StumbleUpon Interweb Menagerie Vol. III

Sorry about not posting for a while; between going back east (read: Salem, Massachusetts) for Spring break and then spending an extremely enjoyable trip to San Francisco (pics soon!) I just had not had the inundation of internet to fuel my blogging spirit.

In the interim, I have collected quite a number of interesting websites for your grubby little hands:

• The Star Destroyer Project - photodoc of a disgustingly intricate model.
  
• How to be hip
• The Dawn of Man (Lego Version)
• SuperBad 2: Super Worse Remix Trailer
• Not necessarily the best AIDS protection out there
• Mr. T brought boy out of coma
• Hair that's alive!
• Open Doors - a great little puzzle webgame where you must move a box around a room with doors which only open in specific directions
• Muppet Bloopers
  
• Compulse - another great webgame, this one aims to get a bouncing ball into a sphere using directional blocks
• Just wait and listen... amazing.
  
• Magic Pen - A wonderful webgame in which you attempt to guide a ball to its target by drawing shapes in the environment
• Lego Planet Express
  
• Our delicious dumpring meal in SF

• Photographic Renditions of Children's Drawings
  

FAO Schwarz: Make Your Own (Anatomically Correct) Monster

I woke up this morning with a neat little page that I'm assuming got onto my browser when I stumbled and then switched tabs before it could load. But that's beside the point. The point is that I came upon this cool little site displaying a new FOA Schwarz Exclusive which lets kids draw their own monster and fork up a measly $250 to have it made into a surprisingly accurate plush rendition.

And when I say surprisingly accurate, I mean it; the people at the North American Bear Co. seem to put a lot of care into making these stuffed animals... er... monsters as close to the retarded scribblings of children as possible.

Take this weird guy, adorned with weird spikes and moles popping out of his feakishly round head. The monster he designed is pretty cool tho:

And this monster design, while a bit simple, translates into what I must say is a pretty rad stuffed monster:

Although, hon, you look a bit old to be having your parents shell out 250 bones to buy you stuffed animals...

But my biggest shock came when I came across a design called Dot by an innocent enough little tyke named Sherri.

Notice anything a little disturbing about the picture? Here, have a closer look:

It appears little Sherri wants her monster to be a bit more than a friend. Let's see if the boys at North American Bear Co. noticed this lil' inconspicuous detail and if they actually implemented it:

That's perfect. I wonder if the parents noticed that part of their daughter's drawing, and what they think of her brand new purple monster with a big fuzzy dong hanging between its legs!

Link: Make My Own Monsters Creation Boutique

OiNKPlus = Ul-Ul-Ultrasexy

So I've just started using this Greasemonkey script called OiNKPlus, and it's absolute sex. It interfaces with gobs of P2P music sites and adds an expandable pane which displays all sorts of information, including discography, similar artists (which for the first time I've seen in a while seems to be accurate) and even a Last.fm player (a site which I should sign up for already).

On top of that I've just installed the latest Firefox 3 beta and, despite the fact that a few of my favorite plugs aren't ready for it yet, the browsing is amazingly fast and seems to handle the display of multiple tabs much more efficiently than its now-ancient older brother.

Justice - DVNO EP Leaked!

How pleased I was to see the word "Justice" suddenly in the Top 10 of my favorite P2P music site. Not much else to say other than: here's my blow-by-blow report:

Radio Edit - Who cares?? It's just a shorter version of a song we already love.

Justice Remix - Starts immediately for no regard for uncalibrated speakers and headphones. A distorted synth-guitar similar to the one from the D.A.N.C.E. Live Version pitches down to what almost seems like unending bass notes under the vocals. A 'trough-peak' breakdown leads into a severely cut up version of the bass solo from the-

...

You know what, nevermind that, I'm a bit drunk and wrote way more than is necessary for a 6 track remix EP. I left the above for posterity really, and to make it seem more spontaneous rather than revealing the fact that I wrote about 300 words per song. Instead I'm going to give one sentence reviews (although anyone who knows me knows a sentence can turn into a fucking paragraph in my prose):

*points* Hey look! It made a sad emoticon!

Justice Remix - D.A.N.C.E. Live Version guitars dive bomb like a fleet of oppressive cross-bearing Kamikaze B-52's.

Surkin Remix - Glittery string-laden space-disco worthy of Discovery surrounding an awkward sandwich of ghettotech cheese and meat made of those Surkin stab-aholic bridges we've come to love.

