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ridleykemp · 3 years

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Bass YouTube is Best YouTube

So, what have I been up to while this place was collecting cobwebs? Mostly house things, a lot of medical stuff, no small amount of avoiding doing stuff I’m supposed to do, and, when there was time, I watched a lot of YouTube, which is something I’ve never done before.

I’ve been missing out.

I’ve been complaining for years about the lack of a la carte television and I’ve known the whole time that you can find pretty much anything you want on YouTube, but I never it together. Nicole, on the other hand, has been on this forever and I suspect she thinks it’s cute that I’m just now coming around. Not for the first time, if I’m being honest.

Anyway, I wanted to share some of the channels that I’ve found to be the most fun.

Music and, most importantly, bass: Adam Neely: Adam’s channel was my gateway to music YouTube. He’s a pretty theory heavy dude, but I find him informative and funny and he’s a heck of a communicator. He’s one of the proponents of bass guitar as the greatest instrument and that’s a bit I can’t help but respect. As much as I enjoyed the chugga chugga choo choo episode, I’d start with The Worst Jazz Solo of All Time.

Davie504: With almost 10m subscribers, Davie504 isn’t terribly obscure, but if you’re not familiar with him, this is your wake-up call. He’s an incredibly silly Italian bassist who is aces at creating a character, staying in character, and making terrific videos. You’d think the joke would wear thin, but it hasn’t yet for me. Oh, and kind of surprisingly, he can really play, too. I’d start with Can I Play the Top Basslines of All Times?

Samuraiguitarist: Easily my favorite Canadian country guitarist. Sammy G is at his best when talking about gear and technique, which is a nice break from some of the more theory-heavy channels I watch. He’s near the top of the list of “YouTube personalities I think I’d enjoy in real life.” Start with Testing Gimmicky Guitar Gadgets.

12Tone: Speaking of theory-heavy, this is one of the best channels out there for making music theory interesting and fun. His deal is making doodles that go along with what he’s talking about and there are all kinds of neat Easter eggs in them. He gets a little salty sometimes too, which is a lot of fun. If you’re into that sort of thing, go check out: Why Ben Shapiro Is Wrong About Rap.

Espen Kraft: Espen Kraft IS the 80s. He’ll tell you as much, too. He’s a musician/producer/gearhead after my own heart and he lives for making 80s style music with 80s gear. It’s great fun if you remember the 80s, which is something I most definitely do. While if it were me, I’d go straight to him talking about my beloved DW-8000, maybe start with 10 Iconic Synth Sounds.

Bad Gear: This channel is by far the most formulaic, but it’s a great formula: He reviews the most hated audio gear of the past. It ticks all the boxes: A discussion of why the gear is reviled, a demo of it, a couple of song featuring it, pros, cons, and, as always, a conclusion. The Bad Gear- Akai Tom Cat - The Better Rhythm Wolf??? episode is one of my favorites.

My favorite thing about music YouTube is watching these folks interact and reference each other. I watch a lot of music YouTube. Other good ones;

Simon The Magpie: Gear hacker who has more imagination than is good for him. Look Mum No Computer: You do NOT want to see the Furby organ… ixi music: Local artist’s deep dive into Nine Inch Nails. Very, very deep dive into it. The 8-Bit Guy: Texas guy who works with old home keyboards and computers. Sonicstate: Good channel. Needs more PWM. Jorb: Another gear guy. Kindred spirit. Syntaur: Local synth parts/sales place. Carlos is a great guy. Alamo Music Audio Lab: Local music store’s channel.

Educational and Related Channels:

Insider: There’s a lot to love here. What I’m binging right now are the “How Real Is It?” videos, where experts go over how well movies and TV shows portray their specialist subject. I started with the Master Pickpocket Breaks Down 12 Pocketing Tricks In Movies and found myself just watching everything that came after.

The LockPickingLawyer: This channel is, if you hadn’t guessed, more about the lock picking than the lawyering. Mostly, he demonstrates how shockingly easy it is for him to pick most popular, well-reviewed locks. There are some bad locks out there, folks. This one’s my favorite: Locksmith Says My Videos Are BS… Loses $75 (Maybe).

