Link Dump

Well, it’s actually been a while since the last link dump, so here’s a few interesting links:

• God of War Movie Trailer: If it were directed by Wes Anderson, that is. Excellent spoof of indie movie tropes.
• I Write Like: David Foster Wallace, apparently. Mayhap I should finish off Infinite Jest sometime. Actually, it looks like they updated the algorithm. I still get mostly Wallace, but I’m also getting lots of other folks (Lovecraft, James Joyce, etc…) which is a bit strange. I mean, I write like everybody! I’d like to know more about how they determine the key indicators for each writer.
• Film Longevity: Box Office vs. Oscars: Sam Stoddard (of the excellent but sporadic All Movie Talk podcast) takes on two inevitable movie topics:
  

  1. Those snooty Academy Awards! Why do they always nominate obscure art films? In 20 years, nobody will remember them. When the films of today have stood the test of time, they’ll have been forgotten. The films people will remember, see, and cherish are the ones that dominate the box office!
  2. The public is stupid! Every year they turn the most mindless drivel into cash cows. But the fame these movies have will not endure. When the films of today have stood the test of time, they’ll have been forgotten. The films people will remember, see, and cherish are the ones that win Academy Awards!

  These claims are obviously at odds with each other. They can both be false, but they cannot both be true, except in cases where the movies that win at the box office are also the ones garnering awards attention.

  He then goes into a relatively thorough examination of the Oscar Nominees and Top Grossing films for each year, going back to the beginnings of the Oscars. Fascinating stuff.

• KFC Drive-Through: Doublelicious all the way. You know, the great thing about laughter is that it just happens. You don’t have to think about it or explain it, which is a good thing, because I have no idea why I laughed so much at this.
• Cognitive Surplus Visualized: Wow.

That’s all for now…

Just some interesting stuff I’ve seen lately:

• Ninja Say What?!: I had no idea.
• Alien vs. Ninja: Apparently a real movie. I wonder how those Ninjas from the first video feel about this.
• Old School Sam Raimi Interview: Harry Knowles reminisces about The Incredibly Strange Film Show, and features an excellent interview with Sam Raimi, circa 1988. Great stuff.
• Luke Skywalker – Worst Scout Ever: Yeah, pretty much.
• The Typewriter: I think Joe Wright just found the soundtrack to his new movie.
• South of the Border: Natural-Born Shillers: Karina Longworth on Oliver Stone’s new “documentary” in which Stone pals around with various South American dictators (such as Hugo Chávez): “South of the Border‘s subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.” Ouch.

That’s all for now.

Apologies for all the recent link dumps. Time has been short. More meaningful content to return shortly. In the meantime, enjoy:

• 2 Guage Shotgun: When I was in high school, I really hated Biology. So after the class ended, my dad and I took my notebook up to our range. Fearing that the 12 guage shotgun wouldn’t do, we broke out the 10 guage and proceeded to annihilate the notebook. Some scraps around the edges remained, but otherwise, it was pretty thoroughly destroyed. Now, these guys have a 2 guage shotgun and manage to pretty much vaporize half a board of clay birds. Supposedly the gun was mounted to a boat and used for hunting duck, but I don’t really understand. What good is a vaporized duck (or a duck riddled with shot)? I guess if you have a large flock and a longer range, it would work, but still. Amazingly powerful gun.
• Cardboard Mechanics Installation: Sometimes when I watch these videos, I wish there could be an easy way to keep tabs on the people that made them. Did they ever amount to anything? What did they end up doing with their lives? In this case, it’s clear that the creators have a pretty thorough understanding of mechanics and how to get things working, but what are they going to do with all that knowledge (besides make a video like this)?
• The History of the Typewriter: As told by Michael Winslow, of Police Academy fame. I have to wonder how close he actually is to the real thing (I wish they would’ve included that for comparison’s sake, but then, I guess the video is long enough as it is).
• Super Mario Brothers with Violin: It’s the white tux that really cements it. Still, pretty good for what is presumably an improvised performance… Also of note: Beatboxing Mario. It’s amazing how many new viral Mario memes appear every week. Here, look at these Mario themed Filing Cabinets! What about Stop Motion Mario? Marathons! Dance Pads! iPads! Crossovers! I’m consistently intrigued by how much love Mario gets, even today, well over 20 years after the game originally appeared (though it’s a bit telling that 90% of these things are referencing the first game and not the sequels, especially not 3d sequels…)
• The Most Badass Alphabet Ever: This is old, but still awesome. I won’t ruin it by quoting anything, but it’s great.

That’s all for now.