Sunshine Brothers Remix - Vocoded vocals and simplistic, video game-inspired electro-house drum machine-synth combos show how the Sunshine Bros. got their name.

LA Riots Remix - The first remix using the instrumentation from the album mix is a fist-pump worthy romp full of vocal cut-ups, 1 bar-long loops and that now-iconic bass solo.

Petitis Pilous Remix - hold on... I gotta adjust the font...








...














LIKE FUCKING A WOMAN WITH SQUARE WAVE VAGINA!!


...in a good way, that is.

I could have also said, "Like making sweet, sweet love to a sqaure wave," but it just doesn't have the same impact in enormous, flashing red font.

UPDATE: Watch the video here, which is still in the tradition of the D.A.N.C.E. video. It remixes the icons from numerous movie (and music?) production companies and studios into reading the lyrics to the song.



Also, after watching the video, I did realize that the radio edit is slightly different - about half way through they start looping the instrumentation differently, like what they do at their live shows, and there's more of the piano from the outro of the video in the mix (which I really wish they had included in the radio edit).

Awesome image stolen from the people over at djmix.es.

Most Bad-Ass Myspace Ever

Along with the rest of the sane population of the internet, I think MySpaces with ungodly amounts of animation, transparencies, and otherwise processor-hogging graphics are unsightly, gaudy things which must go the way of Friendster.

But every now and then the internet surprises us: in what could be called an abstract application of Rule 34, Kavisnky - the French electronic music artist who is more 80's than a Transformer-locomotive carrying Night Rider, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a crate full of 8-bit Nintendo consoles, piloted by Dee Snider himself - has blessed the world with what could only be called MySpace porn:



And thats only one part - the scrolling background is fixed and theres tons more cool stuff to look it - it's like someone took Tron and made it a website. Simply put, this is the most bad-ass MySpace profile ever created.

StaJewtistics

Let me first diffuse any comments along the line of "u rasist fag0t!!!11" (yes, Jewish is a race, get over it) by pulling the age old, "Hey! I'm [insert race, sexual orientation, nationality, or black here] so it's okay for me to make fun of them!"-card. Yeah, it's a card with a big name.

Second, let me amend that statement by saying that I'm an absolutely terrible Jew: I've been to church more times than I've been to temple, I can't remember whether you fast on Yom Kippur or Rosh Ha-Shonnah, and the only Hebrew I know is the standard Hannukah prayer, and only then it's by wrote memory - I have no idea what the gobbledy-gook that's coming out of my mouth actually means. I even just had to consult Wikipedia one last time to find out how to spell Rosh Ha-Shonnah. Oh, and I didn't know Purim was a real holiday until today.

[And what a lovely segue that was.]

So, today I was browsing Facebook and noticed some party being held for Purim in LA. Now, any of you who have seen For Your Consideration (or are better Jews than I) know that Purim is a Jewish holiday which "commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman's plot to annihilate them." (It seems we've got a lot of holidays based on escaping from some sort of oppressor or another. A recurrent theme in the Jewish history, if you will.)

Well, I'd seen For Your Consideration (and, as stated before, am a terrible Jew) and had actually thought that they had made up the whole holiday! I mean, it's a Christopher Guest film; I wouldn't put that anywhere near past him. Actually, I'd put the two right fucking side-by-side. So I was shocked when I threw "Purim" into my Wikipedia search bar and what came up was not a page on the film but one meticulously detailing the very real Jewish holiday of Purim.

A few minutes of fascinated clicking went by and I had moved past the Purim article, on to the Ashkenazi Jews page and finally to the article on Jewish Population. It was here that I started looking at the statistics on the distribution of the Jewish population and noticed a few odd things.

First of all, Jews really don't exist outside of the US and Israel (which my friend Meena claims is the 51st state, so that doesn't even count). According to Wikipedia, 38.62% of all Jewish people live in the United States. The next highest populated country is Irael with... wait what?! The US has more Jews than the fucking homeland?? I guess it must be all the New York bagel shops and waiters willing to lightly toast it, cut it into quarters, and with a small amount of butter and light chive cream chesse - do you have that? Oh, and the cream cheese has to be on the side. But not the butter! And half a kosher dill pickle. No, I can't eat a whole one, just half. Anyone want to split it with me then? Oh well, forget the pickle, just the bagel then. And can I get some napkins over here?



It gets worse from there. After the US and Israel, the next highest popJewpulated country is Russia with a whopping 800,000 Yiddish-cursing residents. Thats only 4.91% of the Jews in the world! Also, if you were wondering what the little splotch above the sad face in my illustration is, it's supposed to be a Yarmulke. At least I knew how to spell that word. Edit: I didn't.

