Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts

Monday, February 17, 2025

Failure Museum, Snicker Cat and other interesting websites


Occasionally I like to spotlight websites and social media accounts that I’ve found to be fun or informative.
I do this partly to take a snapshot of things I find interesting and entertaining. I also like to check back on these sites later to see how the web decays over time because many of the websites I’ve written about have disappeared over the years.
Without further ado, here is my latest batch of favorite websites:

Failure Museum

Sean Jacobsohn runs a website called Failure Museum that spotlights memorabilia from failed companies like Enron, FTX, MoviePass, Napster, Pets.com and Webvan. The website also features failed products like Jarts lawn darts and New Coke.

The Dor Brothers

The Dor Brothers run an AI video production company for commercials, music videos and brands. They’ve also made some crazy deep-fake viral videos, such as ones that depict world leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as modern urban gangsters.
I’ve mostly seen work of the Dor Brothers shared on social platform X, formerly Twitter.



Trudeau is a Clown: AI Generator

The website Trudeau is a Clown: AI Generator allows visitors to create images of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a circus clown. The unpopular Canadian politician announced Jan. 6 that he will resign once a new leader is chosen.


GooBing Detroit

The website GooBing Detroit shows the decline of residential neighborhoods in Detroit using archived images from Google Street View. It hasn’t been updated in a few years, but I doubt much has changed in the Motor City. (See article by the Daily Mail.)

AARoads

A group of Wikipedia editors started a website that’s all about U.S. roads and highways called AARoads.
The goal of AARoads is to provide comprehensive coverage of roads across the United States, including detailed descriptions and photos. (See article by Gizmodo.)

Tourons Of Yellowstone

Tourons Of Yellowstone is a funny yet alarming Instagram account documenting the stupid things tourists do at Yellowstone National Park and surrounds, such as Grand Teton National Park. “Tourist + Moron = Touron,” the account says. (See article by the Daily Mail.)


Snicker Cat

Snicker Cat is another entertaining Instagram account. The creator of the account uses videos of outrageous driving and then edits them to reveal that the car is being driven by a cool cat named Snicker Cat, aka the “Best driver in the world.”


Steve Inman: Non-Essential Commentary

Mixed martial arts and sports commentator Steve Inman narrates videos of thugs getting their comeuppance and people doing stupid stuff for comic effect. It’s a hoot. The videos are available on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, as Steve Inman: Non-Essential Commentary.


Influencers in the Wild

Influencers in the Wild is a TikTok channels that shows the efforts that social media creators go through to make their short videos of them exploring nice places and living the good life. These folks are annoying. (See article by the Independent.)

@influencersinthewild In other news… more influencers #fyp #influencer ♬ Vogue (Edit) - Madonna

Passenger Shaming

Speaking of annoying, how about those airplane passengers who do disgusting and disrespectful things and tick off other people onboard? There’s a great Instagram account for making them public called Passenger Shaming.


Mugshawtys

Mugshawtys is an Instagram account that posts mug shots of attractive women who were arrested and booked by police. There’s also a companion X account.


Rev. Ray Cistman

Finally, Rev. Ray Cistman is a parody account on X that makes fun of the racist antiracist movement. The reverend describes himself as an “anti-racist anti-white black activist.”



Sunday, February 6, 2022

Dude with Sign, Cats of Disneyland, and other interesting websites


Some clever folks have made names for themselves with shticks they perform on social media.

Dude with Sign

For starters, there’s Dude with Sign. Seth Phillips started an Instagram account with photos showing him holding pretend protest signs. (See article by Washingtonian magazine.)

Emily’sTikTok.edu


Emily Zugay earned fame for her hilarious TikTok videos where she does terrible redesigns of corporate and product logos. She pretends she’s using her college design education to improve the logos of corporations and brands. (See articles by PRWeek, AdAge and UW-Stout.)

Jake Thumbs Up Emoji

Another TikTok user, Jakie62, does videos where he figures out when globes were designed based upon historical map changes. (See article by Laughing Squid.)

What follows are some other interesting websites.

