After Lou Reed passed away on Oct. 27, his Spotify account became a default gathering place, as we all collectively mourned him via social media. His account hosted several playlists of songs he liked from the radio, or songs he was listening to. Some of the artists on his mixes were surprising, some enlightening.

It provided the perfect digital platform to channel the sadness of losing an artist we didn’t know but admired: At least we could listen to his mixtapes.

Playlists.net is the aggregating arm for Spotify playlists, a place where user mixes can be shared and circulated, though it’s not run directly by Spotify. In June, the U.K.-based company officially changed its name from ShareMyPlaylists to reflect data suggesting that users mainly browse and consume, rather than contribute.

That makes sense. Since debuting in 2009, the site’s curation has been done, and now it has enough content to attract a community looking to “discover.” The latest version of the Spotify app for iOS, which debuted in October, lets users pin playlists to certain locations, allowing nearby users to share in a location-based experience. There’s also an option for custom artwork for the mixes, adding a bit of nostalgia to the process.

In a crowded room of music-streaming services, Playlists.net has more of a personal angle, where curation is largely left to the user. And their new iOS features are attempting to make Playlists more of a social tool: A digital jukebox that offers an ambient awareness of what those around you are listening to.

In September, Playlists.net founder Kieron Donoghue addressed U.K. label Ministry of Sound’s lawsuit against Spotify for copyright infringement on his personal blog and went further on the issue of how musicians and labels should be viewing Spotify :

“The whole idea of MoS suing Spotify because it's users are going to the effort of curating playlists based on their albums reminds of the days when the record labels would try to sue people who illegally downloaded music MP3's for ridiculous amounts of money. The very fact that users want to have MoS content on Spotify but have to create their own, because it's not there is a huge compliment. MoS need to embrace this and work with their audience, not against them.”

Donoghue told the Daily Dot that the site sees 100 to 200 playlists uploaded a day, as well as approximately 40,000 playlist plays. Of the 147,000 playlists currently on the site, only 82 were curated by staff.

“The whole idea of Playlists.net is to give the bedroom DJ/curator a platform to establish and grow followers,” he explained. “We believe you don’t need to be a Pitchfork or NME editor to know good music. Take Playlists.net super-user Phil Wilce, who curates a monthly “Soundtrack To…” playlist of 50 under-the-radar tracks each month. He doesn’t work in the music industry; he’s just a crate-digger and has amassed a huge following. He’s now become somewhat of a tastemaker and even has record labels pitching him new music to include in his playlists each month.”

He added that they’re seeing more users land on Playlists.net via mobile devices, and the company’s currently working on a new Android app.

“[O]ur playlist charts and social sharing and discovery tools give users the ability to really attract an audience to their playlists,” he said. “A big part of that is the fact that we give users the ability to add playlist artwork and descriptions to their playlists, allowing for that extra bit of individuality that you can’t do in Spotify.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Playlists.net offered these titles in their most  played section: “Hipster International,” uploaded by a user named Sean Parker (yes, that Sean Parker); “Big Lebowksi Mix,” which reimagines the film’s soundtrack with Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” and the Monks’ “I Hate You”; and a questionable list titled “The Best 35 Songs You’ve Never Heard.” (Side note: A Dave Matthews Band version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” is on this list, which is an offense.)

On the “latest” page, you can find oddities like the “Glick Auto and Truck Center Rocks” playlist, ostensibly a promotion for the Glick Auto and Truck Center, which is reaching out to potential truckers/patrons with a curated, car-themed Spotify mix. There’s a decade’s worth of Abercrombie & Fitch in-store playlists, if you’re into that kind of thing, and a preponderance of Pet Shop Boys compilations. It’s a good thing that customized artwork is now available; some of the covers look a bit too Now That’s What I Call Music.

But there are some deep cuts and inspired digs on the site. The sheer number of playlists ensures you’ll see some real questionable material and cringe-worthy mixes, but you’ll also possibly find a collection that you’d never considered.  

And if you look deep enough, you’ll find a Lou Reed mix that brings it full circle.

Photo by AndYaDontStop/Flickr

As any pot farmer will tell you, quality product takes time to develop. Even with that wisdom in mind, we’ve been all kinds of antsy in anticipating the next episodes of High Maintenance.

The elegantly scripted, subtly performed, and gorgeously shot stoner webseries has at this point received notice from no less than the New Yorker, which interviewed husband-and-wife filmmaking team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld as they were inking a deal to convert their beloved Vimeo staple to a full-length show for cable TV. (Blichfeld has, in the meantime, won an Emmy for her casting work on 30 Rock.)

 

Now we’ve got a teaser trailer to heighten our excitement: nothing too out of the ordinary, just a languid look at Sinclair’s character crisscrossing Brooklyn on bike, filling up his tires and jamming to whatever’s on his headphones—with close attention paid, as always, to those microscopic quotidian details that make up a life. You could almost forget that cannabis is the costar of this particular story… until the final frames, anyway.

Blichfeld and Sinclair clarified in a followup Facebook post that the next cycle of episodes would kick off “around Thanksgiving.” Just in time, by our estimation. Who doesn’t need to take the edge off when home for the holidays?

Photo via Janky Clown Productions/Flickr

Less than a week after Aaron Swartz took his own life, filmmaker Brian Knappenberger found himself surrounded by friends and colleagues of the 26-year-old Internet activist. Knappenberger was attending a computer symposium in New York City, where he was scheduled to answer questions about hacktivism, a topic he’s well-versed in.

