This is one of Screen Rant's best "Pitch Meeting" episodes ever. Now I don't want to and don't need to see the final season of Game of Thrones. [Contains spoilers.] Read the rest
Imaginary pitch meeting for the final season of Game of Thrones
This is one of Screen Rant's best "Pitch Meeting" episodes ever. Now I don't want to and don't need to see the final season of Game of Thrones. [Contains spoilers.] Read the rest
This German police officer doesn't take kindly to drivers who slow down to photograph a fatal crash. Image: YouTubeImaginary pitch meeting for the final season of Game of Thrones
German policeman shames photo taking rubberneckers at a fatal crash scene
The Virginia Pirate Corporation is a startup that brokers sales of used textbooks at colleges; they're suing North Charleston, SC's Trident Technical College over its inclusion of textbook fees in tuition, meaning that students will have already paid for new textbooks when they pay their tuition. Read the rest
LuLaRoe, a multi-billion dollar maker of garishly patterned garments, has been hit with multiple lawsuits for being a pyramid scheme. Vice has a 30-minute documentary about the company. Read the rest
Mountain View -- home to some of Silicon Valley's most profitable companies, including Google -- is one of the most expensive places in the world to live, thanks to the sky-high wages commanded by techies, who have gone on to bid up all the real-estate in the region. Read the rest
From 6PM-730PM tonight (Thursday, May 23), I'm presenting at the Exposition Park Library (Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Regional Library, 3900 S Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90062) on the problems of Big Tech and how the problems of monopolization (in tech and every other industry) is supercharged by the commercial surveillance industry -- and what we can do about it. It's part of the LA Public Library's "Book to Action" program and it's free to attend -- I hope to see you there! Read the rest
It took Canadian cartoonist Seth twenty years to complete his graphic novel Clyde Fans, and it was worth the wait. Seth is one of the greatest living cartoonists, and I've been a fan of his work since 1985, when he drew Mister X (after Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez stopped working on it).
Clyde Fans appeared in serial form in Seth's comic Palookaville, published by Drawn & Quarterly. The entire anthology runs 488 pages, and each panel is gorgeous.
From the book description:
Read the restTwenty years in the making, Clyde Fans peels back the optimism of mid-twentieth century capitalism. Legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth lovingly shows the rituals, hopes, and delusions of a middle-class that has long ceased to exist in North America—garrulous men in wool suits extolling the virtues of the wares to taciturn shopkeepers with an eye on the door. Much like the myth of an ever-growing economy, the Clyde Fans family unit is a fraud—the patriarch has abandoned the business to mismatched sons, one who strives to keep the business afloat and the other who retreats into the arms of the remaining parent.
Abe and Simon Matchcard are brothers, the second generation struggling to save their archaic family business of selling oscillating fans in a world switching to air conditioning. At Clyde Fans’ center is Simon, who flirts with becoming a salesman as a last-ditch effort to leave the protective walls of the family home, but is ultimately unable to escape Abe’s critical voice in his head. As the business crumbles so does any remaining relationship between the two men, both of whom choose very different life paths but still end up utterly unhappy.
Even with the cool motorcycles, only ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica 1980 were made.
Enjoy Episode 1. The reboot needed daggits. Read the rest
Playdate is a tiny yellow game console with a hand-crank (!) and a monochrome display. It's being made by Panic and Teenage Engineering, with a launch roster full of game auteurs such as Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) and Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Getting Over It). It'll be $150 and it comes out next year.
Playdate isn’t just the hardware.
It’s twelve brand new video games, one each week.
What are these games? Here’s the thing: we’d like to keep them a secret until they appear on your Playdate. We want to surprise you.
Some are short, some long, some are experimental, some traditional. All are fun.
When your Playdate lights up with a brand new game delivery, we hope you can’t wait to unwrap your gift.
There's a software development kit announced too: games are coded in Lua (as with the popular Löve and Pico-8 game engines) and C.
These are the folks behind some of the best MacOS apps going, working with top indie devs and the hardware people who created the legendary OP-1 synthesizer. I can't wait to get one and will definitely be making some brutally difficult games for it.
I'm seeing a lot of comparisons to the Gameboy, but 400×240 at 2.5" is about three times the pixel density -- not quite what Apple would qualify as a retina display, but close. So games won't have the retro blocky vibe some expect, unless a dev is intentionally pixel-doubling.
The first teaser screenshots remind me of the original mono Macs, in fact—no surprise given Panic's history! Read the rest
It comes in a squeeze bottle.
Calgary Herald:
Read the restThe name seems pretty logical—though some would argue ketchonnaise would be better—but in certain Cree dialects it comes off as less than appealing.