Cats of Disneyland


There’s a niche Instagram account that posts photos of the feral cats that roam Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. It is called Cats of Disneyland. (See article by Insider.)

Nineteenth century videos. Back to life.

A YouTube site called “Nineteenth century videos. Back to life” posts cleaned-up and colorized newsreel footage from the early 1900s and late 19th century. It includes film from the Titanic before its doomed voyage in 1912 and from the 1918 influenza pandemic. (See article by BGR.)

Public Domain Review

Readers of this website know that I’m a big supporter of the public domain and reasonable copyright laws. A good resource is the Public Domain Review.
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to exploring works of literature and art that have gone off copyright and are now in the public domain.
Every year it publicizes new works that have entered the public domain. Works entering the public domain in 2022 included A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”

SorryAntivaxxer


The website SorryAntivaxxer documents the many antivaxxers who have spread misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and then died of the disease. Spoiler alert: there are many. (See article by the Los Angeles Times.)

Sunday, January 9, 2022

The most talked-about things at CES 2022


While there were legitimately newsworthy products announced at CES 2022, the news media can’t help but focus on oddball gadgets at the annual tech trade show.
News at CES 2022 included electric vehicles from General Motors and Sony; Lingo “biowearables” from Abbott Laboratories; an autonomous tractor from John Deere; and new processors from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
What follows are some of the weird gadgets the media couldn’t stop talking about from CES 2022:
  • A cute robotic plush cat that nibbles on your finger called Amagami Ham Ham. The stress-release device is from Yukai Engineering of Japan.
  • The color-changing BMW car. The vehicle was wrapped in e-ink material.
  • Ameca, a humanoid robot from British firm Engineered Arts, captivated attendees. It’s basically an animatronic character linked to a chatbot like Alexa.
  • The dancing Spot robots from Boston Dynamics at the Hyundai exhibit.
  • The Samsung Freestyle portable video projector. It looks like a tiny klieg light.
  • A top photo opportunity for attendees at CES 2022 was hugging the giant plush sloth at the Motion Pillow booth. Motion Pillow is a smart pillow from 10minds.
  • The stark exhibit space by LG Electronics, which pulled out of CES 2022 because of Covid fears. The large, mostly empty space was one of the most-photographed booths at the show.
  • Electric-car maker Tesla got tons of free publicity for providing vehicles that shuttled passengers underground between halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Vegas Loop was built by Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

Photo: Amagami Ham Ham (Yukai Engineering)

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Interesting online diversions: Nestflix, Wine Project, Bodega Cats


I love the fact that people can express their creativity on the World Wide Web. Whether its videos on YouTube or TikTok, niche photo accounts on Twitter and Instagram, or making dedicated websites, people have a lot of outlets to express themselves.
What follows are some of the interesting websites and accounts that I’ve come across in recent months.

Nestflix

Phoenix-based web designer Lynn Fisher created a website full of fake movies and TV shows that were depicted in actual movies and TV shows. The website is modeled after Netflix and called Nestflix because the fake movies and TV shows are “nested” within real productions.
Examples include “Angels with Filthy Souls” from “Home Alone” and “The Rural Juror” from “30 Rock.”
(See articles by AV Club, the Verge, Laughing Squid and EW.)

Wine Project

Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti made a project that photographed people after one, two and three glasses of wine. The Wine Project shows how the alcoholic beverage lowers people’s inhibitions and lets them relax and have fun.
(See articles by VinePair and Considerable.)


Sebcolorisation

Paris-based digital artist Sébastien de Oliveira brings old black-and-white photos to life using Photoshop to colorize them. The result is like being transported to the past to witness a scene as it happens. He specializes in street scenes from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. He posts his photos on an Instagram account called Sebcolorisation.
(See article by Bored Panda.)


Bodega Cats

Rob Hitt started an online project called Bodega Cats where he posts sweet and funny photos of cats in New York City’s many convenience stores and delis, known as bodegas.
(See article by Bored Panda.)


A Street Cat Named Benson

Rescued from the streets of Dubai, Benson the cat became Insta-famous when he was adopted and brought to the U.S. His human companions dress him up in costumes and the handsome, patient kitty is happy to oblige. The photos are posted to the Instagram account A Street Cat Named Benson.
(See article by My Modern Met.)