Knappenberger’s the writer and director of We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, a 2012 documentary that follows the exploits of Anonymous, from its origins on 4chan to the arrests of the Paypal 14 during Operation Payback in late 2010. Most recently, Knappenberger directed a public service announcement for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, featuring Oliver Stone, John Cusack and four government whistleblowers,  that called for an end to mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

A sense of mourning overshadowed the New York City symposium, Knappenberger recalled. Under different circumstances it would have probably been a cheerful reunion. At the conference, he sat between friends Gabriella Coleman and Joshua Corman, while listening to Quinn Norton, an American journalist who was Swartz’s partner for several years. At the time, another documentary was far from his mind.

The next day, Knappenberger attended and filmed a memorial at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Almost 900 people showed up to honor Swartz. Naturally, those who knew him were overcome by a profound sense of loss and heartache, but other emotions coursed through the crowd as well.

“Aaron was targeted by the FBI,” Roy Singham, Swartz’s former employer, said while addressing the crowd.

Singham spoke about the need to hold Swartz’s “tormentors” accountable for their actions and read aloud a letter he received from Indian journalist Palagummi Sainath. “This was—and I say it without hesitation—not suicide. It was murder by intimidation, bullying, and torment,” the letter said.

For the two years before he took his own life on Jan. 11, Swartz lived with the knowledge that he might spend up to 35 years of his life behind bars. Federal prosecutors aggressively pursued the young activist, throwing at him the full weight of the Justice department.

The computer crimes Swartz was accused of didn’t even involve the theft of anyone’s personal information. There were no classified documents, credit card numbers, or executive’s emails. The criminal action, alleged by the prosecutors, was that Swartz downloaded too many academic journals from JSTOR, a digital library, which he was authorized to access on the MIT network. Prosecutors claim that Swartz violated the site’s terms of service by writing a script to copy the articles to his laptop en masse.

Even after Swartz returned the data he’d downloaded and JSTOR indicated they had no desire to pursue charges against him, the government refused to back down.

Eventually, the felony charges deteriorated Swartz’s emotional state—the Secret Service noted Swartz’s “depression problems” in its report—and ruined him financially. Even his friends had been issued subpoenas. “Every word you speak or write can be used, manipulated, or played like a card against your future and the future of those you love,” Norton said later, describing life inside a federal investigation.

Following Swartz’s death, his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman authored a blog post titled “Why Aaron Died.” In the introduction, she shares her recollection of a dream. Swartz sat next to her on the bed, atypically struggling to read the words of a book. She asked him to explain his decision to take his own life. He told her, “I’m dream Aaron… I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.” She calls the experience a dream nightmare.

“I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a criminal justice system that prioritizes power over mercy, vengeance over justice,” she wrote, “a system that punishes innocent people for trying to prove their innocence instead of accepting plea deals that mark them as criminals in perpetuity; a system where incentives and power structures align for prosecutors to destroy the life of an innovator like Aaron in the pursuit of their own ambitions.”

Eventually, Knappenberger realized that he needed to tell the story of Swartz, whose early work, most notable the development of the RSS, is inseparable from the chronology of Internet history.

“I thought maybe at first it was a short film,” the director said, “but the more I dug into it the more I became interested in it and I realized as a whole, it was definitely a feature film.”

Many have argued Swartz’s tragic story highlights the disparity of a crumbling American legal system, most specifically the ill-conceived Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) under which Swartz was prosecuted. The CFAA is an outmoded law, replete with ambiguous language, devised almost 30 years ago to criminalize certain computer-related acts in the wake of unwarranted hysteria surrounding the Hollywood movie WarGames.

“There’s no question that the CFAA needs reform,” Knappenberger said. “That’s a really complex issue, because I think even tech companies are resisting that. It’s just an outdated law, there’s no question about it. It’s being used as this one-size-fits-all incident hammer. They can just go after anything marginally hacker-related. We look at a bigger, broader picture of the Department of Justice system and ways that it’s broken, this kind of overwhelmed system—basically overwhelmed by the Drug War more than anything.”

Most recently, the CFAA was applied in the case of Jeremy Hammond. In 2012, a judge told Hammond that the charges against him could result in life-imprisonment. After pleading guilty, he now faces a maximum sentence of 10 years for his involvement in the 2012 hacking of Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm.

“Ninety-seven percent of people now are forced to plea out,” said Knappenberger, referring to an oft-cited statistic used in Missouri v. Frye. “ It’s absurd to think that ninety-seven percent of the people that are in our court system are guilty. That can’t be true. So, obviously, there’s something majorly wrong with our system. I think Aaron’s story speaks to that.”

He described his upcoming film as being in the same vein as We Are Legion. That film he agrees was the beginning of a battle. “It was basically made during the ‘Summer of Lulz’, the same year that Time magazine had ‘The Protester’ as person of the year. But, this has come when we’ve just witnessed this incredible crackdown on activists and journalists, and obviously the NSA activity.”

The Internet’s Own Boy offers a much more thoughtful and intense personal story. “This is a very different kind of darker side of things,” Knappenberger said. Along with footage of Swartz himself, the documentary, scheduled for release in 2014, features interviews with close friends, colleagues, and a variety of digital activists, including Ben Wikler, David Segal, Christopher Soghoian, Cindy Cohn, and Sen. Ron Wyden, who’s working on an overhaul of the CFAA, dubbed Aaron’s Law.

Knappenberger’s committed to a Creative Commons approach in regards to file-rights of the film, which is fitting given that Swartz aided in the development of that licensing format.

Yet, Knappenberger resists the notion and the easy narrative that Swartz was a martyr for any cause.

