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Everything Is Terrible! and Cinefamily present the Everything Is Festival!
08.27.2010
02:42 pm
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For readers lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, this weekend there promises to be a pretty fabulous terrible event in the form of the Everything Is Festival! sponsored by the very wonderful people at the Cinefamily organization and the Everything is Terrible! video terrorists. Dangerous Minds will be attending so please say “Hi” and offer us free drugs:

Imagine a weekend where all your fantasies come true.  A weekend where you can just be…free.  Laugh until your sides literally split open, and feel as cool as a skateboarding, shade-tippin’ dog.  We’re talking about the festival to end all film festivals—Everything Is Festival! (aka the 10th Annual Gathering Of The Terribles)!  For reasons beyond our control (God’s plan), we at Cinefamily are giving the found footage freaks at Everything Is Terrible! free range of the weekend, and letting them do whatever the hell they want (note: we did have to say “no” to the all-night helicopter foam party).  This makes it the official L.A. premiere of their latest mash-up feature-length film, 2Everything 2Terrible 2: Tokyo Drift, not to mention some of EIT!’s favorite movies in their uncut glory, plus dance parties, BBQs, a return of the Cinefamily Found Footage Battle Royal, and top-secret über-rare prints from the vaults of Cinefamily and Austin, TX’s famous Alamo Drafthouse! For more info on becoming a contestant in the Found Footage Battle Royale, click here!

Sounds pretty good terrible, doesn’t it?

More from Everything is Terrible! This clip is especially terrible.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.27.2010
02:42 pm
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Is Verizon TV commercial using torture imagery to sell the Droid X?
08.26.2010
08:26 pm
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This TV commercial for the Verizon Droid X has an unsettling similarity to the infamous torture photo that came out of Abu Ghraib. Is this an unfortunate coincidence or is Verizon actually making some kind of sick joke? Whatever the case, I’m shocked that anyone would sign off on this ad. Was the ad agency who created it blind, clueless or deliberately mocking a dark moment in this country’s history? What do you think?

Nxtiak made a video of the commercial recording it directly from a television screen.

 
Via Gizmodo

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.26.2010
08:26 pm
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Huey Newton compels William F. Buckley to side with George Washington, 1973
08.23.2010
02:01 am
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Huey Percey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, would be 68 years old if he hadn’t been shot in Oakland on this day in 1989 by Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, an alleged member of George Jackson’s Marxist prison gang The Black Guerilla Family.

Here he is engaging William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line in a preliminary thought-game before getting deep into the kind of civil dialogue on political theory that’s absolutely impossible to find on television today.
 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.23.2010
02:01 am
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Amazing Augmented Reality app for German print magazine
08.22.2010
08:52 pm
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German news daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung have animated their weekly SZ magazine with a mobile app. You download their app and then hover your smartphone over certain images in the magazine, which then turn into videos or outakes from the same photo session. And more.

The app physically interacts with the printed page! Really ups the ante for this sort of thing. Great way for a print publication to begin weening their subscribers off print, perhaps.

None of what I just wrote will make any sense unless you watch the video.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.22.2010
08:52 pm
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‘Telephoneme’: MK12’s lysergic riff on 1960’s educational films
08.19.2010
07:23 pm
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Missouri-based design group MK12 have replicated the look and sound of educational/industrial films of the 1960’s in the beautifully constructed Telephoneme. MK12 was partly inspired by the Bell Science Laboratory series of short films we used to have to watch in elementary school. They’ve just added some LSD to the mix.

Telephoneme takes visual cues from The Alphabet Conspiracy as well as other educational films of days past, inspired by the awkward editing & absurd premises that so often defined the genre. The color palette is simple and deliberate, and we also developed a technique in which all the elements were split out into their respective red, green, and and blue channels(similar to how a printer makes several passes of pure color to construct a realistic image). These channels mostly remain superimposed throughout the film, but they sometimes move independently of one another, creating interesting transitional & graphic effects.

After the jump, you can watch a short clip from The Alphabet Conspiracy and see where MK12 got some of their inspiration for Telephoneme.
 

