Say what you will about YouTube’s affinity for cats or their audience’s collective inability to write insightful comments, but there’s one thing that YouTube really just doesn’t get enough credit for: saving the music video. As MTV losts its original love in favor of Nick Cannon Presents: Whacky Garbage Nonsense and re-runs of America’s Next Quickly Forgotten Reality Show Person, music videos went without a proper home for nearly a decade. Then came YouTube.

The only bad part about watching music videos on YouTube? Everything else on YouTube. The soul-crushing comments; the gawdy artist backgrounds; the endless recommendations. That’s where Tubalr comes in. It’s YouTube’s glorious music video collection, minus all of that darn YouTube.

Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive.

The search algorithm still needs a bit of tuning (a search for “Reel Big Fish” built a playlist of nineteen music videos… and one clip called “Jessica the Hippo”, which was three minutes of an older gentleman talking to a hippo at a zoo.) but this is definitely something I expect to have running on one of my monitors throughout the day. Check it out here.

Bored? Yeah, me too. Which is why I just killed nearly 30 minutes doing mindless web surfing on Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. But it looks like YouTube would like a little of my holiday downtime clicks – and yours, too. The company just blogged about YouTube Slam, a game that involves pairing up two videos and voting for your favorites.

I guess you could call YouTube Slam a “Hot or Not” for videos. Except in this case, you’re not picking the hottest/sexiest face, you’re picking the funniest clip (Comedy Slam), the best dancer (Dance Slam), the cutest kitten (Cute Slam), best music (Music Slam) or weirdest video (Bizarre Slam).

Here’s how it works:

Click on the category of videos you want to watch. View them both and vote for your favorites. Wow, that was hard.

The top-rated videos are then featured on the “slam leaderboard,” which is great, but nothing like getting onto the YouTube homepage, of course.

The site was cooked up by YouTube with folks from Google Research, and has actually been around since this fall, when Google Research used it as the output destination of a machine ranking project. The project analyzed “singing at home” videos and attempted to surface those that belonged to truly talented musicians. The results were then spit out to YouTube Slam to help crowdsource the discovery of the “hidden gems.”

So there you go: mindless web surfing. For science! Slam away.