Stella:
Below is one choice episode of Stella, the tv series. All 10 episodes are available on Hulu, which is where you get your TV. Kill some time, why don’t you.

A Stella Short:
featuring Bradley Cooper

The Michael Showalter Showalter, an original internet series on Collegehumor.com:

Michael Ian Black on VH1’s “I love the 90s”:
Doing his thing.

Showalter’s Parody Ad for the 92YTribeca:

The YouTube world of makeup tutorials can be intimidating. Do a quick search for, say, “smokey eyes” or “five minute face.” It’s practically impossible to pick just five top videos. Given the immense amount of videos out there, you should be able to find someone with features similar to yours.

If you don’t have the time, be sure to check out these five!

1. Sexy Smokey Eyes w/ Warm Touches by xteener

Xteener’s videos may not be as fancy as other “gurus,” but she’s very budget-friendly, using mainly drugstore makeup. Even better, she seems to legitimately prefer the products she uses.

A really simple smokey eye tutorial is a must for any ranking of YouTube makeup videos. If you look at a celebrity with sultry, dramatic eye makeup, chances are they’re rocking a smokey eye of some sort. There are an incredible amount of smokey eye tutorials on YouTube, but I picked this one because it’s easy to follow even for beginners.

What You Need:
White base
White Shimmery Eyeshadow
White Matte Eyeshadow
Black Eyeshadow
Purple Eyeshadow
Brown Eyeshadow

The first four items she uses are from the affordable brand, NYX, and the last two are from a random Estee Lauder palette, which just goes to show that even cosmetics junkies use the random eyeshadow palettes they have lying around.

2. Perfect Red Lips (Gwen Inspired) by makeupbytiffanyd


MakeupByTiffanyD is one of the most popular channels on YouTube, and it’s easy to see why. TiffanyD’s videos are professional without bombarding us with strange music or animation. She covers everything from simple foundation routines to extremely dramatic eye makeup in a charming, straightforward manner. Another plus is that she’s not afraid to tell you what does and doesn’t work on her. Just try not to be jealous of her ridiculously long eyelashes while you’re watching.

You would think simply applying red lipstick would be easy, right? Keep in mind that this video is over ten minutes long! However, its instructions are clear and TiffanyD’s lips are realistic. After all, if you have perfect lips, they’ll look good no matter what crazy shade you wear!

What You Need:
Red Lipstick
Chapstick
Red Lipliner
Lipgloss (either clear or red)
Concealer.

3. Mac Makeup Tutorial: Quick. Easy. Natural. by makeupgeektv


Makeupgeektv is a professional makeup artist, so you can rest assured she won’t leave you looking like a clown. Her explanations are clear and she doesn’t use any overly-complex makeup artistry, instead sticking to simple and easy steps. She does, however, boast unusually big eyes and big lips, so be cautioned that your version of these looks may not be as striking. Also, be warned; some of her videos are a bit over-edited and include cheesy introductions.

The title says it all with this one. If you just want to enhance your own natural beauty, this one’s for you. The simple brown shades and lack of extensive shimmer make this look a winner for pretty much any occasion.

What You Need:
Shimmery Peach Cream Base
Medium Brown Eyeshadow
Dark Brown Eyeshadow
Light Beige-White Eyeshadow
Brown Eyeliner
Black Mascara

While Makeupgeektv mainly uses MAC products in this tutorial, you can definitely replicate this look with other brands. However, you may want to invest in the shimmery peach cream base she uses (Rubenesque Paint Pot by MAC).

4. Megan Fox Dramatic Eyeliner by makeupbytiffanyd


Even though there are hundreds of makeup tutorial-artists on YouTube, I ended up including two by MakeupByTiffanyD. She’s charming, clear, and has a great array of videos. According to TiffanyD, this is a great video for doing “thick eyeliner without just applying a thick line of eyeliner.” It’s perfect for when you want to pump up your black eyeliner.

What You Need:
Beige Shimmery Eyeshadow
Light Brown Eyeshadow
White Eyeshadow
Creamy Black Eyeliner
Black Eyeshadow
Black Liquid Eyeliner

TiffanyD uses mainly MAC products, but you can also get the products from CVS-Evanston.

