engineering progress

Comedian Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant', a comedy bit showing that the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon underlies countless pop songs. This is a high-quality 2019 re-post of the 2006 original.

Comedian and cellist Rob Paravonian rants about having to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, and shows how many pop songs reuse its chord progression. It was recorded live at Penn State.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A short clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about complaining over modern wonders like air travel and wifi. The uploader added a note about the comedian's later misconduct.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

A comedy sketch of a business meeting in which an engineer, the expert, is asked to do impossible things like draw red lines with blue ink.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

A short Simpsons clip from Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 1 in which Mr. Burns declares the sun his enemy and plans to block it out.