I’m getting tired of coming up with names for these things.

Can you tell?

Links, mine at end, yadda yadda.

First up, two videos about the same subject that dropped into my browser completely separate from one another.

There’s this clever little skit :

(warning : EXTREMELY NSFW dialogue!!! Earphones, people!)

Very nice, did not see that punchline coming at all. It’s so rare to see a skit that relies so much on structure these days. Most people are not up to writing and producing that kind of thing. It takes a lot more skill and control than just getting together with your friends and doing goofy shit.

Even decent skitcom tends to hedge its bets with gags before the punchline of the skit… and all too often, after the punchline too. How sad.

But these people laid down a well-timed, well-planned, well-executed skit that is not funny until the end, but builds brilliantly to its, shall we say, climax.

And I love some of the little details. Putting a book on the beach guy’s crotch was genius, makes it seem way pornier without actually showing anything.

And speaking of Beach Guy, it was also brilliant to include that guy’s parents. Friends might approve. Even lovers or significant others might understand, in time.

But you know damned well that your dear sainted parents never figured on you becoming a porn star.

Thank goodness it’s HBO!

Sadly, though, the world of explicit sex on HBO is apparently not nearly as wonderful as it sounds, at least according to these ladies.

Seriously, HBO? No dongs? All that crazy assed sex I have heard about in Game of Thrones, and nobody has seen the actual peen? You are blocking the cock? You think it’s cleaner without the wiener?

You guys just lost major cool points with me.

Look, I am not looking for porn. There’s plenty of porn on the Internet, if you hadn’t heard. You name it, it’s out there. Anything you can imagine and a lot of things you’d rather not.

I just want there to be places to go that are free of the public neurosis of erotophobia and can therefore let their writers run free and tell whatever sort of story they want.

And I thought that was you, HBO. But now I hear that you share the public’s fear of what half the population of the world had between their legs?

And make no mistake about it, to the censors and the squeamish people they protect, the penis is the filthiest, more horrible thing in the world. And do you know why?

Because this is still a male-dominated society and for completely fucked inside out homophobic reasons, every straight man has to evince massive disgust for all penises that are not their own in order to prove they aren’t gay. Because doing the exact opposite of what a gay guy would do has to be super-not-gay, right?

Don’t give in to this madness, HBO. Let the dongs fly. If that makes legions of straight male nerds squirm in their seat and make puking sounds, so be it.

It just means they are in need of desensitization.

Next vidya is of Costa Rica, also know as Liberal Paradise, and their ultra-genius solution to the problem of having too many stray dogs in the pound.

Caso: Territorio de Zaguates from GARNIER BBDO on Vimeo.

And when I say genius, I mean it. A simple and low-cost exercise in rebranding, and suddenly every mutt in the world is actually its own exclusive microbreed.

They took a very negative word that lumped together all dogs which do not happen to be racially pure^[arf] (as though that’s a good thing) and turned it instead into a mark of exclusivity and uniqueness which raises the value of the animal from “trash” to “treasure” in people’s eyes.

And the dogs don’t care. They just want homes!

And I sincerely hope that all those people breeding hopelessly inbred and diseased “purebred” animals that will lead lives of pain and disability just to satisfy someone’s fetish for genetic purity see this video, see that these people are attacking the very concept of a purebred dog, and get really good and mad about it.

Oh sure, you can have your purebred Cavalier King Charles Spaniel…. if you want to have the same dog as dozens if not hundreds of other people.

My dog, on the other hand, is a one-off original and truly expresses my vastly superior wealth and status.

Take that, you goddamn dog Nazis!

Oh god… it just occurred to me. This can only lead to one place : Designer dogs.

Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts, doggies.

And lastly, of course, my little ol vidya of the day.

It’s another piece of music, but I did what I could to spice up the visuals this time.

See? You can either just listen to the music, and not miss anything of substance, or watch the video, and get some colorful (and how) visuals to tickle your eyeballs.

I am fairly happy with how the piece turned out. It’s really two songs with a bridge between them, but I am happy with both of them and glad I am progressive as a composer.

The second part, the Grind movement, took the longest to compose because I just could not seem to find the right instrument to use for the melody.

I only solved that problem by writing the melody with a simple synth sound first, and only then going to find the right instrument for it.

Same with the Pluck Movement too, sorta. You should have heard my first version of that, it was ghastly. Sounded like something a ghost bartender would play in a saloon in Hell.

But it got the melody down, and when I came back to it later, I was able to find a much nicer sounding instrument. Add a little echo, and voila.

This music stuff is fun!