“I think he just cared and was super curious about the world. I think that’s accessible to everybody,” he said.  “A part of that martyr-making is to say, ‘Oh, if we could only have more people like Aaron.’ It’s like… well, yeah, but you could be like Aaron. That’s not out of reach.”

Swartz had a profound impact on the people who knew him and the way they apply their skillsets on a daily basis.

“How do you use what you’re great at to make the world a better place? How are you most effectively going to use your skills in the time that you have?" Knappenberger asked. "You certainly hear that in the startup world, but what does that mean and how many startups really make the world a better place. Everybody says that.” 

Swartz took it one step further. He asked the hard questions, then he created his own answer.

Photos via Brian Knappenberger

The view from the What’s Trending offices in Los Angeles is gorgeous, with glass windows overlooking the iconic Hollywood sign. It’s a fitting vantage point for a company that’s bringing together the best aspects of mainstream entertainment and the new YouTube model.

Inside, it’s loud and bustling with a flurry of writers, interns, and coordinators and a setup that rivals that of a network TV production company. There’s a writers room and a white board with endless lists planning out every day, trip, and segment by the hour.

On my first visit, I rode up in the elevator with Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob Squarepants. No sooner had the doors opened was he whisked away backstage for makeup, while the rest of the cast of Comedy Central’s Brickleberry chatted in the green room.

The upstairs studio’s reminiscent of Carson Daly’s Total Request Live on MTV, except updated for the Twitter era. Along with a stage for musical guests and a balcony, there are big screens with What’s Trending’s social media info. Each show now has an associated hashtag or social media tie-in.

Behind the scenes and in front of the camera, Shira Lazar is the focal point of What’s Trending. She’s not just the host. She’s the perfect hostess for the office, rushing back and forth making sure everyone is having a good time, always with a smile on her face. She’s the reason why fellow YouTube stars like Kaleb Nation and Vitaly hang around the set, even when they’re not appearing on the program.

On this particular show, Lazar showed a compilation of parodies of Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” music video by the likes of Bart Baker (a close friend of Lazar’s), Shane Dawson, and Brittany Louise Taylor. Later, YouTube singer Meghan Tonjes performed “The Fault Is in Our Stars,” a song inspired by John Green’s similarly titled novel. The social media synergy is stunning.

“This isn’t just a place where you have these kind of breakout, random, overnight successes, but you also have a legitimate network growing,” Lazar told me after the show, referring to both her channel and YouTube at large. “This could be the future of media and entertainment. It’s a place where you could get a show you would have watched in the past on TV.”

Lazar has always been ambitious. She didn’t start as a typical vlogger, sitting in her bedroom making videos with a webcam. Her show (cofounded by Damon Berger) originally launched on the Web in 2011 for CBS, but it severed ties with the network soon after and briefly lived as a weekly pop culture show online. Even when the show struggled to find its purpose and audience, Lazar maintained her professional outlook, always choosing quality over mere quantity.

In 2012, Lazar reformatted again to make What’s Trending a daily YouTube show, which meant expanding ad sales, partnerships, more employees, and syndications with mainstream publications like USA Today, Virgin America, iHeartRadio, and Gas Station TV. In the process, it picked up an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Original Interactive Programming.

“I was building my own brand, company, and my own startup, and that can be a lonely process,” she said. “There is a lot of stress to it. It can be intense for a business model like ours that basically has no rules. Anything is possible online, which is exciting, but anything being possible can also be a scary thing.

“I was never like the individuals who make a whole week’s worth of programming alone, though. If you’re not ready for the fame, it can be a really crazy experience and you don’t get a sense of how many people are watching you daily. To realize these translate into real humans watching me, it can be unnerving.”

Even though she has help now around the office, Lazar can’t stop herself from overseeing everything. Long after the show finished broadcasting, she was in the control room discussing the minutia of edits and writing emails about booking. The show likes to pair Internet celebrities, like the guy behind the #StarbucksDrakeHands meme, with traditional stars. (Both director Kevin Smith and Snoop Dogg, among countless others, have appeared in the past.)

That’s perhaps the show’s biggest strength. It taps into virality of the Web, curating the best content for its audience and spotlighting YouTube’s new A-list, but still casts it in a larger pop culture context. Not surprisingly, Lazar has been approached about moving the show to TV, and she’s open to the idea.

“The fact is good content is good content and it rises to the top and it’s not an exec who chooses it,” she said, name-checking YouTube hits like Annoying Orange that have made the leap. “The audiences are the ones who do that.”

Things are really just getting started for What’s Trending. The show only recently launched its app, which allows viewers to watch on their iPhones. During live shoots, viewers can enter a chat with cohost Ethan Newberry and post questions for the celebrity guests. Lazar said around 40 percent of What’s Trending’s viewers are currently on mobile.

“That changes the way all of us should be approaching our content and engaging with our audiences,” Lazar said. “It will definitely create a shift in the traditional viewing experience and what we look at as real-time network viewing. They’ll have to figure out apps and the on-demand experience, making it as accessible as possible for the fans to connect to our experience.”

Two weeks later, I returned to the studio to catch another show.

It featured a strange double booking of Paris Hilton and offbeat duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim from Adult Swim’s Tim & Eric. Before their segment, while Hilton was being interviewed, Heidecker tweeted a photo of her with the caption, “I hate.” The awkward factor didn’t disappoint.

Hilton proved a tame interview, but Lazar still seemed like they were best girlfriends hanging out at a slumber party. Since the show is live, Lazar has to be sharp and wholly present on camera, every time it’s rolling. She has considerable help in the form Newberry, the Andy Richter to her Conan O’Brien. He often plays the put-upon doofus, like, in July, when he took certified YouTube star Jenna Marbles on a date in the studio.

