There is a phase: "I'm on the weird part of YouTube again." It seems 
quite apt for what happened to me yesterday night.

OK, so first of all, as none of you are probably aware, Valve have been 
producing a whimsical series of videos for Team Fortress 2. The initial 
ones were quite tame. For example,

   http://www.teamfortress.com/classes.php?class=heavy#movie

A rather simple affair. But they've been getting more and more 
elaborate. For example,

   http://www.teamfortress.com/classes.php?class=spy#movie

There's one for every character class. I've basically stopped playing 
TF2 because the game is getting too ridiculous. But I just saw that the 
final video, for my favourite class, is now out:

   http://www.teamfortress.com/classes.php?class=pyro#movie

What an anticlimax. *sigh* Oh well...

In other news, I see that the software they used to make all of these is 
now available for use:

   http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/post.php?id=8065&p=1

The short version: Source Film Maker lets you load up assets from any 
Source-powered game (e.g., TF2), play the game as normal, record the 
action, and then go back and change anything and everything, from the 
animation to the camera angles to the special effects. This includes 
adding effects which are too slow for real-time, to get a polished look. 
(In the case of TF2, there's also an option to load character models 
with increased polygon counts. Because Valve have produced and released 
those models.)

The long and short of all this is that I ended up hanging around YouTube 
trying to find good SFM videos. As you can imagine, /most/ videos on 
YouTube are just pathetic. For example,

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weMpv14cW9U

Even the ones which aren't obviously short test videos or just utter 
silliness aren't very good. It turns out putting together a sequence of 
shots so that the audience understands what the hell is going on isn't 
very easy. Especially when your star characters can only say "I am 
bulletproof!" or "You are not welcome in my world!" or one of a handful 
of other pre-recorded lines.

[You can add any audio you want. But then it won't sound like the 
in-game characters, of course. Unless you hire the actual guy who did 
the voice... Good luck with that!]

So anyway, I'm browsing TF2 videos, when suddenly... I'm watching anime? 
I'm not precisely sure how the heck that happened, but there we go. [I 
think you all know where this is going now...] Now I'd heard that anime 
was strange, but just /how/ strange I hadn't realised. I'll be kind and 
hypothesize that only the really weird crap actually ends up on YouTube 
or something.

So somehow I end up watching a video consisting of freeze-frame shots of 
some girl/women hybrid set to the beat of generic electronic dance 
music. (It always slightly creeps me out how anime females are 6 years 
old from the neck up and 26 double-D from the neck down...) It wouldn't 
surprise me if the images and sound have nothing to do with each other, 
but you have to wonder about who the hell drew the images...

Then things take a turn slightly for the worse. We get an unedited 
video, I'm not sure from what. Little boy has something that 
not-so-little girl wants. [I didn't pick up on what exactly.] Girl 
casually lifts up her skirt to reveal fluffy white knickers with pink 
polka dots and offers to trade. "Why would I want to see your dirty old 
fanny?" asks the boy. The girl flips out with "IT'S NOT DIRTY!!!" She 
then calms down and the scene continues as if nothing unusual had just 
happened. [At least, it does for the next 6 seconds before the clip 
abruptly ends.]

As one commenter wrote, "what the actual fuck, Japan??"

I should probably have stopped clicking things at this point. But I 
didn't. Arguably I got what I deserved for my misplaced curiosity. 
Because the next video was... you know, somehow "monster gang tentacle 
rape" doesn't really convey what my eyes just saw. Neither does "cannot 
unsee". Perhaps the most worrying part is the way we go from a perfectly 
plausible real-world situation to some kind of nightmarish acid-trip in 
just a few split seconds. The first 4 minutes or so looked perfectly 
normal. The remaining 5 minutes... not so much.

(I'm still lost as to how the girl escaped the monsters by diving into 
the swimming pool, sinking to the bottom, touching her reflection in the 
pool bottom, and then her reflection climbing out of the water on some 
remote alien planet... Considering she just out-ran two tentacle 
monsters holding the mutilated skin-sack of the other girl, the fact 
that the pool appears to be over 200 feet deep seems almost 
inconsequential by comparison.)

I decided to click on something else. This looked innocuous enough:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVk9uTPIfHo

It turns out... no, it really isn't. But I dare you to watch it.

At this point, I got smart. Very smart. I closed Firefox and went 
outside for a while. Best decision yet. o_O

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