HBO’s Game of Thrones has an iconic credits sequence, featuring a theme song composed by Ramin Djawadi. It’s weirdly catchy and hummable — and it’s an easy geek test to hum this and see if other people pick up on it. I’ve collected ten cover versions of the song for your geeky enjoyment. Bundle up: winter is coming.

1. Floppy Drives

Eight floppy drives playing in sync. The geekery is extreme. If you like this, check out Phantom of the Floppera.

2. Violin

A beautiful electric/acoustic violin version by Jason Yang.

3. Hard Rock

Roger Lima overdubs some metal riffage, drums, electric bass, and several layers of electric guitar. Also pertinent: Jason Yang and Roger Lima mashed up.

(more…)

Ze Frank has been making awesome internet videos since before that was a thing. Today, I have the honor to appear briefly* in his show Chase That Happy, which is concerned with how we get happy when we aren’t. While the goal of life isn’t to be happy all the time, perhaps it is to watch Ze Frank and hope that maybe, someday, he will blink.

Representative quote: “For example I discovered Happy Typing, where you type like a Crazy Secretary in a silent film. [Frank types crazily]“ Content note: there’s some NSFW language in this video, but it’s fleeting. There’s also a mildly NSFW view of my unkempt back yard: horticulturists beware!

Frank mentions the Everything Thing, a previous video dealing with cognitive looping and anxiety, among other topics. Worth a look. Also, if you have no idea who this guy is, get educated. He basically invented the quick-cutting video blog, in 2006.

* = Shameless self-promotion alert (albeit belated to this footnote). This is what I got for tossing a hundred bucks at dude’s Kickstarter.

Ken Burns, creator of innumerable documentaries including The Civil War and Baseball, is the subject of a new short film about the nature of stories and storytelling. It’s compelling, smart, and complex — largely because Burns, one of America’s most famous and revered documentarians, discusses the reality of what documentary films are: that documentary is not about telling “the truth,” it’s about telling a story. (If you will, “a truth.”)

Representative quote: “All story is manipulation.” Also: “There are many, many different kinds of truths.”

You might also enjoy this interview with the filmmakers, Sarah Klein and Tom Mason.

See also: Ken Burns Effect.

(Via Kottke.)

The HBO series “Game of Thrones” features an exquisite opening title sequence, showing cities and settlements growing like clockwork toys from the landscape, using a slightly bizarre tilt-shift computer animation style. That title sequence is helpful in establishing a map of the roughly nine zillion core locations crucial to the story; unlike the “Song of Ice and Fire” books, we don’t have a map to flip to whenever we need it.

In the second season of the HBO show, the opening sequence has been expanded slightly to focus on some new locations. In this two-minute video, Internet heroes “MatthewP” and Monica Garcia construct a LEGO/K’NEX stop-motion animation version of that opening sequence, focusing primarily on Harrenhall and Pyke, two new locations central to the second season of the show (though good old King’s Landing gets a look in the beginning). Using stop-motion and a ton of LEGO bricks (plus some K’NEX), they do a credible job of emulating those credits — and actually give Harrenhall a better treatment than HBO does. Let’s hear it for nerds with time on their hands:

Related: What Happened to Plain Old Lego Bricks?

Meanwhile, at the Bat Cave, the Bat Symbol has been changing. Since its first appearance in 1941, designers have tweaked the icon emblazoned on Batman’s chest and appearing on various Batphernalia, adapting it for each new iteration of the Batman story. In this video, you can watch the Bat Symbol morph through many versions. Watch as the symbol stretches, contracts, and develops new angles for each era. (I chose to mute the U2 soundtrack, for what it’s worth.)

For a non-video treatment of the same subject, check out Andrei Robu’s “Changes of the Bat Symbol.” See also: Bat-Signal on Wikipedia.

What’s Your Favorite Bat Symbol?

For me it has to be the 1989 Tim Burton Batman film version, featured on so many iconic tee shirts of my youth. A close second is the groovy 1966 Batman TV version, with its broadly scooping curves. Quick, Robin, to the Bat Comments Section for further geeky discussion!

(Via Devour.)

Got fifty minutes to spare? Okay, how about an unbelievable reservoir of tolerance for cacophony and 60s color schemes? Perfect. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the first two seasons* (ish) of Star Trek.

Yes, it’s in HD. Put it on the View Screen, Lieutenant!