I seem to have come across a number of somewhat Furry themed things lately, so I figured it was time to best my browser (why does being online feel like war lately?) and share them with you.

First, we have this marvelous collection of animated GIFs that feature foxes doing what they do best, namely being completely adorable.

Here are my faves :

There’s this all time classic.

Take that…. snow!

What you are seeing is the quite cunning but somewhat lacking in dignity way foxes hunt in the winter. They know there is plenty of prey living in tunnels under the snow, so they stand very very still and let their excellent hearing lock in on the sounds of their next meal under the snow, and then dive into the snow hoping to come up with a mouthful of snack.

And then there’s this situation that could have been scripted by Disney himself : foxes on a trampoline.

Suddenly, POUNCE POWER BOOST!

It’s nice to know that some things are universal to all species, and that one of those things is the inherent awesomeness of a trampoline.

And lastly, there is this extraordinary image.

Turns out turning into a meatloaf is not just a cat thing.

Foxes are cute even when they got no legs!

Or rather, when they do an impression of a car that has had all its wheels stolen. They do that by tucking their legs up under themselves and hunkering down so that their fur completely covers them.

Must be might cozy in the winter. But at home, it just looks like your fox got jacked.

Next, we have a book that combines two things I never would have thought I would find together : anthro animals and the study of logic.

It’s called “An Illustrated Book Of Bad Arguments”, and while the art style is quite brutally ugly, I still really enjoyed reading it.

I took a Practical Logic course in university, and loved every minute of it. Finally, proof that other people cared about that sort of thing and that I was not just a lone voice of reason crying in the wilderness of bewildered ignorance!

And while I trust my own intuition as a guide to logical analysis more than I trust formal terms someone else thought up, I really enjoyed having categories and labels for things I had only intuited before.

The book does a very good job of explaining the classic fallacies, although I must say that sometimes the illustrations don’t illustrate the point very well.

And if there is one thing the Internet needs, it’s help with logic. People misapply the terms for the classic fallacies willy-nilly, and therefore anything that might help bring clarity to online discussions instead of having them subside in a fog of confusion and half-understood ideas is quite welcome.

Some of us, when we discuss things, are actually looking to learn from others’ perspectives and maybe even struggle towards the truth.

The rest of you can go yell at each other on television.

The next animal in our little zoo is this heavily furry-themed music video.

WARNING : This has no happy ending. It is, in fact, quite dark and disturbing. At no point does a hero rise to save our poor protagonist. It ends very badly for him.

Just so you know.

Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty damned cool. They used the anthro animals to support a metaphorical treatment of what it is like to be a hated outcast in any society, and I think it really works.

And it was brilliant to make our protagonist a zebra, who is therefore both black AND white. That makes the message more universal than if it had been a creature we could more easily pigeonhole (so to speak).

The actual song that this is the video for is nothing terribly special. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it just sounds like a lot of other things.

But I like the video, which cannot have been cheap to make. So many scenes, so many costumes, so many sets and props, so many extras…. all that adds up to serious cash.

To me, of course, it was all worth it. I love this rise of furry imagery in popular culture. It’s such a rich vein of visual language and potent metaphors that really reach deep into our hearts.

It’s not just about fucking any more!™

Finally, we have my thing for today, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with anthro animals, furry, or even music this time.

It’s a talker.

Bur at least I added little bits of snarky text to keep things from becoming totally visually boring. It was very tempting to just put it up there after the primary edit plus adding the intro and outro. But I have done that too much lately and it makes for an inferior product.

As fascinating and compelling as I find myself, I know that I need to put more into a video than just me sitting there talking. That’s a video you listen to, not watch.

And in a perfect world, my talker videos would be jam packed with illustrations, info-bits, and other herbs and spices to make them more of a total audio-visual experience, like what we expect from television and movies. But I don’t have that kind of energy, at least, not yet.

I totally undersand why Internet superstars like Yahtzee or CGPGrey don’t put out videos every day like I do. Sure, the talking part is not all that hard. It’s the finding or generating enough pictures to fill up all that time that drives you crazy.

Compared to that, the talking about something interesting part is a breeze.

In a truly perfect world, I would be able to just hire someone to find all those pictures for me and only have to do the easy bit that I am totally good at.

But that’s the dream of all Talent, don’t you think?

Seeya tomorrow people.

I messed about with music again today.

I think I will stop using that as a way to do a day’s video,though.

I am never happy with the results.

I need more time to make the really good stuff!

There was a serious thunderstorm here on Lulu Island today. But it was during the day, so no visible lightning. What a waste.