To some, Mayochup can translate to “shitfaced” or “shit is on my face”.
Originally tweeted by CBC radio host Waubgeshig Rice, Grand Chief Jonathan Solomon of the Mushkegowuk council in Northern Ontario first pointed out the translation mishap.
“We the Cree people are laughing about it because of what it means in our language,” he told the National Post in an email. “It’s kinda funny when you think about it. If I ate it and have some on my face, than I [am] Mayuchup/Shitface.”
The Rose Kuli 7" multi-tool looks like an Acme Product of cartoon provenance.
It's a hammer! It's got pliers! Is that an ax blade? Small size wrenches?! A nail file? This multi-tool even has a phillips head screwdriver.
What is a bung puller?
Made of stainless steel this awesome multi-tool weighs less than a pound and comes with a belt-attachable carrying case. I will put one in my camper's glove box, currently a full-size multi-tool ax is sliding around the cargo bay.
Rose Kuli 7'' Portable Multipurpose Multitool via Amazon Read the rest
They're semi-rebooting The Terminator, marking the first two (three?) movies as canon and relegating all the others to the franchise's timey-wimey parallel universes. Linda Hamilton is back, and so, of course, is Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Natalia Reyes and Gabriel Luna as new characters. Here's the first trailer. Read the rest
The incredible human misery on display at the workhouse attached to central London's Middlesex Hospital inspired Charles Dickens to write "Oliver Twist"; now, Camden council has granted a developer permission to develop the site into luxury flats (just in time for the luxury flat crash!), in exchange for a commitment to build some below-market-rent social housing flats, which will be accessible through "poor doors." Read the rest
It's not just pitch correction: with modern music-making software, it's as easy to snap analog recordings of instruments to a time signature as it is to program EDM. When everything is quantized, says Rick Beato, it loses its humanity—and becomes boring.
People actually do this. This is why everything sounds like it's on a computer now. Because it is. ... A live drummer turned into a drum machine
Beato's a master of the software and he shows you how to do it, so his critique is technically instructive instead of just a YouTube rant about something he doesn't like. The tracks he uses really do sound uncannily "off" after being quantized. But I can't help but point out that now I want to get Beat Detective.
A good terrible project would be to quantize hits by The Beatles and other artists where isolated tracks are readily available, then reupload them to YouTube without disclosing what's been done, and watching as the quantized versions displace the originals in online media embeds, and TV and radio play, because so many people just get everything from YouTube.
For years I subtly photoshopped famous photos and paintings, posted them at inflated dimensions to fool Google Images into thinking they were the highest-quality versions, and waited for them to turn up elsewhere. I've spotted "my" versions in news stories, TV segments, even a handful of books and magazines. I have no plans to disclose them, but if you ever see, say, Henry Kissinger with mouths for eyes in a school textbook, you know who to blame. Read the rest
If you can build a cloud infrastructure, you can build a business. Companies are overwhelmingly turning to cloud computing to set up or bolster their network, and it's easy to see why. It allows on-demand access to processing power, a la carte services, and nearly unlimited storage, all without adding extra systems and the maintenance that comes along with them.
When it comes to cloud infrastructure, the usual tech giants have the lion's share of the market. Amazon's AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud all have their strengths, but they share key principles. Right now, one of the quickest ways to get a handle on all of them is the Cloud Computing Architect Certification Bundle.
In the introductory courses, you'll learn the fundamentals before tackling the particulars of the Big Three providers. You'll get a breakdown of the three main models: SAAS (Software as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service) and IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), allowing you to better decide which platform is best for what model.
Later courses will zoom in on what makes each provider unique. By the time you're done with the dedicated course on AWS, you'll understand what makes it ideal for developing web applications and be able to navigate its messaging services.
In the Google Cloud courses, you'll explore the platform's many strengths as a foundation for data analytics and machine learning. That includes a mastery of key software like Hadoop and TensorFlow, along with a fundamental understanding of how neural networks operate. Read the rest
"That's incredible, I mean, I've felt these bricks, these are real bri—", says TV host Steve Uyehara as the brick turns to dust at his lightest touch. [via Reddit] "Oh! Whoa! Whaaaaaa! Check it out, baby! Guns!"
P.S. Glass is an irresponsible material for the board breaking trick! Read the rest
George Best, a soccer legend from Northern Ireland, was immortalized in bronze, but it more closely resembles Pazuzu, the hideous demon infesting the Exorcist series of movies. Sure, it's not as bad as the Ronaldo statue...
... Or the Lucille Ball statue...
But still...
A new statue of George Best - the Northern Ireland and Manchester United football great - has provoked strong reactions from fans and critics alike. ... The often cruel social media sphere has not held back.
