a sandwich, with words???

its beautiful

My yesterday was easily the best –one of the best if you count ROFLshit– days I’ve had in a long time, due to the confluence of ART and INTERNET. My amazing unsinkable honeybadger of an advisor invited me and Brucce over for dinner and absolutely no work allowed; we were joined by her husband and son and son’s two friends. We had a shitton of supplies, including the most nightmarish doll-baby face mold I’ve ever seen, which made me happier than I could possibly say. As we worked on our respective projects we took turns playing our favorite YouTube videos, which as you can imagine (as anyone who knows us could imagine) got pretty NSFW pretty fast. Videos related, it’s our top picks, and by “top” I mean the videos that were replayed the most and/or elicited the most laughter.

The boys wouldn’t stop playing this song, which was disturbing (who am I kidding, I thought it was hilarious) on a number of levels:

I’m very sorry in advance (no I’m not):.

You’re gonna go to Hogwarts and do spells and shit, and you’re gonna be fucking pleased about it, also you’re are a wizard:

I’m sharing this because…well because I want to, but also because it reminds me of something Henry Jenkins wrote in the afterward to YouTube – namely that YouTube is indeed a game-changer, but not because it actually changed the game. Instead, it provided tools for people to broadcast the games they were already playing. As Jenkins explains, people have always remixed existing culture, and people have always created their own big and little and underground sub culture(s), and people have always shared the resulting output; that’s one of the things we’re good at, as humans. What YouTube allows users to do is go public with their private malfunctions (I say “malfunctions” with great appreciation). The site wouldn’t have caught on without existing interest, and/or existing need — it was a market just waiting to be tapped.

My particular market, which consists of all that is WAT (and has since before I ever even heard of computer, back when I was the sweariest girl on the playground), is hardly exclusive to me or to my family — as evidenced by the crush of bizarre, NSFW/L shit that gets posted to YouTube, for no other reason than because people can. As I’ve argued elsewhere re: the post ironic (or whatever I’d call it these days, “post irony” was so 2009) undercurrent of so much internet humor, the NSFW/L imperative functions as a feedback loop, as weird shit tends to beget further, and ever-weirder, weirdness. But if the aesthetic didn’t already exist, if there weren’t already an attraction to dirtwork and dickjokes, there would be no audience to fortify and spread and augment the weird. As always, and providing yet another reason I fucking love the internet, platform and proclivity feed into and strengthen each other. Poopoo the resulting poop humor all you want, but the process is amazing and to this little slop-farmer at least, strangely inspiring.