* = The first season pilot (The Cage) was omitted due to length; instead, the first episode of the third season was used. I think we can all agree that The Cage isn’t strictly canonical.

Related: Watching 130 Episodes of “The Simpsons” Simultaneously.

(Via Waxy.)

In this five-minute video, we see portions of a Mad Men episode (episode 408, “The Summer Man”) as it appears when incompletely downloaded via BitTorrent. The video is extraordinarily corrupt, showing strange artifacts like missing blocks of the picture, “melting” video, repeated actions, and other such glitches. Taken together, and with a surprisingly nice soundtrack, this actually does feel like art, though it’s a sort of found art — the found art of online video piracy and computer algorithms for storing and playing back video. I was surprised by how emotionally powerful this clip was, despite it being basically a series of visual artifacts from a broken video file. Of course, that’s probably because I’m familiar with the series, and I remember this episode (it’s — very mild spoiler alert — the one where Don starts keeping a journal and tries to become a bit healthier by swimming at the New York Athletic Club). There is something truly poetic about seeing the show like this: it’s what might happen if a painter were to deconstruct each scene, focusing only on the areas of movement, and then animate the result.

My favorite part starts around 2:25, as Don takes a drink, the camera pushes in on him, then a shot of Betty morphs into a repeating clip of Bethany talking, as the screen around the women melts into riotous colors. To me, that’s a visual metaphor for the most important emotional content of this episode. The action is most apparent when you watch the video fullscreen.

MADMEN Bittorrent Edition from Stunned on Vimeo.

Also very interesting (particularly for geeks) is a technical explanation of what’s going on here. I’ll summarize: BitTorrent breaks up the file into tiny chunks, which is why the scenes are incomplete (plus the person who put this together did edit together the scenes that were at least downloaded enough to play back, but didn’t add any “effects”); the video encoder breaks up each image into blocks, which is why we see missing blocks, “melting” blocks, and so on; and in the absence of a complete data file, the video playback engine does the best it can, which accounts for the odd repetition, fast/slow motion, and other strange kinds of video effects.

The song used is “The Grass Harp” by Silje Nes (aka “The Glass Harp” on iTunes) from the album “Opticks,” which is definitely worth a look.

(Via Waxy.)

Wow. Here’s the original pitch Jim Henson made to sell The Muppet Show to CBS. It’s a slow build — things only start getting wacky around the one-minute mark, but go completely nuts by the end. This is brilliant. According to Muppet Wiki, there was a little clip at the end that was edited out of this video (this version likely came from a DVD extra):

After Leo’s powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, “What the hell was that all about?”

My favorite little gem: the depiction of “Kermit’s mother” as “Whistler’s Mother,” near the end.

(Via Kottke.)

Oh wow. Every clip of McBain from “The Simpsons,” cut together in sequence. Put down the donut and enjoy McBain’s witticisms and gunplay:

“Ice to see you” indeed. For exhaustive details on McBain, check out this page.

See also: Watching 130 Episodes of “The Simpsons” Simultaneously and Every “Itchy & Scratchy Show” Ever.

Earlier this week I came across Every “Itchy & Scratchy Show” Ever, and went to see if its creator MrBestDeni had made more “Simpsons” stuff. Turns out he hasn’t done more YouTube videos, though he’s on Vimeo now. Anyway, in the “Simpsons” video experiment below, fellow YouTube hero Romain Vuillemot runs 130 episodes of the show simultaneously, in a grid, for about three and a half minutes. The result is an extremely weird visual experiment — we get to see how the opening credits differ between episodes, and also between seasons. Then when the credits finish rolling, it’s just overwhelming visual cacophony, mercifully cut short before total brain meltdown. There’s no sound here, so it’s easy to watch for a minute or two without being caught at work (ahem).

Vuillemot explains:

-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)

A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px

While it seems that some of the variance occurs due to the videos starting with very slight different bits of a blank screen at the very beginning, a lot of what you see is due to real variations in the opening sequence (well worth a read), which famously contains variations from episode to episode, as well as from season to season. Each sequence includes at least a chalkboard gag, Lisa’s solo, and a couch gag — and later seasons include a billboard gag too. Also interesting: a collage of Springfield assembled from shots in both the original credits and the new HD version.

Note: I originally miscredited this as being MrBestDeni’s work, then noticed my mistake today after 27,000 people watched this video. Turns out MrBestDeni just commented on this video, rather than authoring it. Fixed!