Vox: OK, so, I have a distant relationship to Vox media but no money changes hands so that’s all the disclosure I’m up for. Anyway, it’s Vox. They overproduce the crap out of their videos, but there’s some good stuff in there. Start with How a recording-studio mishap shaped ‘80s music. P.S. Prince totally stole from Phil Collins, much more so than the other way around.

Other Fun, Mostly Wholesome Stuff:

The Fish Whisperer: A guy with a fish tank on his farm befriends the animals. That’s about it. But, honestly, what more do you need? Here’s Turtles Love Pizza.

Capybara Donguri: Capybaras are perfect. You cannot have too many of them in your life. There are no bad capybara vidoes. Wait…there is one. Don’t watch that one. Watch Capybaras Are Natural Actors; They Have Such Expressive Faces and Body Language instead.

Timotainment: Do you like surrealism? Sure you do. You’ve seen memes based on this ‘un. Stonks. Pile. Angery. All classics.

Screen Rant: Just go there for the Pitch Meetings. Ryan has it down to an art and they are both a lot of fun and very insightful criticism. I’ve had friends tell me how bad certain movies were, sent them the Pitch Meeting for the film, and their response is “Yes, exactly! That’s what I was trying to say!” This is how I avoided, say, Alien Covenant for example.

There are more, of course, but that’s enough for now I figure. I hope someone finds something they like on there. Or, at least, doesn’t completely lose what little respect they had for me.

-RK

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Britney Spears' Greatest Cultural Contribution Is Her Instagram Account

http://fashion-trendin.com/britney-spears-greatest-cultural-contribution-is-her-instagram-account/

Britney Spears' Greatest Cultural Contribution Is Her Instagram Account

In smoky eye makeup and a fuzzy blue bathrobe, retired pop princess Britney Spears belts Frank Sinatra lyrics into her iPhone camera and, as a result, into the broader cyber universe. “I want to be a part of it / New York, New York,” she coos in a video posted to Instagram earlier this year, punctuated by an extra helping of vibrato and a filter that not only douses the performance in a cascade of golden stars but digitally endows Spears with a pair of furry ears and the voice of a drunken baby chipmunk.

“Who doesn’t love Sinatra??” the caption reads.

“Hear, hear!” more than 1.6 million followers implied with the tap of a “like.”

Spears’ lovably erratic Ol’ Blue Eyes impression is not an anomaly. After conquering the world of pop music and enduring a paparazzi-chronicled meltdown in 2007, she has reemerged over a decade later as an unapologetic social media superuser. Her Instagram in particular, a hodgepodge of corny jokes, earnest mantras and inexplicably hypnotic selfie videos, functions like a repository of all the things that make the internet good.

Of course, I am eternally grateful for all of the sonic gems Britney Jean Spears has gifted us followers. (My first concert was Spears in her hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana; I frequently attempt the choreography to “I’m a Slave 4U” when I reach peak drunk and still tear up while listening to “Everytime.”) But when it comes to Spears’ most influential, unusual and profound cultural contribution, I have to point to her multifaceted, sincere and utterly confounding Instagram feed.

I mean it. Spears’ Instagram is rife with the kind of unfiltered millennial soul-searching that can seem overproduced or unapproachable in the hands of, say, Kim Kardashian or Beyoncé. To her 18 million Instagram subscribers, Spears is certainly still the superhuman we’ve come to love, a master of metamorphosis who’s traversed the classic phases of womanhood ― Mickey Mouse Club starlet, precious schoolgirl, snake-wielding sexpot, fame-tainted “trainwreck” and, finally, Vegas icon ― in the early-internet public eye. But now, online and selfie-savvy, Spears is also a mother, patriot, Nietzschean scholar, Christian, yogi, food critic, Hillary Clinton stan, painter, tomboy and girly girl) ― all in one constantly updated feed.

Her social media persona is so enchanting because it complicates, rather than calcifies, fans’ understanding of a star.

Spears’ ability to provoke a pure sense of bewilderment and fascination is a rare feat amid an infinite feed of influencers. In one post, she’s the basic-as-hell girl next door, posting inspirational quotes like “keep the ones that heard you when you never said a word” and milquetoast jokes like “just let me shop & no one gets hurt.” But then there are the posts that don’t fit the mold, like the minion memes, elephant pics, black-and-white images of “antique children” and trippy New Age artwork.

