Ready to feel really old? In this React video, a group of older teens -- they all seem to have been born right around the year 2000 -- put on headphones to listen to select music from the 1990s. Their task is to guess the song's title and the artist behind it. It surprised me a little that more of them knew Los Del Rio's "Macarena" than Alanis Morissette's "Ironic." (Though, honestly, I didn't recognize all the songs either and I lived through the 90s.) Read the rest
YouTube channel Squirrel Monkey has imagined what it would be like to stream movies through Netflix on a 56K modem in 1995. It's a hoot, whether you lived through the ancient days of early computing or not.
Previously: If Siri existed in the 1980s Read the rest
Looking remarkably like the Mogwai creatures from the 1984 film Gremlins, Furbies first hit the market in November 1998, becoming an instant success. In just the first three years of production, over 40M of these fake fur-covered robotic toys were sold. Since their early days, the Furby has been re-introduced a few times.
That means there are a lot of Furbies collecting dust on this planet.
Well, musician and inventor Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer salvaged over 44 of them and attached them to an organ. Watch the video to hear a cacophony of "Furbish" music (?).
I won't lie, as noisy as it is, I totally want a Furby Organ for myself. Read the rest
Between 1988 and 1990, Tacoma musician John Purkey says Kurt Cobain gave him demo tapes. Now, he's shared those early Nirvana cassettes on YouTube.
One tape includes Bleach demos recorded during the band’s first ever session in 1988 at Reciprocal Studios in Seattle, with Melvins drummer Dale Crover on the drums. Another features Nevermind demos recorded with Crover’s short-lived replacement Chad Channing, who left the band during the making of the project and was replaced by Dave Grohl.
The audio is raw, and many of the demos have seen the light of day via the numerous Nirvana compilations released after Cobain’s death, but the collection and backstory is interesting. Purkey played in several Tacoma bands during Nirvana’s early years and watched the band develop from scratch. He kept the cassettes in a metal box, hidden inside a second metal box, for years, he says in an accompanying video.
Things have been turned upside down (see what I did there?) in the world of Stranger Things as the good folks at Bad Lip Reading have dubbed over original scenes from the show and created a funny sitcom version of it (Wonder Years, anyone?). It's 18 minutes long and worth a watch, especially if you're a fan of the popular Netflix series.
Previously: Watch this Bad Lip Reading of Trump's inauguration day Read the rest
Vanilla Ice's legacy lives on through the Game of Thrones cast as they "sing" a portion of his 1990 rap hit, "Ice Ice Baby." This music video is apparently a promotion for the show by TV channel Sky Atlantic.
And, what the heck, here's the original music video for comparison/amusement sake:
When artist and pop star David Bowie launched an Internet service provider firm in the heady dot-com runup days of 1998, a guy named Ron Roy helped Bowie run the ISP. Days after the music icon's death from cancer at age 69, Ars Technica interviews Roy about how "BowieNet" came to life, and why Bowie wanted to be in the ISP business in the first place. Read the rest