Some more interesting stuff:

• Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: It took them 21 seconds to play an entire game of Monopoly. The details of all 4 turns, in case you can’t follow the video. [via Kottke]
• Kinect Dance Central: In case you don’t feel enough like a total idiot playing the Wii, check out Kinect! Almost as funny, the description of the video: “nerd can’t contain the funk” No, I suppose he can’t.
• Tony Hawk Ride in Real Life: Worth watching mostly for the last 45 seconds or so of the video.
• Russian Versus Ads: Some Russian marketing company devised a series of hysterical low-fi animated videos in which two famous characters or video games are pitted against one another. For example, Mario vs Pacman. Contra vs Tetris. Jackie Chan vs Eye of Sauron. Great stuff.
• Food vs Inertia: Gravity wins.
• Kung Fu Institute: I have nothing clever to say about this one.

There you have it!

A busy weekend and the Flyers storming back in the Stanley Cup finals means less time than usual, so here’s a few links that I’ve found interesting lately:

• Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese: Remember when I posted this comic a while back? It’s apparently from 2007, and according to what appears to be an internal weekly newsletter, Subway will begin tessellating cheese on its sandwiches. A consumer triumph.
• Trailers From Hell: This has been around for a while, but it’s well worth checking out for movie fans (it tends to lean towards horror, but it’s not exclusively that genre). Basically, it consists of a bunch of famous directors doing a commentary on the trailers of their favorite films. While some well-known movies are featured, there are tons of obscure films as well. The people doing the commentary tend to be horror director mainstays, including Joe Dante, Kaedrin favorite Don Coscarelli, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, John Landis, and a bunch of others.
• Johanna Blakely: Lessons from fashion’s free culture: Shamus posts this excellent 15 minute TED talk about how the fashion industry doesn’t use copyright, and various implications to other areas of IP. Interesting stuff about a subject I’m always fascinated by…
• Heist!: An intriguing bank robbery in Buenos Aires that Hollywood should be paying attention to…
  

  On the afternoon of (Friday!) January 13, four gunmen walked into the Banco Rio in Acassuso (part of greater Buenos Aires) and took the staff and customers hostage. There was a tense six hour long siege by the police, expertly handled by the robbers – they let each hostage call home, so that family members showed up at the scene; the calculation was that the police would be more reluctant to storm the building immediately if hostages’ relatives were watching. They made sure to release three hostages right away as a gesture of goodwill, but of course the three released included the security guard and police officer already in the building. While one of the robbers stayed on the phone, negotiating with police, the remaining ones got busy cracking open safe deposit boxes. Towards four in the afternoon, the police delivered six pizzas and some bottles of soda, the fruit of all those hours of negotiation, which the robbers passed along to the hostages. And then they went silent.

  After about an hour of no contact and no news, an elite police bank-storming squad stormed the bank, only to find a group of bewildered hostages sitting scared in the smoke. There was no trace of the gunmen.

  I love the cat-and-mouse games robbers play with the police in situations like this, and this one has a few exchanges of that going on…

• Pulsate: This thing had me transfixed for much longer than it should have. My favorite thing to do was to position my mouse in the center of the space and click several times in succession, creating a series of concentric rings. Then I’d move the mouse to one of the corners (quickly, as you have to do it before the original set of rings makes it there) and do another series of rings. Do it for a couple other corners and presto! You’ve got an Aphex Twin song.
• Soviet Space Center: A photo tour of a decommissioned Soviet Space Center. The post isn’t in English, but the photos are great.
• Nothing New to Report: At first, I thought this was the same newspaper, over and over again, but there are probably tons of copies of the same one in use in Hollywood. I can almost guarantee it’s due to the fact that someone had to clear all the stories in the newspaper once, and never wants to pay for the rights again. Understandable for what should be a throwaway prop.
• Duck Hunt Behind-the-Scenes: Pretty sure that’s what happens.

That’s all for now. Possibly something more substantial next week!

Sorry for all the link dumps, but I’ve not been feeling especially inspired as of late. Anyway, some interesting stuff I’ve seen recently:

• The Enemy Within by Mark Bowden: You wouldn’t think that the story of a computer worm would be this interesting, but it is.
  

  The struggle against this remarkable worm is a sort of chess match unfolding in the esoteric world of computer security. It pits the cleverest attackers in the world, the bad guys, against the cleverest defenders in the world, the good guys (who have been dubbed the “Conficker Cabal”). It has prompted the first truly concerted global effort to kill a computer virus, extraordinary feats of international cooperation, and the deployment of state-of-the-art decryption techniques—moves and countermoves at the highest level of programming. The good guys have gone to unprecedented lengths, and have had successes beyond anything they would have thought possible when they started. But a year and a half into the battle, here’s the bottom line:

  The worm is winning.

  Zoinks!

• And I, for one, welcome our new printer overlords.
• Mann Co. – Form letter from a company of awesome people.
• Periodic Table of Fictional Elements – Sometimes I think I’m a nerd, and then someone goes and makes something like this..
• “Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge?” – Heroic tale of refrigeration and data recovery. “I share this experience with you, the internet, in the hopes that it is useful.”

