Musical mash-ups with cats

I love musical mash-ups with cats! Here are some of my recent favourites.

Meredith Bull

The first person I saw making these types of mash-ups was Meredith Bull on TikTok back in 2020. These are my two favourites from her.

Sick of this empty cup

I don’t want to embed the original TikTok video in my blog, so here’s the YouTube version. She’s since released a full-length version of this that’s available from all music streamers.

I don’t wanna be touched

Here’s her initial mash-up (again, not the original TikTok).

This one she first developed into a full song and then just released a music video for!

The Kiffness

The other person who’s been doing fun mash-ups for a while is The Kiffness on YouTube.

Alugalug Cat (International Symphonic Mashup)

His original version of ‘Alugalug Cat’ is nice, but then he collaborated with a bunch of musicians from around the world to create this international symphonic version — which I adore.

Alugalug Cat 2.0 (Please Go Away)

This week he’s back with a follow-up.

Sherzod Ergashev

Finally there’s Sherzod Ergashev, who has done two mash-ups I love.

Barchaga a’lo kayfiyat (good mood for everyone)

This song certainly puts me in a good mood every time :)

Funny Cat cover

I love both The Kiffness and Sherzod’s mash-ups with this cat :)

Let me know if you have any favourite musical cat mash-ups. I’d love to hear them!

Bypassing the YouTube recommendation algorithm

How many times have you watched a YouTube video that’s ended with a variation of this phrase: “please like and subscribe, and remember to click that bell icon so you get notified every time I upload a new video”?

If you watch YouTube as much as I do [1], you hear this All. The. Time.

What’s with the bell icon?

Why are YouTubers so insistent that viewers clicking that bell icon?

Veritasium (Derek Muller) explains this in his recent ‘My Video Went Viral. Here's Why’ video. In that he presents his “theory of everything when it comes to YouTube”. If you’re a big watcher of YouTube videos, I highly recommended you watch it.

But, basically: clicking that bell icon is great because doing so lets you, essentially, bypass part of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm (while also, technically, giving it more data). This, of course, is the algorithm that, among other things, determines which eight recommended videos you’ll see at the top of your YouTube home page.

If, however, you watch videos from your favourite channel by clicking on a YouTube notification instead, two things happen.

1. You don’t have to wait for your favourite channel’s newest video to appear in your recommendations list. This is great because now you don’t miss a video just because the algorithm determined, for whatever reason, to not feature that video in your top recommendations.

2. Once you’ve watched the videos from your favourite channels, YouTube doesn’t need to recommend them to you anymore. That means it can now recommend other things in your recommendations list. Which, depending on how you look at it, can be an excellent outcome.

But…I use an older magic

That, however, is not the method I use. It would make sense if I did – I do subscribe to 454 channels on YouTube, after all. But I really don’t want to be bombarded with all those notifications and emails.

Instead, I use a much older, much simpler, and much less obtrusive way of keeping track of every video a channel uploads: RSS.

Yes, I subscribe to the RSS feed of all the channels I want to watch most (if not all) the videos from :)

Some of the learning and science YouTube channels (and blogs) that I subscribe to.

Depending on which RSS news reader you use, this is super easy to do. My reader of choice is NewsBlur so all I need to do is copy-paste a YouTube channel’s URL into NewsBlur’s add-feed dialog and, voilà, I am subscribed to a full feed of this channel’s videos.

So, if you’re someone who watches a lot of YouTube and also uses an RSS feed reader, I highly recommend you give this method a try. It will make your life much easier and you’ll be free of those pesky notifications.

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[1] About and hour and half a day, on average.