So, this is it. One year of college just about in the books, and this is the last passion blog I’ll have to do for RCL. It feels odd. Even though I’ve hated getting up at 8 am for class every other day during the week, RCL has brought a sense of welcome familiarity to my otherwise ever changing schedule during this year, and its something I’ve even grown to enjoy over time.

That said, my passion blog isn’t about me and my feelings. Its about videos, particularly the best ones on the internet, and this one is no different. But, since this is a rather personal and informal goodbye to RCL, I decided the share with you the video I believe is the best of them all on the internet: Below Average WWE Skit.

Produced, written, directed, and edited by yours truly, this video acted as a senior parody project we had to do at the end of senior year. Now, I am no stranger to parodies (Once I wrote an entire parody to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ with all the lines relating to something about calculus, and recorded a music video for it), this was one I was particularly happy with.

This video was honestly the most fun I’ve ever had doing an assignment for school, ever. After convincing my friends that the only work they’d really have to do was perform wrestling moves on each other and think of parody characters, we began developing a WWE style story to go around it. At first we have John Ce-None, a parody of John Cena who we made blind to turn his iconic catchphrase (You Can’t See Me) on its head (Now He Can’t See You.). The blind champ starts in an interview, which is comically interrupted by luchador Chef Mysterio who has one the Money in the Bank briefcase, which is a wrinkle in the WWE that allows anyone who has it to get a championship match at any given time. We parodied that by giving other characters similarly titled cases as well, turning the entire video into a moshpit where characters attempt to cash in their title shots all at once to take the title from the blind champ.

Is it a quality video? Absolutely not. We were awful actors, and ended up filming much of the video in the basement of one of the buildings of our old boarding school that looked nothin like a wrestling ring. But it was fun. The freedom we had to create it, the times shared filming it, all of it was great. In our last days of high school, almost a year ago now, we got the opportunity to do one final thing together, and we made it as goofy as possible just for the hell of doing it. As I reflect on it now, it makes me happy to think that in 40 years, I’ll probably still be able to look back on it and remember all the good times I had with those guys, especially since we’ve all since gone our separate ways. So, since this series is mostly my opinion, and it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t include my favorite video of all time as its last entry. Thank you to anyone whose ever read one of my goofy passion blogs, thanks to my buds, and thank you to RCL. I hope you get one last laugh from my stupid video. Mamba Out!

-Aidan

Shia LaBeouf. In all honesty, with all the viral moments surrounding this man, I could center my entire passion blog about him. However, even though some of these include Shia screaming “Just do it” in motivational speeches, and appearing in a song centered around him being a cannibalistic man who stalks other people in the woods, my favorite Shia internet situation has to be this, 6 (So far) video series, where Shia attempts to place a “He Will Not Divide Us” flag somewhere on planet Earth, and other people try to find it, and steal it, just to mess with him.

The situation surrounding the video series is such: Donald Trump had just been elected President, and in an effort to push back, Shia bought a plot of land in New York City, planted a camera there, and planned to chant “He will not divide us.” until Trump was out of office. Now, although this sounds sort of unnecessary, and a little gratuitous, Shia attracted a fair amount of support. Unfortunately though, because its Shia Labeouf, he also attracted the attention of the infamous 4Chan trolls.

In case you didn’t already know, 4Chan trolls can be ruthless, especially when their beliefs were at stake. Not to mention, Shia’s protests had attracted a certain extreme from the left as well, including those who casually called Trump supporters Nazis and a black man who said that the milk marketing industry was racist (I can’t explain his reasoning). So, because Shia is infamously unhinged, and because all the chanting was being streamed live, and because there were some “Emotional” people there, the 4Chan trolls began sending people to Shia’s protests to mess with him. It worked. After 4 days of trolling, Shia assaulted someone at his own protest and was arrested.

