A Listful of Dollars, Infostractions For Graphtards, & More YouTubidity
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 28, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Our final collection of pointless infographics, lists of stupid lists, and the videos that eat up any time you have left over after Facebook.
 Completely irrelevant photo of Heather Locklear |
I’m always searching for ways to bring you interesting content without actually doing any work. For a long time, I achieved this with our Monday Demotivators, but with the incredible growth in the unemployment sector, no one’s at work on Monday these days to avoid it, so we dropped that weekly feature back in December 2009. More recently, I thought I’d sneak by with a weekly “linkdump” (like this one and this one), but quickly realized that this would be almost as much work as actually writing something, so I hope you enjoy this final collection of useless infographics, pointless lists, and YouTubidity. The infographics and videos are first, because the stupid list of 66 stupid lists would take you almost as long to peruse as the hours of suffering all the involved parties endured in the hope that someone would actually take the time to look it over. Oh. But before we move on, my pick for link of the week is the story of how Coach scrubbed their brand clean of all the filthy Snooki. Read the rest of this entry »
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »
You Biatch! You Stoleded My Link!*
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Ever get a weird possessive feeling about the links you share? Me too. That’s because they’re ALL MINE. I just haven’t been sharing them. Help me name our new weekly “link dump” column.
I get depressed sometimes when I realize that my life is just a bunch of web links strung together with occasional real-life discussion, but mostly just connected by written commentary and link sharing on Facebook. It gets REALLY depressing when I find myself having an emotional response to someone sharing a link on their Facebook “wall” without crediting me, as if somehow it was MY link. Or if they get more comments in spite of posting it when it’s already a week old. “Stupid link sharing friend! I shared that link LAST WEEK!” This is one of the unfortunate side effects of maintaining a site like Dissociated Press. As I said to a friend once: “The Internet. I have seen it“. Out of the literally dozens of sources I comb regularly to bring you interesting stuff, I OMIT infinitely more than I share, because, well, they’re JUST LINKS. So I’ve finally decided to put this wasted pile of weekly links to use, with a regular “link dump” section. I just need a name for this new section on the site. “Linkdump” somehow doesn’t sound like something that would generate enthusiastic user engagement. So if you have an idea for a name, feel free to share. But enough delaying. On with delinking! Read the rest of this entry »
Apple Gets EFFed In Court While Al Greene Runs For Senate
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, July 26th, 2010While both the EFF and Alvin Greene have scored their own little victories recently, we’re still waiting for the Alvin Greene Day & The Chipmunks mashup.
I love it when the day’s news converges in such a way that politics, pop media, copyright law, and comedy collide in an amorphous mass of inanely entertaining foolishness. Like today. While the EFF scored major victories allowing you to jailbreak your iPhone and remix YouTube video content, the PR firm “Frank Strategies” forced a YouTube takedown of the Alvin Greene campaign rap video because it used a few seconds of crappy Tea Party protest footage from one of their videos. Except it wasn’t actually Alvin Greene’s campaign video , and and you can still find it on YouTube, ironically on the Fixed News Channel, which parodies Fox News. If you haven’t followed this story, Alvin Greene is an unemployed felon who lives with his mom, who in spite of these minor handicaps was also the recent victor in the South Carolina Democratic U.S. Senate primary race. Many believe he was a GOP plant. Just another campaign season in America, I guess. Given the media mashup nature of this story, the biggest surprise here is that there still is no “Alvin Greene and the Chipmunks”* parody. Until then, the only Al Green video that gets my vote is featured below…. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on May 9, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, May 9th, 2010Id’ like to teach the world to sing, but it sounds like they already know how.
The Britlin Losee clip that started it all |
If you saw the video at left on its own, you might just think “Aw, what a silly sappy little fangirl with a sweet voice”, or, if you’re a weepy little crybaby like me, you might actually tear up a bit. She does have a lovely little voice, and she seems like she’s on the verge of crying as she does her introduction and then sings an a capella piece. But what makes the whole thing more touching is that her simple, unsolicited video clip inspired American choral composer Eric Whitacre to assemble his Virtual Choir (clips below), which is a project that uses 285 singers from 12 countries to perform his work. So what’s so inspiring about that? Well, it’s all done through YouTube! On his how we did it page, he describes how a friend sent him the Britlin Losee clip, which inspired the rest. Although the inclusion of Whitacre “virtually conducting” a couple hundred YouTube clips floating in darkness detracts a bit from the video production (it lends a slightly “John Tesch” vibe), the resulting music is gorgeous, and embodies the sort of thing that’s rarely achieved but always hoped for via the web: international sharing of creativity, passion, harmony, and beauty. It also proves something that I’ve always believed but am willing to ascribe to my perceptual disorders, which is that everyone has a song in them. I am almost always hearing a choir in my head, and this music sounds like part of it. Now I know what some of the people look like! More clips below. Read the rest of this entry »