Brands Against Humanity

Ellie Daghlian and Elisa Czerwenka, a creative team at Uncommon London, made a card game about corporate greed called Brands Against Humanity. It’s a parody of the game Cards Against Humanity. It highlights the real misdeeds of major companies such as Amazon, Coca-Cola and DuPont.
(See article by Fast Company.)


Mr. Skin

While I’m not a customer of Mr. Skin, I admire the website’s meticulous chronicling of movie nude scenes.
The website recently commemorated its 22nd year in business with a list of history’s 22 Sexiest Screen Sirens. Salma Hayek was No. 1, followed by Eva Green, Pam Grier, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron.


Sunday, July 5, 2020

Interesting new websites are few and far between

When I started Tech-media-tainment in 2008, I liked to spotlight interesting new websites. Back then, creative types would make websites to explore an interesting or funny idea.
Sometime later they stopped creating websites and switched to making specialized accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
More recently they’ve put their creative energies into making memes that can be shared online.
This all adds up to fewer interesting new websites.
What follows are the latest interesting websites that I’d like to highlight.

Litquidity

Instagram account Litquidity parodies Wall Street firms and day traders with funny graphics, charts, photos and videos, aka “dank memes.” (See article by Business Insider.)


Culture+Typography

Culture+Typography is a blog about how culture can affect typography. It’s the work of graphic design professional Nikki Villagomez.

Cat Memes Only

Cat Memes Only is a collection of cat-themed memes on Tumblr. Nuff said.


Titania McGrath

Titania McGrath is a parody Twitter account created and run by comedian Andrew Doyle.
McGrath is a fictional 24-year-old "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest" who identifies as non-binary, "polyracial" and ecosexual, according to Wikipedia.


Kobe Bryant Mural Locations

Kobe Bryant Mural Locations is a passion project by Mike Asner of Los Angeles. The site spotlights the many murals devoted to the late Lakers basketball great who died in a helicopter crash with his daughter Gianna.
The website currently lists 277 murals, of which 189 are in Southern California.


Worldometer

Worldometer makes world statistics available online in a thought-provoking and timely format. I especially like the Worldometer coronavirus update page that covers the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Numbers


Speaking of statistics and the Covid-19 pandemic, The Numbers website features a plethora of information about the movie industry. The website’s Movie Release Schedule page is particularly useful during the pandemic as movie theater reopenings get delayed.

FirstShowing

Another good website for checking ever-shifting movie release dates is FirstShowing.

Daily Mail

There are news websites that provide a healthy diet of journalism (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.). And there are news websites that serve up tasty junk food. In the later category is the Daily Mail, which is the online equivalent of tabloid journalism.

SmartNews

Finally, this last favorite website leads to a smartphone app. SmartNews is a leading global news discovery service. The SmartNews app surfaces news articles of interest using machine learning technology. The service is fairly addictive.

Photo at top: SmartNews app

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Favorite websites: OwlKitty and more

The internet is loaded with amusements and useful resources. And every so often I like to document websites that deserve recognition. What follows are some of my recent favorites.

OwlKitty

I love movies and I love cats. Filmmaker and animator Thibault “Tibo” Charroppin has combined both in OwlKitty.
He has made his fluffy black cat Lizzy (stage name OwlKitty) a movie star of sorts. He has edited the cute feline into such films and TV shows as “The Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones,” “Star Wars” and “John Wick.” OwlKitty has even branched out into music videos with Taylor Swift and Billy Eilish. The results are terrifically entertaining.
Check out OwlKitty’s website, Twitter page and this BuzzFeed article.

Stepping Through Film

A movie fan has been visiting his favorite film locations and taking photos that recreate scenes from those flicks. That fan, London-based Thomas Duke, has created an Instagram account called Stepping Through Film to document his work. (See article by the Daily Mail.)

Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site

I’m a follower of pop culture and enjoy interesting online resources. Sometimes those things come together. For instance, one website features every cover of Mad magazine from its first issue in 1952 until the present.
Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site is “a resource for collectors and fans of the world’s most important (ecch!) humor publication.” (See article by Open Culture.)

Streaming video directories

The explosion of video-on-demand services has created confusion among viewers. There is no shortage of websites devoted to helping viewers find movies and TV series to watch online. I’ve previously discussed Instantwatcher.com, Exstreamist and What’s On Netflix. Of those, I find Instantwatcher is the most useful for content discovery.
There’s also Can I Stream It? and JustWatch, if you have a specific movie or show you’re searching for.
Let me point out a few more websites that are trying to make sense of all the comings and goings of content on Netflix, Amazon and other services. They are Netflix Center, Next Flicks and The TV Answerman.

Post Apocalyptic Salvaged Ware

U.K.-based costume designer Mark Cordory has set up a Pinterest page devoted to his nightmarish post-apocalyptic outfits. He has 30-plus years of experience making costumes and props for TV, film, stage and live-action role players.
Also check out his website at Mark Cordory Creations.

Killed by Google

Minneapolis-based coder Cody Ogden created a website that documents every product Google has ever killed off.
The website Killed by Google is organized like a graveyard with tombstones and lifespans for software, services and hardware terminated by the search giant. It currently includes 169 obituaries.
Check out this article on the site by Business Insider.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to legally share and build upon. I use the Creative Commons image search service to find photos to illustrate some of my articles on Tech-media-tainment. It’s a great endeavor. (See article by TechCrunch.)

Saturday, November 3, 2018

The world’s richest cats

Insurance aggregator Compare the Market recently launched its inaugural list of the world’s richest pets.
The 2018 Pet Rich List includes 19 dogs and 12 cats. It also features two tortoises, two monkeys, a chimpanzee, a parrot, a bear, a cow, a fox and even a chicken. (Keep those last two apart!)
As a cat lover, I’ve decided to repurpose the list. So I present …

The world’s richest cats 


1. Grumpy Cat (aka Tardar Sauce). Net worth: $99.5 million. She started as an internet meme and branched into merchandising and media appearances, including the 2014 movie “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever.”

2. Olivia Benson. Net worth: $97 million. She is one of singer Taylor Swift’s two cats. Named after the lead character on TV series “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” the Scottish Fold has appeared on advertisements for Diet Coke and Keds shoes.

3 Tommassino. Net worth: $13 million. The Italian cat inherited its wealth from its deceased owner.

4. Blackie. Net worth: $12.5 million. The U.K. cat inherited his riches.

5. Street Cat Bob. Net worth: $5 million. The U.K. cat was the inspiration for a best-selling book and movie.

6. Choupette. Net worth: $3.5 million. The French feline is the beloved cat of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. The Birman has been in multiple photoshoots for Chanel and other brands. She also has a large social media following.

7. Tara. Net worth: $1.85 million. Known as “the Hero Cat,” Tara rose to fame in 2014 when she rescued her family’s small child from an attacking dog. A video of the incident went viral on social media. She now has a large social media following.

8. Maru. Net worth: $1.8 million. The adorable Japanese cat is a social media star. The Scottish Fold is best known for his love of boxes.

9. Hamilton the Hipster Cat. Net worth: $826,800. The mixed breed cat has a large social media following. He earned his nickname because of his unique mustache of white hair.

10. Henri, le Chat Noir. Net worth: $316,000. The mixed breed cat inspired a web series of short films which are based around his existential musings.

11. Lil Bub. Net worth: $195,000. The odd-looking feline became an internet meme. She makes money from media appearances, sponsorships, YouTube royalties and merchandising.

12. Tinker. Net worth: $160,000. The U.K. cat is another trust fund pet.

Photo: Grumpy Cat on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine in December 2014.

Monday, March 5, 2018

Fun artwork: The Kitten Covers, Social Decay, and Lego The 100

I’m a fan of clever online artwork. I usually find out about these works when they become memes and are shared virally.
Today I’d like to spotlight three such types of art: The Kitten Covers, Social Decay, and Lego The 100.