But the nonsense doesn’t end there. For a series of 5 more videos, Shia attempted to restart his protest, and each time he was foiled by the actually very impressive 4Chan trolls. Switching from physical protests, to a flag being filmed at various locations, from a museum, to London, to a remote location where all that could be seen from the camera was the flag and the sky, Shia tried it all. 4Chan was just smarter. They infiltrated the museum, attempted to steal the flag, and even managed to do so successfully after determining its exact location in the wilderness by using a map of the stars that you could see behind the flag.

Yes, its that impressive. I’ll just link the first video of the series, mostly because its always best to start with the original, but if the rest of the series interests you, absolutely check it out.

In this age of viral videos, works of art both beautiful and grotesque have continued to entrance and disgust their respective internet viewers. Over the course of this series, so far we’ve covered the intricate, the simple, the grotesque, and the coke fueled rants of a recovering alcoholic, but there is one topic we have yet to cover: The disgusting. You may notice that I didn’t link the video at the top for the first time today. That’s for good reason. Human Cake is objectively disgusting. Seriously, do not watch this video if you ate anything recently, it will upset your stomach. I promise. Well, you’ve been warned. Without further ado, ‘Human Cake’!

Coming in with a whopping 10 million views, Human Cake is the third of YouTuber Filthy Frank’s Cake Trilogy, of which the first installments were Vomit Cake and Hair Cake. The concept itself is very simple: Filthy Frank, a character conceived by the channel’s creator to be the embodiment of everything bad about the internet, travels to different regions of the world to gather ingredients from other notable YouTube stars for a cake. The catch is, the ingredients are all variations of someone elses’ body parts. In a montage nothing short of nauseating, Frank and friends collect everything from Toe-nails, to half-chewed bananas, to pubic hair and even urine. Now for the main attraction. Filthy Frank then puts all of the ingredients into a cake, bakes it, and eats it with his friends.

Now, if you didn’t know who this was, you might think that the video can’t possibly be real. Who would be crazy enough, insane enough, unhinged enough to do something so disgusting just for internet clicks? Filthy Frank was the Internet’s controversy king for 5 years from 2013 to his retirement in 2018, and in that time, disgusting, jackass-esque stunts have become his signature. He’s done it all, from playing twister with rat traps, to having firecrackers fired up his butt, to reeling in a fishing line with an actual human hooked to the end, by the time Human Cake rolled around, Frank’s audience had become desensitized to what would nauseate any reasonable human.

So, why have 10 million people watched it, and why have 368,000 liked it, compared to a mere 9,000 dislikes. To put it simply, this video is a collaboration, done the Filthy Frank way. YouTube stars from every corner of the internet, from KSI (16+ million subscribers) to JoeySalads(6+ million subscribers), to even Pewdiepie(60+ million subscribers) openly giving Frank their praise for undertaking this joint venture. Also, even though it is VERY disgusting, the entire video is treated like a joke. Its made to make viewers laugh, and appeal to that sense of desensitized disgust most viewers attain from the channel. YouTube itself has never liked Filthy Frank, often doing their best to make sure his videos are never put in trending or on the home page, despite his popularity. In the words of Pewdiepie himself “Shoutout to Filthy Frank. I would recommend going to watch him, but honestly I’m not sure that’s a good idea”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-Vuw-burI0

From the beginning of the internet, people have been searching for how to do things. From how to bake a triple-decker chocolate cake, to how to prank your friends, there’s always been a reasonable desire from the universal users of the internet to simply apply its practical uses for their purposes. One of the biggest ways the market services this desire is through the creation of how-to videos, informative short projects designed to help the curious attend to their curiosities. This was all well and good, until one man took it upon himself to almost single-handedly destroy the very fabric of the genre. His name is HowToBasic.

In short, HowToBasic creates incredibly absurd parodies of How to videos, designed to make you think you’re about to learn how to bake your favorite cake, only to see the ingredients smashed on a wall in a high quality montage of destruction that has both fooled and entranced viewers for 5 years now. Because of his popularity (Well over 10 million subscribers) on YouTube, often times if you are unfortunate enough to search one of the 475 topics HowToBasic has parodied, you are likely to fall victim to one of his ploys. So if you were, for instance, to stumble across his “How to Fix a Water Damaged IPhone” video looking to fix your own iPhone, you would be rather surprised to find that that video’s conclusion involves smashing your phone into a thousand pieces with a hammer.

