I read an article in the Journal-Sentinel recently about the death of graveyard shifts for radio DJs and it reminded me of my adoration for WLUM. It’s a station which has made an effort to keep radio legit by providing 100% local programming, and, well, with my odd sleeping habits I’ve sometimes found myself listening to it throughout the night until the morning show starts — and there’s an actual person there.

Through my life I’ve migrated across several local stations and with music that tends mostly toward alt and indie rock, FM 102.1 really meshes with my music tastes more than any other.  Their DJs feel genuine, their music is great, they’re extremely clever and they are radio as it should be. In the afternoons I love the 80s and 90s music of Flannel Flashback,  I highly recommend them.

On his YouTube channel, he posts deconstructions — basically, he plays some of his favorite bits of songs (mostly Broadway but a little pop, classical, etc. too — he recently deconstructed Kelly Clarkson and Michael Jackson in the midst of all his Broadway deconstructions) and explains, as only Seth Rudetsky can with lots of arm-waving and lip syncing, why he’s obsessed with them. I find him to be a little bit of the TV Tropes of music, in that after you watch a ton of Seth’s deconstructions you start to notice choices singers make in their interpretations of songs that you perhaps never consciously honed in on before.

I’m not a fan of traditional showtunes as much as Seth is but I still enjoy watching all his deconstructions. He is an example of someone who has such personality that they can talk about anything and you’ll be entertained. His channel is Zonkzink but I’m going to embed one of my favorite deconstructions of his from an event: Barbra Steisand and Bea Arthur. I saw this right before I saw my high school do Funny Girl and throughout Cornet Man and Don’t Rain On My Parade I almost had to hold back laughter remembering this video (definitely no Broadway knowledge required to see how hilarious this is).

I wanted to do a post about one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Regina Spektor, who I’ve been pretty obsessed with lately. She’s a quirky, joyful, soulful young Russian-born pianist who’s probably best known in the mainstream world for her hit “Fidelity” (which is what I first heard from her).

Not only is she crazy talented, but she’s gorgeous and adorably humble to boot. I would love love love a chance to see her live — she seems like one of those unfortunately seemingly uncommon performers that is if anything better live than they are recorded. Here she is singing “Ghost of Corporate Future” live:

Besides her excellent songwriting (other songs of hers I’ve been in love with lately include Braille and Eet), she has done my favorite cover ever of the ubiquitously-covered Hallelujah and has contributed vocals to Ben Folds’ You Don’t Know Me.

They say she’s one of those artists you either love or hate, and I definitely love her. For me she’s definitely an artist where the songs I first fell in love with are not always the songs I ultimately come to love the most — a lot of her stuff feels like it needs to sink in over time, and that always gives me something new to fall in love with.

The project has ended and I still have so many things I’d love to post about.

And so I’m establishing Makes Me Happy, a blog where I can write up features on things that make me happy — not just web-oriented things but also music, theater, events, and so on.

It’ll give me an opportunity to not only share with the world things I think are worth your attention, but to allow myself to look back at things I used to like and to analyze why I like things.

This might be the end of this series (not to mention I have to make up for what I meant to post yesterday), so it’s gonna be a bit of a long one. I’ll do one last post tomorrow reflecting. Cool? Cool.

Today’s topic is vaguely “comedy”.

The first person I want to highlight is comedian Bo Burnham whose comedy is NSFW enough that I’m going to link his Wiki page instead of his channel which you can easily look up yourself (it’s not anything outside what is usual for comedians, but nonetheless not quite appropriate for this blog). Known for writing songs (and occasionally doing some stand-up) with a theme of political incorrectness and self-deprecating humor about being an awkward teenager, Bo is the youngest comedian to have his own “Comedy Central presents” special. His start in the comedy world is all thanks to YouTube. At 16, he wrote a song for his friends’ amusement about people assuming (since he attended an all-boys Catholic school and was heavily involved in theater) that he’s gay, which he stuck on YouTube to show his brother away at college. The video went viral, and since then Bo has proved himself to definitely be a comedic talent and far from a “one-hit wonder” of the comedy world like many viral video stars. I first heard of Bo when he was invited to perform at YouTube Live (an event YouTube held to showcase its more famous users in a non-prerecorded context), where he performed a song about YouTube and its culture.

He also has a Twitter.