Anyhow, as per usual, I got stuff to share.

Like this instant it-video of this week, called Ask A Slave.

It’s a brilliant idea for some fairly low overhead web content. It’s generally pretty hard to milk the age of slavery for laughs without coming across as racist or at least incredibly insensitive, but this actress has nailed it hard.

And it mines its laughter from one of the most primal forms of comedy ever : stupidity. Even little kids laugh at stupidity, although admittedly, the bar is set pretty low for them.

But this is stupidity that requires knowledge and understanding to appreciate, which of course makes it comedy caviar for the Internet set. And her sense of humour seals the deal, of course.

Personally, I would have answered the question about how she got the job as George Washington’s maid with “His wife bought me. ” and left it at that.

But that is just me being a nitpicky comedy bitch. It’s great stuff and I am sure it will get loads of hits, at least until they run out of stupid questions to answer.

And what are the odds of that?

Next, we have this intriguing if somewhat contrived seemed flick.

It has a bit of that same feeling of contrivance as all the other historical continuity porn books and movies coming out now. Let’s take a bunch of famous people from (marvelously public domain) history and have them all meet and fight crime and solve mysteries and eat Scooby Snacks.

And that is growing a tad tiresome. Individually, I might be interested in these things, but when it becomes a genre, it becomes a cliche, and when it is historical rather than fictional characters, it just makes me irritated at the silly self-indulgent mental masturbation of it all.

People who produce media based on actual history have a duty to stick fairly close to the facts because, like it or not, a movie about history will be how a lot of people learn their history and if they see it happen before their eyes, that will be the version of history they will imagine.

Sure, lots of people can tell you how inaccurate the movie 300 is. Heck, even I knew they got a bunch of things wrong and I am no history nerd.

But because it was the first many people had heard of these events, and because it was so colorful and vivid up there on the screen, and definitely because most people are not going to go and look up the real Battle of Thermopylae on wikipedia to get the REAL Story, it will still be the version people remember and believe, even though they know, intellectually, that it’s a work of fiction.

Still, the premise of Murder Your Darlings looks interesting. I might give it a go when it reaches Netflix in a couple of years.

Next up, we have another video that is red hot right now, but not for the same reason as Ask A Slave.

It’s hot because it has two main attributes that the Internet loves : it’s weird, and it’s awful.

Well, the chorus is awful. The rest of the song is merely odd and slightly offputting the way anything European tends to be. There is always that sense of an underlying strangeness to things like this, a very subtle Uncanny Valley effect, and having them be done in quite good English only make it weirder.

After all, the Uncanny Valley only kicks in when things are almost right.

Nevertheless, sans the mind-fracturing chorus, this song would seem to be made for me. It’s all about foxes and how beautiful and mysterious we they are, and how can I argue with that?

But the horrible noises that are “what the fox say” utterly ruin it for me. I am no naturalist but I do know a thing or two about foxes and that is totally NOT what we they say, okay?

Mostly, foxes make small dog noises, with a few unique vocalizations from the same general category thrown in to show off their sophistication.

We need some high quality animal content to balance out that terrible anti-fox slander.

Luckily, I have an animated GIF that will melt your heart.

And lo, the rat shall cuddle up to the kitten, and the people shall squee.

Awwwww! Best of friends.

And speaking of best friends, here’s Man’s Best Friend, helping out.

I bet he does a perfect Downward Dog.

And finally, of course, we have my vid du jour. Today, it is political. And not just political, but actually dealing with current events while they are still current!

I know, it feels weird to be too. I am almost never as specific as that!

I pretty much cover the subject there. Like I say in the text at the end, I have not actually made up my mind about whether this whole Syria action is a good idea or not.

I just want some more information, information from sources other than the people trying (and failing) to sell this war to us.

One thing I have figured out : seeing as this is a civil war and not a straight up regime change, it is perfectly possible for the Americans to win the war for the rebels without ever declaring war or sending a single soldier to the region.

After all, if the Americans decimate Assad’s forces with missiles and bombs and drones, and continue to arm the rebels, the rebels will ave a vital “not being bombed into atoms by the Americans” advantage in the struggle and likely win.

And that would be ideal for all concerned (except the Assad family) because that way, at least on paper, the people successfully overthrew their horrible dictator, and thence seize control of their own government, and nobody has to occupy anyone even for a moment.

That is easier, cheaper, simpler, more democratic, more humanitarian, and above all a hell of a lot more efficient than anything done in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It might even be the pattern for the future.

And regime change is going to have to keep happening, so we might as well get good at it.