So my boyfriend is a 1337 pwnzor Tauran druid ftw, btw, and sends me these crazy things. The previous video reminded me of this one, which is one of the better ones I’ve seen. It’s also musical, to a very catchy song. One more way MMORPGs invade the lives of non-players like me.
And remember; “A man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in twill!” Oh dear, that was a bit much, even for me…
[youtube vqO7zEWu0W0]
Brian, Derek, and I have a friend who plays WoW. We generally find it’s better not to ask, but sometimes it gets us really tasty bits of internet culture, such as this video. It’s worth watching until the credits start rolling.
I present to you “ROFLMAO,” a re-imagined “Mahna Mahna.”
[youtube iEWgs6YQR9A]
Alright, so my titles need work. But this is a webcomic that I read, which I’m pretty sure no one else does. Thus I shall enlighten you as you have enlightened me. Most of them are single panels or short multipanel comics, with continuity stemming from the Transformers franchise. It’s a commentary on the whole picture, from Generation 1 to the fandom to mistakes Michael Bay hasn’t even made yet. The latest edition is of the latter category, and it updates every Monday.
Yeah. I posted it. I capitalized and punctuated correctly. I have two decks stashed away in my desk somewhere if anyone else on the planet still knows how to play.
Moving on.
This is definitely more of a traditional remix than Haloid. It’s a series of episodes- each cut down to about ten minutes and completely dubbed over by one very talented man- and it’s absolutely hilarious. Whether you love, hate, or have never heard of children’s card games, this will probably make you laugh. Littlekuriboh got millions of hits per episode before having his videos taken down and being repeatedly banned from YouTube. I believe his episodes fall under fair use- but you can judge for yourselves. Now he has his own website.
And if you liked the funny subtitles of the Beni Lava video, he does something similar for the opening and ending themes of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Other Abridged Movie right here! Sadly, it will probably be ripped off of YouTube once ‘they’ find it.
[youtube pBhUWjQAJYE]
This is possibly the best example of borrowed media I have ever witnessed. It was choreographed and animated by one guy. If the characters were not borrowed, it would be original media, and impressive original media at that. The lengths fans go to appreciate their favorite games for free is astounding, though I’m sure this produced a different kind of return. It is, of course, available for download in ridiculous quality. Fanservice alert: If you are deeply attached to the manly mystique of Master Chief, you may want to keep a defibrillator handy.
[youtube K9sYixr2miY]
A few of you mentioned Garfield as a comic reference point. There have been some great online remixes of Garfield that you might be interested in.
“Garfield minus Garfield” removes the cat from the strips, turning it into “an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life.” For instance:
“The Garfield Randomizer” mashes up random panels from the strip to create a nice example of non-sequitar panel transitions.
And my favorite: a thread of Garfield strips that just remove the cat’s thought balloons, making it about Jon talking to his cat pathetically. Some favorites from this thread:
and a bit more political: “This is the Garfield from September 11, 2001 – and even though it was probably prepared weeks or months in advance, it seems like a daringly edgy response to a crisis:”
I apologize in advance for the time you will now waste…
I got into webcomics when a friend of mine told me about Ctrl+Alt+Del freshman year. It was revelatory. I could read comics . . . good, entertaining comics that participated in topical debates . . . well-drawn, fun-to-look-at comics . . . on the internet. It took me about two days of obsessive reading to get through the CAD archives. They’re pretty epic. This is probably the strip that did it for me.
And that’s the beauty of the online comic. I did a quick browse through the archives – all there, all free – and dropped the link into this post. It’s brilliant, easy, fast.
Overcompensating is the comic-blog I mentioned in class. It has the odd effect of concretizing the experiences, daydreams, and mad delusions of the author and artist, Jeffrey Rowland. Continuity and plot are generally anathema to OC, but there are periodic bursts of work that make sense. I would say that it’s like Bizarro or Speedbump or I Need Help, except you know, because it’s a comic-blog, that Jeffrey’s trip to hell has some relevance to something – even if it’s just a movie about a Zombigeddon that he saw recently. The comic blog is an innovative way to share creative impulses . . . and to link to the all-important store.
Least I Could Do is another pretty good comic. Some story lines are better than others. However, LICD has, through the entrepreneurial genius of its writer and creator, Ryan Sohmer, turned into a full-fledged business. The site offers freebies – wallpaper, icons, stuff like that – a well-developed online store, an active forum, a Facebook application, and immediate updates (blogs, spaces for chat, etc.) on the front page. Blind Ferret Productions, born out of the LICD enterprise, handles the burgeoning animated series for CAD.
Dominic Deegan and Questionable Content are generally just great comics, but neither has really reached the vast heights of CAD or LICD in their instant-access, multi-user spaces. Forums and stores (QC’s t-shirts are pretty choice), yes, and J. Jacques has a couple of tangential blogs that got their start on QC ground, but I think that both Jacques and Terracciano are still experimenting with the possibilities of webcomicing.