5. Barbie Transformation Tutorial by michellephan


You either love Michelle Phan or hate her. Her floaty, ethereal-sounding voice-overs are relaxing at first, but can grow annoying after a while. Since October is upon us, I figured I had to include at least one Halloween makeup tutorial. I picked this one because it isn’t overly elaborate and doesn’t involve too many extra props (sticky rhinestones, plastic masks, etc.) but still can make a great Halloween costume when paired with a little pink mini dress. However, this is by no means the only Halloween tutorial out there: a YouTube search will yield you makeup how-to’s for everything from 1920’s flapper to rag doll.

What You Need:
Coastal Scents 88 Palette (88 shades for $20)
White Eyeliner Pencil
Bright Pink Blush
Fuschia Lipstick

Honorable Mention: If you want to try a quick change from YouTube tutorials, check out Temptalia. It’s a Web site based more on pictures than videos. Christine, the owner of the Web site, has an astonishing array of makeup looks that are clear, easy to follow, and have great quality pictures.

On November 20, 2008, Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University won the U.S. Professor of the Year award. Wesch made a name for himself studying the social implications of YouTube. His “anthropological introduction to Youtube,” posted on the site itself, now has well over a million views. In it he discusses how YouTube, along with other forms of communication on the Internet, have transformed society by creating new forms of community. When I watched the video several weeks ago, I admit to being moved by Wesch’s celebration of how the Internet has brought humans closer together and created new forms of identity as we move into the 21st century.

By now we’re pretty used to hearing about how the Internet has transformed our lives and how our generation is not only used to it, but also dependent on it. But amidst the emphatic discussion among those who praise the convenience, economic opportunity and even freedom that computers have given us, we often forget how much skepticism and even antipathy the very same people have towards the “new forms of community” that Wesch describes.

While we praise Facebook for its ability to keep us in touch with people we might otherwise loose contact with, we retain an appropriate cynicism over such relationships, which are trivialized to the occasional sentence-length update on our news feed. Online degrees are generally held in contempt by both students and faculty at “real” colleges and universities. Admittedly, it’s easy to see how the above examples require a “human face” that electronic exchanges can’t provide. But even Wikipedia, which provides us not with interactions, but with relatively objective information (and whose accuracy is comparable to the encyclopedia Britannica) is frequently degraded as a cheap source of reference.

The contempt that we constantly express towards these online interactions and others is enough to convince me that the Internet is not an entirely positive addition to human society. I often wonder where this distrust comes from. For those of us who remember the early- and mid-1990s, perhaps some of it is simply a natural conservative impulse. During our formative years, making plans required picking up a phone to call a friend. Accessing information necessitated sifting through an encyclopedia or yellow pages. Like any form of massive social change — from the spread of Christianity in the ancient world to electing the first black president of the U.S.– it would make sense of the rise of the Internet to elicit a heavy conservative backlash. If this is the cause of our distrust of the Internet, will future generations, born after the late ‘90s, accept the Internet more than us?

I think that there is a more fundamental reason for our distrust — something that will always prevent humans from being able to separate the exchange of even the most impersonal information from the social context that surrounds it. It is an attitude that is perhaps most eloquently summed up in the quote that begins this essay. In Book II of Emile, or On Education, (published in 1762) Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses his contempt for the ways in which the abstract epistolary transfer of information can affect something as real as human emotion and even physical condition. He uses this as one of many examples of how advanced society can be artificial and have the power to corrupt morality. Fortunately for his sake, Rousseau did not live to anticipate a time in which one out of every six marriages take place between individuals who met online.

Rousseau’s commentary, though perhaps a bit extreme, reveals a basic fact about humans. We are ultimately incapable of reducing our interactions and our search for knowledge to the mere exchange of information that occurs between machines. The ways in which we receive information will always be as important as the information itself. No matter how much we try to divorce our emotions or our humanity from our search for facts and knowledge, we can never be entirely impersonal or objective. Some would view our inability to extract exchange of information from social context to be something that will hold us back in our efforts to become more technologically advanced. But I think that those same people would also believe that such inability is an essential part of what makes us human.

If you’ve viewed any YouTube videos at all today, you may have noticed a large banner across the top announcing the YouTube Symphony project. The banner, placed in the same high-profile yet highly-ignorable area that usually houses the “Stay cool, we are performing site maintenance, everything will be 100% in a bit” message, represents a long-term and innovative project coming to fruition.

