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This mixtape will turn your local drug store into a dance party

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There comes a time in every man or woman's life when, wandering the aisles of the local drug store—picking up a tube of toothpaste, some toilet paper, and maybe an impulse-buy candy bar at the register—he or she is suddenly struck by a thought: What if drug stores weren't just there to satisfy our non-food-related grocery needs and half-hearted, last-minute children's toy purchases? What if drug stores were also the site of our hottest dance parties?

For just over a year, DJ Hennessy Youngman has been answering these questions with his CVS Bangers series, the third of which dropped on Soundcloud earlier this week.

What makes CVS Bangers pretty much the greatest musical joke on the Internet is that Youngman's conception of a drug store dance party sticks exclusively to the type of universally acceptable lite-rock already being played at the CVS around the corner from your house—Elton John's "Sad Songs (Say So Much)," Roxy Music's "More Than This," and The Proclaimers "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)."

In this case, though, the songs are strung together into a mix and punctured by jarring sound effects and non-sequitur DJ blather like:

  • "Where you at Elian?"
  • "I might join a cult on this song. Cthulhu, I am yours!"
  • "That's womyn with a 'y' motherf**ker"
  • "White people s**t"

If you've never heard a Kate Bush song periodically interrupted by cheesy reggaeton horn stabs, you've never really heard a Kate Bush song.

CVS isn't the only unexpected place Youngman is bringing his jams. Last year, he also released a similar set of NSA Bangers, because even spooks need bangers.

Photo by WhisperToMe/Wikimedia Commons (public domain)


That hilarious fake Lorde song on 'South Park' is now a free single

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That fake Lorde song that South Park wrote and killed with this month is now available as a free single. "Push (Feeling Good on a Wednesday)” is terrific in its ability to tap into the New Zealand singer’s self-involved lyrical perspective and aptly mock. Sample lyric: “Yeah, yeah, yeah—I am Lorde.”

It was a strong enough moment that Lorde shouted it out on Twitter.

The track itself was a performance by Australian singer Sia, fresh off July’s strong 1000 Forms of Fear. Check it out on Spotify.

Photo via Annette Geneva/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Here's how to livestream the 'Wire' cast reunion tonight

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There are two kinds of television viewers: those who love The Wire, and those whose friends are still yelling at them to sit down and watch it already. If you’re the former, take a break from evangelizing about “the best show of all time” tonight to catch up with its cast and creator.

At 7:30 ET, David Simon, the creative force behind the Baltimore-set crime series, which ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, will reunite with actors Wendell Pierce, Sonja Sohn, Seth Gilliam, Jim True-Frost, John Doman, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Michael Kenneth Williams, and Jamie Hector for a panel at PaleyFest, an annual event held at New York’s Paley Center for Media. Dominic West, who played Detective Jimmy McNulty, will appear in a video intro.

How can you watch? Just click this Yahoo link and let the Internet do the rest. And if the thought of a reunion without Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), the Greek (Bill Raymond), Snoop (Felicia Pearson), Herc (Domenick Lombardozzi), Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), or Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) doesn’t tempt you, there’s other great stuff already available, including panels on Bob’s Burgers, The Walking Dead, Archer, and Law & Order: SVU.

Of course, if you’d rather just fire up HBO Go—soon to be a standalone service!—and relive your favorite episodes, that’s perfectly understandable. All in the game, yo.

Photo by Tim Pierce/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Hip-hop icon pulled over by police, details harassment on Facebook

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Respected music producer and Harvard and Duke University lecturer 9th Wonder—who has worked with acts like Little Brother, Jay Z, Destiny’s Child, and Mary J. Blige—was pulled over while driving through South Carolina on Monday.

The encounter, as detailed by 9th Wonder in a Facebook post, stemmed from a police officer’s claim that he had been driving erratically and had a visibly cracked windshield.


When questioned by fans about the legitimacy of being stopped because of a cracked windshield, 9th Wonder posted photos.


Being stopped for “driving while black” is a phenomenon far too familiar to the majority of black Americans. It is an occurrence that places many in a state of fear and paranoia during routine traffic stops, and causes the assumption that they are being targeted because of their race—even when they are being stopped for legitimate reasons.

