We do it #ForTheCultrs
If you can read this, you’re on the internet. These articles cover everything from Tumblr to Steamed Hams.
It’s the DuckTales theme song but key phrases are replaced with the word “duck“. It’s still but it’s ducking hilarious and I’ll duck any excuse to listen to the DuckTales theme song because it ducks hard.
Work can be long, hard, and boring (heh!) but when you put your mind to it and you’ve been doing it for a while, you can do it quickly and efficiently. The video above demonstrates amazing craftsmanship and attention to detail from builders, mechanics, gardeners, and a sheep shearer.
As a way to feed my nostalgia habit (and an act of self-care because the world is always on fire in some way), I watch old adverts from the 90s. It reminds me of my childhood and I can revisit adverts or products I’ve not heard of for decades. They also act as mini time capsules for brands and products that are no longer with us.
The above videos show some of those defunct brands and products from the UK, ranging from one2one (originally Mercury One2One, then becoming one2one, then rebranding as T-Mobile UK, then merging with Orange as Everything Everywhere, and finally becoming EE. Phew!) to Dollond & Aitchison (the opticians), the Goldfish credit card (later bought by Barclaycard), and Tandy.
I posted about a Hey Arnold! quiz a few days ago and there’s another one, related to Cartoon Network characters and their catchphrases.
I only got 6/10 this time. I blame a lack of Cartoon Network viewing between 1995-2014 as I didn’t see some of the shows that were referenced.
Try it yourself and let me know how you did in the comments.
Thanks to the folks at Brain Fall for sending over this cool Hey Arnold! quiz. You get 10 questions to find out which Hey Arnold! character you are.
I actually got Arnold which was surprising (I really wanted to get Gerald).
Try the quiz yourself and let me know in the comments who you got! (FYI: There’s a survey request at the end you can reject if you just want to skip to the result)
Found this on Pinterest while looking for a Simpsons title screen generator (it was a Hail Mary search). This one works really well: you type in your chosen text in the text box and click Generate Image. Here are some I made earlier:
Bespoke search engines are everywhere and as a search engine optimiser (that’s my day job), I love this kind of stuff. Flim follows in the footsteps of Frinkiac and Filmgrab but with a key difference: AI.
FLIM is the answer to the statement: images are everywhere, movies, TV, music-clips, internet. Images are needed at every creative process level. From Fashion to design, via cinema and music video. To meet that need, Dan PEREZ (C.E.O. of Flim) started in 2011 a website « ffffilm.com ». This site collect screenshots from movies. The FLIM’s ancestor had 50 000 monthly users and more than 30 000 screenshots library. This experience is absolutely clear: there is an empty space for iconographic searching.
Flim’s database has over 300,000 screenshots from movies, TV shows, music videos, and loads more. Each one is categorised by media type, director, director of photography, style, and release date but here’s where the AI comes in: it can detect things like clothing, characters, identified colours, and objects. So if you searched for “table”, you’d get screenshots like this:
That’s a lot of tables. I also tried a manual colour search (magenta, although you can search by colour using Flim’s dedicated swatch search feature) and it worked really well.
Is a hot dog a sandwich? Xavier Woods doesn’t think so but New York State Department of Taxation and Finance does. And then the idea evolved into Twitter conversations and eventually, The Cube Rule of Food Identification:
identify any food purely by the location of structural starch
Compelling arguments are made for a variety of foods including pizza (toast), sushi (also toast), toast (which is actually a sandwich), and hot dogs (which are, apparently, tacos). The logic behind it all would make a philosopher weep with hunger but it’s very interesting to think about *hits blunt*
Memes like this are why I love the internet so much. Jokes aside, I can see Disney and Pixar rinsing out the Toy Story franchise until the 2040s. It’d tie in with Buzz Lightyear and whatever advanced technology we’ll have by then.
