As appears to be the norm around these parts, I’m keeping myself pretty busy with a variety of freelance writing projects. I’ve also been compared to Vancouver mayoral candidate Raymond Louie, which really wasn’t my intention of that post in the first place. Weird. Anyways, on with the link love for this edition of What’s Up Wednesdays. Yes, it’s got ninjas and robots… and dancing Filipino prisoners too.

James from Men with Pens is getting tired of all the people ripping off his content, going at length about whether you should let scrapers link to your blog. Beyond the Rhetoric is victim to several scrapers, but I haven’t really done anything about it to date. By deep-linking, though, I’m able to keep track of the scrapers. What’s your take on the scraping phenomenon?

Perfect Blogging, as you can imagine, takes their blogging pretty seriously. They’ve also noticed that blogs are getting awfully popular these days, but there are also a heck of a lot of quitters. And they know why most bloggers give up after a month. I’m proud to say that Beyond the Rhetoric has been live for almost two years and I don’t intend on going anywhere.

It’s because of Bloggrrl that I wrote about small towns and big cities last month. One of the advantages that a small town has over the big city is the price of real estate. Take Bloggrrl’s new home, for example, which costs just $67,000. That wouldn’t buy you a closet in Vancouver.

The fake Stephen Fung was so inspired by my post on Filipino Prison Thriller (which made the ultimate Thriller collection) that he set out to see what else Filipino prisoners could do. The result of this search? The ultimate Filipino dance-off featuring Soulja Boy and MC Hammer. Can’t touch this!

You may have heard about the great Guitar Hero side effect. Well, I’m not the only one affected. Ed Lau has discovered the most awesome music video ever: Knights of Cydonia. What makes it so awesome? The music video contains kung-fu, cowboys, robots, holograms, lasers, robots and even unicorns. The song is also a lot of fun on Guitar Hero.

On a related note, Guitar Hero On Tour (which you may have known as Guitar Hero DS) now has an official peripheral for playing the rhythm game on the Nintendo DS. It’s wacky and abnormally geeky.