The Virtue of Shellfishness: Weebl’s Greatest Hits
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 7, 2013 by admin in Music
Thursday, February 7th, 2013Do the surreal creations of Cyriak, SecretAgentBob, and Weebl constitute a genre? Who cares. Watch hours disappear as you watch clip after one minute clip.
Somewhere in the surreal realm between the audiovisual creations of Cyriak (who brought us cows & cows & cows, Baaa, and Welcome to Kitty City) and the musical animated storytelling of SecretAgentBob (who brought us Charlie the Unicorn and Ferrets) lies the repetitiously brilliant creations of mr weebl (we’ve included a few of these videos below). Is this a genre? I can’t decide. The musical portions of Cyriak and Weebl’s clips seem to reside somewhere in the microgenres of Bitpop or Chiptune, but to be honest, I decided to stop keeping track of microgenres ten minutes after I first heard the term back in the early nineties. So we’ll just let these offbeat creations be what they are. We’re focusing on Weebl today, because in spite of having the largest volume of work of the three on line by far, I personally didn’t know who he was until today, when I ran across Shrimp Glockenspiel. Why are internerds so shellfish with their clever links? Once I paid a little more attention, I quickly realized I was familiar with his NSFW Amazing Horse and Narwhals; I just didn’t realize he had such a huge body of work. You’re likely to either love Weebl (British flash animator Jonti Picking ) or hate him. His 200+ YouTube clips have received tens of millions of views, but his TV ad for Yell 118 247 Directory Heaven earned him the honor of sixth most irritating ad of 2009. Which I guess is actually a positive assessment when discussing TV commercials. Below are what I’d consider weebl’s “greatest hits”. If you actually like the music itself, he has hundreds of tunes on Amazon
Unmitigated YouTubidity
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 29, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013This week’s links you may have missed include lots of vehicular vidiocy, a little “schneedenfreude” (a word we just introduced into German), and the Holy Batting Cage.
As the old saying goes: “writing about YouTube videos is like dancing about reality shows”, so for this week’s Missing Links, we’ll spare you the excessive highbrow commentary, so you can dig straight in to the YouTubidity of it all. From cradle to CataCombo, we have it all. Clips below. Read the rest of this entry »
New Tuesday Column: The Missing Link
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 15, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013Generally, we’re choosy mothers who don’t choose GIF’s. Unless of course they’re Spongebob GIF’s that demonstrate men and women’s perception of the other gender’s idea of foreplay. We’re starting a new weekly section to share the links we otherwise don’t feel are worth sharing. Enjoy the Youtubidity.
Running a site like Dissociated Press, I end up seeing dozens of links submitted by visitors almost every day. Usually, I’ve seen them myself already on Reddit or some other social sharing site, but by the end of the day (like it or not) I end up feeling like I’ve seen the entire internet. A friend mocks me about this by saying, in a dramatic, breathy voice: “The internet. I have seen it“. In any case, I end up with these unimagineably huge collections of bookmarks and animated GIF’s that serve almost no purpose whatsoever. I tried once before to find a way to unload them on you with collections of infographs and videos or pointless lists of lists, but quickly discovered it was almost as much work as creating actual original content. But we’re going to give this idea a reboot every Tuesday for a while anyway, so enjoy. Linky goodness complete with YouTubidity below. Read the rest of this entry »
A Listful of Dollars, Infostractions For Graphtards, & More YouTubidity
[ Comments Off ]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 »