This almost feels like archival inception and that’s honestly the best kind of inception to me.
archives.design is a digital archive of design-related items from the Internet Archive, curated by Valery Marier. She runs the site in her free time. Naturally, the site itself is beautifully crafted and seeing all the covers on a digital shelf in all their glory is exquisite.
Submit an item to the collection by emailing Valery at info@archives.design.
You might have heard about the fool who cemented his head into a microwave. The emergency services in Wolverhampton wasted an hour getting the man’s head out. As pranks go, it was an idiotic one and I won’t say anything more than that. But it got me thinking – could you actually make cement in a microwave? After a YouTube search, I found a how-to guide for making concrete in a microwave but not the classic grey stuff.
The video above demonstrates how to make concrete in a microwave using sand cornstarch and water. Enjoy (and don’t be a fool when you do it)!
Some background info:
In 2016, YouTuber Lizzy Wurst posted a video called WORLDS HOTTEST PEPPER CHALLENGE (GONE WRONG) – CAROLINA REAPER PEPPER – 2.2 MILLION SCOVILLE UNITS. It has over 20m views at the time of writing and features Lizzy with her friend Sabrina trying the Carolina Reaper challenge (related to but not the same as the One Chip Challenge that ProZD and LGR did.
The original video is around 4 minutes long as shows the natural and devastating effects of the pepper as it destroys both challengers, particularly Sabrina who did not cope well. But it’s the edited version that I saw first and the cuts make it even funnier.
Let’s do a quick analysis:
I can’t feel sympathy for anyone who knowingly takes this challenge on and suffers the consequences. As my mother would say, ‘if you cannot hear, you must feel’.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures but Catfish was a rare exception. Even though I know it’s predominately fake and mostly for clout-chasing, it was still wild, messy, dramatic and fun. Now we’re getting a UK version, co-hosted by Julie Adenuga, and she spoke to gal-dem’s Adwoa Darko about the show and romance.
The presenter wants viewers to watch the show through an empathetic lens. “Anyone I said ‘I’m hosting catfish, UK’ to, their first reaction was ‘oh my gosh, it’s gonna be so funny’. That’s their first reaction. And I look at them,” she says before pausing. “These are real emotions.” She also understands how the road to dating someone is often paved with half-truths as she’s had a few people lie to her about knowing her two brothers without knowing she’s related to them (“now you look like the biggest clown of all time”).
We all learnt the rules of the game from Nev: reverse Google image search people if you’re unsure, video call them, ignore people with only one picture because it’s 2021 and everyone has a camera phone. However, through working on the show Julie reveals she’s learnt a new one: “Tagged photos really became our friends. We’ve had profiles sometimes when we see they’ve got 2,000 followers and only one person has tagged you. What’s going on there?”
Bad times for Adwoa, though, who opened the interview with an admission: she had been catfished.
gal-dem: Lets start with the fact that I was catfished
Julie Adenuga: When did this happen?
I met this guy from Ghana right. I was thinking ‘rah we’re gonna do up Kente get ready’. He said he’s single and later he drops that he has kids and an ex-wife that has gone off and married somebody else, and the kids are in Ghana. We go on the date and this man is doing the most, he’s like toasting to us and I’m thinking ‘rah is this me yeah?’
No one has ever toasted to us. This is live.
Read the rest of the interview to find out what happened and stream the Catfish UK promo below.
I watched Hellraiser for the first time a few weeks ago and fell down a very dark and sadistic rabbit hole as I watched the next two sequels (II was very good, III was not). But the common denominator from both films was Doug Bradley aka Pinhead (and, as a brilliant Freudian slip, I initially wrote that as demoninator).
The British actor spoke to Elliott Fullam of Little Punk People about his life, his roles as Pinhead, and what his vision of Hell was. I loved this interview because it cut out all the rubbish you often get with celebrity interviews. The questions were clear and interesting, and so were the answers. No bullshit.
Today, I am tired. And it’s 5 years since Prince died. But we move and videos like this help 💜