During the Tim & Eric segment, while Heidecker was pretending to be high on cocaine Hilton gave him, the comedian spilt water all over Newberry’s laptop. Without missing a beat, Newberry continued the show, playing along with mock-fury at the guests.

When the cameras turned off, the four were all smiles. Later, Lazar compared the interview to “an improv game” with everyone playing their parts.

The bits would be great clips for What’s Trending’s YouTube channel, she said over a tub of Red Vines, because they weren’t boring.

Photos by Gaby Dunn

Blue Is the Warmest Color, a French film based on the graphic novel of the same name, was just released in U.S. theaters. While reviews of the film have been mixed, the most controversial talking point seems to be the authenticity of the seven-minute sex scene between main characters Emma and Adèle.

The novel’s author, Julie Maroh, has gone on record expressing her displeasure with male director Abdellatif Kechiche’s portrayal of lesbian sex, claiming he made it more pornographic than artistic.

Yeni Sleidi interviewed real-life lesbians for queer website Posture to gauge just how realistic the scene is, and the responses are fantastic. One woman laments, “If you end up resting in someone’s asshole, it’s not a successful encounter.”

One viewer claimed it was “really geometric.” Another said she thought it was hot at the beginning, but when they started changing positions every 10 seconds, it started to feel like an “infomercial for a kitchen product.”

Other reactions: Scissoring has never happened ever; in lesbian sex, there’s a lot more crying; this is obviously two straight women having sex for pay.

When asked if she would try any of the moves in the scene, one woman said, “I have my own cookbook, thank you.”

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The third season of Girls debuts on HBO in early January, but since season 2’s ended, there have been a few interesting “fan” contributions to the show, like this bad creative writing piece disguised as a Craigslist ad.

For a more reverent take, British artist Nina Cosford recently created a Tumblr called Girls Illustrated.

It’s framed as a celebration of the show and its characters, but it also sketches out some of the more famous scenes and settings. Cosford, a full-time illustrator, also produces content for clients like Google and Nokia, as well as graphic novels. But she sees this project as more of a commentary on the show's fandom.  

"I find Girls offers a really refreshing perspective on young life in Brooklyn and New York, especially as I am from England and have always wanted to go there,” she explained via email. "It's so different to previous perceptions I've had of it in the past."

Cosford’s perception of the show and its setting, especially from across the pond, points to its popularity beyond the States, though its more outrageous aspects might be interpreted a little differently in England.

“When I watched an episode for the first time, one of my friends who I watched it with was really shocked and taken aback by it, which I found really entertaining,” Cosford said. “It made me realise how different it is as a reflection on young people and their blunders, however uncomfortable it can be to watch.

"Being in my mid-20 myself, I feel I can relate to many of the issues brought up in the series. If I were to relate to one character in particular I think it would be Marnie, but mixed with Hannah's over-consciousness and ambition.”

She says that she’s eager to get to season 3, so she can keep drawing all the awkward (and honest) moments.

“I love the show's wittiness and its painfully relatable scenarios and character traits and wanted to use my style of illustration to highlight these nuances,” she adds. “I think it helps to accentuate the softer, more charming elements of the show which lie beneath the grittiness of it all.”

Illustrations via Girls Illustrated/Tumblr

One of Reddit’s most popular makeup artists is accusing Lil’ Kim of stealing her image for the cover of her new album. But the truth isn’t that simple.

Lil’ Kim’s new mixtape, a reggae-tinged jam called Dead Gal Walking, debuted two weeks ago to rave reviews. The song was a Halloween-themed teaser for her upcoming mixtape album, Hard Core 2K13. Yesterday, Reddit user Sssamanthaa, a.k.a. Samantha Ravndahl, posted on the r/MakeUpAddiction subreddit that the cover art for Kim’s mixtape was a photo of her original “corpse bride” makeup. 

The accusation is a leap. To be more precise, the artwork was used for a mixtape, not an album. Mixtapes are almost always put out for free, so the artist makes no money off Ravndahl’s image. Arguably, Lil’ Kim is gaining publicity from the image, which translates into income. But singles rarely have their own cover art, so it’s not quite clear what exactly the photo is being used for in connection to “Dead Gal Walking.”

Ravndahl told TMZ she “contacted Lil’ Kim’s people asking for payment and got the runaround—first she was told Kim wasn't willing to pay anything ... and when Ravndahl persisted ... was told that Kim's team ‘works slowly.’”

Sssamanthaa’s image may only be connected to the song via the Web service TwitMusic, where it’s being used to represent a “dead gal walking.” But who put it there? If Lil Kim’s people did, the biggest issue is that the girl in the photo is the artist herself, and her image is being used without her permission. Where it gets complicated is that Sssamanthaa put it up on Reddit, a public social news site, without a watermark. 

The photo is also not being used to promote the album. Photos of Lil’ Kim accompany the song on most blogs and media sources:

As one redditor in the comments pointed out, a similar thing happened to Diddy, who ended up paying the photographer for his work. But because this is a mixtape, Lil’ Kim won’t make any money off of it. 

The artist could at least ask for credit. According to Sssamanthaa’s posts on Reddit, she’s looking into getting a lawyer involved.

Other subreddits, like r/AdviceAnimals and r/funny, have started to meme Lil’ Kim’s album-art theft, calling Lil’ Kim a “scumbag”—a popular meme calling out terrible people.

Photo via windyjonas/Flickr

How good is Wolfgang Gartner at what he does? He turned a classical masterpiece into a chart-topping dance hit.

