alan's blog

As a joke, I set my Facebook status to "Alan Lynn is going to start a pancakes by mail service." but after thinking about it, I thought it would be funnier if I actually did it.

When I was doing some preliminary preparation, I found an article claiming you can use a pancake as a postcard. Maybe another time...

So the next morning I got up bright and early (noon) to start making some pancakes for my friend Kevin. By 2pm I had a recipe and was ready to go. By 3pm I had a photoshop of Kevin's Xbox 360 avatar scratching its ass.

I recently discovered the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a place where you can pay anonymous people to do small tasks, or work on said tasks yourself. Amazon calls it "artificial artificial intelligence". It's mostly filled with small work-like tasks such as tagging an image or selecting pictures of wire strippers (which despite the warning, did not contain adult content).

After contemplating whether I was making enough money to power my laptop, it was clear that the other side of the table was where the fun was. I deposited the $1.29 I had made and got to work making my own task.

For the reward of 5 cents, I prompted 10 users with the following:

Draw a picture of a man eating some pants. The only quality requirement is that the picture can be easily identified as a man eating some pants. You may sign your artwork if you desire.