All of his videos follow this model. They start normal, lure you in, and then an almost inconceivable amount of violence breaks out. As I’ve mentioned, this has made HowToBasic incredibly popular, but there’s one catch: No one knows who he is. Communicating in his videos and in the videos of others only in a series of incomprehensible shrieks, moans, and slurping sounds, HowToBasic has, for the most part, presented himself as a cameraman who, in his videos at least, appears to always be completely naked from the waist down. For 7 years, even the Internet has failed to unmask this enigma. That was, until two days ago.

Throughout his career, HowToBasic has stated(On Twitter of course. He can’t communicate on camera, remember.) that when he hit the 10 million subscriber milestone that he would reveal his identity once and for all. He did, and a few days ago he dropped the video, simply entitled: Face Reveal. In the video, which already has over 12 million views and is sitting at #1 trending in two days, we finally see the man behind the mask….. Sort of. At first, it is revealed to be Michael Stevens, a fellow viral star from the channel Vsauce, but then this turns out to be a farce, as he was soon replaced by another Youtuber, Max Stanley, who claimed that it was he who was, in fact, HowToBasic.

This trend continues, in the form of a montage of other internet stars from across the web yelling, screaming, hitting things, and saying “NO, I’m HowToBasic!” So, in short, we never find out who HowToBasic is, and the mystery continues, or did we?

I’ll explain what I mean. Maybe this had a point. Maybe the point of HowToBasic isn’t that he’s a person, but maybe he’s something we all embody. We’ve all given and received terrible directions before, and we’ve all had to deal with the trust that comes along with telling another person what to do, and having them do it the wrong way. Maybe, because of this, we’re all HowToBasic? Or maybe I’m just dumb and this guy’s a maniac. Either way, the video is an amazing trip!

In the world of sports, there’s nothing better than an emotional victory. One where the stakes were so high, where the milestone was so important to the competitor, that a loss simply couldn’t be acceptable. Well, in true ESPN style, what if I told you that one of the most emotional and ridiculous moments happened in a sport that not too man people watch or care about? In this video, we explore the ridiculous emotional rant that bowling’s greatest, and most outlandish player went on after surpassing his father’s record of 4 and winning his 5th PBA open title, the most all time.

This, is the backstory of Pete Weber, a man who has been considered one of if not the greatest bowler in the world since the 1980’s. Pete was born to Dick Weber, a pro bowler himself, and he introduced Pete to the sport by the time he was 2. When he was 17, he became the youngest player ever in the PBA, and almost instantly he was one of the best.

Pete’s style though, has put off numerous competitors over the years. He is brash, cocky, and known for talking trash to anyone and everyone that he feels is in his path, including the crowd. He once even became furious with the sound of a photographer’s camera going off when he was getting ready to bowl. When he defeated Michael Haugen Jr. in the finals of the Louisville open, he looked into the camera and said “He ain’t getting his first against me! No Way!”, and in the 80’s he’s admitted to going on a 4 month long “Complete blackout” where he continuously did lines of cocaine and drank extensively every night. Though he’s been to rehab, Pete has fallen back into drinking a few times. Needless to say, he isn’t really  beloved figure in the sport, despite being one of the best ever. That said, none of that^ compares to the now viral rant he went on in this video.

The video depicts Weber, just after winning his fifth US Open in 2012 on the final throw, by one pin 215-214. After the throw, Weber turns to the crowd, which regularly tries to get him fired up, and explodes. “YES. GOD DAMN IT YES” He says, “That’s right! I did it! I’m number five, are you kidding me? I never thought… WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, I AM! Damn it right!” A seemingly incomprehensible babble that by itself seems absurd (And it is funny), this moment was the culmination of Pete’s whole bowling career, a moment that to be fair is probably the most iconic in the history of bowling, and if you haven’t seen it, might I say, you will never forget it.