I was listening to the Little Mermaid piece again and decided to google it.
Here’s Fred, whose mother made him so famous…
Hi guys,
Check out this article at Wired.com about the economics of free commodities in the digital age. It’s really spectacular. Essentially, it explores what will happen once the price of processor power, memory, and bandwidth reaches zero (or so small as to approximate zero) for the single user, which seems to be happening. The article uses a great metaphor, that of electricity being “too cheap to meter,” which at one point many believed would happen. The result…an end to water shortages, electric cars, virtually no globe-warming emissions, etc. Perhaps a bit of a Utopian vision, but it’s hard to argue that the world isn’t headed for some sort of economic breakthrough of one kind or another.
Let’s get the fact that I’m a little bit of a Locksley fangirl out of the way. Most of the guys went to my high school, seniors while I was a freshman, one of them was an Abercrombie model (or something like that), etc. etc., you get the picture. It helps that they’re pretty darn fun to listen to.
This is an animated music video made to go with one of their newer singles, “Start All Over Again.” I find that the cohesion between image and sound is more like Fantasia than an image-lyric correlation. This is also just slightly bizarre, fairly unique, and generally humorous.
[youtube 4bdRp9auXOw]
I don’t know if any of you have gotten to see Be Kind Rewind yet (I haven’t), but the film’s ideas resonate with the class quite a bit. So if you see it, report your thoughts here.
And be sure to check out the film’s website, which reimagines with a D.I.Y. aesthetic. Don’t miss the Trailer page for a “Sweded YouTube,” and the ability to make your own video boxes. Like this:
Its astonishing the role comedy has played in this election cycle. Barack shows up on SNL for halloween, McCain announces his candidacy on Letterman; Thompson on Leno; Edwards on The Daily Show in ’04 (this time too?).
Now, I know he doesn’t believe in evolution, but Huckabee’s appearance on SNL last night is pretty funny:
[youtube xvSXpM5qGmg]
“With television and the Internet converging at last, who’s going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. “The Medium” will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.”
When I get back to my room from class, practice, or wherever, I typically plop down on my desk and log onto my Middlebury webmail account, see if I have any urgent messages or new facebook messages. Then I procrastinate for about twenty minutes and check out my friends facebook updates. My next step is always to check Perez Hilton. I am really ashamed to admit this, but there is something about the site that makes it so easy to access celebrity gossip and scan through the site, picking and choosing which headlines might appeal to me. It’s much easier than actually purchasing People Magazine, Us Weekly, In Touch, etc. and you don’t have to waste your time skipping over the advertisements. It is a crazy site because Perez updates the information every 30 minutes or so. Each time I get back to my room, there is something new to learn about celebs. I don’t recommend getting started..it can get addictive!
I hate internet banner ads, but this one is so cool, the visual punchline is as strong as the dialogue.
[youtube RMojT_K9gCk]
I am continually amazed at how advanced our mapping technology is via the internet. It seems like every time I pay a visit to google maps, they have developed a new and closer way of getting directions.
There are now five different subcategories you can click on: map, street view, satellite, terrain, and traffic. I could spend hours typing in addresses and finding my house or neighborhood, or other familiar places. Especially with the new street view option which literally allows you to do a 360 from the address you entered. Incredible!
When I went to Belgium with my boyfriend for Christmas break, we used his iPhone religiously to get around the city and the country. iPhone has the google map icon which is just a click away and then you can do the same things as you would on the computer. Had we not had the iPhone, the trip could have been a disaster. Especially in a foreign country where we weren’t exactly fluent in French…
Dinosaur Safari. This was my very first computer game, and it came out in 1994. The goal is to take the best pictures of all of the dinosaurs, from common and innocuous to rare and mostly instant-death. We ran it on my dad’s two-inch thick laptop, which could go for about an hour on its battery in the car, at which point it would be too hot to keep in your lap. This is exactly the version I had, which originally ran on a Windows I don’t remember the name of, and I have no idea why anyone would make it available for XP. I encourage all of you who are able to download it, which took about six minutes on my machine, and give it a whirl or just click on the link and look at the screencaps. It has no music, the graphics are exactly as shown, and it has the weirdest voiceover I’ve ever heard. That Ichthyosaursus swimming around down there used to scare the crap out of me, but look at the poor thing now. But someone has written an article about it and detailed the odd processes one must go through to get the poor little game to run on a contemporary operating system. Thank you, but WHY?
I think it just goes to show that, as technology evolves, so do our expectations of it. I was six and loved this game, my dad was thirty-six and loved it too. We still reference it with much fondness. Now I’m making fun of it. Having fought dinosaurs in the gorgeously-rendered Final Fantasy XII, seeing them move in real time with fancy things like a shadow and music and sound effects and individually moving body parts, this old game seems like something a six-year-old should be making, not playing. It makes me wonder where we go from “gorgeously-rendered” with all the fancy new trappings.
