It's really not a waste of time

I'll get back to the subject line in a minute.

Sunday night, I was procrastinating, putting off studying for an exam. When I find myself doing that sort of thing, I often end up on Youtube, searching random things.

Somehow, I came across this - The New Pornographers' "Mutiny, I Promise You", as composed in Mario Paint.

This led me to another discovery - for some reason, taking popular music and putting it into Mario Paint has become somewhat of a cottage industry among Youtubers in the last few weeks. I don't know why Mario Paint is the program of choice - in the early 90s, composing programs were everywhere, I remember there being one in The Treehouse, a PC game I had as a kid. But for some reason, it's Mario Paint that's taken off.

A lot of the videos aren't that good. But there are three that deserve special mention - the one I linked to above, as well as Bohemian Rhapsody and I Get Around (in my opinion the best one currently on Youtube, even if the last part does sound a little out of tune).

I spent over an hour watching this sort of thing. Then I started wondering if it was fair to say I 'wasted' over an hour on it - I decided that it was. Then I started wondering "well, if I wasted an hour watching them, imagine how much time the people who made them wasted!" After all, I like to think I'd be able to do a slightly better job at creating one of these than the average person, and even if I were to completely put my mind to it and have no distractions, it'd probably take me most of a day to shoot one off.

I'm going to guess that these people are really good at it, but even then - transcribing the music, finding the right sounds in Mario Paint, and then putting all the notes in would probably take them a few hours.

I can't call it a waste of their time, though. Not when what they're doing is that awesome.

--Ryan