Stuff I’ve found interesting lately:

• Total Recall: The Musical – Brilliant.
• Neave Strobe – I can’t stop looking at this. I think my eyes might be broken now.
• Get Out of There – Somehow these clip compliations never cease being interesting to me.
• Iron Man Punches Hugh Grant – There are a surprising amount of similar videos, including a Dirty Dancing one and this one, which doesn’t feature Iron Man until the end, but it’s worth it..
• Scout Walker Command Tower with Speeder Bike Ride – I want one.

That’s all for now!

You know the drill – some interesting stuff I’ve seen lately on teh interwebs:

• Robot Exoskeleton: Power Loader: Towards the beginning of the video, some text starts scrolling across the screen that says “This is the power loader. The prototype robotic exoskeleton is designed to allow the wearer…” and I totally thought the next screen was going to say something like “… to act like Ripley at the end of Aliens!” but alas, the video was serious.
• Google Predictive Search is amusing sometimes. I’d hit that. [via Nick Holmes]
• A Sincere Letter of Thanks to Roger Ebert: Ebert trolled the video game industry again last week with his long-standing assertion that video games can’t be art. Kevin Beverage from GameSpy brilliantly skewers both Ebert and the general response:
  

  Noting the content drought on many game enthusiast websites, you selflessly decided to peel the crusted top off of the cesspool that is the games-as-art debate, to present us gamers with the opportunity to wallow in our own intellectual feces for a solid week-and-a-half. And with bony fists raised in impotent rage and eyes fixed unflinchingly on our navels, we took up the call.

  Heh.

• David Thorne: Awesome Person: Also apparently a “fucking legend”. [via Nick Holmes]
• Man At Very Top Of Food Chain Chooses Bugles: Somehow, the Onion never ceases to be funny.
  

  Acting on an impulse from an incredibly complex forebrain that has evolved over millions of years, Atkinson then took note of the Bugles’ amusing conical shape and placed one on each of his opposable thumbs like little wizard hats.

• Super Mario Crossover: Awesome concept – play Super Mario Brothers with other NES classic characters, like Samus, Simon Belmont, Link, etc… Awesome idea, and well executed too. I kinda wish I still had a gamepad for my computer though (and that it would work for this)…
• Lawn Mower of the Future: Why didn’t I ever think of this?

That’s all for now!

Yes, another one.

• Dear Subway, Inc. – I always thought they shaped the cheese like that because they didn’t want to use as much cheese. This guy has a somewhat more optimistic outlook.
• The Videogame Car – Apparently it’s much harder to drive like that in real life than it is in GTA4.
• Why records DO all sound the same – The unknown knows of the music industry. In all seriousness, it’s pretty interesting how modern music mixing and mastering techniques are used to smooth out and “louden” music tracks.
• 5 Year Old Baseball Star – This kid is better at baseball than I ever was, and he’s only 5. He can consistently hit an 85 mph pitch (since he’s so small, he actually gets pushed backwards).
• Transformers Crossover – This felt vaguely infuriating until I realized that it was Anikin Skywalker, not the real Star Wars.
• Auto-Tune Some Pizza – How is it that Auto-Tune never gets old. Ok, well, it does, but still, this was pretty funny.

Yeah, so, sorry for the gratuitous link dumps of late. Just not especially inspired right now. Hopefully something more interesting on Sunday.

Perhaps I’ve been doing these a bit too often lately, but here are a few interesting links I’ve seen lately:

• Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief: The title pretty much says it, but as near as I can tell, this guy is like a one man Ocean’s 11. I hope Hollywood is reading, because you could make a pretty good movie out of this stuff.
  

  …Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

  It was two weeks before anyone realized that what was on display was actually a fake bought at the on-site gift-store. The article is great stuff. (via Galley Slaves, who also has some interesting comments about Wired magazine and editor Chris Anderson’s willingness to run stories like this…)

• Google Search for Recursion: Get it?
• Archer: Why was I not informed of this show?! It’s like The Venture Brothers, but for James Bond (rather than Johnny Quest). This show definitely owes a lot to the Venture Brothers, and it’s perhaps not quite as good, but it’s still quite funny.
• Birdemic: Shock And Terror Official Theatrical Trailer: “A towering achievement in human creative expression.” – IMDB User Review (via CHUD, where Devin notes “every so often, ineptitude and fate converge on the event horizon of cinema’s black hole (read: anus) to produce an experience so bafflingly sucky and confusing it borders on the remarkable”)
• ‘Battlefield Earth’ Screenwriter Is Sorry About That: More for the headline than the article itself, but the guy does seem to have a sense of humor about himself and his work.
• 160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes: Awesome.

That’s all for now.