June 25, 2014
Father and Daughter
A 9-minute Dutch animation about a daughter who remembers her father. The Academy Award winner in 2000 for animated short films, and multiple other awards. A more detailed review here and an in-depth interview with Michael Dudok de Wit, but these are best read after watching the film first.
No dialogue, sepia-tinged and with an accordion-dominated soundtrack. Possibly NSFW if your workplace minds you suddenly bursting into noisy sobs.
Dudok de Wit is now working on The Red Turtle, a dialogue-less feature and the first Western project with Studio Ghibli as co-producer.
Hubbard’s Great Grandson: Beat Poet
I can almost smell the pizza...
Have an android phone? And a pizza box? Then you can build your own Virtual Reality system. Cardboard, from google.
Quality of life around the developed world
The OECD has for a long time offered up measures of human wellbeing across a range of indices. Now they've taken the resolution a step further, providing measures of well being at a regional level for 300 regions/provinces/states across the developed world. How does your neck of the woods fare? What other part of the world is comparable to where you live? Allow your location and see.
The first rule of Slap Club is...
Max Landis invited a bunch of strangers together (including Haley Joel Osment) and invited them to slap each other (behind the scenes).
Single-use bicycle rim
World Cup Downhill MTB Run - With No Rear Tire
Pitbulls, Lies and Videotape
Welcome to the Internet crowdfunding, where the cutest, blondest, and most adorable victims of unverifiable woe seek to fund their health care via the largesse of outraged strangers. This isn't uncommon. We've seen the stories about mean things written on receipts, or even fingers in chili. [more inside]
A Song of Ice and Pugs
The Pugs of Westeros: Scenes from HBO's series Game of Thrones recreated with pugs. Don't miss the making-of video.
How to write 225 words per minute
How to write 225 words per minute. With a pen. Dennis Hollier, in the Atlantic, writes about Gregg shorthand, a piece of analog data-compression technology now largely forgotten and probably forever unequalled.
This Woman Had Her Face Photoshopped
Esther Honig, a freelance journalist based out of Kansas City, sent an unaltered photograph of herself to more than 40 Photoshop aficionados around the world. “Make me beautiful,” she said, hoping to bring to light how standards of beauty differ across various cultures. (SLBF)
My Aunt Katherine is ALLERGIC to wi-fi.
This is not a think piece about how "problematic" the terrible fuckin puppets are in DirecTV's new series of ads currently running over and over during every commercial break of every TV show. It's A FACT PIECE. And the facts are in: Fuck these puppets. (Gawker)
David Sedaris, meet your new obsession
Ep. 6: Ben and Johnny spill unstable molecules on Sue’s good tablecloth.
The greatest TV show never seen: "The Fantastic Four" (1963-64)
Generate a random annoyed footballer.
Karim Benzema is ticked off because you stretched out his favourite t-shirt. FIFA filmed every footballer present at the 2014 FIFA World Cup folding their arms and looking moody, to be used in VFX. Now, thanks to Josh Cluderay, you can find out why they look so pissed.
one more down
Ken Sei Mogura
"The twist here is that this is not an actual fighting game, it’s a Whac-a-mole title, one of those games where little heads pop up and you have to use a hammer to hit them back into the ground. The whole machine is Street Fighter II themed, the moles are Bison (Vega) characters and the on-screen characters play out a fight based on your performance."
"Robert was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that"
NHS Prescribes Books for Better Health
Bibliotherapy:
From June 2013, a new scheme, Reading Well Books on Prescription will be available in libraries throughout England. This new scheme has been developed by The Reading Agency and The Society of Chief Librarians and aims to bring reading's healing benefits to the 6 million people with anxiety, depression and other mild to moderate mental health illnesses. There is growing evidence showing that self-help reading can help people with certain mental health conditions get better. Reading Well Books on Prescription will enable GPs and mental health professionals to prescribe patients cognitive behavioural therapy through a visit to the library. Here they can get books to help them understand and manage conditions from depression to chronic pain.More on the program from the Boston Globe. Previously.