Gartner is one of the biggest artists to emerge from the Beatport community in the past couple of years. His breakthrough single, “Wolfgang’s 5th Symphony,” a banging EDM spin on Beethoven's iconic “5th Symphony,” became the highest selling track on Beatport back in 2009 and launched Gartner’s career, leading to appearances at major music festivals around the world.

Gartner owes his rise in no small part to the support from the online EDM community, galvanized at Beatport and quickly disseminated across the Web. His success is also testament to his persistence, though—the hard-earned recognition that comes from almost two decades tireless crafting beats. In fact, as the 31-year-old Gartner notes, his rave-wrecking remix of Beethoven's 5th sprung from excavating demos he had made at 14 years old.

“Wolfgang’s 5th Symphony” also speaks to the vibrancy, and challenges, of contemporary remix culture. The popularity of Gartner’s remix stems from the novel take on the recognizable original, which is freely sampled due to its public domain status, but the very remix culture that made Gartner’s version a legitimate hit also quickly spawned unauthorized knock-offs. It’s the double-edged sword of sampling culture and our modern online access and distribution.

Still, Gartner’s original has more than received the attention it deserves,  well beyond the Beatport community. Since the release of his 2011 LP, Weekend in America, he was nominated for a Grammy and four International Dance Music Awards. He’s also collaborated with superstars Deadmau5, Tiesto, Skrillex, and the Black Eyed Peas, and had his music featured in numerous video games and television shows.

Gartner’s a modern music success story powered by the fervent online fan communities, rising from Beatport to Billboard.

Screengrab via YouTube

Shane Dawson will soon become the latest star to make the transition from YouTube to the small screen.

He just sold a half-hour comedy series called Losin’ It to NBC, which has now been put into development, Deadlinereported. Based on his own life experiences, the show will feature a weight loss center client who becomes a consultant and is promoted to manager on his first day.

Dawson worked at Jenny Craig back when he first started making YouTube videos, and not long afterward, he made a pole-dancing video while on the clock. That video directly resulted in him, his mother, brother, and six co-workers losing their jobs. 

That allowed Dawson to make videos full-time, and it couldn’t have gone better. In five, years he has accumulated over 10.5 million subscribers across three YouTube channels (5.2 million on his main channel alone).

Once the news about Losin’ It broke, Dawson, who co-wrote the original story and will serve as an executive producer on the show, made a video to talk more about the announcement.

Dawson teared up as he explained that while he sold the show to NBC, there’s still a long way to go before Losin’ It ever appears on a TV screen.

“All that matters is I sold the show to NBC, so now, even if it doesn’t happen, I can still say, ‘I’m not just that guy that puts on wigs on the Internet,” Dawson said. “I’ve actually sold a show to television. And that’s all because of you guys.”

Dawson joins the ranks of other YouTubers who have made the transition to television, the most successful being Dane Boedigheimer, the creator of Annoying Orange.

But with subscribers and colleagues congratulating him, he’s been floored by all the support.

Overwhelmed by all your amazing tweets today. i feel so lucky to be connected to each and everyone of you. thank you. <3

— Shane Dawson (@shanedawson) November 13, 2013

H/T Variety | Photo via The Bui Brothers/Flickr

Chip Chocolate just might be Angelica Pickles’s hero.

When his mom tells him to take an apple over a chocolate chip cookie, he refuses. And he manages to turn his mansion into a cookie haven that would make the Keebler elves foam with envy. And with a name like Chip Chocolate, what other possible outcome could he have?

Better known as PrankvsPrank’s Jesse Wellens, his premiere music video showcases his luxurious life with Mrs. Fields constantly cooking him fresh batches and milk fountains everywhere as he’s visited by a bunch of Girl Scouts.

There’s even an actual cookie dance, which doesn’t take nearly as much effort as something out of a Psy music video, but it’s most effective when there’s milk and cookies in hand. Oh yeah, and you might recognize a few faces in the video, like Jenna Marbles and DeStorm Power.

With Nutella sushi being a thing, cookie sushi doesn’t sound so bad.

And as far as we can tell, there’s no hinting that the cookies might actually be an unrequited love transformed, so this ode to food is only an improvement.

Photo via ChipChocolate/YouTube

For the modern DJ, talent is often no longer based on executing a seamless transition from track to track or finding an obscure sample to blow people's minds. It’s all about creating the sickest drop.

A redditor named mrdvno, a former DJ, decided to turn his disgust at the current landscape of EDM drop-peddlers like Skrillex into parody. He posted his homage to Reddit as a series of mp3s with excellent titles like “A Drop So Epic a Bunch of NYU Bros Already Bought a 3-Day Weekend Pass For It” and “A Drop So Crazy You’ll Kill Your Family.”

He takes extra time with the the build-up, which is the signature of the drop, then does a bait-and-switch when you’re supposed to “lose your mind”:

Like when he drops in a sweet Filet-o-Fish reference:

Or audio from the most heartbreaking scene in Bambi:

Though redditors are in on the joke, there are several confused Soundcloud commenters. Over on his Twitter, where he goes by the name Kevin Wang, fans got the #LateNightTerribleDrops tag trending on Vine last night. Via email, he told the Daily Dot why he decided to explore this trend:

“Epic drops are loads of fun for the DJ to play and the audience to hear, but when it's all about the drop, as it generally is these days, DJing is less about challenging the listener with something provocative and interesting and more about giving them what they want. When you know what the audience wants, why bother putting together an elaborate melodic transition mixed in key that a grand total of five people will appreciate when you can just raid Beatport's Top 100 for the most disgusting drop that's guaranteed a great reaction? Fans after the show would say, ‘Oh, _____ had the best set because his drops were the sickest.’ It was disheartening to be a part of.”

