Autotune the News

While I'm on the subject of Autotune, I can't pass up talking about Autotune the News. With the popularity of Autotune, its gotten to the point where a lot of "artists" don't even bother trying to sing at all, they just talk and let Autotune do all the work. This lack of effort inspired a band called The Gregory Brothers to try something new, Autotuning things that weren't supposed to be music to begin with.
They take news clips and Autotune them to make them into songs, throwing in other material by green screening themselves into the news clips. They also Autotuned the clip of Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the VMA's. Its quite hilarious that his "unintentional singing" sounds pretty much just like his songs on his album.



I think its great that they're making fun of the whole hip hop autotuned genre by making music out of clips of people talking.

I AM TPAIN!!!

There's an iPhone app out now called I Am TPain that is has Autotune. If you're unfamiliar with the term Autotune, it's computer software originally designed to be used for pitch correction in music studios. Artists have been secretly using it for years but when Cher put out her song Believe, the used Autotune for a new effect that the creators didn't originally intend. Rather than pitching the note slightly to make it sound better, they used the software to make a huge pitch jump. Ever since then, that type of sound picked up and now rather than using Autotune to sound like a better singer, the use Autotune as a feature in their music.
With the I Am TPain app, you can talk into your iPhone and it will play you voice while Autotuning it so it sounds like you're singing. Now you can sound like TPain or Kanye. I think its stupid but it really caught on.

Lady Gaga???

While I'm on the subject of fashion, I would like to talk briefly about Lady Gaga. I willy begin by asking a simple question: WHAT THE F***???? Some of her dresses that she wears on stage are absolutely ridiculous. I can't take her or her music seriously when she's wearing such ridiculous clothes. A couple years ago, Bjork wore her swan dress and everyone thought she looked crazy.
Is Lady Gaga just trying to one-up Bjork???

Some of Lady Gaga's weird outfits include bubble dress
Kermit dress

and what some people call "slim jim dress"
Come on Lady Gaga... Your musics not that great and you look stupid.
She probably only wears such weird dresses because she likes the attention she gets by having everyone think she's insane, but whatever. It's not okay to wear a dress made out of Kermit... EVER!!!!

Animal Haircuts

So I just saw that my friend Tombob posted some blog posts about some weird haircuts so I wanted to do him one better. A while back, I stumbled across these photos of models with their hair cut to look like the heads of different animals. It was one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen but it was oddly somehow beautiful at the same time. So without further ado, here are the animal haircuts.

These hairdos are designed by Japanese weird art designer Nagi Noda. She built them out of hair weaves with a mesh of wire sculpted into the animal shapes. Weird yes but I think its great. Its fun and interesting and bizarre but it works really well and looks beautiful.

Lightsabers

By far, one of the coolest weapons in any movie ever is the lightsaber. What's cooler than a sword that's made out of a laser that can cut through anything (except other lightsabers) and can block laser guns??? So awesome. As a kid, I always loved to pretend to be a jedi with my toy light-up lightsaber.
I found this cool diagram on how a lightsaber is made. It's crazy how a movie prop that was originally made out of a handle for a camera flash with a dowel rod could become one of the coolest weapons ever. I also love how no two lightsabers are the same. They all have different handles and different colored blades depending on who it belongs too.
Thank you George Lucas, for giving me a new way to be better than my younger brother. Lightsaber fighting rules!

Lord Vader

The tale of Anikin Skywalker's path to the Dark Side and his redemption at the end of Return of the Jedi. Darth Vader is the baddest of the bad guys! I was so intimidated by Vader as a kid, and as I watched the original trilogy over and over again I thought it was interesting that such a bad guy could end up saving the galaxy by destroying the emperor. Then the newer trilogy came out when I was between 10 and 14. This new trilogy showed Anakin's descent into evil and how he became Vader. Anakin/ Vader is such an interesting character because he's so arrogant and powerful and misunderstood. He originally had good intentions but they blinded him and he ended up hurting the ones he loved.

On top of being such an intriguing literary character, Vader has one of the coolest costumes! He's got this soulless black helmet and black leather suit with robotic parts underneath. So scary and awesome
!

Yoda

A wise man once said "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." It doesn't matter that he was a puppet. Yoda is a staple character in the Star Wars saga. He's so lovable. Whats not to love about the weird love child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. He's a little green hermit who can levitate a space ship with his mind.
I love where digital technology has taken Yoda. Don't get me wrong, I love the stiff old puppet version, but I love how bad ass they made him with the digital version. We always knew he was powerful, but he's so humble, without the digital Yoda, we'd never really know just quite HOW powerful he is.