9th Wonder’s Facebook fans were divided on the topic of his stop and some even accused him of crying wolf and race baiting.





9th Wonder clarified that the reason for his post was to highlight his belief that “the system” is corrupt and leads to encounters like the one that he had. He further clarified that he doesn’t believe that all white people are guilty of racism.


While there is some ambiguity surrounding the events as detailed, the racial profiling of drivers is a hot topic in South Carolina, and 9th Wonder’s apprehension about stepping out of his car is certainly justified less than a month after a South Carolina state trooper shot unarmed man Levar Jones during a routine traffic stop. It’s also not the first time entertainers have spoken out about their treatment by South Carolina police and claimed to be racially profiled during a traffic stop.

Photo via DeShaun Craddock/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) 

'Men, Women & Children' finds unlikely marketing ally in Whisper

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“Discover how little you know about the people you know.” Those are the enigmatic words cut between the frames of the trailer for Jason Reitman’s latest film, Men, Women & Children. But to those familiar with Whisper, the tagline might sound more like a fitting description of the secret-sharing app rather than a drama based on the seedy digital lives of suburban families. In part, that’s what drew the two projects together in the first place.

“We started to see in Men, Women & Children that themes involved in the film really resonated with themes we were seeing people discuss on the platform,” Megan Wahtera, senior vice president of interactive marketing at Paramount Pictures, told the Daily Dot. Having tracked Whisper since its inception in March 2012, Wahtera was intrigued by the digital confession booth the app offered its users and what conversations those confessions led to. “We really just felt there was an organic alignment between the film and what people were talking about from a natural standpoint across Whisper,” Wahtera said.

The Venice, Calif.-based app allows users to voice their deepest thoughts, darkest deeds, and astonishing admissions in white block letters against corresponding imagery, ostensibly without fear of repercussions—though Whisper users may have cause to question some of the app's claims about anonymity. After breaking the news of the split between Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow earlier this year, the app gained legitimacy as not only a news source, but also a purveyor of pop-culture trends. Soon after, brands began to flock.

“We’re pretty selective about how we choose our partnerships,” Whisper's director of business development, Jay Rockman, told the Daily Dot. “We wanna make sure that any brand we expose our audience to makes sense for them.” But after reviewing the film, the company found the film’s message a natural fit with the subjects Whisper users were already discussing. “It’s definitely about technology and relationships; it’s something that’s very central to Whisper,” Rockman said.

With a track record of successful media partnerships that include the film Endless Love, Hulu’s Deadbeat, MTV’s Virgin Territory, and VH1’s Couples Therapy, the app has mastered integrating branded content into its streams without alienating users. Unlike Instagram’s upsetting attempts at weaving sponsored content into feeds, the Whisper team’s understanding of its audience helps distill a project’s message into questions for reply and discussion.

“It’s not marketing in a way that it would just be talent-driven; it’s definitely something that works as a moment in life,” Wahtera mused. In early September, the app began rolling out a dozen featured posts, each illustrated with imagery from the film. The 12 prompts were varied, with questions ranging from tame (“One thing you miss about school?”) to incendiary (“When is it okay to cheat?”). Yet, the most successful Whisper of the campaign was the simplest, with the post asking users “What song describes your life right now?”

What song describes  your life right now?

With tens of thousands of original pieces of content created and Paramount reporting 120 million impressions from the campaign, both parties were pleasantly surprised with the resounding success the partnership generated. “We’ve seen the most success of any of our partnerships,” Rockman beamed over the phone. As the film moves to wide release this weekend, Paramount is hoping that that engagement will translate offline into box office dollars.

That’s kind of our philosophy, to always reach people where they’re heavily engaging with the content versus instead of just pushing marketing messages on them—just trying to look at the trends and look at what people do and reach them there.

With so many streaming options available and video-on-demand releases showing no signs of slowing, studios have to fight harder to fill seats in a theater. But by recognizing its increasingly digital audience, Paramount has hopefully identified a marketing philosophy and that just might keep the Hollywood behemoth ahead of the curve. 

Men, Women and Children opens in theaters everywhere Oct. 17. 