That said, he should totally do a mix with Hennessy Youngman, purveyor of those 'CVS Bangers' mixtapes.

“I would really love to,” Wang says. “That CVS mixtape is game-changing. GAME. CHANGING.”

Photo via messycupcakes/Flickr

It's when Ice T's jaw drops after he stampedes through a churning pile of cuddly robots that you realize Sony probably just pulled off the PR coup of the year.

It happened on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon last night. Playstation's head of special projects, Dr. Richard Marx, marched onto stage bearing the almost mythical new console, the PS4. Fallon and his apparent best gaming buddy, Ice T, were Sony's chosen ones to try out the thing. If you haven't paid much attention to the development of game technology over the past couple of years, what happens next will probably look like some computer graphics magic whipped up by the masters at Pixar or some other Hollywood studio.

It can't be real, right? Well, let's put it this way: Ice T is not a good enough actor to fake that childlike smile.

Screengrab via Late Night With Jimmy Fallon/YouTube

The cesspool of comments for which YouTube is notorious aren’t just taking over the website. They’re crawling out into real life.

The company’s move to link commenters with their Google+ profiles has effectively backfired. The hateful messages haven’t quieted—if anything, they’ve just gotten troll-ier, possibly in an effort to spite YouTube.

Conan O’Brien’s writing team had a bright idea: If the haters aren’t welcome on YouTube, where will they go? How about to a taping of his show?

The typical commenters you see on almost every video, no matter the topic, all went to the set of Conan last night with one goal in mind: to have their voices heard, even if that meant interrupting the host.

The more sexist and racist commenters stayed at home for this one, but it was already more than enough for one person to handle. And O’Brien couldn’t even moderate or block them.

But he does have one advantage. He could call security.

Photo via Team Coco/YouTube

Breaking Bad delivered a near-flawless series finale. But what if it all—Heisenberg, the crystal blue, the stare down with powerful drug dealers in the New Mexico desert—had all been just a bad dream?

As a bonus feature on the DVD/Blu-ray box set of season 5, due Nov. 26, the producers made good on a long-running Internet theory that Breaking Bad was somehow tied to Malcolm in the Middle, in which Bryan Cranston played a lovable goof of a father to three kids.

Back in January, Cranston’s TV wife, Jane Kaczmarek, appeared on set to film this alternate ending. It’s priceless, and it gives you an idea of what Breaking Bad would have been like as a suburban comedy for network television.

The best part: “The only thing that still made sense in the whole dream was that I still walked around in my underwear.”

Update: The original video has been pulled from YouTube. Here's a foreign mirror, if you don't mind subtitles. 

For good measure, here’s my favorite Breaking Bad/Malcolm in the Middle mashup. If you’ve seen the show, you’ll remember the scene.

Screengrab via YouTube

By now, you probably know what the fox says. But the story of the Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis doesn’t start at dingeringeding.

Brothers Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker host a talk show in Norway called I kveld med Ylvis (Tonight with Ylvis). They created the famous song about animal sounds to celebrate the show’s third season, but they gained worldwide fame when the music video went viral.

Here's a look back at five of the brothers' lesser-known YouTube moments.

Since 2000 Bård and Vegard have contributed to sketch comedy shows, hosted radio and TV shows, and performed several stage tours. Though they mainly perform on stage in Dutch, their physical comedy transcends language barriers.

And they can be funny in many other languages, including Spanish, Chinese, and Donald Duck.

They have a way with celebrities, Norwegian and otherwise. Here is a clip from I kveld med Ylvis with Norwegian comedian David Batra in which the three dress up as superheroes and "help" unsuspecting passersby cross busy streets.

And here is Vegard joking on stage with Josh Groban after a performance in Oslo, Norway.

When it comes to their music videos, there's a reason they're often called "The Lonely Island of Norway." In “The Cabin,” they do the slow-jam-about-ridiculous-things shtick almost as well as Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake do.

And last but far from least, a bonus track, just in case you forgot:

Screengrab via YouTube

Donald Glover just gave all of Tumblr an open invitation to his house party.

In anticipation of his new album, Because the Internet, the former Community star and alter ego of rapper Childish Gambino is planning a small house tour where he and some friends will play the album in a living room.

Unlike your typical celeb house party, he gave all his fans an equal chance to attend.

GIF via iamdonald/Tumblr

“I can’t invite everyone, so leave your name, email, phone and zip after the jump,” Glover wrote. “The few people I can invite will be notified by phone so we can let you know the address.”

The winners will be selected at random, and with almost 11,000 notes on that post in less than 24 hours, the odds of getting into one of Childish Gambino’s exclusive concerts aren’t really in anyone’s favor.

There’s no word yet on when exactly the concerts will start taking place or how many he’s planning to throw across the country, but by the time most of us find out the details anyway, we’ll probably be wistfully viewing the highlights on Twitter and Instagram.

Photo via The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas/Flickr

Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown teach you everything you wish you’d learned in chemistry class: "The Scientific Power of Naps,” the benefits of frozen veggies, and "What causes a Hangover?"

The duo’s wildly popular YouTube channel, AsapSCIENCE, has amassed over 130 million views and 1.5 million subscribers, but there’s a good chance you have no idea what they look like.

The two 25-year-olds from Toronto, Canada, work with whiteboard animations, using quirky illustrations and succinct narration to deliver entertaining tutorials tailored for ever-shortening attention spans. In a recent video explaining what would happen if a person decided to stop sleeping, for example, Moffit explains how the mesolimbic system in your brain runs rampant after losing a night’s sleep, while a whiteboard marker rapidly draws a pair of bloodshot eyes and a number of props.