YouTube hosted auditions for musicians of all types and then built the symphony by mashing videos contributions from selected musicians around the world. Very Web-2.0 indeed.

The music itself? YouTube quality, at best. The project may be bold, but there are certainly advantages to having your symphony players in the same room.

More details available here.

But if you want to see something far cooler…go here instead.

And then there are those NU students who express themselves musically on YouTube. In an era where anyone can record themselves covering “Live Your Life” on the ivories and have 50,000 people view said performance within a week, I’m surprised more NU students haven’t struck out for YouTube fame via tune. But Northwestern has a fair amount of notably weird musical performances floating around the web. Here are ten of the strangest musical endeavors to go from dorm room to YouTube.

1. “That Guy” by Steve Persch

As the most notable rap song out of NU (with a strong, compared to the competition, 6,102 views and media coverage ), “That Guy” takes a hard-hitting look at the type of dudes inhabiting NU. And by “hard-hitting,” I mean a Republican, a hippie, a dork and the lead singer of Vampire Weekend. While “That Guy” falls flat in delivering any riveting commentary (Persch explains in the above Daily article how the song is about how people “front” who they are, a topic socially popularized by Fat Albert), it succeeds in being very well-written (he may not be Q-Tip, but Persch has some good lines in here) and bosts references to SESP, Plex and Net IDs.

2. “Thriller” as done by various NU students

Everyone remembers the hilarious Filipino prisoner rendition of “Thriller,” but before your grandma forwarded you this internet sensation, the folks behind Dance Marathon briefly held the Guinness World Record for “most people doing the ‘Thriller’ dance at once.” Back in February of 2007, 78 dancers imitated the King of Pop, breaking the previous record of 60 people zombie-ing it up at once. For a few months, DM laid claim to a (quirky) world record. And then 1,500 inmates took that joy away from NU.

3. “I Screwed My GPA” by The Northwestern University Singaporeans and Friends

Somehow “I Screwed My GPA” both bucks and embraces the NU stereotype of homework before Hundo. Yes, the song revels in debauchery (including games of frisbee and vomiting into what appears to be a Halloween plastic pumpkin), but everything comes back to that sagging grade point average, and what’s more nerdy than letting the thought of a sub-3.0 GPA interfering with your good time? It’s important to think about this internal conflict while listening to “I Screwed My GPA” because it helps your mind avoid the subject of the putrid source material.

4. “Ignition (Remix)” by Ladies In Red

A cappella isn’t my thing. Like, when I see a flyer taped on the ground for a show, I turn the other way. I’d rather be strapped to a chair placed in front of a thousand speakers blaring out The Jerry Lewis Telethon than sit through ten minutes of a Ben Folds song done completely vocally. But even though I’m not really a fan, I understand a cappella is a staple of NU culture and tons of people enjoy it. And plenty of footage of Northwestern a cappella groups can be found online. Instead of wading through clip after clip of human beat-boxing, I’m throwing Sigma Alpha Iota’s a cappella rendition of R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” onto this list because, quite frankly, this song is pretty neat. Good work ladies, you made me not want to throw my computer out the window after four straight viewings.

5. Freestyle about NU by Common

What could be better than Northwestern students singing a famous rapper’s song? How about a famous rapper singing about the lives of Northwestern students? Chicago emcee Common did just that that at Dillo Day 2008, when he slipped into a hoodie and freestyled on topics pertinent to the NU community like painting The Rock and eating at Flat Top. The whole clip isn’t entirely Northwestern-centric though: Common gets in plenty of shout-outs to Kanye, Obama and sex, but the most memorable bits come when the Smokin’ Aces star rhymes about jumping in the lake at midnight. One complaint though: Why would you alienate the majority of the campus by just giving a shout-out to Bobb? Now I’ll never come around to Finding Forever.

6. “Tarzan Boy” (according to the video) by the Northwestern Marching Band

The NU Marching Band’s various game performances are a breeze to find online, so why settle for something so obvious? I have no idea what the context for this video is, but somehow this is the strangest band video I’ve ever seen. The key is the insightful commentary (”woooooo, hahaha, ohohohohoh”) by the ladies behind the camera.

