When You’re In Trouble, Go Into Your Dance

By Less Lee Moore

Shortly before last Christmas, fellow pop culture enthusiast and Popshifter writer Chelsea Spear sent me a link to a YouTube video and referred to it as ” HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE MOST FACE-MELTINGLY AWESOME THING EVAR.” (This is a direct quote.)

Without even questioning her expert judgment, I clicked and found the oddly-named but utterly mesmerizing “Prisencolinensinainciusol.”
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Killing The Language Of Cinema?

By Less Lee Moore

The recent launch of Movieclips.com, a website featuring “over 12,000 movie clips” that one can “search, find, view, discuss and share scenes from” seems like a great idea. From a practical standpoint, trying to find YouTube movie clips can be challenging as they are often taken down due to copyright infringement issues. (Movieclips has the express permission of several of the major studios to showcase these clips.)

On the other hand, why would we need a site like Movieclips.com (or movie clips on YouTube, for that matter)?
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You Only Die Twice: Casey Johnson Died For Your Tweets

By Emily Carney

It’s only six days into 2010, and already we’ve been forced to endure the dumbest hype over a celebrity death ever. Casey Johnson, the openly gay Johnson & Johnson heiress who has recently gained headlines for committing grand theft and getting engaged to (of all people) Internet “celebrity” Tila Tequila, was found dead in her residence on the morning of January 4 due to (guess what?) “natural causes.”
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Become A Published Author: Make A Comment

By Hanna

In a lot of “end of the year” lists for 2009, Twitter was listed as the Internet trend or website of the year. Another contender was Facebook, which has amusingly been included in “trends that won’t return next year” for about five years now. Although to most people who spend a lot of time online, Twitter had its trendy moment a few years back, and Facebook’s was around 2005, there remains this insistence that quite a lot of the Internet is just part of a fad or a trend.
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Do They Know It’s MIDI?

By Less Lee Moore

Since after nearly thirty years I still remain somewhat obsessed with Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single (despite how ridiculously offensive it is), naturally I was overjoyed when Megashaun pointed me in the direction of this MIDI version of the song.
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Record Stores Died For Somebody’s Sins (But Not MySpace’s)

Pretty In Pink, 1986
Screencap from Striped Wall

The new millennium has become the Battle of the Social Networking Websites. Which one you prefer depends upon how you utilize each one. As much as Facebook fans may bitch that MySpace is ugly and user-unfriendly, when people want to hear what a band sounds like, they usually go to MySpace.
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Toothpaste For Dinner: An Interview With Drew, Humorist

By Adam McIntyre

Drew and Natalie Dee are a husband and wife duo, creators of a handful of well-known webcomics. I discovered them through their joint creation, Married To The Sea, which updates with a new comic at midnight—every night. Their webcomics—and now videos on YouTube—often become viral Internet phenomena. I had a chat with Drew about the nature of their work and where it may be headed.
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All The Time In The World

“Every age is the same.
It’s only love that makes any of them bearable.”
Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, from Time After Time (1979)

“I started collecting records when I was five years old.” I can say this with total honesty. However, I’m actually quoting part of the Keynote Address at the Grammy Northwest MusicTech Summit, given by Ian C. Rogers on November 6, 2008.
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Kings of the Wild Frontier: An Analysis of Music-Related Halloween Costumes

By Hanna

Every music nerd knows dressing up is serious business. Halloween is the big night for us to pull out the stops on our [insert favorite obscure artist here] costume, and gives us a chance to show it off outside of gigs and poorly lit clubs in the harsh light of the work and family circle.
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The Days of Future-Past

“He had been a tool in their hands, his childhood image had been used as bait to condition him, he had lived up to their expectations, he had played his part. Now he only waited to be liquidated with, somewhere inside him, the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time.”
—From La Jetée, written and directed by Chris Marker, 1962

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