“We decided that by using our hands, people aren’t distracted by our personalities,” Brown told me. “They’re more able to focus on the actual content and what’s being produced.”

Moffit and Brown are at the forefront of YouTube’s scientific revolution, a wave of creative thinkers who are gaining massive popularity, online and in the classroom, by explaining the extraordinary science at work in our ordinary lives.

“We were realizing that you don’t learn the coolest stuff in high school science, but once you’re in the university you can really start to apply a lot of it to your own life,” explained Moffit, who majored in biological science alongside Brown at the University of Guelph. “We were learning this groundbreaking information and we were constantly trying to translate stuff for them.”

After graduating, Brown became interested in science education, specifically how he could teach young students to understand a curriculum that was sometimes immensely intimidating. Moffit, meanwhile, had a number of friends who had managed to grow significant audiences on YouTube and noticed that his younger siblings were seemingly glued to the video platform.

“They kind of clued us in to the medium as a whole and how it wasn’t just a place for funny videos or cat videos or one-off viral videos,” he explained, “but that people were actually gaining audiences that were coming back week after week or episode after episode.”

Eventually, they began to map out a concept for AsapSCIENCE. It wasn’t difficult to settle on some initial topics; they were the subjects the two had found themselves explaining to their friends in college. One of their first videos, uploaded a mere year ago, explains why drinking coffee and alcohol makes us need to pee more often. (Hint: it has to do with how these substances affect your pituitary gland.) Though their videos gained immediate traction, they didn’t stumble upon what they’d consider their winning formula until a few weeks later when they produced a video on the causes of hangovers.

“That skyrocketed the quickest,” Brown said. “I think that was a testament to the importance of making our videos relatable to the average person.”

Though the two had assumed their videos would mostly appeal to young students in the classroom, they quickly concluded that there was a much larger audience hungry for this sort of content. Six months into the series, they discovered through analytics that their average viewer was male and 35 years old.

“These videos get tons of traffic from being shared because they ask very simple, interesting questions that you would want to talk about with people,” said Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s trends manager. “These are questions that we don’t always think about, but the moment they’re presented to us we immediately want to know more about it.”

But why have channels like AsapSCIENCE, MinutePhysics, and Michael Stevens’s Vsauce, which boasts more than 5 million subscribers, become so popular recently when YouTube as a company has been around for more than half a decade?

For years now, scientists have complained that there’s a dearth of great science communicators, like Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist who captivated the world with his 1980 documentary series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

The tide has certainly shifted on YouTube, but it’s part of a larger pop culture trend. The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters—a documentary series where Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, two Hollywood special effects artists, use science and engineering to test out the validity of claims made in movies and pop culture lore—has become a runaway success. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes regular appearances on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and contemporary “Science Guy” Bill Nye is a much bigger celebrity now than he was when his show went off the air in 1998. (“Bill Nye was one of the top science searches on YouTube last year,” Allocca told me.)

YouTube has become a prime venue for this type of content, partly because it’s easy to share and science teachers across the world need only a high-speed Internet connection and projector to show it. Many of these videos are evergreen in their subject matter, and Google, which owns YouTube, is known to weight video above other types of content in its algorithm, often making these series the first to surface in search results when users ask a science-based question.

“One stat I like to cite is that videos that are uploaded to the education category are viewed twice as much as videos uploaded to the pets and animals category,” Allocca said. “Everyone thinks of YouTube as a place for pet videos, but education videos are viewed twice as much.”

And their popularity isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon: 80 percent of education videos are uploaded outside the States.

If there’s one thing that these popular video series have in common, it’s their brevity. Brown and Moffit told me they like to keep AsapSCIENCE episodes between one and three minutes long. MinutePhysics, as its name suggests, sticks to a similar formula.

On YouTube, it’s all about doing more with less.

But while this length works well in elementary and middle school classrooms when a teacher wants to explain a complicated subject in the simplest possible terms, how do you compose a video that will be used to instruct subject matter experts, including both Ph.D. candidates and medical school students?

That’s a question Rishi Desai contemplates daily. A pediatric physician by trade, Desai oversees all the medical content for Khan Academy, the nonprofit company founded by Sal Khan in 2006 to create video tutorials on dozens of topics from chemistry to economics. The Academy has reportedly reached 85 million students to date who have completed over a billion exercises.

Desai had originally signed on in July 2012 to create tutorials for Khan Academy Medicine, but in September of that same year he was promoted to run the entire operation. The content his team produces differs from many of YouTube’s most popular science videos in that it’s meant to be supplemental for actual medical school students.

“Something like this would have been really nice for me to have in medical school because there were so many times when I didn’t understand something and I went to a friend who explained it to me in a pretty straightforward way,” he told me. “And a lot of lectures don’t do that. They kind of steamroll right through the material, and they have this curse of knowledge where the professor can’t help but use jargon when a simpler, more clear way of explaining something would be optimal.”

Earlier this year, Desai hosted a contest in order to attract the best science communicators he could find, and out of 70 submissions he chose the best 15 and hired them as contractors. The group gathered for a one-week training camp where they settled on a single mission: “Let’s chop up the MCAT into different pieces. You do physics and you do chemistry, etc. And let’s crank out this material. Let’s make it so people really understand the concepts and we don’t just teach to the exam.”

Creating content geared toward those with subject matter expertise, as you can imagine, isn’t easy. Unlike AsapSCIENCE, which can simply mine the most interesting information, Khan Academy Medicine must walk you through all the abstruse details while still remaining interesting and engaging.

