Lowtax (From Somethingawful.com)

[Golbez]

Lowtax, the owner of somethingawful, goes to the University of Illinois to give a power point presentation.

Quite honestly, the funniest/most unorganized presentation ever proposed by man.

Duration is a little over an hour and a half. Had me crying the entire way through.

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3318

Recently, Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka was invited by forum user "dissonance" to speak at the "Reflections | Projections" seminar hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois.

Fortunately the university videotaped his historical speech, "Enabling the Online Community through Vertical PSOTs and Automated Adverse Content Delivery Systems" and we've got it here for you to enjoy.

Video Links:

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/video/kyanka.wmv

http://homepage.mac.com/ryana/.Movie...iuc-speech.wmv (mirror)

http://videos.somethingawful.com/mis...iuc-speech.wmv (mirror)

[Samus Aran]

Yeah, I watched that, too. Dunno why, but I rolling throughout the entirety. Afterwords it just seemed so so so stupid.

[qxx]

I watched it a few days ago. The beginning was funny, but it got very unfunny about halfway thru and it was just annoying. You could tell half the people there just wanted to leave. There wasn't much to learn except when he got semi-serious talking about community.

[GaliemVaelant]

Nah, this isn't the most unorganized presentation ever.

My presentation back at the end of August on existential probability was much, much worse.

First, my movies wouldn't work on the university computer, so my entire power point presentation was broken.

Second, I actually had to explain to a mathematician with a PhD in differential equations that the radius of each set could not be solved for the same way that it would in a three dimensional system. That is, it changes relatively unpredictably with time.

I think the freshmen present understood that before he did, and by the time I convinced him that four dimensional systems are not the same as three dimensional systems, the rest of the room looked like I had just subjected it to Chinese water drop torture.

Third, when I called the system "chaotic," I was set upon by a dozen or so PhD holding mathematicians, because it is technically "random".

They owned me with a ferocity that puts these boards' greatest moments of ownage to shame. Looking back, I now wish that someone had taken a picture of my face. My expression of utter helplessness at the hands of these wolf-like gurus must have been hillarious. Nevermind the fact that I'm working on shit WAY too advanced for my progress thus far, there's also the fact that these guys make a living debunking other experts in their fields.

These guys have no sense of colloquial meaning. At all. If you tell them that you like pussy, they'll think that you mean p times u times s times s times y, and will ask you to define pussy for them. Of course, they were right, and I'll just leave pussy mathematically undefined, thank you kindly.

Oh, there were lots of laughs... Mostly at me. It got so bad that the professor who advises my research had to stand up and ensure the crowd that my work will eventually have a significant impact on science in general. There's nothing worse in a socially crushing situation than having a teacher rush to your defense, even in college, and even when your moral attackers are other teachers.

By the end of the presentation, it had gone so badly after a year of almost incessant work that I wanted to cry like a little girl who just dropped her ice cream off the cone at the same time as getting her first period. The fact that I had dropped my ice cream off the cone while getting my first period during the presentation (despite my being male) really didn't help.

THAT was the worst presentation ever.

...and I get to repeat it in D.C. in April as an attempt to secure federal financing for my research. Oh, how the gods of physics lay their gifts upon me ><

I can only hope that senators are generally nicer than mathematicians.


edit: I should edit to say that it wasn't all horrible, and there was a method behind their madness, it turns out. That is, they weren't just picking on a n00b student. They honestly try to prepare us for real world presentations at conventions and symposiums when we present here, which means being ridiculed to ridiculous lengths by peers and superiors alike. A simple slip of the wrong word at a symposium can cost a physicist all of his or her credibility, so this was a very useful lesson for me.

...not to mention that I won't be making the same stupid mistakes in D.C., which makes their jumping on me a very valuable experience for both myself and the school, both professionally and potentially monetarily. These guys do know what they're doing!

[Drunkard]

Who the fuck are you to come in here and derail an entire thread with 6 paragraphs about your boring ass life?

GTFO and go crawl on top of your ugly wife...

[CeNo65]

ugh what codex is it, windows plays it in super slow mo , and vlc only plays the audio ..

[Kiely]

Haha he mentioned an admin on the forum back in 2001 put up a nice rule "If anyone posts between 6:00 and 6:15, you will be banned" n enforced it

[Tingteng]

Drunkard, try again. This time with emotion!

[Tuco]

I liked the one where the SA guy was on G4 or whatever that crappy computer show is.

[Mazuli]

He sounded like he was still going through puberty or something.

I got bored about 20 min in and turned it off.

[Frawdo]

I watched half of it when it first came out. It had its moments, but for the most part it was pretty boring and the first 45 minutes did not justify watching the last 45 minutes.

Galiem's post = WTF? I know it's kind of somewhat almost related to this thread, but seriously dude, those six paragraphs just came out of left field.

[Dantre]

He could have just cut the lame jokes (and thus, cut it down to a 15 minute presentation) while still being funny and focused on the topic. Seriously though, this type of presentation has no business at a academic lecture when there's other, more serious presentations happening at the same time that the students in the room could have attended.

Dr. David Thorpe on G4TV > this

[qxx]

I downloaded it in hopes it would be somewhere as funny as Thorpe was on G4.

Ya, I guess that's how I felt when watching this "If I was attending this lecture, I'd feel pretty cheated" You have a guy who started one of the most popular forums on the web with 60k+ registered users. There's *so* much information he could have shared that it seemed wasted he spent so much time rehashing lame jokes over and over. He was doing less lecture and more 'I wish I was a stand up comedian but only nerds would laugh at my jokes so you're a nerdy audience to test it on".

[Mcpickle Deluxe]

I go to UIUC, and I went to this .. .and it was a piece of shit. =(

[Samus Aran]

I couldn't figure out if he was just fucking around with the crowd, or if he is really that lame?

I thought the first ~20 min were funny as shit, just for the random pictures/slides alone. And then when he focused in on what the presentation was about, it just was sorta ... lame?