Link Round-Up: Audio and Video Treats

Various pleasures for your eyes, ears and twitchy fingers:

  • Via BoingBoing,
    a great,
    hyper-speed Beatles mashup
    featuring over 40 Fab Four tunes. Why are the
    Beatles featured in so many popular mashups? I guess it’s a whole medium-is-the-message
    thing, where they provide a cultural baseline for other artists. Mind you,
    this is all Beatles, so that logic doesn’t really apply.
  • Hurray for Boulderdash!
    One of the earliest graphical games I played on my IBM PC.
  • I recently read about this crazy, 23-member, band-cum-cult called Polyphonic
    Spree
    . They look and sound a bit like the Rheostatics meet the cast of
    Hair. Here’s an
    article
    about them.
  • Tetris.
    Just Tetris.
  • This
    robot can run
    . It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’m thinking it’ll be another
    10 or 15 years before it’s running into the beachhouse to get me some sunblock.

6 comments

  1. Kind of a tangent, but since you brought up audio, I’ve been meaning to ask you…

    A while back you posted about signing up with a Russian MP3 website. I wonder if you have continued to use it, and if so, do you still recommend it?

    [side tangent, when I tried to search for the post, I got redirected to the top page of Google instead of getting any search results… I’m surfing with Netscape 7.1 on a Windows98 machine, so maybe it’s my fault…]

  2. Indeed, the search got b0rked with the redesign. I’ve fixed it now.

    As for the Russians, you’re referring to allofmp3.com. They’ve doubled their prices, which still makes them about 10 times cheaper than iTunes et al. Plus, as far as I can tell, they haven’t defrauded me in any way. So, while I don’t use them that much, I’m very happy with them.

  3. You asked why the Beatles. They kind of make sense as fodder for Mashups. Wasn’t the term “recording artist” basically invented for these guys? They were “early adopters” as far as playing around with the medium in the studio…

  4. Polyphonic Spree performed this year at the MTV Video Music Awards. They were the only performance of the night that showed a single sign of being musical. They knew how to do little things like sing. Carry a tune. Find harmony. And melody. It’s rare on MTV today, which is too busy bumping and grinding and screaming and rhyming to no effect.

    And, yes, they look like a cast of hippies doing it.

    Thanks for reminding me about them. I do need to pick up their CD.

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