South Korean mega-social network Cyworld has launched in the US, bringing another avatar-based social system to the already crowded US market. Cyworld is a giant in South Korea, with reportedly 90% of the population under the age of 20 registered to the service, which is a market share I doubt they’ll ever see here in the US. Cyworld ties in a web-game with social networking, allowing the user to create their own personalized cartoon avatar and Minihome to personalize and invite friends to visit. There is even an in-world currency (not currently present in the US version) where users can purchase more Cyworld Currency (Acorns?) in exchange for real-world currency (not sure if that works vice-versa). I unfortunately don’t see this service taking off stateside, as their reliance on the younger market just doesn’t translate over to the US and with services like MySpace and Facebook currently struggling to define themselves in the youth market, it makes it that much rougher for Cyworld.

Read more: Cyworld (Via Techcrunch)

New web-application Emotionr wants to know how you and the rest of the world are feeling. Have you had a bad day, well, now you can let the world know about it AND effect the world’s overall happiness level at the same time! Consider Emotionr your personal emotion log, you sign-in to the site, set your happiness level, enter a one word answer about your current feeling and another one word as to what makes you feels this way, then submit. You are also free to keep track of your friend’s moods and their friends and so on, social-networking style.

Read more: Emotionr – How are you feeling today?

The internet holds many wonders, one of which is the fan-run archive-site, where fans from around the world collect facts, media, gossip and news on their favorite television shows, movies, or whatever else you can think of. This archive is impressive, run by fans, J! Archive is the internet’s largest collection of Jeopardy! clues in the world. Almost every clue from the past 22 years of Jeopardy! are featured here, as well as just about every statistic you could possibly want per-episode, such as winnings totals and short bios on the players. The layout is clever, utilizing a nice roll-over effect for those at home to play along at their own pace, when you roll-over the clue, the question appears.

Read more: Archive of 63,000+ Jeopardy! clues

At the San Diego Comic Con this past week, the makers of the new Simpsons movie showed off two videos of rough animation story boards to the much-appreciative fans. Both scenes feature heavily on Homer, who has of course taken the crown for most popular Simpson away from Bart (finally). This is all very basic and early work, but it looks great and I can’t wait for this movie to come out, followed by a Futurama movie (in my dreams)! There are rumours rushing around actually that there will be new characters introduced in the movie, with Albert Brooks reportedly voicing an all-new character as well as reprising a few of his past characters. Feel free to leave a comment telling us what you think of the clips!

Sit back and enjoy the videos after the jump…

[Update 1: At the request of FOX these videos have been removed from YouTube and just about any other video sharing network. Copies are being put up and being taken down just about as quickly. I'll update the links as soon as new videos can be found.]

[Update 2: .....Aaaaaaaaaand we're back. These videos will be up for probably the next 10-15 minutes, so enjoy!]

Update 3: Ok we all knew YouTube would suck after Google legitimized it. Both videos were put up, then taken down and now has been put up again by the fan who originally captured the video. Right on!

Read more of “Simpsons movie footage from San Diego Comic Con (Update 3)“

Snacksby is an interesting addition to the new breed of web applications. Basically a recipe site, with a twist, Snacksby asks that you enter in what you have in your pantry or cupboard and it returns to you a list of recipes containing those ingredients. For instance, if I had sharp cheddar (soy) cheese, multigrain bread, onions, pepper, dijon mustard, and butter (margarine), Snacksby informs me that I have all of the ingredients to cook a quick and easy “Grilled Cheese sandwich, Alton Brown style-ish” as well as a partial list of ingredients for over 9 more pages of recipes. Kudos Snacksby, you just made a lazy household’s cooking even easier!

Read more: [Snacksby]

The enterprising homebrew hackers over at Disinterest.org have hacked together a version of Stackless Python for the Nintendo DS, allowing homebrewskies the ability to begin experimenting with portable Python on everyone’s favorite hand-held console (PSP-what?). This is a port of Python 2.4.3, with the normal functionality of Python supposedly “bug-free”, run from a compact flash based card which is connected directly to the DS. The FAT version includes FAT filesystem support, allowing Python source to be read directly from homebrew devices. Homebrew on the DS is still rather far behind the PSP, thanks to Nintendo’s different directions in security, but the homebrew scene on the DS is moving along quite healthily, I can’t wait to start seeing more and more progress. While I’m happy playing a port of Drug Wars on a DS, I can’t help but thinking so much more can and will be done.