The Kitten Covers

Digital artist Alfra Martini has recreated legendary rock albums replacing band members with kittens. The artwork is featured on her Tumblr blog titled The Kitten Covers.
Brooklyn, New York-based Martini is obviously a fan of rock music and cats.
(See article by the Daily Mail.)

Social Decay

Graphic artist Andrei Lacatusu created a series of illustrations that depict today’s tech giants as if they were abandoned storefronts. The series called “Social Decay” featured illustrations of dilapidated signs for Facebook, Google, Twitter and more. The artwork is featured on his Behance website.
(See articles by Business Insider and Co. Design.)


Lego The 100

For grins, I used to make dioramas of reality TV shows using Lego bricks.
Twitter user Lego The 100 makes silly artwork of science-fiction TV series “The 100” using Legos.
The results are usually pretty corny, but the artist’s heart is in the right place.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Newsworthy cats of 2016

As 2016 draws to a close, let’s look at some of the cats that made news during the year.

Larry the cat remains in office


The British government announced in July that Larry the cat, the chief mouser at 10 Downing Street in London, wouldn’t have to leave when Prime Minister David Cameron left office.
“It’s a civil servant’s cat and does not belong to the Camerons,” a spokesperson for the British government told the Guardian. (Check out more photos of Larry at Politico.)

Tombili immortalized with bronze statue


In Istanbul, Turkey, a beloved neighborhood cat named Tombili who died in August was immortalized with a bronze statue in his likeness.
Tombili would regularly lounge on a concrete sidewalk step and lean in anthropomorphically on one elbow to watch all the people walk by. The artist recreated this pose in the statue, which was unveiled in October. (See articles by Laughing Squid and the Independent.)

World’s oldest cat missing, presumed dead


The world’s oldest living cat is believed to have died at the age of 27 after having gone missing from his home in October, the Daily Mail reported.
Seven weeks after Corduroy ran away from his home in Oregon, his owners posted an emotional tribute to their pet online.

Library cat outlasts councilman that wanted him gone


A city councilman in White Settlement, Texas, who tried to have the city’s beloved library cat Browser evicted was voted out of office, CBS News reported.
Browser got his job at the library when he was just a kitten. He was recruited from a local animal shelter as an inexpensive, effective method of pest control at the library.

Cat runs for president


When Donald Trump set up a campaign office in a strip mall in Warwick, R.I., the owner of the pet store nearby decided to offer an alternative for president: Stump the cat.
(See articles by The Cut and the New York Times.)

‘Saddest cat on the internet’ becomes a star


A feline dubbed “the saddest cat on the internet” was 24 hours away from being euthanized when a couple moved by his photos adopted him.
BenBen was brought to the animal shelter as a stray and looks permanently sad because of excess skin on his face. He appears to have been attacked by a large animal.
Since his last-minute rescue, BenBen has become a social media star, attracting thousands of fans on Instagram and Twitter.
(See article on the Telegraph.)

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Websites with an expiration date

Creativity is rampant on the internet. People are always coming up with new ideas for funny memes or collections of photos and other things.
But these websites usually have an expiration date. The joke runs its course or the curator loses interest in the subject.
What happens then is the website either disappears (if someone has to pay web hosting fees) or it becomes a zombie blog that is no longer updated (if it’s on a free blogging platform like Blogger and Tumblr).
Of the 275 websites I’ve highlighted as favorites on Tech-media-tainment, 34 are dead, with the content no longer accessible, and at least 64 are zombie blogs.
That works out to 23% of the blogs I’ve spotlighted are no longer being updated but the content is still available. In many cases, the content hasn’t been refreshed or added to in years. But at least the content is still available (for now) as a time capsule of what was once of interest.
I’ve started and abandoned a couple of online works, so I can relate. (See: One Stop Video and TSA Rants.)
Among the blogs that I previously spotlighted that are now zombie blogs are: The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog, Con Artist Hall of Infamy, Evolution of Soft Drink Cans, Hot Olympic Girls, My Kid Is Gifted, Rappers Doing Normal Shit, What Ridiculous Food Day Is Your Birthday? and, of course, Zombie Dead Blog.
Another example is a website I meant to spotlight, but it only lasted a couple of days.
In July, Jason Shevrin, a media relations person at George Washington University, created a Tumblr blog called Empty Pressers. It featured photos journalists posted on Twitter of empty podiums ahead of press conferences by government officials.
The blog was active for just two days and posted just seven entries.