Photo via Menwomenandchildrenmovie.com | Remix by Jason Reed

Entire train is oblivious to amazing subway dance troupe

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Two exceptionally talented young men are seeing their act expand beyond their usual captive audience. A YouTube video that recently gained traction on Reddit reveals "Showtime," a dance act performed not on the Radio City Music Hall stage, but rather aboard a moving subway train.

It’s not uncommon for musicians, dancers, and other performers to liven up lengthy subway rides with expertly choreographed routines… which is quite evident in the altogther unimpressed behavior of the performers' fellow riders. Despite a mostly inattentive audience, the "Showtime" performers carry on, not letting pesky things like physics or the constant stopping and starting of the train hinder them.

For those who do not ride the New York City subway on a daily basis, the act certainly is impressive. So far, it has received over 11,000 views (in addition to whoever else caught it during their commute).

Photo via Paul L/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)

'Welcome to Fairfax' is a throwback to an era that thinks it's still relevant

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Welcome to Fairfax, a new series following the lives of creative entrepreneurs that premieres at 10pm on Pivot TV, harks back to a simpler time when you didn’t need to know how to code to make ca$h. The problem is, those times are gone, but nobody told the show’s stars.

Do you remember “apparel”? It’s what entrepreneurs used to make before apps. They’d get a few designs together, collect some plain T-shirts, put them on skaters or rappers, and away they’d go. If they were lucky, kids would line up for them, and everyone would hope that they had managed to navigate that narrow and impossible-to-sustain channel where popularity doesn’t cannibalize legitimacy.

Of course you remember this. It was only about five years ago. But then, seemingly overnight, everyone had that beer drinking app and people began queuing for phones. Selling snapbacks and bow-ties out of old shipping containers didn’t look like a smart business model when more technically minded teenagers were suddenly starting to sell out for squillions. How many screen-printed T-shirts would you have to move to make that kind of money?

But Welcome to Fairfax is refreshing. Hearing about tech success gets tiring: The creative process is rarely exciting to the layman, and its inherent link to functionality means that it will always struggle to be cool. Contrast this with Los Angeles’ Fairfax Avenue, which we are told is the Rodeo Drive of streetwear, the Mecca of swag.

It’s a spot that understands cool and the need to protect and contain something that to outsiders might seem desperately arbitrary. It’s a hub for young fashion designers, artists, skateboarders, and musicians. It’s ground zero for Diamond Supply Co., The Hundreds, Crooks & Castles, and Tyler, the Creator. And as we are told repeatedly, like anywhere worth going or anything worth doing, it’s really hard to break into.

“We’ve got to hustle, hustle, hustle,” says Julian a.k.a. Jay Ughh from rap group Chill Black Guys a.k.a. CBG.

“This is the Do It Yourself era—I’m designing the clothes, selling them, marketing, and promoting,” says Gavin a.k.a. Mizzle, the owner of the store YOUth.

“I remind myself that this is hard, but it’s not impossible. I’m not going to stop,” says Tori, who works in a store on Fairfax.

They’re the sort of sound bites you’d expect from people raised on The Apprentice and 50 Cent—fighting words from people who just want to get ahead. But what is there behind this talk? Depressingly, there isn’t a whole lot; especially when it comes to the aforementioned “hustle.” Julian’s grandmother looks on with disappointment as he outlines a bare-as-bones day—studio session later, then meet up with guys—that runs counter to his mom's insistence that it’s “business first, rapping second.” His bleating about a fellow member’s decision to go out “making money” touring with Kreayshawn smacks of jealousy. He spins his annoyance as being somehow connected to his creative control of the group, but instead it just highlights his laziness or inability to pivot the situation to his advantage.

The others aren’t a lot better. While Tori seems too preoccupied to get anything done—“trying to figure out [her] dreams”—at least Gavin’s heart is in the right place. He’s peddling an acceptable line in social activism. But his designs are so glib (“Just Be Cool”) and his demeanor so bland that his storyline concentrates on his relationship with his father, a former NFL star who is now suffering from dementia. Sad indeed, but an unlikely vibe with which to get viewers frothing at the mouth for one of his “Stop Hating” T-shirts.

At least Gabe Brooks, a street BMX rider fresh out of the joint, has an engaging reluctance to buy into this mantra of positive thoughts and words. When asked whether he planned to keep “his nose clean,” he pauses and, disinterested, replies, “Um… I think that would be a dope thing.”