NEXT we step into the weird sort of is-this-comedy? quirky category of YouTubers with BalloonShop, which makes videos that… are often so weird and nonsensical that they become totally hilarious and very quotable. I was introduced to them by their weird stop-motion-esque video, Poptart:

Trucking along, next is Barats and Bereta, a comedy duo who tend toward more sketch comedy. I’m not quite sure what happened, but I heard that they made a pilot for a show but it wasn’t picked up. Nonetheless, here’s the MANtage:

NEXT and second-to-last is comedian/filmmaker/actor/puppeteer/singer/musician/animator Neil Cicierega also known as Trapezoid or Lemon Demon, who is an internet renaissance man for sure. As a teenager, he more or less started a new genre of flash animation called “Animutation” and eventually branched out into other creative ventures on the internet, such as making quirky music under the name Lemon Demon and putting together short films and the popular series Potter Puppet Pals in tribute to the Harry Potter series. He has a YouTube channel where he posts a lot of nonsensical sort of videos sort of in the same comedic style category is BalloonShop above as well as an official website.

Here’s the music video for his song Word Disassociation:

There are some times, as I get angry over shoe shopping or had to ask other people to braid my hair for me every night of my high school’s spring musical… when I wonder if there is some universal class in girly ways that I missed out on somewhere. One of these categories of feminine failure for me is makeup, which for most of my life I struggled to figure out how to apply correctly (still a work in progress). Luckily there is the internet, and YouTube is full of tutorials on all sorts of things, including lots of women who do makeup tutorials. The most popular of which is definitely professional makeup artist Michelle Phan, who is one of the most subscribed YouTubers (and is the most subscribed in the “Gurus” category). She has a lot of videos on everything from buying beauty products, to everyday tips, to these elaborate costume-y tutorials for Halloween and special occasions.

Her videos are professional yet friendly, and she’s someone who has used her fame online to get job opportunities and such offline.

It’s no secret to people who know me that I love useless trivia, and today I want to talk about a few sites related to fun facts, random questions, urban legends and so on.

 The first of which is Snopes. Snopes is a collection of alleged urban legends and old wives’ tales — and information about whether or not there’s any truth to them. You can check out the top 25 legends currently circulating most widely, check out a random page, or look up those nagging questions about whether that story your friend told you about the suicide in Wizard of Oz is true, or if there really was cocaine in Coca-Cola.

Next is the website for the column The Straight Dope, which has been “fighting ignorance since 1973″ by answering people’s questions on everything from “Who or what is the Flying Dutchman?” to “Could I survive on nothing by potatoes and milk?” to “How does a touch lamp work?”

Finally, I have a twitter account worth following: qikipedia. It’s the official Twitter of the excellent British TV show “QI” where interesting facts are tweeted.

So first I want to talk about a musical that is famous because of YouTube, and that is A Very Potter Musical. If you have any sort of love for the Harry Potter series you need to see this musical. It was put together by a few University of Michigan students in early 2009 and was performed for free. It’s more an affectionate parody of Harry Potter than any real attempt to make the entire series into a musical, and it is SO hilarious and well done despite being amateur and low budget — in fact, that just makes it even better. I’ve watched it several times through and it never stops being funny and awesome and I highly recommend it. The soundtrack is also available for free at their website. There’s talk of a sequel.

The second part of today’s post is some blogs — not vlogs, I mean those actual written things with words that you read. Wow, right? These are blogs from some theater actors that I enjoy:

Emily Kinney is an actress currently touring the country in a play called August: Osage County (which, no, I’ve never seen). Her posts are written in this quirky overdramatic style that is very charming.

Krista Pioppi is an 18-year-old actress touring with… wait for it… Spring Awakening. She’s a swing, meaning she doesn’t have a set role in the show but rather steps in for any of the girls (including the leading lady) if they can’t go on and also occasionally rotates with the two girls in the ensemble. Seeing as her job is a little unique she has tons of stories of being thrown on for a role at a moment’s notice and general tales of life on the road at such a young age.

Krystina Alabado is a… 20-year-old? actress who is also touring with Spring Awakening. She’s an ensemble member — Spring Awakening has seats on the stage that audience members can get tickets to sit in (and actors also often sit in when they’re not in a scene), and four teenagers, dressed in normal clothes and acting like they’re regular audience members, come in with those audience members and innocently sit among them — until the show starts and they leap up and pull out microphones to sing harmonies. I got tickets to sit on stage the last time I saw this show, and I got to sit next to none other than Ms Alabado. My choice to try and get that seat was definitely influenced by this blog where she also gives accounts of her now over year and a half with the tour. She also understudies all the girls’ roles in the show and has plenty of stories of her own, including tales of mid-show injury and Christmas on the road.