Photo: Socks the cat from Empty Pressers. 

Friday, September 30, 2016

Disappearing websites: No permanence on the web

Since August 2009, I’ve been writing about websites that I find interesting and worthwhile on Tech-media-tainment.
A lot of those websites are no longer accessible or their content has been taken down.
Of the 275 websites I’ve spotlighted in blog posts about my favorite websites, 34 are now gone. That’s 12% of websites I’ve listed as favorites that are now no more.
Their amusing and informative content has vanished into the digital ether.
That’s truly a shame. And it points out one of the greatest failed promises of digital content: there’s permanence on the internet. Something here today can be gone tomorrow.
I don’t know why these 34 websites disappeared. In some cases, bloggers likely didn’t want to pay the web hosting fees anymore for their low-traffic sites.
I suspect Tumblr’s onerous copyright enforcement played a part in some of those blog disappearances. That’s because a lot of the blogs that disappeared were on Tumblr and they used photos for fair use applications.
I know from personal experience that Tumblr doesn’t give a crap about fair use, so they hit the delete button.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Where did all the interesting websites go?

Google’s Blogger used to spotlight interesting blogs on its platform with a feature called Blogs of Note. But it quit that feature in 2012.
The Huffington Post used to have a weekly article titled “7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Time on Right Now.” But it ended that feature in June 2014.
Internet users have shifted from blogs to social media to share fun and interesting ideas and media. Lovingly curated blogs devoted to a single topic have given way to quick hit funnies and notes on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere online.
In the seven years I’ve been writing Tech-media-tainment, I’ve spotlighted over 250 cool websites. But lately they’ve become fewer and far between.
Early on there were a lot of Blogger blogs highlighted on TMT. Then Tumblr was a popular place to create blogs (before it became a heavy-handed DMCA tool and a vast wasteland for TV show GIFs, lame quotes and cat photos).
Now it’s hard for me to find interesting websites, especially those devoted to pop culture and Internet curation.
It’s been almost a year since I last posted a collection of 25 interesting blogs.
What follows are a few interesting websites that I’ve been meaning to spotlight.

The Meta Picture

The Meta Picture is an old-fashioned photo blog with funny memes, comics and inspirational messages.
The quality is hit-and-miss, but the blog posts a lot of material. It’s worth checking out for grins every now and then.
See sample photos above.

Perv_magnet

Professional violinist Mia Matsumiya created an Instagram account, Perv_magnet, to document all the rude come-ons and misogynistic comments she gets online.
Matsumiya describes herself as a “perv magnet.”
“I’ve archived 1,000+ messages from creeps, weirdos and fetishists over the past 10 years,” she says in her bio. “I’ve decided to post them all.”
(See article by the Huffington Post.)

Couple Pictures 2015

Last fall, Nicole Larson of Alberta, Canada, made a lot of people chuckle by posting a parody engagement photo album on Facebook.
She posed with a Pizza Hut box in a series of outdoor photos for a collection called Couple Pictures 2015.
“I wanted to do a spoof of other couples pictures because I am single and in my opinion pizza never lets you down,” Larson told the Huffington Post.

FatCatArt

Russian artist Svetlana Petrova likes to add her large ginger tabby into classic works of art. She posts the works on her website FatCatArt.
She has since branched out into FatCatArt calendars and a book.
(See article by the Daily Mail.)

Chipmunkson16speed

Toronto-based electronic musician Brian Borcherdt took some old Chipmunks records and rerecorded them on a suitcase record player at 16 RPM.
The result, a SoundCloud account called Chipmunkson16speed, is “both brilliant and terrifying,” the A.V. Club said. The chirpy pop records now sound like dirge metal tracks. My favorite is the cover of Blondie’s “Call Me.”