There’s a real awareness that these guys are on the outside looking in, and at the moment there is a reason for that. None are really artists. They are entrepreneurs with unoriginal dreams trying to latch onto something, anything, that is current—and hopefully lucrative. But while the scene is far from dead, and there will always be room for fresh creative minds, there’s a real feeling that the big show has moved on. The age of the entrepreneur is well and truly active, but it doesn’t have a physical shopfront.

Screengrab via pivot/YouTube

Not even Sting can improve these annoying classic ringtones

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Sting is bringing us a blast from the past, and it’s not with his music.

Instead of having the singer play one of his many variety games, Jimmy Fallon had him cover some classic ringtones for the audience, or—as he aptly called them—Stingtones. It’s just an excuse to get him to sing, and while he eventually puts a voicemail twist onto one of his biggest hits, he’s not singing anything intelligible—although that’s more the fault of the ringtones than Sting.

Despite what we had hoped, even Sting can’t fix these terrible ringtones.

Photo via The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon/YouTube


Disney's newest animated short stars a very hungry puppy

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Disney’s next star is something to feast your eyes on.

Winston, an energetic (and seemingly always hungry) Boston terrier, is front and center in Disney’s newest animated short, Feast. With only about a minute of footage, Winston is already making a vast first impression as he goes on a culinary journey full of things that most of us probably wouldn’t ever feed to our dogs.

Our hearts are in love, but our brains have to wonder if that dog is medically okay after eating everything in this video.

Feast is debuting ahead of Big Hero 6 on Nov. 7, as if you needed another reason to go see it.

Photo via Walt Disney Animation Studios/YouTube

Even Stephen Colbert hates the memes on Reddit

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Stephen Colbert really is a true redditor: He thinks the site is going downhill just like the rest of the community.

We’ve known for years that Colbert, the late-night institution taking over David Letterman’s job later this year, reads Reddit. In a new interview on the “Working” podcast with David Plotz, Colbert said that he reads Reddit every morning, but he called it  “not as useful as it used to be.”

After first searching Google News, Colbert said, he then hits Reddit to see what people are talking about.

“I used to feel like it was more stories, less memes,” he said. “Now it’s been consumed by Imgur photographic memes. You can still find it, though, so I’ll go to the news page or the politics page to find what I want there.”

Translation: The Reddit front page is useless, but, if you can wade through the crap, there's some good still to be found in certain subreddits.

You can hear him talk Reddit at 2:26.

If browsing the comment section on that site is any indication, the truest mark of a redditor is a deep and growing dislike of Reddit.

Screenshot via Dan Correla/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Holy casting, Batman! Is Jena Malone the new Robin?

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OK Batman fans, prepare yourselves: Jena Malone may be playing Robin in the upcomingBatman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Jena Malone, known best for her role as Johanna Mason in The Hunger Games, could be the first female Robin to hit the silver screen. Malone has been seen on the WB set sporting a new red hairdo, which may allude to a Carrie Kelley cameo.

She also posted an image of her fiery locks on her Instagram page.


This all comes from a report by local news station WILX-10 which caught up with an extra during the filming of Batman V Superman at Michigan State University. The anonymous extra, if caught, could face a $5 million dollar fine, in accordance to WB’s non-disclosure agreement.

Warning, the video below does detail some potential plot spoilers.

 

 

The film has been shrouded in intense mystery as director Scott Snyder has kept things very close to his chest. He has said that he has drawn a lot of information from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which featured the first female Robin. The film is set to launch March 25, 2016.

Variety | Image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Hey Twitter, please verify Carl Winslow already

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Twitter this week has been a veritable clusterfuck of awfulness: Between Gamergate and overblown Ebola panic, the microblogging service is a pit of despair. But have no fear, veteran television and film cop of my ‘90s nostalgia-induced dreams Reginald VelJohnson is here to save the day.

Lest you thought the Die Hard and Family Matters star had disappeared into obscurity after the last nasal strains of “Did I do that?” faded off the ABC airwaves, rest assured you’ve been missing out: VelJohnson’s Twitter feed is pure, wonderful, unmitigated bursts of hashtag-laden joy. Now, thanks in large part to a dedicated campaign by Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key of Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, he’s turning his 140-character act into a concerted mission: to get verified by the Twitter powers that be.

