Important to note that the paper the article is referencing [1] is titled:
"Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation"
So, the actual data is about PRE-Youtube weird internet. Baffling why they chose to focus on YouTube instead of Newgrounds like the original paper does
I think I'm reacting like this because I'm actually unaware of anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category. Youtube just reposted stuff from elsewhere (it's the biggest pirate site on the internet probably).
Edit: The key point is that there is a huge network of weird internet that predated and continues outside of YT. The Absolutely[2] Produced stuff is the standard bearer here
Maybe MeatCanyon[1], or Joe Cappa's stuff[2], could fall into the modern "YouTube weird" - but I think a lot of the particular "weird" vibe of the early days of the modern web is pretty much dead - or at least not mainstream enough for me to know about it. There was a much more amateur bent to a lot of the old viral flash stuff, which I think just wouldn't stand out today.
These two are a sort of new kind of weird - MeatCanyon is based largely around gross-out body horror parodies of pop culture, and Joe Cappa is ... I'm not sure what it is, but I love his stuff.
If you like either of these videos the rest of their work is well worth a look. Especially the Joe Cappa "Haha You Clowns" series is just the weirdest kind of hilarious.
SCP Foundation has been around for like 15 years! The wiki itself is absolutely great though, it's definitely a good example of that DIY ethos. It's been interesting to see how much content has been generated from the stuff on the site over the last few years. My kids seem to enjoy the SCP lore explainer videos (at least, when they're allowed on YouTube).
Skibidi Toilet is 100% worth calling out - very in line with that DIY weird vibe of the Newgrounds/AlbinoBlackSheep era. Has to have been Garry's Mod or probably these days, Source Filmmaker (SFM).
Makes me feel old, though - that's a meme from my kids generation, which I know about only because of them.
There's a YouTube channel called BuiltByGamers that does nothing but post absurd fake podcast clips where two guys pretend to argue about FNAF and Skibidi Toilet and get all the lore wrong. I think it's interesting because I've never thought of trolling elementary schoolers as a business idea. Watching them feels like getting a lobotomy though.
That reminds me, tangentially, of the videos with deepfaked voices of Obama, Trump, and Biden playing video games together. For me it gets stale fast, but I will admit there's something pretty hilarious about the whole setup.
My nephew and everyone in his generation seem to be really into it, even to the extent that I heard kids singing 'tears for fears' songs (from the 80s) used in it in the street the other day.
I tried to show him source filmmaker in an attempt to get him to be interested in messing around / producing stuff rather than consuming it on an iPad, but sadly he wasn't interested.
Oh man, I absolutely love his stuff. Every once in a while that Fever the Ghost song gets stuck in my head, even a decade after that video debuted. He's definitely got a very psychedelic and surreal style that is 100% Felix Colgrave. And I think that he certainly deserves the title of weird as much as anyone.
Especially his earlier stuff very much has that old school net sensibility about it. (Although he's talented and polished enough that it's not _quite_ the same amateur vibe of those early Newground days).
Another source of phenomenally cool and interesting "content" is the Adult Swim Off the Air series, which also has a very psychedelic vibe to it. The series collects a wide variety of really awesome animations (and also lots of silly stuff).
Probably my favorite thing to ever come from the Off The Air oeuvre is the animated music video for Dan Deacon's song When I Was Done Dying[1]. They also did a 20 minute special episode featuring Dan Deacon's music which is extremely cool[2]. I was exposed to so much cool stuff via Off The Air, the first episode is still one of my favorite ten minutes of weirdness[3]. There are so many other great episodes, too, if you like this kind of thing.
Dude, that is the best shit on YT right now. I think it’s more “absurd,” than “weird,” though. It’s more in the spirit of Tim & Eric than Salad Fingers. I haven’t checked MeatCanyon, but I will be soon.
my personal rule of thumb : if they're going for the eccentricity, it's absurd -- but if they just act that way and they lean-in they're weird.
Tim & Eric and similar acts are absurd -- the people themselves are somewhat normal and put on a show when the gong sounds; this is obvious in their 'normal' productions.
Bjork, Steven Wright, Emo Phillips, Andy Kaufman, Tom Waits -- they roll out of bed 'acting that way'.
Yeah, this threw me too. Salad Fingers is absolutely pre-YouTube. I remember watching that, Weebl and Bob, Charlie the Unicorn etc etc, all as Flash videos.
Salad fingers and weebl and bob were both on weebl's stuff AFAIK http://weebls-stuff.com/ back in the day but got put on to youtube so that he could reach a wider audience. (and with the downfall of flash player).
Edit: Reading up about it, salad fingers had a different author
'Badger! Badger! Badger!', scampi, magical trevor etc. were also from there. It was a favourite site of my friend group when we wer 12 and spent lunchtime in the computer lab at school.
Those were excellent. Such was their popularity that their (badgers, Weebl) creator was invited for a presentation at the Holywell Music Rooms in Oxford; I can't remember exactly when but it must have been 20 years ago. This was fairly well attended (including the entire bioinformatics group from my institute).
"Unaware of anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category"...
What?! Currently the most watched animator on youtube falls squarely into this category. You don't know about it because you're old. TBF I only heard about it from an elementary school teacher. Here's a summary for the old folks, aka everyone here:
Yeah YTP is what I think of when I think of YouTube-originated art form. It's sort of like a visual version of the "Paul's Boutique" crazy sampling to make new art.
Absolutely true - it's actually crazy how much of an art form YTP became. (Not sure how popular it is these days?). It was a whole style with its own conventions, memes, etc. And on the surface, it seems really stupid, but there's a lot of creativity and talent that went into those wild videos.
I've always thought people simply copied the style of “Robot Chicken”, “12 oz. Mouse” and other shows of that era because it was considered “HiLaRiOuS!!!!” by some crowd, and did not require complex work in the video editor.
The really crazy thing is that I initially hated Youtube poop for some reason, despite having made several Animutations. Later on I realized how silly that was.
It's quite obvious that the author doesn't understand the difference between “internet” and “internet TV”, and only used the latter. Otherwise, the article would say “weird internet”.
"Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation"
So, the actual data is about PRE-Youtube weird internet. Baffling why they chose to focus on YouTube instead of Newgrounds like the original paper does
I think I'm reacting like this because I'm actually unaware of anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category. Youtube just reposted stuff from elsewhere (it's the biggest pirate site on the internet probably).
Edit: The key point is that there is a huge network of weird internet that predated and continues outside of YT. The Absolutely[2] Produced stuff is the standard bearer here
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565231208569
[2] https://absolutelyproductions.com/