Video podcast infinite recursion

Look what happens on this podcast when the host clicks the button to play the podcast.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Weird

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Anonymous

Yo dawg, I heard you like podcasts so I put a podcast in your podcast so you can podcast while you podcast.
Nylund

That made me laugh out loud harder than I ever suspected it could have.
Anonymous

recursion, not regression…
Anonymous

I laughed a lot harder than expected at this.
Anonymous

I’m about half-stoned and when this came up I rofl’d until I nearly peed. Great stuff.
Anonymous

I did this once accidentally while livestreaming to about 30 viewers (http://ustre.am/p0 for the shows). I started singing “row row row your boat”, perfectly in time with my historical selves. The audience went wild. :)
SamSam

That was funnier than it ought to have been.
Germanico

Fail? Ill say its a Win… I just hope this somehow ends up becoming a meme. Way funnier than that stupid ceiling cat.
Scary_UK

What was the point of the webcast showing it’s viewers how to watch the webcast in the first place?

Was there something stopping them from pressing pause except just liking the effect it made?
fxq

So THAT’s how DC Lobbyists work!
Anonymous

You divided by zero, didn’t you?
Nadreck

OMG! That guy came this close to imploding the whole internet into a singularity!
kpkpkp

Just another day at the LHC..
2k

I counted over 9000 regreshunz.
robulus

Another vote for awesome.
Anonymous

Very danceable.
aldasin

I did this with shoutcast many years ago to see if it would work. It does!
musicman

Ah, resonate frequencies of rooms – how can it be that in a room full of mutants, I am the first to mention Alvin Lucier and his infamous/ground breaking track I am sitting in a room?
Stefan Jones

One of the guys on my high school AV squad did this about 35 years ago.

The video system patch panel had a little monitor.

He pointed a video camera at this monitor.

The output of the camera went to the input of reel-to-reel video tape recorder “A”.

The monitor was hooked to the output of reel-to-reel video tape recorder “B”.

The tape from VTR “A” was threaded over the record heads and across 2′ of space to the play head of VTR “B”, and onto “B’s” take-up reel.

The monitor displayed a infinite-regression image . . . monitors inside monitors.

The cool bit came when you waved something in front of the camera.

After a few seconds, the item appeared on the screen in “front” of the first monitor image.

Then it appeared in the monitor image INSIDE the first monitor image.

Then a few seconds later inside the monitor inside the monitor.

And so on, until you just saw a vague motion way far of in the “distance.”
- Anonymous
  
  We did the same thing to end our morning broadcasts in my high school but it was simpler. Just point the camera at a an in-studio monitor and voila. After a while a white blob would begin to form and take over the entire screen. It was pretty cool.
TerribleNews

Somebody *PLEASE* do a techno remix!
Keneke

Made my day!
JPW

Wow–we’ve managed to bring up Steve Reich AND Steven Wright in the same comments.
Anonymous

nice one;)
Matt

First to say malkovich malkovich malkovich.
- Anonymous
  
  Oh I so need to watch that movie again.
  Unfortunately…. I think my EX stole it when she left. :-(
Immortal Time Keeper

The Internet almost collapsed. BTW, where did the favorite this post button go?
Anonymous

This guy’s Internet bill will be infinity dollars, and his ISP will hire Steven Wright to deliver the bill in person.
Derek C. F. Pegritz

That was just awesome!

I just love the way he says, “Jesus!” at the end. The very sound of exasperation.
ValuedRug

sometimes comedy is done so well that you can’t tell they were trying to be funny.
MattF

This needs to be seen by every engineer who is working on implementing a resolution-independent model for video displays.
Anonymous

Look at this podcast! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it! Just look at it!
ill lich

I refrain from using the abbreviation LOL, simply because there are so few things that actually make me laugh out loud. Somehow this made me LOL.
nerdo

That was priceless.
23d

Anybody watching that must’ve thought it was a negative reality inversion! – Neil
Strabo

Oh god, that’s hilarious. I’m pretty sure it’s all role-playing, but it’s still hilarious.

Check out another incredibly lol-worthy clip from last year from the same guy playing Left 4 Dead.
jsauter

Wouldn’t it be infinite recursion versus infinite regression?
Anonymous

I don’t see what the fuss is about. Every webinar feels like that.
Griffin

Once I figured out you could play videos from my camcorder by hooking it up to the TV, and then that the output works even when recording, I had many many hours of fun doing stuff like this.

It can get pretty trippy. So much fun though.
Anonymous

Has someone called Steve Reich yet?
Day Vexx

My “Improv For Folded Signals” piece utilizes this technique, but taken to much greater extremes. It’s a free download, I hope the more sonically adventurous mutants will check it out…