And of course, the true showstoppers: videos of Spears herself strutting, twirling, pouting and teasing. The clips somehow feel spontaneous, even DIY, although they’re clearly cut from many takes featuring multiple costume changes.

Therein lies the allure: Spears does little to cover up the effort behind her montages. Rejecting concerted nonchalance in favor of unapologetic effort, she showcases a sincerity so exposed it becomes vulnerability. For someone who’s been so thoroughly shaped and tormented by a greedy public, Spears’ radical openness feels especially fearless.

I brought up my obsession with Spears’ Instagram in a recent email exchange with culture writer Mallika Rao (also a former HuffPost colleague), who’s written about the mysteries of self-representation online. Spears’ social media sagacity, she agreed, stems in part from her total disregard of self-conscious curation, which allows her to jump from posting calculus equations to providing bikini thirst traps in the blink of an eye.

“Instagram is a brand management tool, even among people branded as ‘creative’ or ‘iconoclastic,’” Rao wrote to me. “Britney does not seem to care for brand management. She uses Instagram as kids once used home videos, to work out fantasies for an imaginary viewer. Her primary beneficiary ― her perfect viewer ― seems to be herself.”

One of the most iconic of Spears’ Instagram posts, uploaded in October 2017, is a video of the multidisciplinary artist painting flowers and swirls on a canvas outside a Versailles-esque mansion I can only assume is her home. “Sometimes you just gotta play!!!!!! 🤓😜💋💅🏻👩‍🎨🎨👯👗👛👒👠🦄🦋🐠🌹💥💥” the caption says.

There are so many things to love about this video: That Mozart’s “Turkish March” is playing in the background; that Spears, perched with one leg on a stool like a flamingo, starts out wearing a men’s button-down shirt over her white pushup sports bra and workout shorts before the vid jump-cuts to an outfit change with a kimono robe; the way she purses her lips in a pensive yet flattering pout before each blessed stroke.

Above all, Spears exhibits almost no artifice while presenting her Art to the masses. Again, it’s not that she’s not trying in her presentation, but that she’s clearly trying so hard. The evidence of her effort is written all over the post, its deliberate staging ringing truer than forced authenticity. The video, described by Glamour as “delightfully bizarre,” quickly went viral, and the Spears original painting ended up selling for $10,000. (For more Spears painting content, check out this equally primo gem.)

Since she was a teen, Spears has lived her life on a stage, perhaps preparing her for our post-Insta reality, in which privacy is a right we’ve all gleefully abandoned. In her book Trainwreck, Sady Doyle describes the impossible tightrope Spears was forced to walk in the prime of her fame. To avoid public scorn, she had to be “virgin and pin-up, wide-eyed innocent and worldly temptress, icon of cool and conservative Christian role model, she would always have to be both and neither, everything and nothing.”

It’s no surprise that this unimaginable pressure made Spears crumble. And as Doyle put it, her suffering became a form of entertainment, plastered across Us Weekly and TMZ. As a result, Spears’ life between 2008 and 2016 was governed by a court-approved conservatorship, meaning her father, sister and lawyer were in charge of her personal and financial decisions.

After staying out of the spotlight and rebuilding her life and self, Spears appeared on Instagram not as a symbol of desirable femininity or calamitous adulthood but as a real, weird person with interests and a sense of humor and a passion for strutting down the catwalk. For Spears, a public figure who was asked to embody the contradictory values of sanctioned womanhood from an extremely young age, this newfound freedom appears intoxicating.

“People are obsessed with Britney’s Instagram because it offers some glimpses of hope,” critic Alicia Eler, author of The Selfie Generation wrote to HuffPost.

As Rao put it: “We re-meet someone we thought we knew until she left in a haze of mystery,” she told me of Spears, “turning into herself and turning notions of fame on their head.”

