We Recommend: Your Friday Freebies

Each Friday, our contributors send in a bunch of (legally) free stuff they’ve come across this week, to help you waste your weekend. You’re welcome.

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Slam Poetry: ‘OCD’ by Neil Hilborn

Recommended by: Madeleine Watts (‘Why Teenage Girls Crush Hard On The Bad Boys‘)

I never thought I’d be recommending slam poetry, but here we all are.

This is a performance of American poet Neil Hilborn, filmed back in June. Reddit picked it up out of the depths of YouTube a week or so ago and since then it’s been profiled here and there across the internet. Hiborn has OCD, and the poem is about the first woman to become the object of his affections and obsessions. It is wonderful and ardently beautiful and it breaks my heart. Head’s up — you might cry a little bit.

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Song: ‘Through The Fire-O-Flame Over The Sea’, By Mangumforce

Recommended by: Alexander Tulett (‘Lock Up Your Daughters, Crazytown Are Back‘)

Ever wanted to hear a re-imagining of Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘Two Headed Boy’ as if it were written by Dragonforce? No? Too bad: it happened, and it’s amazing.

Fingers crossed whoever is responsible tackles the rest of the album, because the “I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRIST” section in ‘King of Carrot Flowers Pt 2’ would translate incredibly well.

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Software: Bunkr

Recommended by: Alex Sol Watts 

I hate PowerPoint. I mean, really hate PowerPoint. Loading times are ridiculous and it’s consistently (painfully) unattractive. Heaven forbid you try to share work with anyone, with versioning issues and file sizes both out of control. Bunkr.me is HTML5-based presentation software with unified cross-platform presentation. It’s functional and pretty, and brings across the guiding basics you’re used to from PowerPoint. If you need to go offline, you can export to PDF and PowerPoint, as well as being able to embed your presentation just about anywhere online.

Your first presentation is free, and worth trying out if you’ve ever experienced the dissatisfaction of a failed presentation. Sure, there are other online presentation softwares (Prezi, Slideshare), but Bunkr is new, fun and French. So try it out. Productivity is great.

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Game: League Of Legends

Recommended by: Alan Parry

“Alan, get off the computer! You can’t play games for a living!”

Suck it, mum, you could not have been more wrong!

With Defence of the Ancients 2 offering $2.8million in prize money for their recent 2013 championships, it seems you can make a tidy living from it. Matter of fact, E-Sports are quite huge, and you don’t even have to be good! If you have an engaging personality you can just stream the games you play to the masses for sweet sponsorship coin.

So you might as well start with the best (and possibly biggest) game out there, League Of Legends — and get ready to quit your desk job and start your desk dream.

Its completely free to play, too — you only ever have to pay money to buy optional cosmetic items and/or boosts to get you to max level faster. Spend the weekend inside and show your mother what for.

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Birthday: The Little Mermaid Turns 100

Recommended by: Andy Huang (‘Before He Was Breaking Bad, Aaron Paul Was Really Good At The Price Is Right’)

And who said mermaids aren’t real?

The Little Mermaid (not the film; the statue in Copenhagen sculpted by Edvard Eriksen, which was based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale) turns a hundred today! To mark this very important event in history, ‘live’ mermaids made one-day appearances in a bunch of cities, including New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Sydney, just outside the MCA.

In other news, here’s a Carly Rae Jepsen cover of ‘Part Of Your World’, which is disturbingly great.

Happy Birthday, The Little Mermaid!

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Story: ‘Animal Cruelty’ by Patrick Lenton

Recommended by: Steph Harmon (‘News Limited Calls Out Kevin Rudd For Being Fat, Because This Is Where We’re At Now‘)

“Mike is like a beautiful hothouse flower, grown in a greenhouse made of cheese. That’s a weird way of saying that Mike is one of the loveliest, stand-up guys I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing and that also his family is fucking batshit insane and their house a manifestation of all that is wrong with them.” 

‘Animal Cruelty’ was performed live by Junkee’s own Patrick Lenton at Confession Booth, a live storytelling night in Sydney run by Junkee’s own Anne H. Cayley and Matt Roden. It’s the true story of a series of unfortunate events that occurred to a group of friends and a pet tortoise during a summer holiday gone horribly wrong.

It made me laugh so hard that bits came out my nose.

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Doco: A Clip From Samsara

Recommended by: Matt Akersten (editor of Junkee’s sister site, SameSame)

If you can make it all the way through this wordless six-minute shocker — a clip taken from Rob Fricke’s 2011 documentary Samsara — why not treat yourself to a nice salad?

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Poem: ‘Your Face’, by David Dick

Recommended by: Edward Sharp-Paul (‘The Five Ages Of Richard Dawkins‘)

Dave is a friend of mine. I like him because he not only condones but actively supports my lavish use of niche punctuation to get my point across. He is very well read, and he knows his poetry. I mean, he’s read poems other than Howl and The Wasteland, and all the flaccid Romantics. He is no fan of the elitist and exclusive strands that run through the contemporary poetry scene. He is also an inveterate sass-talker.

When you combine all of these elements, you get what is possibly the world’s most perfect, thorough and highbrow ‘your face’ insult.

I love you, Dave.

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Long-Lost Artefact: Woody Allen’s Resume

Recommended by: Adam Kamien (‘Simon Pegg, Nick Frost And Edgar Wright Have A Plan For The Apocalypse‘)

You know what they say about the release of historically important, hitherto unseen documents: When it rains it pours. We kicked off the week with Nirvana’s first record deal and now we have the resume of one Woody Allen.

According to oldshowbiz.tumblr.com, the document came “from the files of a former press agent” and dates back to 1965. Some highlights include Allen’s proclamation that he would not be interested in writing any movies he’s not “in heavily (star or co-star in is what I mean)” and that his hobbies include “not drinking and avoiding sex”.

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Game: Shambles

Recommended by: Rob Moran

‘Notch’ is a famous Swedish games developer who was responsible for the culty, nerdy Minecraft. When he’s not building incredibly complex open-world titles, he’s creating experimental nonsense like this zombie first person shooter titled ‘Shambles’, which he made over seven days as part of last week’s 7DFPS challenge. I love how delightfully shitty the whole thing looks, but I am very, very bad at shooting zombies.

You can play it here.

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