So to recap, nearly 75% of the Jews on Earth (I'll get to that later) reside in only two countries, one of which has more Jews and more movie-making than the other. This gives us a fairly decent world view of the sitJewtuation. But wait, Wikipedia wants to give us an even more comprehensive understanding, because in determining the Jewish population of the world, we need one more piece of crucial information:



Yes! It is indeed true, according to Wikipedia, that 100% of the Jews are on Earth! Goddamn, I'm glad that someone cleared that up, because I had been beginning to wonder where the Joozians were going to be factored into these population percentages.

But no Jew feels as alienated (Ha! Pun! Get it?) as the one lonely Jewish person in Afghanistan. You read that right: there is 1, count it, 1 Jewish person in Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia. Again in a conversation with Meena, it was decided that someone should edit the page to make it maybe a little more up-to-date:



Sorry little guy, but no one really expected you to make it.

UPDATE: Oh man, would it have been better if I titled this post Stajewstics?

Lobie Minus <3's u

My newest mix, Crashed, is up on The Lobie Blog and The Pirate Bay.



Crashed on The Pirate Bay

Includes the two mash ups, 'Little Harder Little Better' and 'I Don't Feel Like _________,' both of which are also available to stream and download on MySpace.

Full track list available at The Lobie Blog.

Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger

I found this pic and in my current haze I immediately thought of only one thing and just had to animate it:



If you're still not getting it, you should have seen this first: badgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadger

I was also always a fan of this remix.

LobieSpace

The MySpace page for Lobie Minus has been launched at http://www.myspace.com/lobieminus.

It includes four of my mash-ups, two of which are from my new mix 'Crashed' which will be up on torrents in a matter of days (I just have to finish seeding a few other torrents so that I can have my full upload bandwidth available).



Link: Lobie Minus on MySpace
Sample: MySpace Player

StumbleUpon Menagerie 2

• A light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek viral vid of a hospital plagued with an outbreak of ailments from popular urban legends.


• A list of Dr. Parodies, one of my favorites being this Freudain analysis of Cat in the Hat:

  After poohpoohing the righteous rantings of the waterlogged Christ figure, the Cat begins to juggle several icons of Western culture, most notably two books, representing the Old and New Testaments, and a saucer of lactal fluid, an ironic reference to maternal loss the two children experienced when their mother abandoned them "for the afternoon." Our heroic Id adds to this bold gesture a rake and a toy man, and thus completes the Oedipal triangle.



• Virtual Spirograph - great fun!


• Amusing, biting comic with which I agree:
  


• The Twenty Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life - I do question the abscence of the Ender's books, but they get kudos for including a novel by Cory Doctorow of my favorite blog, BoingBoing.


• A totally awesome list of videos of building demolitions. This is one of my favorites, mainly because you can see so much of the explosion illuminating the inside of the building:
  


• And finally, a picture (thanks to my neighbor Brittany) of a car which drove through the front of the 7-11 down the street. Another of my neighbors, Doug, was in the store and literally 5 feet from the car when it crashed through the window. The guy was so trashed that he was actually trying to back out of the store. I guess he was hoping for a drive-thru.
  
  

This is the bottom of the barrel people...

This is probably one of the worst people on earth right here:



This kind of exploitation of people is just horrendous, as are the people willing to go on these shows. Although, I hate to say it, but I almost wanna know what happened in the first half of the show; I mean, stealing the money and everything? Damn this bitch is cold.

Link: AWKWARD! is Today's Big Thing

Ghetto Blaster!

I just StumbledUpon this site which catalogs a number of 80's boomboxes. It led me to find the Vintage Boombox and Ghetto Blaster Museum, a site which I had perused a while ago. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, wishing for the days of cassette tape and neon colors. I remember getting boomboxes banned from the buses to Camp Mitchman after my friends and I played songs like "Long View" and "Stinkfist" one too many times - makes me want to buy one of these from eBay, get a cassette-adapter, and carry it around with my laptop and midi controller and DJ out on the street on hot summer days, drinking 40's on the curb. The perfect meld of old (read: from my childhood) and new technologies and culture.

Link: oobject >> monster 80s boomboxes via Stumble and Pocket Calculator's Vintage Boombox and Ghetto Blaster Museum

Lobie Minus HQ

I've just launched a separate blog for my DJ "persona" Lobie Minus.