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Geek and Sundry

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Can we first just take a minute to acknowledge how awesome it is that, in this day and age, someone can just go on the Internet and start their own television network? And I’m not talking about some kind of crappy home-movies, I’m talking about full production budgets with costumes real actors and witty writing. I’m talking about Geek & Sundry.

Geek & Sundry is the youtube channel of Internet royalty Felicia Day (if you know her from nowhere else, you should at least recognize her as Penny from Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog).

My introduction to Geek & Sundry actually came via one of the shows on the Geek & Sundry network, TableTop. I used to love a show called Celebrity Poker Showdown, in which celebrities played poker against each other while throwing out hilarious one liners. TableTop is like that, except instead of regular celebrities, they have geek celebrities, and instead of poker, they play geek board games. The show is hosted by none other than the king of the Internet himself, Wil Wheaton.

I anticipate watching TableTop to learn about awesome new games that I’ve never played before. However, I’m also excited to watch episodes where they play games that I know and love, such as Settlers of Catan:

However, once I was there on the Geek & Sundry network, I started to check out some of the other shows. I swear that someone has tried to get me to watch The Guild before, but I couldn’t find any reference in my email, so I guess it never really happened. However, The Guild is HILARIOUS and awesome, so someone should have recommended it to me if they didn’t. This show is as good as anything you’d find on traditional television, and a must-see if you are a gamer, or know a gamer, or even know what a mmorpg is. There are 6 seasons currently, but a whole season is about an hour long.

But I didn’t stop there! Geek & Sundry led me on to the fantasy and science fiction show Sword and Laser. They’re starting a book club, and they just so happen to have picked The Magicians by Lev Grossman as their first book. I just so happen to be about half way through The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Kismet. This is a book that I have heard tons about, and I’m very excited to read. And now I’m in a book club, which is a first for me.

There are other shows worth being excited about as well, such as Written by a Kid, which hasn’t premiered yet (fantastic premise, professional animators provide animations for stories told by kids).

Anyway, long story short, we have gotten to the point where there are a lot of non-traditional media streams out there, which leads to highly targeted, highly specialized sources that are apparently highly attuned to my own individual wavelength.

In other words, Geek and Sundry.

I never knew YouTube was so creepy

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The other day, I went down a dark and scary road on YouTube.

It started innocuously enough. Someone found my blog by searching for “the dancing gnome scary”, which struck me as odd and/or hilarious. So I did my own search and found this video.

Now, this video is probably very offensive to little people. There is absolutely no reason why this person is scary. He’s just little, with some difficulty walking and dressing himself. However, the way the video is set up and the way the video is filmed, is a little creepy. I think we have been trained to believe that anything filmed with that grainy night vision is automatically creepy.

In any event, the related videos on the side of that led me down a whole cadre of frightening videos. I just couldn’t stop clicking on them. Ghost sightings, unnamed mutant creatures, demons, aliens. There’s a lot of creepy stuff out there! It can be hard to find it, because there’s also a lot of people goofing around and making silly things, but there’s plenty to see if you look.

So turn off the lights, sit back, and enjoy:

Youtube How-to

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A while back we were having some issues with our washing machine. I wasn’t sure if it was worth repairing, or if we needed to replace the whole thing. I was kind of stuck: I didn’t want to pay a technician to come in and look at it, if we were ultimately going to get rid of it anyway. So I turned to my old friend, Mr. Internet.

If you go to youtube and look for information on how to fix something, you’ll be amazed at the amount of detailed information people have put out there, in video form! I found a video that showed me exactly how to take my washer apart and repair the suspected problem.

Now it turns out I didn’t need to fix my washer, but I could have! And now I have a new go-to place to find examples for fix-it projects. I wanted to find the exact repair video I watched, but I couldn’t because there are just so many. And very high quality, with good production budget too! Anything from how to fix your refrigerator, replacing your spark plugs, or this fantastic video, which will show you how to repair a broken leg:

Thank you, Internet, for this high quality information! I will follow this video exactly next time I need to set a broken bone!

Kids can embarrass you in weird ways

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I’ve mentioned before that I spend a lot of time listening to music on youtube at work. Well, the other day I was minding my own business, listening to music, and a senior guy who is sort of an outside consultant came over to ask me a question. As he was staring at my screen, I was forced to bring up the webpage and pause the music, so I could hear him. The problem is, I was listening to a Laurie Berkner song, and though he couldn’t hear the music, the video was clearly a kid’s video, with little animated bumble bees flying around, etc.

Now it could have been a lot worse, lord knows there are plenty of uncomfortable visuals in music videos. So I probably shouldn’t be embarrassed about listening to the same music as my 2 year old, and that guy has kids anyway, so I’m sure he can understand how badly kids music gets in your head. But still, I’m sure he was like, “What the?” when he saw what I was listening to. Very embarrassing.

So here it is, in all it’s embarrassing glory. Feel free to watch at work.

Anybody else ever do something like that? No, probably just me.

Playlists

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I want to give a shout-out to Youtube Playlists.  Fantastic!  I listen to my headphones a lot at work and sometimes I want to hear something different.  Usually, if you search for any song in the world you can think of on youtube, you’ll get a video of some sort.  So basically you can hear any song you want.  The only problem is that when the song is done, you have to find a new video. So, every 3 minutes or so, you have to go back to the webpage and at least click on another video (if it is related) or do another search.  Not very productive!  But now you can search for a playlist.  So people make lists of whatever they want and the videos will play consecutively.  So now I can listen for hours without having to do anything!  Lovely.

In other news, I saw this trailer for a movie during the superbowl and I thought to myself, “Hmm, this looks like a pretty cool movie.” And what should the movie be other than G.I. Joe the movie!  Arguably the best cartoon of my youth, although I am not willing to put it above He-man. So I’m singing the theme song today and I keep singing “He’ll fight for evil, whenever there’s trouble, GI Joe is there!” So either I’m remembering it wrong or I was seriously misunderstanding that cartoon…here I thought they were the good guys! Whenever there is trouble GI Joe is there indeed. The weird part about turning a cartoon into a live action movie is that I can’t imagine that theme song playing without being cheesy.  I’m sure that means we will be treated to a special rap version of the song or something, ruining our collective childhood once again.

So enjoy it while it lasts I guess:


(and by the way, he fights for freedom)

And, just to tie everything together, here is a playlist of those hilarious re-dubbed G.I. Joe PSAs.