Interesting that I mostly read girl’s blogs but watch guy’s vlogs. If I try and analyze why these things are worth reading… I think, for better or for worse, it’s not unlike why some people love reality TV. Sometimes it’s fun to hear anecdotes from the lives of people who living interesting lifestyles far from your own.

First up is Craig aka WheezyWaiter.

From wheezywaiter.com:

My name is Craig. I used to be a waiter in a downtown Chicago restaurant. It’s not as lucrative as it sounds. I started this video blog in late May 2007 out of frustration with a job that barely paid the rent and didn’t involve any of my creative skills. It was originally going to be a blog about the trials and tribulations of the dining experience, from the point of view of both waiters and customers. It became a showcase for my own brand of absurd humor which occasionally includes dining subject matter. After half a year of blogging and freelance video work, I eventually got a job as a video guy at a web development company.

Wheezy makes hilarious videos on a variety of unlikely subjects from President’s Day to Puppies which often involve punching himself and others, changing camera angles, and a choice of multiple endings but always ends with a wink.

Next up is Natalie Tran aka CommunityChannel.

From fansite Natalietran.me:

Natalie Tyler Tran is a video blogger on YouTube from Sydney, Australia, using the nickname communitychannel. She is a digital media student at the University of New South Wales, an amateur violinist and second-generation Vietnamese Australian.

Nat’s videos usually involve her making commentary on awkward social situations she finds herself in and generally involve self-deprecating humor, such as being the third wheel around couples and trying to self-diagnose using Google. Her videos almost always involve some skit to demonstrate whatever topic she’s describing, where she uses split-screen type editing to have every role in the skit (usually) played by herself just wearing different clothes. Her videos always start with a Hi! and end with her responding to comments from the last week’s video.

Last is Charlie McDonnell aka Charlieissocoollike.

From CharlieMcDonnell.com:

Charlie McDonnell is an English Video-Blogger and Musician from Bath, Somerset. Known on YouTube as charlieissocoollike, he is currently the second most subscribed YouTuber in the United Kingdom, with over 300,000 regular viewers. Currently, he has amassed over 30 million total video views. He is 19 years old, still lives at home with his Mum, and does not enjoy small talk.

Charlie’s videos are charming and include his ongoing attempts to complete a list of challenges that so far have included him painting his body purple and giving his opinions on different kinds of baby food.

Why love these vloggers? As Buck said in that video of his in an earlier post of mine — success on YouTube really is about personality. These three vloggers have charisma and an ability to make everyday topics incredibly entertaining. They have well put-together video without removing themselves from that everyday-person-talking-in-their-bedroom charm that draws a lot of people to these personal-type vloggers. They’re relatable enough to feel a sense of community and non-commercialism surrounding them, but also talented enough that they are consistently entertaining and high quality.

First is Colourlovers. A good friend of mine introduced me to this site a year or so ago and I’ve found it incredibly useful. When I do any sort of project where a color scheme is useful I like to just search through the palettes and open ones that jump out at me in new tabs, then look through them individually and narrow them down to a few I’d like to try. As soon as I started paying more attention to how colors worked together in my work the quality got a lot better.

Also DeviantArt, particularly the resources section. DeviantArt is a site for artists to gather and post and review each other’s work. In Resources you can find some great tutorials and things like textures, fonts, Photoshop brushes and textures from people on DA, much of which is under creative commons licenses (though look out for people who have lists of restrictions on their profiles — well, I don’t mean LOOK OUT like BEWARE, but pay attention so you don’t disrespect their wishes). I’ve gotten a ton of textures at DeviantArt and even miscellaneous things like sets of emoticons for a forum I run. True, there are better sources out there for things like stock images (such as sxc.hu) but if you have the patience to sift through DA you can find some really unique things there. A lot of people who post things there, in my experience, are students, so you can find some really good quality work from talented people who you might end up buying stock from in a few years. Not to mention, besides resources, there is a lot of excellent work of all sorts on display there to be admired and perhaps spark inspiration.