Desai said he goes through each video to determine if it makes what he calls “logic leaps,” jumping from point A to point B without describing how the narrator got there. He then scores the video on whether it’s engaging and contains compelling imagery. “It’s not so much about the content,” he explained. “People know the content. They can teach it easily, but can they teach it well?” Once he’s critiqued the piece, he asks the contractor to remake it. It’s not uncommon for him to ask for a video to be remade five or six times.

For Desai, the end goal isn’t to merely provide a supplemental education service; he wants to upend how classroom time is spent. The typical university model is to pack 300 students into a classroom and have a professor lecture to them for an hour. And for most of history, this model made sense, given there was no easy way to convey the material to the students beyond the textbook.

“You have to ask, ‘What’s the best use of these people’s time?’” he said. “If I were an alien coming down to planet Earth to observe our culture, I would think, ‘They should probably be talking or discussing and working together in some way.’ And that’s not what happens.”

In Desai’s vision, students watch the lectures during their free time and the classroom is reserved for projects that involve critical thinking and group collaboration. “Let’s do a debate, let’s do a project, let’s do any of those activities that are a little bit higher order of thinking than simply getting the facts and understanding the basic principles.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge in producing science videos is simply choosing which topic to tackle next. At this point, half of AsapSCIENCE videos are answers to questions asked by the YouTube community. Moffit said he has a list of 172 video ideas on his phone, and those were chosen from the thousands suggested.

Luckily for Moffit and Brown, they have plenty of free time to tackle these subjects. AsapSCIENCE has become popular enough for them to quit their jobs and work on it full time. If the world has suffered from a lack of great scientific communicators, then the Internet has responded, fulfilling a demand that no one knew existed.

“For us it is that constant evolution that keeps us excited,” Moffit said. “We’re scientists at heart and the challenge now is to continue stimulating those who have been around for a year. We want to find new ways to entertain them.”

Illustration by Jason Reed

Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose is currently experiencing some cold November rain: His ex-wife is auctioning off his breakup letters.

Erin Everly recently posted the collection of letters and notes to the Beverly Hills-based Julien’s Auctions site, and they offer some insight into their tumultuous relationship, which began in 1986, around the time Guns N' Roses signed to Geffen. They were married in April 1990, but less than a month later, Rose filed for divorce. Then they reconciled, then broke up again.

The marriage was annulled in 1991, but these letters form part of their on-again/off-again narrative, when Rose was attempting to win Everly back.

One note, written on a card from La Cienega Flower Shop, says, “FROM AN ASSHOLE!!!” A three-part letter from November 1986, the year they first started dating, points to their initial troubles. Rose shows his vulnerability, though, and some of his words almost come off like lyrics to a Guns N’ Roses song:

“Ya didn’t need ta play it so tough — I should have known better — I never realized how much you cared and wanted me. Sometimes I’m an insensitive bastard.”

Another note is more pained, and reminiscent of the Romantic poets:

“I just can’t bear this life — so I must drown my sorrows. The name William proves too much to bear, and now in my moment of despair, I have become frustrated + confused!”

Rose then signs it, “Think of me when you wipe yo’ ass.”

In addition to these very personal effects, Everly also auctioned off other spoils of war, including their wedding video and marriage certificate, a copy of a domestic abuse report from 1988, and a gifted copy of Richard Bach’s The Bridge Across Forever. If you're a GNR completist, you are, oddly, in luck.

Photo via Ed Vill/Flickr

One horrendous and truly awful side effect of Billboard Magazine’s February announcement that the magazine would factor YouTube views into its Hot 100 chart is that any song on any viral video can now register as a new hit song—no matter how old the song featured on the video happens to be.

It’s something we saw in October when Kanye West’s “Gone” hit the Hot 100 in the wake of Marina Shifrin’s wildly popular “I Quit” video sent to her former employers at Next Media Animation, and it’s something we’re seeing today, as Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” has catapulted into the Billboard Hot 100 on the heels of a viral video that—believe it or not—already made the rounds on the Internet a full four years ago. 

According to Billboard, Bon Jovi’s cheeseball slam—which already hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 19-holymoly-87—has landed at No. 25 on the Hot 100 this week. Its reason: The video you see below—a two-minute clip of a Boston Celtics fan named Jeremy Fry dancing to the song during a TV timeout that everybody and their Irish mother watched in 2009—has once again gone viral. 

To be honest, we’re not quite sure why that’s happened either. 

In any event, Bon Jovi’s newly reignited fame bodes poorly for Hot 100 chart purists who hope to see their beloved Billboard statistics adhere to what’s both hot and current and not just hot on the Internet. Alas, it appears as if, at this point, there’s little we can do about that. 

H/T Gawker | Photo via Bon Jovi/Facebook

Author Bret Easton Ellis has a podcast now, and his first guest, naturally, was Kanye West. The two spoke of creativity, genius, and how much those things inform their creativity and genius. But fashion also came up, and West had a message for Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online retailer Zappos, and his “shit product.”

Why all the shade towards Hsieh? Well, he apparently told West to focus on music, rather than fashion, during a recent business meeting in Las Vegas. But no one puts Yeezy in a corner:

"I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he's trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this shit product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling shit product.”

The Vegas-based Zappos wasted no time with their own mic drop, however, and posted a link to a new product, priced at $100,000, with this item description:

“Interested in buying sh-t product? You've come to the right place! Here at Zappos.com, we happily sell sh-t products to everybody! This is the throne, everyone has been watching. Whether you're #1 or #2, your clique will show no mercy, even in Paris.”

Oh, snap! There's even a video. 

C’mon, Kanye. Zappos makes perfectly comfortable shoes for a god.  

Photo via the _ml/Flickr