We Recommend: Your Friday Freebies
Includes an app that lets you steal Bill Murray's face, a few fitting farewells to Videogum, and a helpful guide to emailing.
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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Time-Wasting Tool: Face Substitution
Recommended by: Elizabeth Flux (‘Shipping Out Hermione: What J.K. Rowling Really Got Wrong‘)
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to waste time, I’m going to waste it finding out what I look like with Bill Murray’s face.
Face Substitution is a site that delivers exactly what it promises. Your face substituted with someone else’s (provided that the someone else is one of the seventeen on the pulldown list provided.)
Debate how Connery-ish the Connery option is, re-enact scenes from Breaking Bad as “Walter”, and, if you’re me, be disturbed at how seamlessly Bieber melds with your own face.
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Goodbye, Videogum: ‘Gwyneth Paltrow Gives “Helpful Advice” To Busy “Working Moms” Like Herself‘, by Gabe Delahaye
Recommended by: Alasdair Duncan (‘How American Idol Got Great Again (And Why You Should Be Watching It‘)
Videogum, aka once the greatest pop culture on the internet beside this one, is shutting down, as editor Kelly moves on to bigger and better things. To wrap things up, the writers have gone back through the archives and begun reposting some of their best and funniest pieces from the last few years… like this one, by former editor Gabe Delahaye, which marks the site’s ongoing, creepy obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow.
There’s literally hours of great and hilarious reading on the site, so if you’ve never seen it before, kiss your weekend goodbye.
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Rant: ‘R.I.P. Everyone‘, by Gabe Delahaye
Recommended by: Steph Harmon (‘#Sochi2014: Pissing Off Journalists, And Killing All The Dogs‘)
As long as we’re on the subject:
Gabe Delahaye, former editor of Videogum, had a love/hate relationship with his job. For every ten news pieces he’d write about something stupid a celebrity had done, came an extremely insightful, occasionally philosophical essay examining the culture and context in which it is okay/not okay to post such a news piece. These once-in-a-blue-moon ruminations were the greatest, funniest, saddest corner of the internet for a time, and everyone who ever read his blog and then wrote about pop culture owes something to his voice. Specifically people who have a penchant for using ellipses to instantly undercut themselves, which of course I have never done. (I have.)
In the week of Videogum’s demise, and the week of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, comes a short, searing piece about both: ‘R.I.P Everyone‘. Delahaye writes about the awfulness with which the media has clamoured to capitalise on the loss of a great — specifically the New York Times’ piece describing his final days — and the blame that falls on anyone who’s taken part in it.
“In the rush of all this technology and instant gratification and the lab rat need to push the button because sure, 9 times out of 10 you get an electric shock but on the 10th time you get a crumb of cheese, and cheese is great, I do think we are forgetting a time honored human tradition that was passed from generation to generation, which is literally just this:
Think before you speak. You fucking dicks.”
(Also: ‘You Can Make It Up‘ is some of the greatest fan-fiction on the web.)
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Tutorial: ‘How To Speak Australian’, with Kylie Minogue
Recommended by: Matt Akersten
It’s been a while since we’ve caught Kylie being as adorable as this. She’s a coach on the UK version of The Voice and has a new album out soon, but the tiny singer still found time to quiz a geeky young Brit on the meaning of ‘Bogan’, ‘Sangas’, ‘Bush Oysters’ and more.
Bonza Kyles, you little ripper!
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Infographic: Email Solved, by Wait But Why
Recommended by: Mel Mahony
Ever gone to e-mail someone and found yourself stumped at the very first word? Is this person in the ‘Hi’ zone, or have you progressed to ‘Hey’? That’s usually easily solved, but what about when someone goes beyond a ‘Hey’ – what do you do then? This should help you.
It’s item #5 on another excellent essay from Wait But Why: ‘11 Awkward Things About Email‘.
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Poetry (And A Self-Plug): Ross Gibson’s Accident Music
Recommended by: Aden Rolfe
Most of us have come across the City of Shadows images at some point: true crime mugshots from Sydney’s seedier side from 1912 to 1948. For Accident Music, Ross Gibson pulls from the same Justice & Police Museum archive of 130,000-odd images. The difference is that the images Gibson selects no longer have case files; all that remains are the ghostly captions: ‘Illegal Gaming, Hoxton Park, 1964’; ‘Croydon, Traffic Fatality, 1954’.
Gibson crafts “three breath-short lines or ‘mutant haikus’” in response to each image. The result is a quiet balance between photo and poem. And he’s been posting them one a week for the past three years, so there’s plenty to sift through.
For those in Sydney: Ross Gibson will be reading this coming Tuesday February 11, along with Astrid Lorange and the author of this Freebie, at Avant Gaga #9, a night of experimental poetry at Sappho Books and Café in Glebe.
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Prank: ‘Dokkiri Award’
Recommended by: Rob Moran
Pranks are kinda dumb, but the Japanese do ‘em better than George Clooney. Here’s a poor guy, comfortably asleep in bed. Unfortunately, some jerks rigged his bed to a 50-metre catapult, and fitted it with rockets.
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