Read more: [Stackless Python ported to Nintendo DS | Nintendo DS homebrew scene]

DNS is an essential system for the contemporary internet, basically translating domain names (ie. bunchofnerds.com) to IP addresses, making for easily recognizable names assigned to IP addresses. That’s about as deep as I’ll get into the networking 101, but you get the gist. The internet has gotten a shot in the arm last week, with the launching of OpenDNS, a new public DNS service which is faster, safer, and smarter than your ISPs DNS and best of all, it’s completely free to use.

OpenDNS gives the user a bit of extra security by automatically blocking sites which are determined to be Phishing site (you know those emails you get from PayPal or eBay asking you to login to www.bizserchsrvice.info/EbAY because your account has been blocked?), speeds up many of your connections by taking out several hops from your DNS lookups while surfing the internet, and even intelligently tries to route you towards your desired destination when you mis-spell the TLD (i always type in .cm or something similar). It’s extremely easy to switch to OpenDNS’ services, with the end user merely having to change 2 settings via their computer and/or router, a step that OpenDNS has documented to a tee to make it even easier. I’ve been using OpenDNS for several days and I’m now more than happy to encourage others to also give it a try, as I’ve seen noticable increases in speed and it’s pretty cool to see a Phishing site automatically being blocked before I reach it.

Read more: [OpenDNS - Free public domain name service | DNS entry @ Wikipedia]

The designavists over at Yay Hooray have started a huge thread of traditionally mainstream or “famous” logos being re-designed to be more web 2.0. There are quite some gems and a hell of a lot of aqua and gradients going on, but man, the ABC, Citi, and Nike logo re-imagines are good stuff. Thanks to a Digg of the thread, we’re getting a lot of interesting gripes on what web 2.0 is and isn’t, which is almost as entertaining as the actual redesigns themselves!

Read more: [Famous logos redesigned for web2.0]

In 1968, David Lynch was just getting his hands dirty with experimental film and art, but was getting reluctant to continue working with film due to the high cost. His mind was changed when a fellow student saw Lynch’s paintings and offered the soon-to-be cult director, $1000 to create a similar film to Lynch’s “After Six Figures Getting Sick”. Lynch purchased a used Bolex camera and began filming, only to discover a few months later that the camera was defective, rendering his film useless. The film student told Lynch to keep the rest of the money and do whatever he’d like with it.

Around this time, Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream she had, where her niece was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, woke up, then started bouncing around the room repeating the recital. Lynch ran with it, creating the haunting short, “The Alphabet”. When I say haunted, I mean it, I’ve seen it many times and I always get an icky feeling, maybe it’s just something about scary chanting children or the chilling soundtrack, featuring a newborn Jennifer Lynch crying, I can’t quite place it.

Turn off your lights and watch the video after the jump…

Read more of “David Lynch short film: The Alphabet“

Chuck Shephard is the father of odd-news reporting, starting in the 1970s with his zine “View from the ledge”, Chuck has been collecting, reporting and syndicating odd news bites long before Fox News was ending their broadcasts with their feel-good puff pieces or stupid crook stories. Chuck’s column is currently published in over 250 daily and weekly newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Posting weekly round-ups on his site and daily blasts via his blog, Chuck documents just about every odd or strange news snippet you could imagine, from dead cow carcasses mysteriously placed in trees to incompetent crooks to just plain weird tales of a detiriorating society. Chuck works from morning until night documenting judgment-challenged people committing weird news and is an inspiration to all of us here at Bunch of Nerds. One such example of Chuck’s work:

Ernest G. Johnson, 42, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in May after he, posing as an insurance company employee, roamed the corridors at LSU Hospital seeking to photograph women wearing casts. Said a police detective, “It’s like all he wants is to be in the presence of a woman with a cast on and have her attention.”

Read more: [News of the Weird | News of the Weird breaking reports]