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.

–

YouTube: Ricky Gervais Meets Larry David

Recommended by: Ned Chigliak (‘Everything You Love About Modern TV Can Be Traced Back To Oz‘)

Remember when egomaniac-that-pretends-not-to-be-an-egomaniac Ricky Gervais was known as one of the world’s most ingenious television creators? Well, it was that version of Ricky that sat down with another ingenious scribe, who couldn’t change if he tried: Larry David.

The results are refreshing, eye-opening and, as you’d expect, hilarious.

–

Book Things: An Interview With Gary Shteyngart, And An Excerpt From His Book

Recommended by: Matt Roden (‘Five Things You Need To Know About Justified‘)

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is a lovely book. It plays with the same ideas as Spike Jonze’s Her, wiggling through the tensions that exist when love and social technologies are intertwined. He has recently released a memoir, Little Failure, that investigates his own immigration from Russia to America, and his family’s story as it reaches back through the Soviet Empire’s political history. But it’s also a story about a strange little boy trying to work out how to fit in. You can read an excerpt here, care of Longform, but maybe better yet listen to his interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

If the idea of a lonely kid gaining schoolyard notoriety for writing a Muppets and sex manual-inspired spoof of the Torah called the Gnorah tickles your fancy, there’s plenty of similarly bizarre details awaiting you.

–

Tutorial: How To Apply Makeup

Recommended by: Alasdair Duncan (‘I Was Beaten Up One Night In Sydney‘)

The secret is to look like you’re not wearing any makeup at all.

The video comes courtesy of Zach Broussard‘s YouTube series, Being A Better You.

–

Anxieties: Deep Dark Fears on Tumblr

Recommended by: Steph Harmon (‘Junk Explained: On Jezebel vs Vogue’s Lena Dunham Shoot, And “Mean-Girl Shit Masquerading As Feminism‘)

If you’re anything like me, you can’t stand the thought of space and just looking in the sky makes your knees weak and your stomach drop because if we don’t understand anything about our universe, and can’t even work out whether it exists, what’s to stop gravity from simply reversing one day and sucking us up into dark nothing forever?

I thought that this fear, like many other bizarre and occasionally crippling anxieties I carry around, was specific only to me — which was lonely and terrifying, in a “WAKE UP SHEEPLE” kind of way. But then I stumbled on Deep Dark Fears, and felt instantly vindicated.

On his Tumblr, Los Angeles animator Fran Krause translates his and others’ fears into comic strips which make them a little easier to communicate. Some of them are grizzly. Others are simple, and occasionally profound.

“Why you, a person scared of space, gravity, escalators, elevators, theme parks, sea creatures, mud and your own teeth would be reading a tumblr called Deep Dark Fears is beyond me,” my boyfriend emailed back, after I sent him this link. “You’re on your own in the Nightmare Zone tonight.” Fair call.

–

List: ‘Untouched Photos Of Disney Princesses‘, by Buzzfeed

Recommended by: Jenny Noyes (‘An Interview With The Creator Of Dogecoin, The Internet’s New Favourite Currency‘)

Thank goodness for Jezebel paying someone $10,000 to let us gawk at Lena Dunham’s risque neckline and real-woman eyebags that Vogue decided to preen and polish away this week.

This important freedom of information investigative report helped woman all over the world to realise something they never knew before: that the images in Vogue are not 100% ‘real’, thus enabling us to free ourselves from the unrealistic expectations we all had that we should look exactly like models in a fashion magazine.

But Jezebel didn’t go far enough: there are women and children out there who think they are supposed to look like cartoon Disney princesses. GUYS, DISNEY PRINCESSES AREN’T “REAL WOMEN” EITHER.

And here’s the proof, courtesy of Buzzfeed:

–

YouTube: Friends Without Laughter

Recommended by: Alex McKinnon (‘Cool Prisons, Women’s Rights, And Other Heaps Fun Stories From Australian History‘)

Much like the incredible comic Garfield Minus Garfield turned the popular strip on its head, some brilliant sadist has magicked the laugh track out of old Friends clips, killing any vestige of joy or happiness the show may have given you.

Minus the obligatory canned laughter, Ross and Rachel and co. have nothing holding them together but snide jabs and crushingly awkward silences, revealing Friends as less the zany antics of a bunch of witty New Yorkers and more the dull everyday difficulties of a bunch of fairly bitchy people who don’t particularly like each other. Also, Ross is a violent criminal now.

–

Zombie Prank: Nick Santonastasso pranks Norman Reedus

Recommended by: Jaymz Clements (‘11 Movies That Prove Blockbuster Sequels Aren’t Always Bad‘)

Ahead of the mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead, Norman Reedus — aka TV’s most crossbow-shootingest badarse, Daryl Dixon — had a helluva prank pulled on him by his ‘Dead co-star Andrew Lincoln (who plays the show’s stone-faced sherif, Rick Grimes) and zombie prank phenom, Nick Santonastasso.

Teamed with Walking Dead special effects honcho Greg Nicotero, Nick (born with Hanhart Syndrome) scares Reedus pretty nicely, but you’ve got to hand it to the elegantly coiffed actor: most of us would’ve freaked the fuck out and started swinging at an approaching zombie’s head with the heaviest blunt object at hand.

It’s a neat reminder to catch up with all of Walking Dead Season Four before it returns in February.

–

Infographic: ‘Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits And Literary Productivity‘, by Brainpickings

Recommended by: Rob Moran (‘Sky Ferreira On Her New Album, That Whole Drug Thing, And Being Excessively Honest‘)

Pfft, writing: it’s got nothing on late-night beer or early morning Coco Pops. Still, it’s always nice to know the work practices of famous authors, if less for inspiration than for another reason to chuck their overachieving books out and reclaim some bedroom floor space. The useful website Brainpickings used interviews and biographies with legendary writers to put together a nice chart highlighting their wake up times and levels of productivity.

As a piece of science, it’s fairly useless — I mean, if I stare hard enough I can vaguely make out some sorta pattern that says late risers tend to get more done but earn less recognition for their work, meaning you should probably time your wake-up to sunrise if you’re chasing a Pulitzer. But the piece is missing some vital information: for example, I’m not sure Stephen King’s 8am starts had as much to do with his prolific output as those constant benzos did.

Still, it’s a fun thing to print out and look at (lols, of course Bukowski woke up at noon). Look at the entire thing here.

–