Over the first two entries of this blog, I’ve explored the two extremes of Viral Classics: The incredibly well made video with a nuanced and thoughtful message, and the incomprehensible screaming of a man at his cats with no particular message whatsoever. But, rest assured, the Internet is by no means limited to such stereotypes when it comes to producing new videos, and this blog entry’s subject is one such case.

At its heart, the story at the heart of The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon is a pretty generic plot. Basically, a regular guy is cursed and is being constantly hunted down by a being sent to kill him. However, the short film manages to take that stereotype and make it humorous in its own ridiculousness. You see, the murderer in question not only moves at an incredibly slow pace, his only weapon with which to kill his victims is an ordinary spoon.

This makes for a video both very long and very funny, as the main character traverses the world, going to experts and just trying to get away from the spoon-wielding assassin. As he becomes aware that he is in fact, dying very slowly due to blunt force trauma (Again, from a spoon) he begins to try to take out his enemy by any means necessary. It is exceptionally well made (The video was adapted into a larger film that actually did quite well), but what sets it apart from both videos so far is its commitment to its ridiculousness antics.

Though the concept of being beaten to death very slowly over time by a monster only you can see could be considered a dark metaphor for cancer or illness, in this case the pure absurdity of the character’s action in the film make it anything but. For example, there’s a typical horror movie parody scene where the main character attempts to call 911 on the murderer, but the murderer stops him by….. attempting to saw the phone cord in half very slowly with his spoon. Though you expected a more serious response from something following the plot of a murder movie, your expectations are always met with some kind of ridiculous plot twist, usually involving a spoon, which makes you laugh and keeps you interested in the next minutes.

Honestly, this video is one of my all-time favorites. It has 33 million views as of my writing of this, and it deserves so much more. The quality of its production is very high, and the quality of its humor and creativity is even higher. Even if you’ve seen a Cat and Mouse/ Murder kind of movie before, I guarantee you’ve never seen something as ridiculous(-ly cool) as this before.

Now, as you may or may not remember (Probably may not) my first entry into this series of the best videos of the internet was a video that covered a serious topic in a couple humorous, yet insightful lyrics of a song. It was creative, it was meaningful, it had substance, and the video I wanted to emphasize for this week is not any of that.

You see, more often then not the internet isn’t a very serious place. In fact, when looking for videos, most of the time people aren’t really looking for something grounded in reality at all, instead choosing to giggle or find humor in something so absurd or ridiculous it can’t be taken seriously. That’s where this edition’s video “Some Guy Yells at Some Cats” comes into play.

The video itself is very simple, it consists of a series of clips of a man screaming obnoxiously loudly at his cats, who he makes very clear were just minding their own business before he started filming it. Uploaded in 2006, this is one of the oldest videos on YouTube, and its popularity hasn’t really abated much, as the video has amassed almost 7 million views since its been uploaded. Be warned though, the video does feature pretty extreme vulgarity, with which you will be barraged at a deafening volume. Despite this, though, and despite the lack of a message or purpose in general, this video is absolutely beloved by veterans of the site.

These videos, ironically enough, to me have always been the most interesting and funny. By all accounts, this video shouldn’t exist, or at least be as popular as it is. I mean, it doesn’t have a purpose, story, message, and this man appears to be at the very least inflicting some pretty legit psychological trauma on his cats.  But I think perhaps the lack of a story is perhaps what makes the absurd behavior so transfixing. The video is funny, not because of any inherent humor, but because it is so absurd and shocking that it leaves you with several questions that are simply up to your imagination to answer. ‘Who is this guy?’ ‘Why would he make this?’ ‘Is this real?’ all are very valid questions to ask. Whether you think its funny or not and, although I find it funny I can see how others would just be confused. But that’s the beauty of the internet. Not everything has to have a purpose. Some things just are what they are, and this is just some guy yelling at some cats.