Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers
Here’s an amusing Flickr pool dedicated to crappy bootleg DVD covers.
(via Nerdcore)
Here’s an amusing Flickr pool dedicated to crappy bootleg DVD covers.
(via Nerdcore)
From The Big Picture:
Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)
Slender Man is an internet meme created on the Something Awful forums and who now haunts the depths of 4chan’s /x/ forum. A net-brewed urban legend, Slender Man is a morbidly tall and thin man in a black and white suit who haunts forests, playgrounds, and anywhere he can blend in with scenery to leap out and drag away unsuspecting victims.
From the Mythical Creatures Guide:
The Slender Man was created at the Something Awful Forums in a thread entitled “Create Paranormal Images.” He is described as wearing a black suit strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men In Black, and as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them. He is also able to create tendrils from his fingers and back that he uses to walk on in a similar fashion to Doc Ock, the Spider-Man villain in the Marvel Universe. The superhuman stretching ability could also be seen as a similiarty between himself and Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. Whether he absorbs, kills, or mearly takes his victims to an undiclosed location or dimension is also unknown as there are never any bodys or evidence left behind in his wake to deduce a definite conclusion.
Not much is known, as no specific information is given within the thread about origins, but his objective and habitat are made very clear. He has the need to kidnap children, and is seen right before the disappearance of a child or multiple children. He seems to prefer fog enshrouded streets and wooded areas as a way to conceal himself from being noticed. It should also be noted that children have been able to see him when no other adults in the vicinity could. Children also have dreams or nightmares concerning The Slender Man before their disappearance. Confiding these stories to their parents are met with the usual parental admonition: overactive imaginations.
Even though The Slender Man is a total fabrication, people have already claimed sightings. He appears to the unwitting mostly at night, and most always peering out of wooded areas or near rivers. He has also been reported to peek inside left open windows and to walk out in front of lone motorists on long uninhabited roads. The Slender Man or men, have appeared everywhere from Japan, Norway, and America to name a growing few.
Somebody hold me!
Lucifer’s Friend was a seventies prog-metal band that… OK, you stopped reading at “prog-metal.” I know, I know. But hear me out… these guys were one of the best of the whole lot, and are criminally underrated. I heard their album Banquet
A German outfit fronted by a British singer, Lucifer’s Friend first gained minor notoriety, and later major cult status, as both early practitioners of heavy metal and progressive rock. Formed in 1970 Hamburg, by former German Bonds members Peter Hesslein (guitar), Peter Hecht (keyboards), Dieter Horns (bass), and Joachim Rietenbach (drums), the group was initially dubbed Asterix and recorded an entire album’s worth of material before connecting with singer John Lawton, whose then band, Stonewall, was playing a residency at the city’s famed Top Ten Club. Lawton’s vocals would grace Asterix’s only, eponymous album later the same year, and all involved were excited enough by the results that they immediately began collaborating on more material with which to relaunch the band under the provocative new moniker of Lucifer’s Friend…
Click the sample track below?
Rokk ?ɬ? Reykjavik is an excellent documentary about the Icelandic post-punk scene in the very early eighties. The film strings together interviews and concert footage from a couple dozen post-punk bands, including ?
Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn columns in The Guardian are always funny, but this week’s is especially hilarious. Brooker writes on a new British telemovie that imagines the trial and death of Britain’s most notorious pedophile, former popstar Gary Glitter, whose 1972 hit “Rock and Roll Pt 2” is still to this day played by the unwitting at sports events big and small across America:
Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution Of Gary Glitter (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4), which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.
I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) Reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) Changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) Chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.
He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full 70s glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.
Read the whole thing at The Guardian
William Kotke addresses the need to create a human paradise on Planet Earth instead of waiting for otherworldly salvation. This is pertinent to my interests.
Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many generations. In the modern view, generated from the Alternative Culture and Cultural Creatives, we have a permaculture design in a valley that has been ecologically restored and has added additional trees in different ecological niches to create a food forest of fruits and nuts. Under the forest canopy are tall bushes also of fruit and nuts. Under this, the lower berry bushes and vining plants grow.
Lower, are the forbs: perennial vegetable plants that grow year after year and require no disruption of the soil community. Below this are the perennial tuber plants and also down in the soil are the edible mushrooms. This is a perpetual food design that will produce more food per acre than the industrial agricultural system, without digging, disrupting and damaging the thousands of species of the soil community, and at the same time, continually building soil fertility and preventing soil erosion.
Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.
Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.
New ad spot from Moms Against Climate Change pits child protesters against riot cops in the cuddliest demonstration ever.
In December, at the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, world leaders will come together to discuss this issue, and Canadians want results. zig joined with Environmental Defence, ForestEthics and hundreds of volunteers to produce this film, and the web site that goes with it, to inspire grassroots action from Canadian parents.
The effects of climate change are going to be very real within the lifetime of the current generation of children, and if our kids knew the facts, they would act. On the web site, people can upload their kids photos to be included in a projection that will appear on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper?Ǭ?s route to work leading up to the conference to remind him who he?Ǭ?s representing in Copenhagen.
Zig’s cinematic spot for Moms Against Climate Change pits child protesters (shouldn’t they be in school?) against cops (don’t they have parking tickets to write?) to illustrate that if kids knew what was at stake, they’d take action. There’s no denying it packs a punch. That said, something feels off. I think I was expecting a boffo climax to really drive the point home. Why not have the sides embrace, each kid finding one of his or her parents among the riot squad, to symbolize that we’re all in this together? Conversely, acid rain pouring from above and “frying” every last person? That would make a strong statement! Sure, it’s easy for me to second-guess?
After 20 years, the CIA has finally released Iran-Contra documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Better late than never, I suppose. See docs and analysis here.
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Discover Magazine reports on a new military-grade Taser which has a 200-foot range and has raised concerns about lethality. As opposed to what, um, guns and all that OTHER stuff the military uses? Hey, I just hope mall cops don’t end up with them…
If you?