I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

  • Nick Weaver

    Are you sure this isn’t a video from Portlandia?

    • jimh

      Yeah, don’t change a thing, not a BIT of dialogue. Just have Fred Armisen wear the mustache…

    • http://redesigned.com redesigned

      I was just going to say that…best episode of portlandia yet!

  • p96

    He just wants people to offer to take his cream… well, that would be my motivating amusement.

  • PhosPhorious

    I’m pretty sure that western civilization has nothing more to offer after this.

    This is the high point, it’s all down hill from here.

    • peregrinus

       Nah, this is just the beginning. The Dawn.

  • gadgetgirl

    On the one hand, this is totally cool. On the other hand, why doesn’t he just buy/bake chocolate biscuits?

    • Nathan Edwards

      Then what would he use the hatchet for?

  • MikeKStar

    Is there a Double Stuff option?

    • nixiebunny

      Looks like it would work OK on those. There might need to be a slight adjustment of the distance between the two flipper paddles.

  • finaldonut

    Smells an awful lot like a viral marketing video to me.

    • rocketpjs

       If it is then it is a magnificently well crafted marketing video.  The guy is brilliantly dry.

    • ChickieD

      I feel the same way. The very obvious product placement, the way the blue packaging is the brightest thing in the video, the way he said “Oreo” ten thousand times…not as cute to me as someone obviously intended it to be.

  • xzzy

    Hey look, it’s Jamie Hyneman’s long lost twin!

  • Liam Fake

    Sadly, like so many seemingly great things, this is viral marketing. A little googling shows that Mr. Neevel works at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland. One of their clients is Oreo.

    Still an awesome contraption and funny video, just a little less enjoyable I think.

    • MollyMaguire

      Ah, I thought something was off. To think that Neevel was playing up the dry hipster ‘physicist’ that much was so irritating I couldn’t watch the whole thing.

    • echolocate chocolate

      It’s sad, because if they just said up-front that it was sponsored by Oreo it would be less insulting. That they try to pass this off as something else makes it stick in my craw; much like a waxy, cardboardy Oreo cookie.

      • SamSam

        Absolutely agreed. I still think it’s a cute video, but they should have been honest about it.

        That said, I may have found it less funny if I had known that it was all probably scripted by a roomful of writers.

        • chaopoiesis

          Maybe just by one: “My name is David Neevel, and I’m a physicist and copywriter.”

          • ocker3

             Perhaps there was a Harrison Ford moment when the test-reading the script got the actual part? *probably wishful thinking*

      • Ken.C

        Or, perhaps, one could make a note that it was posted by OREO. But I guess that’s a little subtle. 

        • Promethean Sky

           Well that begs the question, how many of us followed the link over to youtube, and how many of use watched it imbedded on BoingBoing or Make?

    • http://twitter.com/spookiewon Pjay (Patti) Pender

      I was suspicious from the beginning. The creme is the best part of an Oreo. Why else would there be “DoubleStuf”?

    • http://www.facebook.com/eedumas Evan Dumas

      I’ve known David since he was in WK12, and if you check out his personal art at  http://dickbird.org/ you’ll see he makes crazy stuff without the help of ad dollars.  He’s a rad and often-laughing dude, and is playing up the deadpan role just for this vid. 

      • millie fink

        How much did he get paid?

  • SexBobOmb

    Buying a package of Nabisco chocolate wafers is a lot easier.

  • bcsizemo

    I. Just. Don’t. Even.

    Don’t like the creme…I can’t even process that.  I literally take double stuffs apart and create a quad stuff.  In fact I’ve been known to go bigger than that.

    Wasting all that creme, when you could be harvesting it and selling it on ebay.

  • guest

    one of my neighbors works for W+K (weed and kennebunkport as it is known) and is probably responsible for this fake ‘cool’ video. if so,   i’ll ask him to come up with a viral video for a shin-kicking machine with him as the test subject.

  • Schratboy

    What a nerd! May I suggest paying some kids to separate your cookies so you can spend time with your dog & GF. All that effort just to eat some shitty GMO-filled crap cookie is silly. You’d be better off baking your own.

    • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

      Ah, but the effort isn’t for the cookies; it’s for the $$ from the cookie company.

      I thought there was a bit of a bum note; the slickness of the vid versus the crappiness of the machine.

    • SamSam

      You may possibly have found the wrong blog, if your response to that is “what a nerd”…

    • Antinous / Moderator

      If you were able to grow a mustache like his, you’d understand the need for this machine.

      • oasisob1

        We ARE still talking about Oreos, right? IMO, we were all born with the perfect Oreo Separator and de-cremer ever invented.

    • http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael

      >May I suggest paying some kids to separate your cookies

      That would be the Mechanical Turk.

      Srsly, can’t we get some micropayments for people to do small, manual things?

      Problem: delivery. dang.

  • Jonbly Herbert

    Needs more work. The useless ‘chocolate’ bits should be catapulted away, whilst the useless ‘cream’ should be catapulted away.

    Catapults make everything better.

    • http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

      Lasers. Need lasers.

      • ocker3

         To shoot down the catapulting biscuits, Genius!

        • http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

          Well I was thinking for the purpose of cremical disconstituation, but I can roll with that too.

  • Petzl

    “I’ve been working on my machine for .4 years, wait, .04 years.”

    So…. 2 weeks?

  • legsmalone

    Marketing or not, the music really brought it together for me.

  • Promethean Sky

    I thought something seemed off. Mostly it came down to the construction style being… inconsistent is the best word I can think for it. Like it was deliberately designed with crappy parts where that could be gotten away with.

    • Preston Sturges

      Yeah the little router setup was completely out of place. It would have been better if he had gone all “Red Green” with a Sawzall.

      • Ken.C

        I was rather struck by the precision of the grabber in contrast with the incredibly shitty “switch.”

        • Donald Petersen

          I’d been searching my soul for a way to accurately describe that switch, and I fear the Bard himself couldn’t have improved upon your succinct, evocative description.

  • http://marrickvillian.blogspot.com/ Al Corrupt

    20th century – physicists split the atom.
    21st century – this..

  • http://www.facebook.com/joseph.stradling Joseph Stradling

    Are you people who are bitching about this video serious? Was it that you wanted to save others from naively trusting a video that might make them give 5 dollars to a company with a hugely popular snack under false pretenses, or was it just that the big, bad advertising company tricked you and it hurt your feelings? The video was funny, clever, and all around entertaining and you feel cheated because you were subtly prompted to buy a cookie?

  • dculberson

    It’s posted by the Oreo account, and says “Oreo” at the beginning!  You can’t get any more honest than that, do you want them to put a flashing black and yellow banner at the beginning that says “THIS IS ADVERTISING?”  Sheesh people.  [throws up hands]

    Edit: Besides, I this is an enjoyable video, so it seems that they’re giving us what we want despite it being advertising. XKCD to the rescue:

    http://xkcd.com/810/

    • Liam Fake

      It is certainly an enjoyable video, and I don’t think that anyone was unaware that it was affiliated with/sponsored by Oreo. However, this is presented as a mini-documentary of a maker and his invention and not as an advertisement. It is chock full of details like the building name, location, maker’s profession, relationship status, love for sandwiches, etc. These details are meant  to give this video authenticity (read: honesty) and to put the viewer, who may already be skeptical that this is an ad based on its affiliation with Oreo, at ease. A viewer who is at ease is going to think less critically and be more susceptible to an advertisement.

      None of this is new, but we are approaching a point wherein so much viral “content” is now heavily manipulated advertising, that it becomes hard to view anything as an honest, non-commercial, moment to be enjoyed. That is fine, but it it also a cynical reality, and opposing it isn’t a sign of naivete it is a symptom of frustration.

      As to your point about a banner saying “THIS IS ADVERTISING,” I would suggest that this would be fitting with the normal way that BoingBoing is run. Typically when there is a sponsored post/ad it is clearly labeled, in bold letters, as advertising. In this case, this advertisement was presented as real content about a physicist/maker and his cool invention. In other words, Oreo got to put a free 4 minute ad on BoingBoing, and thousands of us watched what we would normally just scroll past had it been marked as an ad.