Despite being on Twitter since October of 2009, Twitter still hasn’t verified Vel Johnson, much to the chagrin of his near-4,000 followers. (Urkel, on the other hand, has 109,000 fans and a coveted blue check mark.) In the interim, perusing 367 tweets might be the best way to spend an afternoon.

We agree. #checkmark4reg

Screengrab via YouTube

You can become a Hollywood producer for $1—and that's how it should be

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In the crowdfunding school of filmmaking, the argument can be made that every donor is a producer—even if those donations generally earn you an appreciative tweet from the filmmakers at best. But a new film being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, Talk Is Cheap, is aiming to put its money where its mouth is by offering an official associate producer credit to every donor who contributes to the campaign.

The filmmakers behind Talk Is Cheap, a fictionalized account of one teenager’s mission to do something about climate change, launched a Kickstarter campaign two days ago, seeking to raise $1.5 million to produce the film. It’s a lofty goal that they’re hoping is buttressed by having Oscar-winning producer Barrie M. Osborne, one of the producers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix, and Face/Off, as their executive producer. The other sell? Giving an on-screen associate producer credit to every backer who donates even just $1. Rather than tier donation rewards up to the thousands of dollars range, the film has only three rewards: for $1, onscreen associate producer credit; for $15, the credit and a streaming copy of the film; and for $25—you guessed it—25 onscreen associate producer credits for 25 people of your choosing.

To put this into perspective, Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here Kickstarter campaign charged a minimum of $10 just to receive production updates from Braff throughout the shoot, whereas one of the priciest rewards, for $9,000, earned a mere onscreen credit that would read “Visual Effects Made Possible By” said donor. Similarly, the Veronica Mars film Kickstarter from Kristen Bell and director Rob Thomas offered a speaking role for the maximum $10,000 donation, but no producer credits to speak of at any donation level.

Deadline Hollywood was quick to panTalk Is Cheap’s gimmick—which, to be clear, is most definitely a gimmick to entice Hollywood hopefuls the chance to see their name (ever so briefly) in the lights—but ultimately, are Kickstarter backers not film producers by definition?

Hollywood has long been known to hand out producer credits to people for any variety of reasons. While executive producers are usually involved elbow-deep in almost all aspects of the development of the film, from concept to completion, lesser credits—those of coproducers, associate producers, supervising producers, and so on—can be handed out for a myriad of reasons (being a manager of one of the actors or writers of the film, being an junior executive who helped develop the film, offering some sort of financial contribution toward the film), the generally unifying reason being to placate the person being named. 

The Producers Guild of America is equally vague on what defines an associate producer. While an executive producer credit is very specifically delineated by the PGA—“an individual who has made a significant contribution to the motion picture and who additionally qualifies under one of two categories: having secured an essential and proportionally significant part (no less than 25%) of the financing for the motion picture, and/or having made a significant contribution to the development of the literary property”—an associate producer is by far much more discretionary, and ceremonial, a title.

The Associate Producer credit is granted solely on the decision of the individual receiving the Produced By credit, and is to be granted sparingly and only for those individuals who are delegated significant production functions.

At a $1.5 million campaign funding budget (at the time of publication, the film has earned only $8,457, but has another 28 days to go on its campaign), it’s clear that the filmmakers behind Talk Is Cheap aren’t handing out credits as "sparingly" as the PGA would advise—but there’s also nothing in the PGA constitution that reprimands them for handing out credits like they’re candy. While most producer credits come with some sort of profit participation, Talk Is Cheap has promised no such thing—and again, by PGA standards, isn’t under any requirement to do so.

Industry insiders like Deadline Hollywood can mock the trend and chalk it up to a cheap gimmick for a film that might not otherwise get funded, but really, what Talk Is Cheap is offering to its backers is no different from what other independent films that secure financing in the more traditional offline avenues of fundraising: a ceremonial title that is offered up as a thank-you. While Talk Is Cheap may be cutting through the backroom dealings that usually secure funding and producers, their Kickstarter donors are every bit as much producers for helping bring the film to fruition. Offering them onscreen credit shouldn’t be viewed as an aberration; it should instead become the norm for all crowdfunded films. 

