YouTube Revived The Video Star

Sometimes I forget how fantastic music videos can be but more and more I'm finding that they are the perfect little nugget of entertainment for my YouTube-sized attention span. I've also noticed that artists (or the directors) are exhibiting far more creativity in the medium than before. I'm definitely seeing a lot less of the standard band set up playing for the camera and a lot more storytelling and visual effects. Now that I think about it however, creative music videos probably aren't a new development but more a function of the wider availability of a broader selection of videos. Now that YouTube has effectively rendered MTV even more obsolete than it already was, nearly everything you can imagine is available on-demand. Then again, the neat-o factor that I'm trying to describe could also just be a characteristic specific to certain genres of music. I'm sure the Nickelbacks of the world still have the dullest videos you could imagine.

Anyway, all this blah blah blah is just because I happened to spend the last 45 minutes watching music video and I found some pretty neat ones that I wanted to post. I suppose I could have done just that without all the preamble but I'm not about to go back and delete it all now!

D.A.N.C.E. by Justice

Daft Punk Is Playing At My House by LCD Soundsystem

Boy From School by Hot Chip (you have to watch this one all the way through to the end for the full effect)

Montreal -40°C by Malajube.

Thoughts? Anything else I should be watching? Please share!

Jeremy Dower

Jeremy Dower's artwork had a fantastic glossy three-dimensional property that makes his little characters (astropuppets and robonerds, dontcha know) jump right off the screen. Actually his work looks more like photographs of designer vinyl toys than illustrations. Let's have a look at the creatures of his imagination:




Via Drawn.

Simpsons At The Movies

Accordion Guy did some pretty nice blog sleuthing by digging up stills from all (or most) of the Simpsons episodes that spoof movies and comparing them to their original cinematic counterparts.

He has also taken it upon himself to explore more in depth Simpsons-to-film comparisons, including: Citizen Kane, How The Grinch Stole Christmas and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Via Boingboing.

Park Planters

I saw Science & Sons' booth at an arts fair in Toronto this summer and meant to blog about them but of course I totally forgot. But thankfully for all of you I just came across their work again in a post on Ozoux. Their Park Planters are made out of white glazed ceramic, depicting various, often lewd, "urban park scenes" including flashers and fellatio. For seriously. These tiny scenes make the plants look like large trees by comparison. Dirty dirty trees.



Via Ozoux.

My Other Trucker Hat Is Funny

Do you watch 30 Rock? If not, you should stop reading my blog right away, get your hands on season one and watch all 21 episodes back-to-back and then come back to reading my blog. If you do then you may proceed with this blog post. In every episode 30 Rock, Judah Friedlander's character Frank Rossitano wears these awful looking Ashton Kutcher-style trucker hats with random nonsensical statements apparently made up by Friedlander himself. Of course I took it upon myself to compile a list of all of Frank's trucker hat phrases from season one.


Here is that list:

• Ninja Expert
• Done Deal
• Extra Sausage
• Joystick Master
• Double Cheese
• Arcade Champ
• Bigfoot Expert
• Hand Held
• Over Easy
• ESP Tutor
• Kung Fu Beech
• RODS
• Karate Sluts
• Beef 'N Bean
• Smells
• Extra Cheese
• 1,000,000 Points
• UFO Cop
• Squeeze It
• Cool As Ice
• Time Travel Agent
  
• Liz Rocks
• Mash Potatoes
• Beef Ravioli
• Atomic Super Kick
  
• Mystery Solver
• Bahama Trapezoid
• Alabama Legsweep
• Force Field
• Alien Knight Force
  

What would you do without me?

Just What The Doctor Ordered

Is it bad to buy things just to make yourself feel better when life gets you down?


Oh well. I'm wearing them now. They're not even plugged in to anything. I love them. And I feel a little better.

One For The Bookmarks

I've stumbled on to the webcomic xkcd many times before and have always had a laugh but for some reason never thought to read it regularly. I recently landed there again having followed a link from Kara's blog and this time I took the time to poke around (and by "poke around" I mean repeatedly clicking the "random" button). And the dude is funny...as many people have already discovered. "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," xkcd is created by Randall Muroe, former roboticist for NASA. He now writes xkcd full time supporting himself on the sales of his webcomic merchandise on his online store. Man this guy is seriously multi-talented. Also check out the Life Imitates xkcd section in the Wikipedia entry for a list of instances where people have actually carried out some of Munroe's comics in real life. He's that good.





Via Just Happy to be Here.

Uh Oh LocoRoco

Move over Ninja Town, there's a new game in, uh, town. In a valiant effort to supplant the Nintendo DS as the undisputed reigning king of unbearably cute casual hand-held video gaming consoles, Sony came out with LocoRoco for the PSP in 2006 and are taking another stab at it this year with LocoRoco Cocoreccho.


The plot - which, as we all know, is integral part of cute, colourful Japanese video games - revolves around the LocoRoco, a peaceful, fun-loving, group of hippiesque rolly-polly blobs made of a jello-like consistency. Think Barbapapa meets a bag of Skittles. So anyway these globulous goobers are all Greenpeace, making sure everything is right with Mother Earth and tending to nature etc. until these bastard Moja Troops (invaders from outer space, dontcha know) swoop down from the heavens for some vague reason that isn't well defined in the Wikipedia entry about LocoRoco that I am currently paraphrasing (someone should really elaborate on that party of the entry). So anyway, mad cute video gaming hilarity surely ensues.


So the LocoRoco roll and tumble their way through the world, presumably in an attempt to save it, and meet a whole bunch of wacky characters along the way (see detailed character chart above). And of course, as is the standard nowadays, I've got a trailer for the game displaying the LocoRoco in all their shapeless glory. Be prepared to be amazed and astounded. Your eyes will go wide, your mouth will go whoa and your brain will go "I want that" as you cast your gaze upon the candy-coated beauty of LocoRoco. Behold:

Great. Now I have to get this game. And a PSP. Le sigh.

Via Notcot.org.

Kanye's Krib

I'm not sure how much thought you've given to what the inside of Kanye West's Los Angeles home looks like, actually I'm pretty sure the answers is none. And if you have then 1. that's weird, and 2. you're probably wrong. I mean chances are you didn't come up with this: Andy Warhol? The Jetsons? Giant creepy plush happy face flowers? Yes, yes and definitely. Read the Interior Design article or just skip the words and go right to the slide show.





Via Fimoculous.

The Business of Cards

I bet your business card sucks. Now I don't mean to be rude or anything, and really, chances are I've never even seen your business card but seriously, take it out of your wallet and have a look. I'm right, aren't I? It's pretty dull. Don't worry, mine is too. Now these people on the other hand have got some pretty nifty looking cards. If I were them I'd be standing on the street corner giving out my business cards to people as they walked by just to show off. Wouldn't you? No? There are about 400,000 neat business cards in this Flickr Group, so I didn't get to go through all of them. But you should.







Blog post idea pillaged/pilfered/plundered from Tutorial Blog via GeekLikeMe.