Nintendo staffer Rob Heiret and his colleagues worked on the localization of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, translating its Japanese dialogue and culture for an English-speaking audience. Well, on Sunday, in a long and insightful Twitter thread, Rob shared some thoughts about their work on the game, and the story behind its sea bass joke... which he wrote. If you're not familiar, when you catch a sea bass fishing in the game (and it's a common catch), this joke appears in a pop-up,

"I caught a sea bass! No, wait — it's at least a C+!"

Cute for a few yuks, but can grow tiresome, as he admits:

If you've played the game, you're tired of the sea bass joke. I get it. *I'M* tired of the sea bass joke, and I wrote it. But here's a secret about the sea bass joke:

It was originally "I caught a sea bass! Well...maybe a C- bass...)

He goes on to explain:

And when we were workshopping the fish jokes, someone pointed out that, as a joke people were going to see many, many times, generally along with disappointment they didn't catch something better, maybe it would be better to spin it positive. Make it a C+ instead.

He furthers:

From a comedy-mechanics perspective, it's the same joke, relying on the homophones "sea" and "C" to change how you perceive the description of the animal (and, let's be honest, it would work better as a verbal joke than it does in print, but that fish has sailed).

Cards Against Humanity asked Spencer Kelly to teach a computer to write mean, funny joke-cards for a new, AI-based expansion pack to the game; Kelly trained the popular GPT-2 generative language model (previously) on existing cards, and now the company is livestreaming a 16-hour competition between its AI and its human joke-writers, with a voting system to up/downvote the resulting jokes (at the end of the day, these votes will be "tallied up and thrown in the garbage"). You can choose to buy the resulting packs, and if the human team outsells the robots, it will receive a $5,000 bonus. If they fail, they will all be fired. Read the rest

"When a Starbucks cup is the smallest mistake, you know you've fucked up." Read the rest

German actress-model Palina Rojinski responded to the lewd and rude commenters on her Instagram by delivering a perfect prank. With help from German TV show Late Night Berlin, Rojinski turned the sexist creeps into the, er, butt of a joke. The image above that she posted brought out the usual male buffoonery but, as you can see below, all was not quite what it seemed.

View this post on Instagram

Danke Bernd, @damitdasklaas und @latenightberlin Wir hatten unseren Spaß! Ihr auch? Der ganze Prank #Busengate LINK IN BIO

A post shared by Palina Rojinski (@palinski) on Mar 26, 2019 at 12:06am PDT

(via PetaPixel) Read the rest

Fred Armisen, a drummer, tells jokes that pretty much only a drummer would love and then ups the ante by going into guitarist humor. (Late Night with Conan O'Brien)

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Jimmy Fallon often features viewer submissions like mildly humorous CAPTCHAs, you know, "those squiggly words you have to type in before you buy tickets to concerts and stuff?" He seems very invested in humorously educating the public about CAPTCHAs. Read the rest

What do you call someone who derives pleasure from the bread of affliction?

A matzochist.

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Why do we have a Haggadah at Passover?

So we can Seder right words.

Share your own in the comments! Happy Passover! Read the rest

Kelsey Hightower's Nocode [github] fixes all the problems associated with modern web app development: "Write nothing; deploy nowhere."

Now that you have not done anything it's time to build your application:

 

Yep. That's it. You should see the following output:

 

A number of issues are open at github, mind you. Perhaps it wasn't ready for prime time. Read the rest

What does a Jedi use to open a PDF file?

Adobe-Wan Kenobi. Read the rest

Matt Shirley (better known via Instagram as mattsurelee) tries to make a whiteboard chart every day, with oft-delightful results. Read the rest

Miguel Marquez Outside chronicles Australian artist Michael Pederson's clever and cute installations of small artworks. Read the rest

Whenever I leave town I put the can on my kitchen counter.

Loftus Three Snakes in a Can - King Deluxe Mixed Nuts Prank via Amazon Read the rest

Anyone familiar with Star Wars or even the modern art of movie-making will know what's coming as soon as Rey says it, but it's a brilliantly effective joke. Read the rest

Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into comedy's outsize role in Trump's victory. It's one of the best long reads about the pop culture that defined this election. To use Emily's comedy metaphor, with notable exceptions like "Delete your account," Hillary and her supporters didn't read the room and were heckled at nearly every turn. Read the rest

The Nerdwriter presents a fascinating analysis of why Louis CK's jokes are funny.

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Adapters for everything!

Previously: Already regretting assigning the new MacBook Pro review to Borges Read the rest

Jason Klamm from the Comedy on Vinyl podcast (previously) writes, "My comedy duo just set a world record with the world's smallest playable comedy album. People in A Position to Know made a custom turntable and plinth and we got it down to 1.5". It's a really dumb joke (set up on side A, punchline side B), but that was sort of the joy of having to put it together. Since Guinness doesn't want to accept a new world record by genre, they didn't include it, but there are no other contenders that any of us have been able to find." Read the rest