It also makes me wonder at the huge amount of mostly-useless stuff archived on the internet. Who would bother making this available twelve years after it was a good game? And why? I suppose it supports the concept of this (for me) newly-discovered “abandonia.com.” Abandoned games for the people who like them, and advertising for people with that target audience. I guess that’s me then…
Excuse me as I go try to make this tiny speck of nineties run on my machine.
Welcome to the Cladagram Room.
This is a fantastic tutorial for using common, inexpensive technology in unexpected ways that go way over my head. Like most media, I didn’t find this one myself. My much more technologically-adept boyfriend showed me over Christmas.
Almost every day, I have my daily dose of the internet. This usually consists of social networking, email, news, and checking various websites pertaining to the newest things in popular and underground culture. Since I’m not one for finance or ‘politics-only’ news sources, my favorite site to visit is the New York Magazine website, where I can read stories from emerging artists, to fashion designer experiences, to valid latest-celebrity news, and even to enjoyable political stories, etc.
Another site I frequently check is called Cool Hunting. On this site, I always find links to other places where I can learn a whole new area of expertise in searching for “cool.” New methods of art and stories behind them can be found here, as well as new products arising from secret underground companies.
Aside from the websites previously stated, I also surf through websites that contain the digital form of magazines, just like nymag.com. Underground hip-hop magazines and sneaker magazines are my usuals, but anything new that I can find will most certainly join my list of daily dosage…
So this is the big piece of news this week as most of you probably know. HD DVD has essentially been buried in the ground by retailers, and by itself as well. I myself am happy that HD DVD lost the battle, if only because I already own a Blu Ray, and it make the format a lot more accessible to me. This will especially be the case when prices begin to drop on the actual movies themselves.
I remember when DVD first came out. My family received a DVD player as a gift from my uncle, with Gladiator on DVD. At this point, the machine was worthless if only because DVDs were so expensive in the early years. It was something ridiculous like 35-40 dollars for a single movie. Not worth it.
Right not Blu Ray is in that same position. But now that there is no longer an opposing format, it’s up to Sony to begin dropping prices. Look at HD Tv sets. Years ago a 32 inch High Def tv would run you back up to two thousand dollars. Now adays, a 32 inch tv will probably run you closer to seven hundred, and under. That said, Sony needs to pick up the pace now. Though I suppose things will really get started once previously “HD DVD ONLY” films start to pop up on Blu Ray.
Still, at least it’s over, and the consumer can finally get in on it without being scared of one format losing to another.
So, HD-DVD “lost” the new HD format wars to Blu-Ray…check out this short article at Wired for more details and links:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/
It brings up an interesting question: with more and more of us watching video in completely digital formats, are physical manifestations of “content” relevant anymore? In the days of LPs, there was certainly a fetishistic quality about the records themselves, and part of the joy of “listening” to them came from an experience of ownership and organization (High Fidelity, anyone?). I know that I personally value having a binder of DVDs organized alphabetically by genre and title; many people make playlists in iTunes for similar reasons. As the article suggests, however, we seem to be entering an age when much of the media we consume is literally nothing more than trillions of bits of computer memory expressed as 1s and 0s, translated by software into audiovisual grammar we can understand. The one aspect of media consumption that this transformation seems to be affecting is the notion of ownership; to what extent does our ownership of a copy of a song, movie, video game, or television show factor into our reading of it? Has “ownership” become a quaint notion of a bygone system of cultural expression, if anyone can edit and redistribute content at will?
It seems to me that a shift to all-digital media content is in one sense simply the addition of another layer of abstraction; the content of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, for example, is essentially the same whether we listen to it on a CD or an mp3. As McLuhan would point out, however, the practices that surround our listening of the 5th symphony have radically changed. Whereas before we might peruse our collection of records or CDs and find that we were in the mood for Beethoven’s fifth, now (in iTunes, for example) we must specifically seek out the fifth symphony from our 58 days and 30 GB of music. Whenever I have a vague idea about the kind of music I’d like to listen to, I find myself simply hitting “shuffle” in iTunes and stopping on whatever song that pops up that I feel like hearing…there’s simply too much music in my library for me to realistically “browse” it all in any reasonable time. While I “own” all of the songs and albums in my library, I don’t own them in quite the same way I own my DVDs. I expect that something similar will happen to movies and TV shows in the next few years.
There really isn’t any reason why this should be funny.
moar humorous pics
Nonetheless, I find it hilarious and laugh every time I see it. Is the cat a mad scientist? Are the cat and the Tee Recks confined together in an asylum for the mentally unbalanced? I don’t have a clue. What’s beautiful, however, is this:
Ticket stub from the (truly great) film There Will Be Blood, only our friends at the theater managed to make it Bloo. This delights me and maybe one other person, and if it delights any more of you, we might have a proper meme-birth on our hands. Nifty.
