Five Things You Had to See Online This Week

This week in “Thanks, Internet” —how to go about breaking the internet, remaking an endless Hobbit trilogy, rediscovering grunge’s dead trees, disconnecting with a wooden puppet, and taking GIFs to the third dimension.

1. Behind The Kim

Late last year,Paper Magazine tried to “break the internet” with artfully ridiculous nude portraits of Kim Kardashian taken by the French photographer Jean-Paul Goude. As Paul Ford wrote on Mediumthis week, the images instantly launched a thousand think pieces on “Kardashian, her body, the female body in general, the male gaze, buttock proportionality, reality television, consumerism, feminism, racism, the media, female and male sexuality, nudity, privilege, motherhood, and Kanye West.” They also instantly became a meme, with jokers photoshopping anything from Krispy Kremes and unicorns to replace Kim’s posterior.

Ford explains in great detail how Paper Magazinebuttressed its site in advance of the photos going live to prevent it from crashing. It’s a funny and somehow entertaining look at the back-end of our totally insane cultural internet phenomena.

2.A More Perfect Hobbit

There’s a lot of re-cutting happening on the tubes. Steven Soderbergh made2001: A Space Odysseyshorter, countless fans have had funwith Star Wars,and now, we have a shorter version of Peter Jackson’s interminable Hobbit Trilogy.

The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edittakes the over nine hours (!) ofAn Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug,and The Battle of the Five Armiesand trims them down into a single four-hour film. Action sequences (like the one above) are shorter, peripheral characters disappear, and flashbacks are few and far between. Unlike most of the internet’s superfan edits, this one is a public service.

3. Can’t See The Forest For The (Dead) Trees

The 90s gave us grunge, and a whole lot of dead plant life. It just took almost two decades for anyone to notice—at least publicly. deathandtaxes published an authoritative collection of all the zombie trees that appeared in mainstream 90s music videos this week, from Nirvana to Cranberriesto Live. “Enter the Grunge Forest” explores the trees’origins while placing it alongside other notable 90s video tropes:

If asked to choose the most ubiquitous tropes of ’90s music videos, most people would offhandedly cite the bright colors ofHype Williams, or overwrought depictions of the quiet horror of middle class suburban life (like that shot in “Jeremy” where the bloody grade-schoolers are Sieg Heiling in front of an American flag, or the BBQed Barbie dolls in Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun“). Given how over the top these visual cues tended to be, it’s a bit ironic that the visual that may most succinctly sum up the attitude and aesthetic of the era was subtly tucked away in the background, so that we barely even noticed it.

4. DIS \ CONNECT

Navigating the digital ecosystem can be challenging, but now we have a handmade wooden puppet to serve as our guide. In British animator Doug Hindson’s two-and-a-half minute short, a nameless, faceless avatar asks the tough questions: How long before this kid is summing up his life in 140 characters? We won’t end up likethat couple (that doesn’t speak at dinner), will we? Shouldn’t I be doing something more meaningful with my time?

The puppet comes up with some decent answers, too.

5. Even Greater GIFS

This week—thanks to redditand our friend Joel—we discovered amazing split-depth GIFs that bring super shareable internet imagery much closer to the third dimension. Just weeks in, 2015 is looking like a very good yearfor our favorite file extension.