 
Watch The Alphabet Conspiracy…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.19.2010
07:23 pm
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Bigotry gets no sanction from the Founding Fathers: What George Washington said on this day in 1790

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Like many of you, I am sick to death of watching ill-educated and misinformed Tea party-types attempting to hijack the notion of “what our Founding Fathers would have wanted” in favor of what they and their ignorant brethren actually want. Whenever someone pulls out the “Founding Fathers” card these days, I recoil immediately because I know I am dealing with an intellectually dishonest scoundrel from the get-go, as this is usually an admission that what they have to say is totally bogus and very often has next to nothing to do with actual history. Referring to what the Founding Fathers would have wanted has become a fall-back straw-man argument of the historically-challenged Glen Beck set and it’s being rendered meaningless the more and more often it gets repeated by ignorant people wanting to shoot their mouths off on TV and at Tea party rallies regarding issues they know nothing about.

While we can’t know exactly what the Founding Fathers would say about the racists on the radical right who are protesting the plans for the Cordoba House in downtown Manhattan, we can read what George Washington himself said about religious freedom on this very in history, August 18th, 1790, in his letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Not very ambiguous is it? Even something like the above would probably still fail to faze the Facts? Who Cares About Facts? brigade of the Republican party. If you are going to invoke the matter of what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, you simply can’t pick and choose from history willy-nilly to suit your argument and be considered credible. But whether they are misinformed or simply lying, however you slice it, when these folks start to evoke what they Founding Fathers would have wanted, they are almost always just plain wrong.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.18.2010
02:21 pm
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Hallowed be thy ground: History Eraser Button takes a look around lower Manhattan
08.17.2010
05:51 pm
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Over at Daryl Lang’s History Eraser Button blog, he’s posted some shots taken the same distance from the World Trade Center as the site of the proposed Cordoba House cultural center, AKA the “Ground Zero Mosque”:

What’s my point? A month ago, I wrote about my support for a group of Muslim New Yorkers—whom I consider my neighbors—and their right to put a religious building on a piece of private property in Lower Manhattan. Since then, the debate over the Park51 community center, inaccurately nicknamed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” has jumped from talk radio to mainstream conversation, and turned nasty in the process. Sarah Palin wrote that, “it would be an intolerable and tragic mistake to allow such a project sponsored by such an individual to go forward on such hallowed ground.”

Look at the photos. This neighborhood is not hallowed. The people who live and work here are not obsessed with 9/11. The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric.

At this point the only argument against this project is fear, specifically fear of Muslims, and that’s a bigoted, cowardly and completely indefensible position.

Bravo! Here’s a link to some of the responses he got to the photo essay.
 
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It’s painful to see how a hate-filled harpie like Pamela Geller (of the ridiculous Atlas Shrugs blog) and her rubbish wingnut bigotry and foaming at the mouth anti-Muslim racism has been allowed to hijack and steer the national debate for a few weeks. In recent weeks she’s been elevated to the new “hate lady” on cable news channels. I can’t stand seeing her fucking face. I have to change the channel I find her so revolting. Facts? Why let facts get in the way of irrational hatred? Pamela Geller represents a new intellectual low even for Fox News!
 

 
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Via Little Green Footballs

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.17.2010
05:51 pm
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Billboard coupons: visual pollution that earns you beer money
08.15.2010
05:14 am
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James Ready Beer has created one very cool ad campaign. In an effort to save their customers money so they can afford to buy more James Ready Beer the brewery created billboard coupons.

By partnering with local retailers, we created a program that allowed people to take a picture of our billboard, show the picture to the corresponding retailer and receive savings on selected products and services. Saving money meant more beer money.

 
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Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.15.2010
05:14 am
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Nupticution: death row lovers to be married while strapped in electric chair and then exececuted
08.13.2010
01:30 am
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It’s not so much wedding bells as ‘execution yells’ as a killer of 12 marries his ‘fried to be’ on the electric chair.  Barbara Wintergreen reports for CBN News.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.13.2010
01:30 am
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Fox News has the _____est viewers
08.11.2010
12:37 pm
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Stupidest? Meanest? Grumpiest? Racist? Jingoistic? Xenophobic? Most ignorant of history? Most likely to be married to a cousin?

Close, but the answer won’t come as a huge surprise: Oldest. From The Hollywood Reporter:

In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News has the oldest audience among fully distributed cable networks. The network’s average viewer last season was 65 years old, according to Nielsen. Heck, it’s viewers are even older than viewers of Hallmark Channel, Military Channel and Golf Channel.

Perhaps the reason viewers tend to leave Fox News on all day racking up hours of big Nielsen numbers is they can’t actually change the channel?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.11.2010
12:37 pm
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