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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Pledge: Earth Hour, From 8.30pm On Saturday March 29

Recommended by: Anna Rose, national manager of Earth Hour (‘Five Reasons To Turn Off Your Lights For Earth Hour This Weekend’)

It’s Earth Hour this Saturday night, and this year it’s got a special focus: to show Australia’s commitment to save the Barrier Reef from global warming.

As part of the event, a new documentary — Lights Out for the Reef — is airing on Channel 10 at 4.30pm, and streaming from 5pm here. You can watch it at home with friends, or head out to a public Earth Hour gathering: the major ones are being held in Manly, Bondi, Canberra, Melbourne and Townsville, but you can find a bunch more here.

Between now and then, take the Earth Hour pledge below. And if you need further convincing, look at these turtles.

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Song: ‘Dreams (Fleetwood Mac Cover)’, by Dana Williams and Leighton Meester 

Recommended by: Alasdair Duncan (‘Remembering Abby Morgan, The Mean Girl Of Dawson’s Creek‘)

What’s not to love about this? I’m a sucker for a good Stevie Nicks cover. I’m a sucker for sweet vocal harmonies. I’m a sucker for anything involving Gossip Girl‘s Leighton Meester, even the song she did with Robin Thicke. I’m a sucker for the shocking big reveal of the poolside percussion homonculus at 1:10. Basically, everything here is perfect.

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Short film: Operator, by Steve Barnett

Recommended by: Andy Huang

Maybe it’s the stop-motion aesthetic of melted faces, or the Orwellian-cum-bio horror themes, but this short film is awesomely creepy. In Operator, Bob is a worker at Infocorp, a faceless organisation obsessed with efficiency. Bob’s job is to screw plugs into lettered sockets, as instructed by a computer voice. Then one day, a biomedical parasite crawls through the sockets and tries to take over his mind…

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Reddit: Redditors sum up their first sexual experience via GIFs

Recommended by: Elizabeth Flux (‘#Nomakeupselfie, #Cockinasock, And Five New Ways We Can Tap Into Vanity Charity‘)

This one pretty much explains itself: Redditors were asked to try and sum up their first sexual experience through a SFW GIF, and the results were pretty great. If you’ve seen that Monty Python sketch where a love scene is (apparently) being told through stock footage, this is basically the same thing, except with less falling buildings and more USBs, exploding soft drinks, and childhood-ruining Willy Wonka moments.

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Genius: ‘Mike Tyson Boxing Clips With Street Fighter Sound Effects’

Recommended by: Rob Moran

“The result of Sony Vegas and boredom,” says YouTube master Vogey, who put together this thing that I can’t believe hadn’t ever been put together before.

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Game: Ai Wei Whoops

Recommended by: Andy Huang

Nineteen years ago, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dropped a 2000-year-old Han Dynasty urn, as a part of a work accurately titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995).

Nineteen years later, a man in a Miami Museum smashed one of Ai Weiwei’s coloured vases in what appeared to be an act of protest, which occurred in front of photographs showing Ai Weiwei dropping an expensive piece of China.

And now, in response to this response, Grayson Earle, a digital artist and hacker, has created a game titled Ai Wei Whoops. It poses questions about art vandalism and the destruction of digital representations of property, but more importantly, if you happen to be in the mood, smashing vases — real or virtual — can be quite soothing.

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Cocks: A Gallery Of Chicken Glamour Shots, By Ernest Goh

Recommended by: Steph Harmon (‘Snickers Latest Ad Tries To Tackle Sexism, Misfires Spectacularly‘)

Singaporean photographer Ernest Goh’s latest book takes a close look at the bizarre world of chicken pageants in Malaysia. The chickens bred for competition are purely ornamental, not only in the silky, silky smoothness of their feathers but also in their ability to strike ridiculous poses. Or as Goh puts it, far more diplomatically, they “project a natural and seemingly effortless charisma rivalling that of human models”.

Like this one.

And this one. Sah glam.

There’s a small gallery available online here, and a video below, where Goh talks about “the spirit of the little chicken itself.”

“The owners want to see them as warriors — kind of soldiers — that are going into battle, because of the way they stand,” he says. “And I guess that’s kind of a strange image that you’d want to project onto a chicken.”

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