Help me Obi-Wan, you're the only way to Rawk...

Yet another astounding trend in Japan.

Crowds flocking to a sold out tour featuring a popular artist sounds pretty normal. What is not normally is that the artist is a 10 foot tall animated hologram. I watched the video for the "headliner" (WTF?), but to actually see how the hologram actually works, I thought this was a better video.

If you pause at 1:02, you can clearly see the glass wall where she's being projected with the live band in the background. Why are they in the back, cause SCREW those guys for being humans, am I right?


I'll give her and her engineers credit for the sweet dance moves, but when I envisioned a world with life-like holograms, it just wasn't this. I'm still waiting for the Jaws 19 poster to leap out and take a bite.

When the Zombocalypse happens, I'm finding this kid.

He honors his family by showing no fear in the face of the undead. Well done. The girl gets half credit.

Credit to Jax's sister for finding this one.

Pushing the internet to even greater heights

I'm an admitted fan of mash-ups. And while in many cases the end result of combining two turds is simply a larger, grosser turd, sometimes rearranging things in unexpected ways can make magic.

Take Tube Dubber, for instance.  A mash-up tool that amazingly takes YouTube to an even stranger place.  It allows you to combine the video track of any YouTube clip with the audio track of another. 

How is this helpful, you might ask?  Well, I mentioned magic earlier.  What happens if I combine a popular movie about magic with the preeminent song about magic?  Even more magic, right?  The answer: some surprisingly badass yet expectedly stupid teen wizards.  So yes – it’s more magical.  

I’ve also discovered that Tube Dubber is capable of cranking the crazy level of YouTube upwards, past 11, and screaming into to the lower stratosphere.  By combining two elements commonly accepted as nuts – Japanese games shows and William Shatner – I created something so insane that it appears almost normal.  It may in fact have gone full circle through our plane of reality, rendering its components sane while leaving us mentally shattered.

The possibilities are endless.  I can combine two things at random – say, two suave dudes like Don Draper and Bruce Campbell – and create something even more suaver than the sum of its parts.  Or I can take an awesome movie trailer – like “9” – and use it to enhance another movie that needs some help being more awesome.   This thing is literally an “awesome enhancer”. 

Again, most times crap + crap = more crap.  But sometimes there is beauty in the juxtaposition of random things.  A whimsy in the gestalt.

Or, we could all just be going batshit insane.