Srebrenica

DISCLAIMER: Not the Bosniak massacre.

It is, however, something to completely destroy any semblance of sanity you thought you might've had. As far as I can tell, Nanny Lynn's animated work of unparalleled genius was discovered in a video reproduction store. Its target audience appears to be children, but no child with a shred of self-preservation would find this entertaining in any way:

So, what do you think?

P.S.: I first found this mentioned on a site that sells DVDs of what the trash cinema elite might call "badfilm". Srebrenica comes packaged with a similarly animated pornographic short called "Rumpenstein's Monster" and a collection of out-of-context freezeframe endings from CHiPs. I'd recommend pretty much anything there.

Joker Boner

No, seriously. I don't even want to explain. Just click here.

Between The Bars

This is Madeleine Peyroux, a gal I strongly suggest you check out. Elliott Smith fans should be happy with the cover.

Windosill

Last night, I played one of the best games I've played in several years. No, not the new Ghostbusters, although that does look awesome. The game I played was the product of indie Flash developer Vectorpark, who first piqued my interest with their release of Feed The Head. Go ahead, play it. It's one of the most surreal uses for the Flash engine I've ever seen. Besides, it's got barrel-of-monkeys levels of fun. But when I heard that Vectorpark was demanding MONEY for their new game Windosill, I was adamantly opposed. They were, however, allowing the first half of the game to be played for free. Thinking nothing of it, I decided to play the five free levels and leave it at that. About half an hour later, I was eagerly shelling out the three dollars necessary for the remainder of the game (yeah, I'm a cheapskate). It's that good.

Windosill is a masterpiece of design. The cool blues and whites that define the first levels are a common theme through the entirety of the game, and the seamless animations serve to keep the player engaged right up until the end (breathtaking). You know I don't advocate the purchase of anything, so when I say that this game is worth far more than the three bucks it costs, trust me. In the unlikely case that you don't, just try out the free levels here.

P.S.: The first few levels are pretty easy, but that doesn't mean you should just run through them. Take the time to play around with everything you can see. (For instance, try knocking over some of those letters in level two. If nothing seems immediately awesome, wait around.)

Gene Simmons' NPR Interview

If you ever had any reason to think that the frontman of KISS wasn't a complete ass, allow me to change your mind. Download the MP3 of his interview here. Trust me on this, you'll want to listen to it. It's almost as good as the infamous Billy Bob Thornton interview for Q Radio:

If you cringe at episodes of The Office, watch that. He puts Michael Scott to shame.

Pictures For Sad Children

Ladies and gentlemen: a new webcomic, quite possibly the most existential one yet. Pictures For Sad Children, regularly updated by John Campbell, is a disquieting look into the unblinking eye of ennui, as told through the perspectives of a heartbreakingly bleak cast of characters, including Paul Who Is A Ghost and Sara, a depressed woman suffering from an unnamed mental condition, possibly schizophrenia. It's a comic! HAHAHAHA!

That pretty much sums it up. Enjoy.

P.S.: The Sherlock Holmes trailer is... *sigh*... ballin'. Check it out.

WE'RE BAAACK (Also, Some Internet Weirdness)

Hello, all. I know it's been a while, but rest assured with the knowledge that I couldn't have updated even if I'd wanted to. But all that's in the past now, and I'll get back to a semi-daily regimen once more.

Allow me to ease back into this with an easy (lazy) post: PicIsUnrelated.com. Just what it sounds like. Beautiful fodder for the insane and the bored:

My personal favorite would be a tie between Taxi Bear and a rather fly-looking Sith lord. Pink Vader is hard to beat. See you tomorrow, y'all.

A Wolf Loves Pork

Is it wrong that I only notice how wasteful this is?

