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Hipster Runoff, Gorilla vs. Bear, Diplo
Turntable.fm
Monday, June 27

Better than: Listening to your friends DJ on turntable.fm.

Turntable.fm is a newish "social DJing" site that basically brings the chat-room concept to the world of online radio stations. DJs can congregate in rooms and add their favorite tracks to a queue, and listeners can chat and rate the songs that spin into their orbit as either "lame" or "awesome"; if a song gets too much negative feedback, the DJ responsible for playing it will be skipped.

The site is still in beta mode; only people whose Facebook friends are already using it are allowed inside. This exclusivity (or "exclusivity") prompted Gorilla vs. Bear and Hipster Runoff to throw a virtual festival on the service—called, naturally, #VIPFest, and starring Diplo, Pitchfork head Ryan Schreiber, Hipster Runoff's "Carles," and a bunch of online rubberneckers.

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@bwsullivan

​The revelation that a movie about a disgruntled mother wreaking havoc on a blogger who snarked her indie-rocker son—tentatively called Pitchfork—is on the way has (perhaps inevitably) sparked the wonderful hashtag #PitchforkThrillers. What better way to spend a summer Thursday than coming up with witty names for the flick? After the jump, the best of the best.

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And thus the man who became famous on the internet for making quasi-racist scare-quote jokes about black people attending indie rock concerts opens up his web browser for another long day of mocking naked Asian people, and finds himself looking in the mirror instead. [@solangeknowles/HRO]

Leslie "The Opportunity" Feist

This isn't the dumbest way we've ever spent an hour in the workplace, but it's certainly up there. The most idiotically laughable meme of the past few days goes to Jerzify Yourself, the inevitable Jersey Shore personal-transformation site in the glute vein of such popular avatar reconfiguration hubs as Simpsonize Me and MadMen Yourself. The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-sized jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spraytan shade, pick your pose--and holy Freckles McGee, you're magically recast as a human meatball. Michael Cera already did this for real, so with the help of the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, it seemed like a natural progression to run your favorite indie luminaries through the G.T.L. ringer. Certainly you can conceive better ones, and please do send them our way, but first, a few words of caution: beards look funny, as does Thurston Moore, and thin-faced folks don't adapt well to this interface, so Bradford "DJ Douchebag" Cox and Stephen "S-Tan" Malkmus were sent to the great Apple trashcan in the sky. So without further adieu . .

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​Yesterday's New York Times on the Hipster Runoff genre shirtification of indie rock: "Ten or 20 years ago it was relatively easy to define the term "indie-rock" as a handful of related styles and a collective audience slightly on the fringe of the mainstream. But by the end of the decade it has become an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres. So you say you like indie-rock -- well, do you mean mumblecore? Freak-folk? Ambient doom-metal? Eight-bit?" This all sounds familiar, somehow. [NYT]

The offending screenshot, wherein the wrong seems to have been at least credited, if not actually righted [via, ahem, Hipster Runoff]

​"What percentage of what you do is completely sarcastic, as opposed to mostly sarcastic?" we asked Hipster Runoff blogger Carles, back in February. "Are you basically playing a character? Are you in character now?" The answer, then as now, seems to be very much yes, as local freelance photog Kyle Dean Reinford found out the hard way. Yesterday Hipster Runoff posted, without consent or credit, a few of Reinford's photos of the xx that had originally appeared on Stereogum; Reinford replied with "a polite email asking him to remove them." Chaos ensued, peaking in a wholly unreal email exchange between the photographer and renegade blogger, who seems to be making wild and interesting strides into the real world. How unreal was the exchange? Well:

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​The gist of this being that Hipster Runoff borrowed one of Kyle's photos for the sake of his art. The above ensued. Photographers should be credited. But there is something admirable in the man who receives a notification that he is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and responds in character, as a blogger who "just thought it would be chill" to share said stolen photos with the world. One wonders if he would come to court wearing the Daft Punk mask. As we go to print a "content sharing program" is being contemplated (the sincerity vs. biz speak quotient of this arrangement being basically the entire subtext of this interview Rob did, back in February), so perhaps a peace has been brokered. Or perhaps Reinford will just go ahead and sue the motherfucker. [@kyledreinford]

Updated: "Day Two of the Hipster Runoff Photo-Stealing Scandal, Or, A Bloggable New Story"

​Been a while since we checked in with "America's" "most" "relevant" "blogger," so what's Hipster Runoff been up to lately? Apparently launching a spinoff site, I Am Carles, to sell merch and offer personal-branding advice. Here is the marquee item: "This shirt will be delivered by Carles. You will have an opportunity to meet Carles and possibly 'chill' with him depending on your personal brand." $3,000. Many sizes available. I wonder if I could expense this.

Having chatted via IM with (bet-hedging ahead) someone claiming to be Carles, the enigmatic proprietor of memesphere giant Hipster Runoff , I suppose it behooves us to acknowledge this new Tao Lin Is Carles theory making the rounds, if only to express sadness about the ongoing, mundane, headache-inducing demystification phase of a social experiment that, like it or not, is giving/has given us something to think/talk/laugh/rant about. Personally, I wouldn't bet more than $5 on the veracity of anything related to anything that's been said, or that Carles has said, about any of this, and the fuckin' deluge of scare quotes surrounding this mess is increasingly toxic -- just make a couple out of papier-mâché and affix them to both sides of your computer screen.

Personally I hope Carles is not a known entity -- a Tao Lin, a Patton Oswalt, a James Murphy, etc. -- as that'd make this whole fiasco even more of a smug put-on than it already is. And if this all turns out to be guerrilla marketing for the next Michael Cera movie, I will bury him myself.