Internet Mixtape

Sexually Oblivious Rhino

More on just why this is so hilarious (beyond the immediate gag) later. I just got back from St. Louis and I'm tired. So until tomorrow, just enjoy...Sexually Oblivious Rhino:

 

(via Jessica...and probably lots of other people)

If You Don't Know the Words to a Song, Don't Volunteer to Sing

This is one of the half-dozen gems of epically bad performance captured on Ben Huh's (of ICanHasCheezburger & FAILblog fame) newest adventure in lulz, NotVeryTalented. It certainly lives up to the new blog's name:



(via NotVeryTalented)

Introducing the Inevitable: Three Worf Moon

You know you already thought of it, but didn't have the guts to make it happen. Twitter user dinoignacio has taken a necessary step for us all, and I, for one, thank him for it. So is anyone going to actually make this thing real so I can buy it, please?

 

(via Fernando Rizo, via Buzzfeed, via Twitpic)

Animals on Ice Skates

Have you ever seen a bear on ice skates? Usually these kinds of situations don't go very well, but when it's done right, it's brilliant. This video is amazing, but I also kind of want to see a video of someone trying to put ice skates on a bear in the first place.

I did a search for other animals on ice skates, but only found one video. It was well worth the effort...

Turkish Ice Cream Man Channels Buster Keaton

So hilarious for everyone watching, so frustrating for the person trying to buy an ice cream cone...

Underwater Video from a Flooded Meadow

Following a heavy springtime snowmelt, an alpine meadow in Austria was recently, instantaneously, turned into a deep, crystal clear lake. A fairly well-trafficked spot, the meadow features hiking trails, flower bushes and benches, making for a super-surreal underwater landscape.

A few creative divers decided to check it out and produced the following beautiful video:

(via wimp.com)

Twits: Dramatic Readings of Celebrity Twitter Updates

This is more or less the best thing ever. The girl reading P. Diddy is great, but the Lindsay Lohan guy has something special going on.

(via Metafilter)

The Most Masochistic Video Game Ever

Once in a while, you come across something on the interwebs that's such a fundamentally bad idea that you couldn't possibly suggest that people explore it, yet you feel compelled to write a post about it because it's also so fundamentally awesome. So I'm writing a post about Lose / Lose, a new game created by Zach Gage, that you really, really shouldn't play.

Here's the basic premise: You're a little spaceship hurtling through space against a steady stream of alien spacecraft. You have a cannon and are free to use it, but each enemy is tied to a different file on your hard drive, and when you kill an enemy that file is immediately, irrevocably deleted. For real. It chooses files at random, so you have no choice in the matter other than whether or not to shoot in the first place. Oh, and if your ship is destroyed, the game application deletes itself.

Here's a video of what gameplay looks like. I literally cringe with each enemy death:

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

More detail, along with some rationale, from Zach himself:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

A wise computer named WOPR once said something very wise to me: "The only winning move is not to play." You would do well to listen, and to never play Lose / Lose. Unless....you're trying to reformat your hard drive and want something more engaging than an MS DOS terminal.

The Only Upside of Widespread Global Warming

...is that Bearsharktopus will lose its natural habitat: your deepest, darkest fears.

I know, it's a few days stale already, but last week, for no real reason, someone posted the following image to Reddit because he "knows Reddit likes bears and sharks."

Nice job! As expected, within minutes came the first build, Bearsharktopus:

Then, within a matter of minutes....Baconbearsharktopus, Smokedbaconbearsharktopus, and, naturally, Gentlesmokedbaconbearsharktopus:

But these were all merely appetizers to the main course, which, if we're honest with ourselves and with our culture, we knew was inevitable...Three Bearsharktopus Moon:

The circle is now complete. And I haven't even mentioned "Obama fights Bearsharktopus." So much lulz, so little time...

Really Early Video of MGMT (2002)

So you know that band that you and everyone you know really love, MGMT? You know that awesome song, "Kids," that's still more or less inescapable? You know how that song got famous in 2008? Here's a video of Ben and Andrew, the two guys in MGMT, playing "Kids" for a crowd of fifty at a club in 2002:

Now watch this video, of the same two kids, playing the same song, at the Reading Festival in Leeds last year for a crowd of 50,000 (or more):

There's something so incredible about watching these two videos back-to-back, or playing them both at the same time....even though their performance back in 2002 was rough and they seem nervous and uncomfortable at times, the music is completely there, ready for a stadium. The only thing that needed to catch up was the size of the crowd. To see a piece of music that will eventually get millions of people excited first being tested by two nervous college students for their friends is a rare and amazing thing to be able to witness.

Even though I never wrote any songs as good as "Kids," I know exactly what it feels like to be 18 years old and playing loud, crazy music you wrote for your friends and not caring what it sounds like. When you're on a stage in a setting like that, you're just dreaming of playing somewhere like Reading, but for most people that will never happen.

Knowing that this is where MGMT will eventually be, however, with tens of thousands of European fans screaming their lyrics, makes that first video all the more magical by giving it a sense of pre-destiny...