RiffTrax

Among the detritus of late-night basic cable dreck during the Nineties, one might have stumbled across a great little program entitled "Mystery Science Theatre 3000". MST3K was a show in which a man, accompanied by his two robot friends, is periodically subjected to terrible B-movies. His torturers are incompetently evil doctors (or mothers of said doctors, in later seasons) whose motives in this endeavor are mysterious. Do they think the movies will drive this man insane? Who knows? Regardless of how A-W-E-S-O-M-E that premise sounds on it's own, any sane viewer will realize that the flimsy premise is covering for a show that allows audiences to enjoy terrible B-movies from throughout history, accompanied by the three wisecracking protagonists, who lambast the film from their seats. I mentioned them before, you know. The link includes a full episode, so if my description doesn't suffice, you can watch "Space Mutiny" to get the idea.

Anyway, that show ended over ten years ago. Fortunately for us, the genius minds behind the show continued to do what they do best. They started RiffTrax, where they sell feature-length DVD commentaries that sync up to movies people already own. The Dark Knight, The Happening, Pirates Of The Caribbean, I Am Legend, Transformers, and dozens more. It actually doesn't matter if the movie is good or bad, it just gets better when these guys get a hold of it.

Disney Animators: Lazy

This speaks for itself.

Sleepwalking

YES.

Crispin Glover Is God

There are many ways one might describe Crispin Glover. Some would describe him as "Who?" or perhaps "That dude in Willard? I didn't see it, but he's a weird guy, so... it was probably weird." And then there's the tiniest fraction of you who are like, "Hell yeah, Crispin Glover." I am now one of the latter. And you can too. Just enjoy this:

In the event that you did NOT like the above, then I advise you leave this establishment. Because this... this is AWESOME.

The song is "Rubin & Ed," and was, of course, written and performed by Crispin himself.

Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee

Exactly what it sounds like. Easily the most impressive non-studio stop-motion animation I've ever seen (if that makes sense).

Saddest Thing

There have been many suggestions as to what may constitute the saddest thing. As an exercise, I asked many of my friends, and a young woman as kind-hearted as any I've met suggested that the saddest thing was a three-year-old girl with no arms, falling off a swing on a lonely hilltop. Needless to say, the game ended shortly thereafter. Clearly there was no topping her response; there was also the frightening quickness and clarity with which the answer came to her mind.

On a whim, I wondered what the internet had to say on the subject, and with the help of my friend Google, I found The Saddest Thing, an online user-generated pit of despair. Check out the Saddest Of Them All. These are the ones that were voted saddest, and they are SAD, people. Fun stuff. These are found among the much more numerous sad-but-still-sorta-funny things, like this story, or this picture:*

The brutally honest webcomic Achewood has an excellent (read: heart-shattering) suggestion to add at this point:
(click to enlarge)

I, sadly, do not have a definitive answer to offer you. Perhaps one day I'll stumble upon something so sad I instantly fall into a coma from how bummed out I'll be, and then I'll know. Until then, dear readers, I remind you that you're free to comment below with your contribution to this ongoing dialogue. I would also implore you to consider this video in your own deliberations.

*I know EXACTLY where he got that photo. This spectacular website has been a favorite of mine for a while now.

Cake Wrecks

Proving once again that the concept of a "trickster god" is not entirely without merit, the internet has managed to find enough pictures of poorly-decorated cakes to warrant an entire website. Cake Wrecks is your one-stop shop for pictures like this:

Happy Anniversity indeed. Or maybe something a little more... intentional?

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that this would be the ULTIMATE birthday cake. Just saying is all.

Text says: "We Love Freymoto Put Heart In Place Of 'Love'". Freymoto is an amalgamation of he unlucky couple-to-be's last names, by the way. Probably the most confusing thing about this is the fact that several people are presumably involved in the creation of a custom cake, and not one of them looked at this and thought anything was amiss.

I like thinking that this cake was intentional; it would have been the greatest birthday party ever. I also like to see Holly make some bold choices where most 12-year-old girls would have opted for something else on their cake (Horses? MySpace? I have no clue).