Photo via Direitos Urbanos/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

Netflix has 40 classic Halloween episodes of your favorite TV shows

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Halloween is almost upon us, with many TV shows breaking out their annual ghosts and goblins for fun All Hallows Eve episodes. But in today's TV/internet landscape, you don't have to only rely on current TV. There are dozens of classic Halloween episodes available at your fingertips via Netflix. 

RELATED: 31 classic Halloween episodes and specials photos

Here's a handy guide to 40 Halloween episodes available on Netflix, with links to each episode for easy access. Happy haunting. 

American Horror Story: Halloween parts 1and 2

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Halloween, Fear Itself, All the Way

Cheers: House of Horrors With Formal Dining and Used Brick

Frasier: Halloween,Room Full of Heroes, Tales From the Crypt

Gilmore Girls: Twenty-One Is the Loneliest Number

Glee: The Rocky Horror Glee Show

Gossip Girl: The Handmaiden's Tale, How to Succeed in Bassness

Greek: Friday Night Fights

Grey's Anatomy: Haunt You Every Day

Hart of Dixie: The Undead & the Unsaid, Help Me Make It Through the Night

How I Met Your Mother: Slutty Pumpkin, The Slutty Pumpkin Returns

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Who Got Dee Pregnant?

The League: Ghost Monkey

New Girl: Halloween

The Office: Halloween, Costume Contest, Spooked, Here Comes Treble

Parks and Recreation: Greg Piktis, Meet 'n' Greet, Halloween Surprise

Pretty Little Liars: The First Secret, This is a Dark Ride, Grave New World

Psych: This Episode Sucks

Raising Hope: Happy Halloween

Supernatural:It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester

That '70s Show: Halloween, Too Old to Trick or Treat, Too Young to Die

The Vampire Diaries: Haunted, Masquerade, Monster's Ball

Illustration by Jason Reed

Russell Brand threatened with arrest for filming outside Fox News headquarters

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Actor and comedian Russell Brand was threatened with arrest for filming his show outside Fox News studios in New York City. Fortunately, the cameras were rolling.

Brand, who's reinvented his career as a anti-corporate, pro-democracy rabble-rouser, had a reason to film a segment for his YouTube news show, The Trews, outside of Fox's building. He was recently bumped from The Sean Hannity Show, he said, so he set up shop as close as he could get. Security, as you might imagine, didn't appreciate that, and threatened him with arrest.

Brand, cheeky as he is, instead goes inside the building and asks to see Hannity's studio and asks to "touch some stuff." Sadly, that request was denied.

 


Ohio State marching returns with a tribute to rock

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You’ve seen them turn into superheroes and dinosaurs. You’ve seen their Wizard of Oz homage. Now see the best marching band in college football (hailing from Ohio State Univeristy) show their appreciation for heavy rock riffs in a performance that put every Super Bowl halftime show to shame.

Half the fun here is not knowing what shape the group will take for a given band—Scorpions, the Rolling Stones, and The Edgar Winter Group all get their due—but we have to voice our love for the mechanical simulacrum that accompanies The Who’s “Pinball Wizard.”  

Man, I wanna march and blare all night—and rest my feet all day.

H/T WBNS-10TV | Photo Prayitno/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Author slammed for stalking negative reviewer

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Lest you think #Gamergate is the only industry scandal with paranoids trying to ruin one anothers’ lives under the guise of a quest for integrity, I direct you to this chilling Guardian essay by Kathleen Hale, a YA author who recounts her efforts to monitor, stalk, and ultimately unmask a pseudonymous book blogger who trashed her debut novel on a review site.

We’ve seen that even a mild critique from a reader can trigger a sequence of self-destruction that plays out online for everyone to see, but the one-star Goodreads review of No One Else Can Have You that sparked Hale’s obsession was less than civil by design: “Fuck this,” it begins. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.” Blasting the novel’s sexual politics and approach to matters of mental health, specifically PTSD, the blogger, a “Blythe Harris,” concludes that it’s one of the worst she’s read in her life.

