Tangerine Dream - Phaedra

The New Samsung Apex Wearable Computer

"For my career I do need internet and TV and my dick sucked all the time." -Andy Hold, Brooklyn, NY.

Pretty Much Exactly How It Went Down

Once again, Life imitates Taiwanese Television News Anime: Wendy Davis' Texas Filibuster

Wringing Out A Washcloth In Zero-G

Just what I said:

National Crystal Meth Hallucination League

From the Comedy Central and the Onion.

Langer: 562  Snakes: 1



Totally awesome.

That's Nature: Ever Seen An Actual Meteor Strike?

Me neither. But here's a comp of the meteor that struck Russia. This is totally amazing/scary/beautiful:



Not to make light, mind you. More than a 1000 people were injured from the impact. More here.

I need a stagecoach - Hipster Thanksgiving

This... is hilarious. And I've been to this Hipster Thanksgiving. Spot. On.



And now I'm off to delete my Facebook account.

In Norway Kids Are Freezing

Interesting take on international aid from the prospective of those who feel exploited by images of starving children. From their website:

Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway”-video, and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?

So they made a parody video:



Best comment on YouTube from fellaciousderp:

the radiators will just be stolen and fuel their viking tribal warfare.  They'll have a population explosion and then they'll just need more radiators. By interfering, you're just going to increase the misery. Let them freeze, that's their way of life.

You Are Warrior Dreams. Wait, That Doesn't Make Any Sense

This is just kinda AWESOME.

Birds from Tree of Life

You seen the Tree of Life? It was good. Very good. Though the last twenty minutes kinda blew. Sean Penn walks through the set of what looks like an 80's music video. Doesn't ruin the film, but sorta drops the ball, because before that point, galaxies, fatherhood, dinosaurs, water effects, the birth of the universe (man that sequence was beautiful/amazing), it was pretty awesome. One thing I really liked is that for all the grandeur the movie is really made up of  small, quiet (sometimes loud), intimate moments. Like this sequence of birds flying.

The Tree of Life - Birds Sequence from Hugo Hollmann 

My favorite moment is when they're mostly obscured behind the building, and yet, I can still feel them moving, flowing. If this is special effects then it's brilliant. If it's real and just a moment captured on film, it's magnificent. 

When All Is Said And Done, It Makes Good Toast

Hrm. Perhaps this sheds some light on why Florida is so fucked up. Satanic Toast.



Satan Lives!

Thanks to Gen for bringing this into my life.

Hyperlapse

Though I think the term is a bit off, the technique is not. Hyperlapse basically is moving the camera while taking hi-definition stills at regular intervals, what we call normals call "timelapse". Not sure where the hyper- comes in, as not all of these shots done by video artist Ben Wiggins involve movement and not all of them are of large intervals either. In some hours go by in two seconds (the sunsets), while in others only scores of seconds go by in seconds (people walking on the street; might actually be minutes, but to me it looks like ~30 seconds). None of this detracts from the fact that this piece is hyper-fucking-good. And the music by DeVotchKa doesn't hurt.

Watch:

Very Little Stars from Timelapse, Inc. on Vimeo.

Originally spotted over at the Atlantic.

Flight of the Conchords: "Gotta stop blowing all the money on couches"

I mean, this is just just pure genius. Flight of the Conchords' charity song.



"We all just want to be bubbles."

What I Did Last Sunday

A few weeks back I was introduced by a friend of mine (Genevieve Brennan) to a gorgeous camping spot in the Marin Headlands right across (right across) the Golden Gate Bridge: Kirby Cove.

En route to Kirby Cove

She organized and cooked up a outdoors dinner, on the beach, under redwoods and cypress trees, with raccoons. She served vegetable tarts, lentils, fresh grilled asparagus, some kind of quinoa deal. It was delicious and magical. Take a look at the spread:

Like out of a magazine, right?

You can read more about it from her post here.

Anyhow, on the way to the cove I came across an old abandoned battery, them forts they built to take pot shots at ships coming into the San Francisco bay. It's between Battery Spencer and Battery Kirby (nee Gravelly Beach Battery). Various links online say this was Battery Wagner, but I couldn't confirm that with the GGNRA/Marin Headlands maps, and it appears from one source that Battery Wagner is closer to Battery Wagner road deep in the Headlands (whoduh thunk?). At any rate, this cool old battery has been repurposed as an outdoor mural space by a bunch of graffiti artists.

View of Battery Wagner (?) from above.

360 Degree View From the Red Planet!

This interactive panorama, stitched together by Andrew Bordov over at 360cities.net (original post here) from photographs beamed back from NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. It's pretty awesome. Check it:

 
(Source: The Verge)

We Put A Car On Mars!

You know, it just catches my breath whenever I think about how we just LANDED A FRIKKIN CAR ON MARS!!! (Well, it's a car-sized rover.) Just look at the size of that thing:

Notice the full-sized grown ass dude/tte in the backgroud? That thing is huge!

It's feats like these that sustain my optimism for humanity's future (it's things like the mass pollution and denial of responsibility that's crushed the lives of people in Ecuador or Bhopal or you know the Holocaust and the Holodomor that sour that optimism. But, we've managed not to kill ourselves so far. Fingers crossed!) Still, come on, pretty effing cool! Here is a just a partial list of things they did to land that $2.5 billion roving precision science lab and state-of-the-art robot: launch it into space; develop heat-shield to enter Martian atmosphere; deploy parachute that can take 65K lbs of force to slow it down from 1000s of MPH to 200 MPH; use a ROCKET PACK to slow it down further; use a "sky-crane" to set it down on the ground; and because of time delay to Mars (14 minutes) all this had to be done automatically. It landed itself. Or rather they (all those systems) landed it on their own.

All this to answer some fundamental questions about our existence in the universe, namely one of the mission goals is to determine if life is or ever was present on Mars. I am of the camp that hopes they find life or its footprint. Kim Stanley Robinson is of the camp that hopes they don't (JK: just something he said in regards to his Mars trilogy at a reading one time).

Anywho, here's the trailer for the Movie that just happened on Mars:

Gulp!

Watch Closely

Holy shit:

[Reddit]

Behold: Blade Runner Sketchbook

The 1982 Blade Runner Sketchbook, edited by David Scroggy, which records the production design and drawings from Syd Mead and Ridley Scott. Need I say more? Wipe your drool up before you leave.

Open publication - Free publishing - More blade runner

Outer Space

Created by filmmaker Sander van den Berg this video is pieced together from photographs mined from NASA archives. Just watch. Drool:

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

Quiet Arcs: Aurora Australis as seen from the ISS

Footage taken by Expedition 28 of the International Space Station on September 17, 2011. The green "curtains" are photons emitted by oxygen (and nitrogen) atoms returning to ground state after being excited by solar winds. Observe and drool:

Quiet Arcs are A- when the aurora form long solid curtains, and B- the perfect name for a post-rock band, from some town in the middle of nowhere (but probably not near any aurora).;  B - are a hardcore band from Philadelphia.