Jazz Tap

Okay, so watch this:

If YouTube is to be believed, Fred Astaire once called that the greatest example of tap dance ever caught on film. If that were so, on would have to wonder if he ever saw the dance trio Tip, Tap & Toe in the movie Pardon My Sarong:

Kutiman

First things first. If any of you see someone wearing this Sargon Ivy cap, I am telling you that it's alright to hit them as hard as you can. Here's a photo of it.

Just to be clear, that's an ivy cap with an embroidered dagger on it. The dagger is intricate and fancy, and lies broken amongst the lilies. It is meant as a tribute to Sargon, a Mesopotamian king who seems kind of sick and twisted and cruel. I mean, this is a guy who "marched to Kazallu and turned Kazallu into a ruin heap, so that there was not even a perch for a bird left." I get angry at places with stupid gimmicky town names as well, but I don't flip out and torch the place. And if I did, I wouldn't want to be memorialized on a hat whose target demographic would be purchasing them for "irony".

ANYWAY! Kutiman is a DJ, musician, producer, composer, animator, and, what the hell, artist. He's been the recipient of some fairly high praise of late, with the release of "ThruYou", an album composed entirely of remixed YouTube videos. This has garnered some minor nerdy applause, but has also revealed this Israeli musician's oeuvre to US audiences.

That's the first track off of the album, "The Mother Of All Funk Chords". If you liked it (you should have), you can watch the rest on the album's website here. Enjoy.

BeatleJazz

Being such a huge fan of both the Beatles and the entire genre of jazz, I'm actually a little shocked that I'd not heard of these guys before. BeatleJazz is a band that I have been blissfully unaware of, as they scooped up some major awards and appeared on several "Top Ten Albums Of The Year" lists. Seriously?! Usually, I'm fairly hip in the ways of music, and yet they appeared at first glance to be newcomers. But they've been around for about a decade now. Am I that pathetically oblivious, or does nobody else know these guys?

Irrespective, I found all four of their albums. I love them all, but the newer two are one that have (apparently) received huge praise. These ones were released after BeatleJazz's first two albums, "A Bite Of The Apple" and "Another Bite Of The Apple". I mention them together because they were conceptually on the same level. They were released a year apart, and are often mentioned together. By the way, you'll need a RAR expander for those files. If you don't know what that is, then GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND. Remember that, kiddies. Google is your friend. The password is "mbmc", if that's not immediately obvious (it took me two days to crack that nut. No joke). I can't really recommend any particular songs, because I listened to these albums all in a row without checking the track names. I would, however, point you towards "I Am The Walrus". Some excellent piano work on that part that goes, "Selmolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower." Awesome.

Their next effort, "With A Little Help From Our Friends", was a big leap in excellence, as you can tell from the sheer number of bytes it's going to take up on your hard drive. Check it:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Shazam. Three parts. That means it's three times as good. And then, you have their newest release, "All You Need". This just has two parts, but it doesn't get the above fanfare because I haven't finished downloading it yet. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Okay, I'm not the only one not in the know, because Wikipedia doesn't have a page on them, and Wikipedia has a page on EVERYTHING.

The Dresden Dolls

With the help of a friend, I have rediscovered the dark cabaret stylings of The Dresden Dolls. That's the actual name of the genre. Dark cabaret. Anyway, they've only released two albums, so I'll make this short.

2003's self-titled album features some good stuff, most notably "Good Day", "Coin-Operated Boy", and "Bad Habit".

The real treasure trove is on their second album, 2006's Yes, Virginia.... This is the album with "Sex Changes", "Backstabber", "Modern Moonlight", "My Alcoholic Friends", "Mrs. O", "Necessary Evil", "Mandy Goes To Med School", and "Sing". You may notice that I recommended well over 50% of the songs on this album. That's because this album rules. If I were you, I would just go ahead and get the entire album. You don't have any excuse, it's that good.

Back To The Future Edit

This is inexplicably funny. Stay tuned.