In yet another classic Britney post, the singer stands alone in her cavernous living room wearing a little black dress and belts “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” using the same affected tone she’s rocked since she was a teen. No one is in the room for the performance, save for whoever is moving the camera around Spears for the full 360-degree view the video affords. Unapologetically, she got all dressed up to perform for Britney, and Britney alone.

“I’ve always wanted to do a performance like this,” the caption reads, “singing in a pretty little black dress, with a simple 360, one take shot! I figured since it was my birthday, why not go for it?! So boom 💥 When the clock struck 12:00, I did it!!!”

For us non-famous normies, social media can offer a space to pretend that things worked out differently. On the platform, friends become followers, not unlike fans; documentation of the most mundane activities suddenly warrants attention and praise. We can use digital space to curate and perform the platonic versions of ourselves.

Spears, who grew up famous and in the spotlight, uses Instagram to do the opposite.

In the words of Spears herself, “Sometimes you just gotta play!!!!!! 🤓😜💋💅🏻👩‍🎨🎨👯👗👛👒👠🦄🦋🐠🌹💥💥.”

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ablondebrit-blog · 6 years

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New Aesthetic

Pick one post from 2016, one from 2017 and one from 2018 that interests you. Put links to them in your blog posting.

2018

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/170116918880/via-robert-burns-poem-brought-to-life-by-new-3d

This post interested me because it involves facial reconstruction which is becoming a big field in forensics. As sketches are phasing out, and technology is taking over it is jaw-dropping to see how accurate 3-D models can be made out of a description. In this image a character from a Robert Burns poem, was put into this program and made into a 3-D animation. The top image is obviously the finalized model, but you can see the similarities and differences in the bottom 3 faces to grasp every detail of the authors depiction of his character.

2017

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/149331155315/how-an-algorithm-learned-to-identify-depressed

This post was a series of pictures of the Chanel Datacenter Fashion show in Paris in October of 2016. The stage was a datacenter where the walls were lined with servers with colorful wires of blue, turquoise, yellow, orange and red. This was not transferred into the clothing which gave a nice contrast. Most of the outfits were either black, white, or had small pops of colors.

2016

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/166737317720/chanel-datacenter-show-paris-october-2016

This picture caught my eye because it is the same image, but reversed and in black and white on the other side. The caption is what caused me to stop and read more. It says “How an Algorithm Learned to Identify Depressed Individuals by Studying Their Instagram Photos” which I thought was a new way to find signs of someone's mental status. According to two professors who did research on the topic, “the link is so strong that the pair suggest that it could be used for early detection of mental illness”. There was then a study performed to confirm this idea, which I think is a brilliant way to identify possible early signs of a mental illness, since social media is such a wide used platform.

How does this concept of the New Aesthetic relate to Benjamin’s essay and his thoughts on mechanical reproduction? Can these new objects and items of the New Aesthetic be considered to be “authentic”, or to have an “aura”, in the sense that Benjamin suggests? Please put some substantial thought into this response, and produce a minimum of 200 words on the subject.

Benjamin knew that as technology advanced, so would media and art. The New Aesthetic to me still holds an authentic value, because although these types of images are now a days common, they are not viewed constantly, but also have an aura because images are a constant in our lives. An image that would lose its aura in the New Aesthetic would be an image that is overproduced, such as black and white photos of an English Double-decker bus with a red telephone booth in the background. This image is found in many people's living rooms, phones, computers, in restaurants, and malls disrupting the original aura of the photograph. Most images now a days are seen, people stop for a second and then they continue their day. Our lives are constantly bombarded with art via pictures, videos, gifs, clips, memes, movies, and songs. This creates a different reaction to all forms of art, because today's world has already destroyed the form of aura that Benjamin believes in. I think in today's age, many photographs would lose their aura in Benjamins eyes, but many still have the same effect on people. As Benjamin mentions photography is not all forms of evolving media. Videos and sound also is constantly evolving, which can change the aura of a media. Songs are constantly played and certain tunes/jingles are recognizable from the first note. The mass production of songs comes into play with how much the song is played on the radio, tv shows, and movies. Most people hear the same songs constantly, breaking the specialty of the artists intentions. I believe we are at a weird stage in Benjamins beliefs where media has not yet destroyed authenticity, but not every piece of art is an aura.

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