7. “Go U” by Mo Greene

Is Marching Band not doing it for you, especially at football games? Then I present the Bad Boyz II of Northwestern football songs: Mo Greene’s “Go U.” Mr. Greene should be thankful the Wildcats are having an awesome season; I can’t picture listening to this rap if NU were limping towards the Motor City Bowl (heck, the line about Ohio State makes me cringe). But beyond being a good cut for Jock Jams: Northwestern Edition, “Go U” also offers up one of the most glowing portrayals of NU in song ever. The fans are “rowdly like Piper” and Mo Greene (oh geez, I just got that) even makes Willie the Wildcat come off as a bouncer at The 40/40 Club. Plus, “N-Dubs” is a much better t-shirt slogan than tepid “Nerdwestern.”

8. “The Real Stephtizzle” by…I’m not sure

“Stephtizzle” grew up in the Show Me State, got accepted into Northwestern and feels rejection because she’s surrounded by talent and…she made a rap video about it? The mysterious tizzle and her roommate filmed this biographical rap joint with visual aides courtesy of a laptop. This little diddy is shrouded in mystery (well, not really, you can figure out more details by checking the tags on the video) and is a vital artifact of NU during the YouTube era. Also, I’m digging The Blood Brothers poster in the background.

9. “Hockey Mom/Pitbull (Jockin’ SP Remix)” by Russ Armstrong

For all you university YouTubers who aren’t sure what you want to do with your life, NU alum Russ Armstrong shows you that it is possible to rap about current events after graduation. Though it feels archaic today, this video probably looked and sounded awesome back when a certain Vice-Presidential candidate was still relatively unknown and had not yet been outed as a functioning idiot. It’s good to see Northwestern graduates not named Stephen Colbert creating YouTube content, even if said content features a defecating kangaroo.

10. “The Jewish Boy Rap” by Rappin’ Joely-B

Not every NU YouTube video was made post Y2K. “The Jewish Boy Rap,” made by a National High School Institute participant under the name Rappin’ Joely B, was created in 1987, before a large chunk of the current NU student population was born. Featuring a very brief story starring a young Jewish man and the “King of Rap,” it doesn’t take “The Jewish Boy Rap” long to get to the good stuff, especially when he “raps the Jewish way.” Terribly awkward and unfazed by stereotypes (”we’re gonna blow you away with our big Jewish noses,” not to mention enough bagel shout-outs to give Einstein’s a run for their money), “The Jewish Boy Rap” is without a doubt the most bizarre musical endeavor to ever come out of NU and that’s even before it hits the lox-and-prayer breakdown.

Given the difficult task of finding a popular Jewish Comedian, TheGreatSchlep.com decided to make shock-comic Sarah Silverman the poster girl for their campaign. In this video that launched last month, Silverman describes a hilarious voting initiative for the young Jews of America — flying down to Florida and convincing their Jewish grandparents to vote (for Obama).

The group’s 24,000 members are counting on swinging Eretz Florida toward the left.

http://www.thegreatschlep.com/

If you’re mad at me for subjecting you to four minutes (which is pretty damned long by internet standards) of politics, here is a more light-hearted approach to Baracking the vote, and what an excellent throwback it is.

But what about the McCain camp, you might ask. Well, here is the most popular video on the web that sports the red elephant somewhere in its hyperlink:

I apologize if you were expecting something funnier, but it looks like the internet humorists are a little one-sided this time around.

Further Reading:

http://lolbama2008.blogspot.com/

http://lolatmccain.com/

I love music mash-ups. In fact, this past weekend I headed into Chicago with friends to see some of our favorite mash-up artists perform. While the concert made our heads spin, the actions were (mainly) voluntary. That said, there comes a point where mash-ups go too far. Like when the music is mashed-up with muscles in your face.

Daito Manabe’s electric facial stimulus machine does just that. By feeding small electric shocks to his facial muscles, Manabe is able to program the machine to make his muscles involuntarily dance to the beat.

Scroll to about halfway into the video. It gets better.

via Gizmodo

For all you musical snobs not impressed with the the fun house soundtrack of the video, I recommend listening to Boards of Canada while watching this video. Things get a whole lot weirder.