Missing Links
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[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 5, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, March 5th, 2013If that headline sounds like nonsense, you probably don’t live in the UK, and/or haven’t seen BBC 2′s Weekly Wipe
As we mentioned last week, our Tuesday Missing Links feature is abandoning GIF’s and other moribund memes to bring you things you probably actually haven’t seen. And unless you live in the UK, there’s a pretty good chance you haven’t seen Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe (clips below). If I watched TV, and if when I did, I watched reviews, I’d move to England just so I could watch this show every week. Fortunately, there’s an internet, so I don’t have to start eating eggs chips and beans for breakfast or surrender my stockpiles of automatic weapons, I can sit right here on my ignorant American butt and “watch it on the Youtube”, as one of our more popular US presidents used to say. If you’re an ignorant yank like me, the occasional joke will fly over your head, but heck, being oblivious to how people in other countries live is part of being a patriotic American, so don’t feel bad. Or “badly”, as those pompous Brits would say. Just enjoy segments like “Shitpeas and Cunk”, in which Philomena Cunk and Barry Shitpeas serve up some compelling insights about current pop media like A Good Day To Die Hard, the Harlem Shake, and Brian Cox (Sir David Attenborough’s heir apparent) of The Wonders Of Life. Clips below. Read the rest of this entry »
Will You Shut Up About The Oscars Already?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 26, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013Right after you view an amazing roundup of Oscar GIF’s. Somewhere else. Last week we declared social media dead, this week it’s the Internet Meme and the GIF.
Our sentiments about the Academy Awards can be summed up pretty quickly. They’re stupid. If you don’t get why they’re stupid, Jerry Seinfeld sums it up well in this clip (video also below). But you know what made them even more stupid this year? The fact that for the first (and hopefully last) time in history, the post-awards commentary collided with the already-played-out animated-GIF-as-meme. Nothing says You’re Doing it Wrong like the mainstream media trying to be hip by mining mercurial internet humor. And the incessant re-posting of the same decidedly not funny GIF’s on thousands of news and entertainment websites was a fitting eulogy for the animated GIF meme. So. We declared social media dead last week; this week we’re declaring the whole “internet meme” meme dead. Especially the animated GIF. The only effective humor to be found in most internet memes is driven by their obscurity and inside-jokiness. They almost universally are given birth deep in the bowels of Reddit, Something Awful, or 4Chan, enjoy a brief “humor event horizon”, and by the time they reach sites like QuickMeme.com, they’re even more unfunny than when someone tries to verbally explain a really funny single-panel comic that was based on a sight gag. So we apologize for recently capitalizing on the linkbait strategy of posting “funny YouTube clips and animated GIF’s” in our weekly Missing Links. Next week we’ll have a roundup of actually interesting links. Enjoy our farewell to the animated GIF and YouTubidity, after the Seinfeld clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Are There So Many Dash Cams In Russia?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 19, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, February 19th, 2013We not only have the answer, we have a roundup of the more peculiar videos created by them. And links to real carnage, if that’s your thing.
The fact that the first video of last week’s meteorite to make the rounds was a Russian dashcam video wasn’t surprising; it seems like one in every five videos on YouTube these days is from a Russian daschcam. But after a year or so of making that humorous observation, I finally got curious. Just exactly WHY are there so many Russian daschcams? The answer turned out to be kind of politically and economically enlightening. When Russia finally embraced free markets, it was inevitable that insurance companies would be part of the new equation. But it also became quickly evident that these insurance companies would operate like a lot of things in Russian capitalism, and be rife with corruption and deceit. As people started making claims, and companies started refusing to pay, a court of law was the only solution. And the best evidence in court? A video. Voila, a new industry blossoms, the Russian Dashcam business. And of course, on the other end of the consumer/provider relationship, resourceful Russians quickly adapted, and started jumping on the hoods of cars to try to make personal injury claims. There are other reasons than insurance though; apparently you want to be mindful of highway psychopaths and corrupt cops. Get a more detailed explanation here. In any case, this week’s missing links are a roundup of the best dash cam videos we could find. We omitted quite a few that recorded obvious human tragedy. If you want the hard stuff, you’ll have to visit the Ru CHP LiveJournal community. Videos below. Read the rest of this entry »
Fear of a Black Pope, Hamster Drag Racing, and Flying Cats
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on February 12, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013What do helicopter crashes, dead cats, hamster housekeepers, and the “Scumbag Pope” meme have in common? They’re all part of this week’s roundup of links we don’t think are worth sharing but do anyway.
I’m not the sort of person who likes to make jokes about other people’s religions. That’s why all the Pope jokes I’ve rounded up below were created by OTHER people. Except the “Poprah” gag, which was my solution to one of two potential impending crises. If you’re a fan of wingnut prophecies and were disappointed by all the recent end of the world failures, don’t fret. The world is ending again! Already, the lunatic fringe has latched onto a prophecy that says that if the next Pope is black, and is named Peter – and there’s a good chance he will be both – that this is one of the signs of the end of the world. But never mind that. If you live in America, you’d have to have your head in some pretty deep sand to not realize that having a black president – while it is never, ever voiced directly – makes a lot of folks edgy. Imagine what having a black POPE would do to this crowd. But everybody loves Oprah, right? VOILA! POPRAH! More papal humor below, along with this week’s selection of YouTubity and GIF’s, as well as some thoughts on the usefulness of hamsters. Read the rest of this entry »
If This Page Gets One Million Likes I Won’t Shoot a Kitten
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 5, 2013 by admin in Missing Links
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Our roundup of the dreaded “plea for Likes” meme.
Of all the insufferable things that Facebook has done to poison the inflection of online communication, I think we can all agree that the “Like” button has done more damage than emoticons, chat speak, and the “reply all” button combined. Remember when it was new? If you were one of the people who immediately stopped sharing actual thoughts on the first day, doing things like “Liking” my mother’s obituary, I just want to say: I hate you. The more articulate amongst us of course resisted for months, realizing that resorting to the Like Button was yet another step toward the brain dead consumer world uncannily prophesied in the movie Idiocracy
So if a “Like” really serves no purpose as a communication tool – having simply become a Pavlovian response that releases you from an obligation to use your brain for a second – what value does it have? Well, some would argue that it has a value of $3.60, but that’s clearly preposterous. It’s obviously not a reliable form of currency; even if one is able to manipulate that Like into some kind of real conversion, the value varies tremendously based on the quality of that conversion. If a person who regularly buys Luis Vuitton luggage “Likes” something, that’s worth a hell of a lot more than someone Liking a picture of your cat wearing a piece of bread on its head. And while there have been studies which demonstrate that Likes correlate with web traffic, there are two problems there. One is – as anyone who operates a website should know – that getting ten thousand visitors from Reddit in one day typically has less cash value than getting TEN visitors with whom you have any kind of relationship. And the other is the redundant and/or useless nature of that data. Okay, “Likes” correlate with page views. Duh. But this only tells you something about the Facebook users who visited the page. And I don’t know about you, but the most influential people I know aren’t avid Facebook users. Hmm. Maybe I should finally kick the Facebook habit so I can become one of them.
In any case, enough Like hating. Below are the worst and best desperate pleas to be liked that I could find. The winning plea is at the very bottom. Read the rest of this entry »