''Is it...silent?'' ''Well, there's a percussion track''

#991; The Chipmunks, and What Came After

  — December 23rd, 2013

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It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I realized the Chipmunks (which I had always known as cartoon characters from my childhood) were actually, as pop-cultural entities, much older — dating back to their eponymous novelty Christmas record in 1958 or, arguably, the “Witch Doctor” song all the way back in 1952. There was a short-lived cartoon in 1961, but the Saturday-morning cartoon that I and people of my generation are most familiar with didn’t come around until more than 20 years later (1982-1990).

The audio trick that creator Ross Bagdasarian used to create the sound of the Chipmunks’ voices was so simple, and the resulting songs so popular in the late 50s and early 60s, that I figured they must have spawned some knockoffs. Sure enough — enjoy the squeaky sounds of:

The Nutty Squirrels (singing “Uh Oh”)
The Grasshoppers (singing “Shortnin’ Bread”) (More info)
The Three Happy Crickets (“We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)
Woody Woodchuck’s Christmas Sing Song (info only)
Sing Along with the Busy Beavers (album download)
BONUS LINK: The Happy Hamsters sing “Ghostbustin'”, a few decades later. Full album here.

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Check out: Cabel Sasser’s amazing XOXO 2024 talk

November 14, 2024 by David Malki !

A few months ago, I attended the final XOXO conference in Portland, Oregon.

XOXO is (was) an IRL gathering of “the good internet” — bloggers, hackers, artists, journalists, makers, all coming together to bounce off each other for a few days to see what happens.

Each annual installment was a place of learning, of inspiration, of friendly collegiality and of bonding over shared interests (and shared distress, sometimes — after all, the subject at hand is the internet, and what it does to people).

This year, XOXO returned for the first time since before the pandemic. It was billed as “Once more, with feelings.”

One of the themes that emerged from the talks, presentations, and conversations was the state of community on today’s internet.

Lots of people at XOXO, myself included, have spent the last few years reeling from the hyper-fragmentation and accelerating commodification of online spaces.

For example: Twitter used to be a place where I could reliably converse with and broadcast to a lot of like-minded people. Now, personally, I’m done with Twitter. I’ll never post there again.

That space has become toxic, and not merely toxic, but useless to me with respect to what I want out of a social network (conversation; reach; entertainment).

Bluesky…Threads…Mastodon…Private Discords and niche subreddits…Substack newsletters and Facebook groups just one spam DM away from being hacked…Everyone I know who works online has had to face the question, lately, of what is going to work now.

For now, I’ve personally shifted my focus to Bluesky – here is my personal profile, and here is one for Wondermark comics. I hope to see you there!

As for the video linked above…

All the XOXO speakers were great, and you can watch all their talks on YouTube (from this year and years past).

But I’ve chosen to highlight Cabel Sasser’s talk in this post for a few reasons:

  • It’s very entertaining. The entire audience was on the edge of our seats the whole time.
  • It’s on a topic I care deeply about: remembering, and cherishing, artwork from the past that can speak to us in the present in a new way.
  • It’s about taking time to save, and bring along with us, things we love that might otherwise be lost as we move from place to place, platform to platform, website to website.

Watch the whole talk, and then, visit the website Cabel set up in its aftermath. (No spoilers from me.)

[ Cabel Sasser describes how he discovered a forgotten artist – XOXO 2024 ]


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