--hopefully for as long as humans exist--to create magic as real as it can get. Waking up the child inside us all!

/length

I used to not be scared of heights. Then one day I fell and broke my arm right above the wrist. Nothing can cure that like having a doc and some helpers grind bones together while resetting your arm.
Now I double check every curb height before stepping down so I don't make that mistake again.

Hopefully the backup did the trick (first time I've messed with it, so don't blame me for utter failure ).

*notdead edit: (busted...oh well; someone else can call this dead, hopefully if they have the power to switch out the old embed with the backup; as I found out you need to be Ruby or higher to do it)

Well, I "thought" that "manually" fixed it; but, as I found out a bit later (and it took a bit of digging with the search engine) that you do indeed need a higher star level to manually fix the embed.

AHH! For those interested, you need to be Ruby or higher to fix an embed and replace it with a backup; off to find a helper...

EXTRA EDIT!

BTW, You can pull this off so long as you can invoke backup and dead (so Silver, like me, I just did things in the wrong order and didn't know...so on so forth). Post the backup, then declare it dead; then let the tin can work everything else out.

Life.

If you need someone to tell you what is the meaning of your life to you, there is a long journey inwards you have failed to make. Most don't do it because of fear and are just happy to be empty shells built upon the ideals of others. It is not really your life then, is it? The journey is fucking scary one and one can not trust upon gods to make it thru. You can have them as companions, for solace but not as guides or helpers.

BTW, you will never find the whole answer and the one told to you by someone else is not it either.. No one knows the answer and wondering about that is the most wonderful thing to have. This puts your inner morale in to question: do you have it or are you relying on someone else to tell it to you? How is that any better, to ruin one of the most wonderful part of your life which is asking questions all the way to your grave. My journey thought me that my moral is the same with or without religion, only thing that changed was that the outside matched the inside; there was no more pretending to be holier than i am. I'm true humanbeing now, full and i can enjoy the miracles of life as they really are.

...Meh. I understand why that sucks, but I'm still going to:
1) Run Adblock Plus on everything, with element hiding helpers for other annoying shit like "hey, we noticed you are running adblock! please don't!"
2) Entirely avoid Facebook, not for any political or philosophical reasons, but because I have no interest in it
3) Be generally dismayed at how much power and economic influence the entire concept of advertising has in modern culture

Now can anyone identify all of the anime characters? I'm not huge into anime but here are my guesses :

Bart is Naruto

Maggie is Pikachu

Marge might be Rangiku Matsumoto from Bleach?

Lisa is a character from Attack on Titan?

No clue about Santa's little helper or Homer.

Hey Newtboy, what's your background in reading and understanding scripture? I believe this is the scripture you were referring to, and if it is there is more to it:

1 Corinthians 2:11 For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

Through the Holy Spirit, man is capable of understand Gods word:

1 Corinthians 2:12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

This can come through the hearing of the word, the exposition of the word by a believer, or other means..but in all cases God must intervene directly with revelation:

John 6:44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.

It is the Holy Spirit who will teach us how to understand and interpret the word of God:

John 14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

It is not that men are incapable of understanding the truth that God reveals, it is that they deliberately turn away from that truth and harden their hearts towards God:

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Romans 1:19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

Romans 1:20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

We have a choice to accept or reject God; He makes His will known to each one of us, but we have the choice of rejecting His will and doing what we would like to do instead:

John 3:19 And this is the condemnation, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the Light, because their deeds were evil.

Thanks for answering my questions.

Sure thing

Actually, it's today's so-called "Doctor Who" and the whole point of using a barrel with a plumber's helper was to save money. I don't know what Jim Bakker has to do with it, though. I suppose you just forgot to check the sarcasm box.

It hasn't been much of a show since Jim Bakker. Whenever they left using one's imagination for computer enchanced effects, the whole idea of Dr. Who was violated and demeaned. The whole point of using a barrel with a plumber's helper, and all that, was to engage the viewer's imagination; not the pablum and puerility of today's so-called "Dr. Who".

I've used Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper to hide the entire YouTube comments section for somewhere around 2 years or so now. I used to get very frustrated with watching anything on YT and seeing that 95%+ of the comments were trash, as this guy noted.

That is one of the primary things that I love about the sift here. I love comments here because it seems like the polar opposite of YouTube; instead of 99% trash and 1% relevant, interesting, or funny comments it seems like we've got 99% good stuff.

Even on controversial things where lots of people disagree, comments here are usually respectful and even-handed -- as is the moderating when necessary.

I think I've posted a sum total of 7 videos to the sift (only one of which made top 15), but I do a lot of commenting and comment reading and upvoting. The whole comment system here makes the entire Sift experience so much better than YT for me that it is like a breath of fresh air.

So I guess, score one for the sift -- at least we've got a pleasant experience here while YT/Google are busy trying to reinvent the wheel.

Santa's Little Helper was the first full episode.

I remember watching these short Tracey Ullman's shorts when I was a callow ant.

To my eye, it seems like YouTube has been actively trying to piss users off with shit like this for a while now. I don't have enough of a tinfoil hat on to actually think that is true, but it sure seems like it.

This guy hit a lot of the issues, but here's my rundown of annoyances:
* I've used GMail forever. In the past year, Google decided that means that I want their services for everything. YouTube, Google+, etc. etc. No, I don't.

* GMail inbox now has handy-dandy tabs that separate my email into "Primary" (the one I actually want), "Social" (can I rename this 'trash'?), and "Promotions" (kill it with fire). I don't want that crap, other than as a filter that immediately trashes it and marks as spam.

* YouTube embeds used to not show annotations by default. Which was nice, because annotations suck. Now, the embed player seems to decide that you want them all the time, unless you want to sign in and go through a 19-step process to disable them.

* Caching and streaming used to work. I don't have a massively fast connection, and I live on the opposite side of the earth which gives me high latency. BUT, my connection is fast enough that I used to be able to pick out videos that I really want to watch in high quality, set to 1080p, pause, and let it cache for a few minutes. With that head start, I could probably play the video the whole way through. Now, if I pause, the player decides that I really want it to shittily try to transition down to a lower quality, which frequently garbles the whole video stream for a moderate duration and occasionally crashes it altogether. Thanks for that!


Plenty more issues, but I guess I'll stop there. Basically, all that Google/YouTube have accomplished is to encourage me to put on Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper (hide the entire f*&$ing comments section, nag-bars, etc. -- highly recommended), and Flash Video Downloader. That last one lets me simply download videos, at any quality available, so I can watch at my leisure.

Of course, YouTube is in a constant arms race with all those downloader plugins, so they periodically break for a day or so while they are updated to circumvent the YT blocks. But generally, they work well and let me download material to use when teaching classes here in rooms with no net connection.