Five Things You Had To See Online This Week
This week in “Thanks, Internet” —floppy disk drive jams, MS Paint World Cup recaps, OK Go makes another masterpiece, farewell to funnies, and the most important six seconds of Summer 2014.
1. Finding A Use For Floppy
Technology keeps making our lives easier, but it gets old faster than a Katy Perry song. Those of us distressed by all the e-waste got good news this week fromThe Onion’s A.V. Club: floppy disk drives can be used as musical instruments. Remember those purrs and stutters your computer made when opening a WordPerfect document? You can use them to play that surf rock jam from Pulp Fictionand the Game of Thronestheme song.
2. MS Paint Me A Picture
If you don’t have dozens of hours to invest in the World Cup but still want the headlines, Here Comes The Ball is the Tumblr for you. The selfless human being who runs it is summarizing each match with a single image made in MS Paint. It may not be as HD as the TV at your favorite sports bar, but it’s got way more charm and far fewer drunken louts.
3. OK Stop
OK Go might be the first band to be better known for its music videos (which are amazing) than its music (which is good). If these four dudes rocked out to one of their songs in an empty loft space, their fans would never forgive them. No one seems to be more aware of this than OK Go themselves. This week, they dropped another startlingly ambitious single-shot treatment for “The Writing’s on the Wall,” from their upcoming album Hungry Ghosts. It’s four minutes of smart visual tricks that animate geometric paintings by Felice Varini and Dan Tobin-Smith.
4. Barsotti, You Crazy Bastard!
New Yorkercartoonist Charlie Barsotti died this week and his colleaguesremembered him with his work. In a magazine full of fancy umlauts and essays, Barsotti was never afraid to be really sweet and silly. He’ll be missed.