It’s posts like that that have landed Blythe, as Hale soon discovered, on a list of so-called Goodreads bullies, reviewers of varying influence who have been known to engage in flamewars with authors they don’t like—at least when those authors take the bait. Hale, though repeatedly warned of this trap, walked, um, blithely into it, choosing to cyberstalk rather than block her tormentor, who began to wage a Twitter campaign against her as well.

“I prowled Blythe’s Instagram and Twitter,” Hale writes. “I read her reviews, considered photos of her baked goods and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox—at one point bragging she was the only person she knew who used her real name and profession online.” Then, encouraged by a mounting suspicion that “Blythe” was an alias used by someone who had lied about her age, appearance, and job, she contrived to get hold of her address and finally traveled there to confront her in person, because only the pop-psych formula of MTV’s Catfish could give her closure. That didn’t pan out, and a phone conversation with the accused troll yielded few answers.

In the Guardian piece, of course, Hale effectively doxes Blythe, releasing details of her employment, personal life, and identity. She also questions her own sanity or common sense throughout, and half-jokingly tweeted that both she and Blythe were “bananas.” This helped her position with supporters and weakened it with detractors, who lined up to review-bomb No One Else Can Have You as well as Hale’s forthcoming second book, Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen, which won’t hit shelves until next year. It didn’t help that the piece ran on a major news site, a factor some saw as symptomatic of mainstream literary culture’s disdain for Goodreads’ self-appointed book critics.


At issue, as ever, is the fractious, fluid, and Internet-enabled relationship between authors and whatever fandom they’re ostensibly writing for; these literary micro-scandals most often erupt when bullying becomes a two-way street. There’s a sick codependence of victimhood that unites a site like Stop the Goodreads Bullies—which has propped up authors who lashed out at reviewers—and bloggers who have savaged those same “Badly Behaving Authors,” at times mobilizing for boycotts over some “unprofessional” rudeness either slight or imagined.

Clearly both sides have vindictive members who see themselves as defenders of ethical discourse. The lone thing all involved agree upon is that “everyone is entitled to their opinion.” What’s at stake is how, when, where, and why that opinion is imparted, and the range of acceptable reactions. (Goodreads, as Hale notes, continually cautions authors not to comment on negative criticism, even in a civil tone, as it rarely leads to anything good, and authors who weigh in on their contemporaries’ dust-ups do so at their peril.)

In this case, many observers found Blythe’s campaign of online abuse overshadowed by Hale’s fixation with her, and the lengths she went to in expanding it. The story echoed another Hale published last year on Thought Catalog: As a 14-year-old, she explains, she stalked and accosted a girl her age, dumping a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on her head as revenge for a claim of molestation she’d leveled against Hale’s mother. Following the attack, Hale continued to keep tabs on her via AOL Instant Messenger, and tried to make contact again.

“It’s me,” I typed. “Could you please just tell me why you did it?” My palms itched. It said that she was typing, but then it didn’t. So I sent a few clarifying messages. […] I was at my dad’s house that night but somehow they still found me. About an hour after I chatted her, there was a knock on the front door. I looked out my bedroom window to see a cop on our stoop. I tucked my nightgown into my sweatpants and shuffled downstairs. My stepmom was already there, chatting with the officer. She gave me a look. “You know that girl has bigger problems than you do,” she snapped, and left me to talk to the policeman.

So: two people significantly invested in their online reputations and, with a common history of allowing the Internet to fuel their worst instincts, became entangled in a petty dispute that took on more sinister dimensions. Whatever the damage, both emerge better-known—more liable to be heard, as Hale describes their mutual desire—with a new posse of fans in their corner. And the great conflicted beast that is publishing lumbers on.

Photo by Mark Roy/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

A YouTube vlogger is giving a classic TV show a new lease on life

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As America’s Funniest Home Videos enters its 25th year of seeing men getting smacked in the groin by a baseball bat and wedding parties going berzerk doing the Electric Slide, its creators (correctly) figured it was time to bring the program into the current millennium by adding a Web twist in the form of a companion YouTube presence.

Enter Shay Butler, better known to millions of adoring Web video fans as Shay Carl, the pied piper of family vlogs. Shay takes the YouTube vlog craze fairly seriously: He has vlogged about his life and family every day for the past 2,000-plus days. That’s about six years, for those counting.

