It can be a tempting thing, on YouTube, to fall into the trap of oh… it’s just a bunch of shitty Vlogs and regurgitated content from various other media sources.

Thankfully, user garudoh has been proving us all wrong for the past year with his enormous collection of game music retrospectives. At the link above are three playlists containing a total of 500 games worth of music and gameplay samplings. While yes, it is a bit of reguritation, it is a very apt collection that obviously took a lot of effort to compile. He also knows what he’s dealing with, including some very rare gems that either never made it to the US or were so obscure that they didn’t get much attention.

While 500 videos at 8-10 minutes a piece is a daunting task, give it a browse… Maybe you’ll find some tunes from that old game you used to play but forgot existed.

I’m not big on fan films, per se. They’re usually woefully under-funded, badly acted, and rely on help from snippets of source material that only serve to heighten how terribly produced the fan film is. ‘Painful’ does not usually begin to cover it.

That said, go spend 40 minutes watching the fan film The Hunt for Gollum.

Based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, the film—free to stream and watch—follows Aragorn around Middle Earth as he finds, loses and then recaptures Gollum for Gandalf to question. These events happen at the very beginning of the trilogy, and while Frodo is yet happily ensconced in his hole, Aragorn is mucking around Mirkwood (Epping Forest and parts of misty Wales in this iteration).

Everything about this non-profit labor of love is impressive: the settings and cinematography are lovely, as are the CGI backgrounds, and the prosthetics on the Orcs are of astonishing quality. The actors chosen to play characters who appear in the official films are passably close to their analogues, and the similarity of the costumes and props to the Jackson films more than makes up for it. Even the acting and dialogue are solid, especially for a fan film.

The team behind this film has surmounted the obvious obstacles with skill.  For instance, since Gollum is a major player in this short—but their budget didn’t extend to full-body motion capture—they find ways to keep him off-screen (and someone to do an amusingly good impression of Serkis). And instead of co-opting the music completely, the composers re-mix and rewrite some of the major themes and melodies from the Shore soundtrack.

A few things detract a bit from the venture, but by no means are negative: the fight choreography is about the quality that one would see in a Xena episode, and an interlude with Arwen is maudlin and overly cheesy. (But, it can’t be faulted for not sticking with its source material: so are the Arwen scenes from the Jackson trilogy.) Oh, and Gandalf’s wig is, um…yep. It sure is.

In all, this is an incredible feat of mimicry and innovation. Watch it, and feel your eyebrows rising in surprise like mine did.

I’m no great basketball fan (especially considering the demise of the Seattle SuperSonics Oklahoma City Whatevers) but when March rolls around, I nevertheless get the fever. Not to bet in office pools and to count brackets, but a different kind of obsession: to vote in Go Fug Yourself’s March Fug Madness event.

Go Fug Yourself reports on the sartorial ouches and “what were they thinking?”s of celebrity fashion, and in March they create a competition that pits the worst dressed head to sequined headband. Stars I would never have heard of if not for their appearances on Fug will compete in rounds for the title of Worst Dressed Celeb, and the commentary and photo flashbacks make it worth checking in on every day of the competition.

Whose leggings/shirt-that-is-not-a-dress/giant handbag combo will reign supreme? Which Knowles sister will stumble her way through feathers, sequins, leather, gold lame and fishtail dresses to the final? How many Paris Hilton lookalikes and nipple slips will be eliminated? The action starts up in mid March.

Why am I continually fascinated by food art? Maybe it’s the idea of using food as an artistic medium, and therefore rendering that food inedible but more beautiful than before. If I owned a tv I think I’d spend all my time watching shows about artists with OCD carving maps of the Grand Canyon into gourds, or something. (IS there a show for that? Please tell me there is). Anywho, these are photos from last year’s World Watermelon Carving Contest, or as we all know it, the WWCC. I am so there next year.

I don’t have a tv—who does these days, except as a vehicle to game?—so I rely on dedicated bloggers to watch and spin my tv for me in their cutting, typo-ridden prose. The sarcastic duo from the fashion blog Go Fug Yourself are virtually smarming and eye-rolling their way down the red carpet for New York Magazine at the Golden Globes. Go read it, it’s updating now! RIGHT NOW!

(A memo to The Office’s BJ Novak: if you looked any more smug your tuxedo might burst into flames.)