The Call Is Coming From Inside The Grave
"If the phone rang and you were in another room, you had to come running: in that immediate sense, and in a way that now seems comical, your phone controlled you. And before the ‘90s, there was no caller ID, an inconvenience which ensured, for that benighted first century-plus of the instrument’s analog existence, the first premise of phone horror—that you could never know for certain whose voice, or what sound, would issue from the other end of that raised receiver." - HiLoBrow is in the middle of a series exploring the tropes and history of Phone Horror. Of particular note is the brief historical connection between the telephone and the world of occult crypto-science - The Atlantic explains further.
Prick Up Your Ears
In an interview published Monday with Playboy magazine (mostlySFW), Gary Oldman, the British actor who first gained critical recognition in 1987 for his portrayal of gay playwright Joe Orton, defended Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and use of the other "F" word. He has since walked it [most of the way] back.
how to make sure we don't leave trans people behind
The Stranger's Queer Issue 2014 – How to Make Sure We Don't Leave Trans People Behind
- How to Stop the Stupid Debate About Taxpayer Dollars Funding "Sex Change" Surgeries
- How to Stop Thinking All Trans People Are the Same
- How to Date a Trans Person / How to Have Sex with a Trans Person
- How to Make Seattle Better for Trans People
- I Am the Best Feminist, for I Am Dating a Trans Woman
- How to Treat Trans Sex Workers with Respect
- About the Word "Tr-nny" by Mx Justin Vivian Bond
- How Zackary Drucker Photographs Trans People—Including Herself
- CeCe McDonald Speaks Freely About Being in Prison, Laverne Cox, Penis Pumps, and Gay Men Taking Women Seriously
- Interviews with Mac S. McGregor and Clyde Petersen
- Pride Everything 2014!
End of the line for Aereo?
Internet TV/DVR start-up Aereo lost its copyright-infringement case at the Supreme Court today in a 6-3 decision, with Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissenting. This decision effectively reverses an earlier lower court ruling that found Aereo safely within the law. Although Aereo based its case on the 2008 Cablevision decision, which upheld the legality of cloud-based DVR systems, the majority ruling (PDF) states that "[B]ehind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly."
This decision effectively puts Aereo out of business, given CEO Chet Kanojia's earlier statement that there was "no Plan B" if the Supreme Court ruled against the company. [more inside]
Under the Ground Floor
Rocks Made Of Plastic Found On Hawaiian Beaches. But is it rock, or just fused detritus? Depends on the timescale, similar to how the beaches of Normandy are part shrapnel. [more inside]
The Founding Fathers Would Have Protected Your Smartphone
The Supreme Court has unanimously reversed (large PDF) the California Court of Appeals in Riley v. California, deciding that police cannot search the contents of a phone without a warrant during an arrest, and that "the fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought." [more inside]
Louis Wain 2.0
@GenerateACat is a Twitter bot which will make cats for you. Exquisite gatos, lovely kitties, brilliant felines. By @mousefountain, a.k.a. Gruau Pomme Lackey, a pixel artist and game designer.
Still Life with Hairballs
The animals that attract crowds pay dearly for our affection.
Comfort in.... Dump out...
How not to say the wrong thing... A simple rule for dealing with other people's difficult life events.
Je Suis Heureux
Older and wiser societies than ours knew about Tony Blair
Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through, a gassy eruption stinking of farts and sulphur. It doesn’t matter how many rounds you fire into his shambling frame; he just won’t die. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the Middle East, whenever some huge corporation is discovered to be starving people to death or poisoning them through calculated negligence, whenever the chaos of the international order starts to wobble into another death-spiral, a damp wind blows through a graveyard somewhere in England and Tony Blair emerges from his tomb. There’s something viscerally revolting about the man. His fake chumminess and his sham gravitas are both as nauseatingly contrived as his shiny oily skin, hiding what can only be bloated rotting organs inside. He’s a gremlin, an incubus, very strange and very cruel and very foreign to our world. But still there’s a decaying vestige of that charm, the memory of the love in which he was once held, that universal joy when he finally ended a generation of Conservative rule by ending the Tory monopoly on evil.Inspired by his latest pronouncements, Sam Kriss talks about the role of Tony Blair in UK politics.
Open Source Everything
The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1%, says an ex CIA spy:
The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth [more inside]
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