Shay has become an icon in the world of consumer-generated video, chronicling pretty much everything he and his family do in their daily lives. What started off as something of a video diary, though, has expanded into a series of channels anchored by ShayCarl and Shaytards with 1.3 and 3.7 million subscribers respectively. YouTube’s latter-day Orson Welles recently started a video channel/weight-loss challenge which attracted more than 470,000 subscribers in a matter of days.

Shay now hopes to bring his trademark Web spice to the reboot of AFV, which debuted a new season in early October on ABC. Every Sunday for 17 weeks, Shay and his six-member clan will post a five-minute clip on YouTube, the goal of which is to create the link between the digital and broadcast versions of the show. The secondary goal, of course, is to attract the kind of young YouTube audience that is already watching Shay to the staid broadcast TV program.

As the digital face of AFV, Shay will be wearing many hats—including one made of toilet paper. To get home viewers involved, the head Shaytard shows folks how to make a toilet paper chapeau and then invites us to upload our video creations to the AFV YouTube channel.

The AFV gig is a natural fit for Shay, who is also one of the founders of Maker Studios. “Just like everyone else, we’d lounge around on Sunday until it was time for the show was on,” Shay told the Daily Dot. “It showed me that you could be on TV without being famous. That influenced how I got into vlogging.”

The official YouTube companion piece appears to be a mashup of sorts. In the first episode, Shay pulls an AFV clip out of the vault and decides to re-enact it. The gag involves setting up some caramel apples and asking his three kids to race and see who can finish theirs the quickest. The loser, he says, will get thrown off the balcony. In another setting, that would be deemed horrific, but not if you know (and appreciate) Shay’s zany/offbeat sense of humor. The kicker is that the apples are actually onions; the visual gag involves watching his kids’ reactions as they bite into the stinky vegetables.

The clip goes a little sideways after the apple switcheroo shtick: It concludes with Shay and his kids watching an old AFV video of dogs playing with little kids. Clearly, this YouTube venture is a work in progress.

Shay’s AFV tie-in is only part of the show’s digital reinvention plan. Digital stars like comedians Jason Horton, Ceciley Jenkins, and Ed Bassmaster will be reenacting some of the show’s memorable clips in AFV Do Overs, putting their spin on some of the show’s most beloved segments. Their videos will air one week before the show premiere on the AFV YouTube channel.

And in case you’re still scratching your head, the four hosts of AFV have been Bob Saget, Daisy Fuentes, John Fugelsang, and Tom Bergeron. Don’t tell anyone, but Shay’s secret desire is to be number five.

Screengrab via Maker Studios

John Oliver mocks Supreme Court's camera ban with cute animals

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The Supreme Court is surely going to the dogs—at least if John Oliver has anything to say about it.

In Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight, Oliver took on the Supreme Court for its archaic practice of banning cameras in the court chamber. The Court does release audio of its proceedings, which TV newscasts usually pair with painted scenes of oral arguments. While it works, the portraits don’t do the Justices justice.

Oliver's remedy might have taken a long time to put together, but we think you'll agree that it was so, so worth it: Last Week Tonight provides stock footage of dogs dressed as the Supreme Court justices and TV news stations can add the audio.

Oliver only needed a few scenes to completely justify the bit, but he did one better: He released all of the footage online to allow anyone to recreate major court cases. The Internet has already gone to work. Meanwhile, the rest of us can enjoy nearly 11 minutes of pure, unedited SCOTUS dogs. That Sam Alito in particular is one to watch.

Image via Last Week Tonight with John Oliver/YouTube

This music video made on 14 iPhones and iPads is a work of magic

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Take 14 Apple screens, probable multiple failures, and incredible precision and coordination, and you’ve got yourself a miraculous music video.

The Ukrainian band Brunettes Shoot Blondes released a music video for their single “Knock Knock,” and it’s nothing short of stunning. While the storyline itself, in which a suitor chases a woman after it looks like she doesn’t want to speak to him, is fairly creepy, the animation is incredible to watch.

Not only did it involve starting nine devices at the same time at the beginning, the people coordinating it had to move the devices to the right place at the right time lest everything fall apart. It’s nothing short of sorcery.

The music video came out last month, but it’s getting resurgence after Art Fido reposted the video over the weekend.

Photo via Brunettes Shoot Blondes/YouTube

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