mrjawright

laughingsquid: Free Jazz vs A Baby Hitting Piano Keys as...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:06:00 -0500

laughingsquid:

Free Jazz vs A Baby Hitting Piano Keys

as evidenced by http://youtu.be/4ecHjX3Wyxs

trextrying: T-Rex Trying to Be a Matador… #TRexTrying

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:53:22 -0500

trextrying:

T-Rex Trying to Be a Matador…

#TRexTrying

Photo

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:06:21 -0500

sunfell: theatlantic: The Cabin in the Woods Disembowels the...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:35:32 -0500

sunfell:

theatlantic:

The Cabin in the Woods Disembowels the Slasher Film

Stop me if you’ve seen this one: A handful of attractive young folks representing immediately recognizable types—the good girl, the sexy girl, the jock, the decent guy, the stoner—plan a weekend of partying at a remote cabin in the woods. When they arrive, though, something timeless and implacable begins stalking and brutally slaughtering them one by one. Liquor-fueled rounds of “truth or dare” and displays of nubile flesh give way to screaming and running and bleeding and dying.

On second thought, don’t stop me. Even if you’ve seen this one—even if you’ve seen it over and over again—you haven’t seen this one, this The Cabin in the Woods. Produced by Joss Whedon, who also co-wrote with director (and longtime Whedonite) Drew Goddard, the movie is a delightful demolition of the horror genre, a tale that subverts not only its own terrors, but those of pretty much every scary movie you’ve ever seen. Why do the protagonists of these films always choose the worst moment and locale to have sex? Why do they split up when it’s evident they should stick together? The Cabin in the Woods at last offers answers.

This is a movie best seen with a minimum of foreknowledge, so I’ll spoil as little as possible. (I’d strongly recommend avoiding the trailer, which reveals a good deal more than I will.) Suffice to say that there are two interwoven narratives taking place at once: the one in the woods with the kids (among them Kristen Connolly and Thor’s Chris Hemsworth); and another, at a secret bunker of the military-industrial complex, where two beleaguered company men (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), along with a large cadre of technicians, accountants, interns, and various other drones, are hard at work, doing—well, if I told you what they were doing, someone (not me) would presumably have to kill you.

Read more. [Image: Lionsgate]

A message from this Joss Whedon fanboy to Tumblr: The Cabin in the Woods is excellent.

Not much into horror, but I might go see this, on the review alone.

sunfell: theatlanticvideo: The Waveform of a Dubstep...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:42:24 -0500

sunfell:

theatlanticvideo:

The Waveform of a Dubstep Track Visualized With 960 Vinyl Records

Director duo Us, aka Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor, animates hundreds of custom-cut records for Benga’s “I Will Never Change.” The records accumulate as the track builds over time, creating a mesmerizing physical volume that develops in parallel with the music

Via Motionographer.

WubWubWub it!

a few grossly overexposed photos of the new digs. Wife’s...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:21:00 -0500

a few grossly overexposed photos of the new digs. Wife’s not enthusiastic about some of the colours.

Is the idea of getting decent pics of the house you want to sell that hard to grasp?

So, anyway..first pic is, obviously, the living room. Just out of frame in that pic, to the rightish, is the red ‘dining room’, which has a doorway into the kitchen that you can see in the next two images…then a shot of the breakfast area…also in the kitchen.

There are more, but the kitchen-dining-living room colour scheme is what we’re thinking on, ATM.

laughingsquid: The World’s First All-Diamond Ring Is Made...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:38:28 -0500

laughingsquid:

The World’s First All-Diamond Ring Is Made Entirely Out of a Diamond

areasofmyexpertise: WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE? … I hate to beat...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:44:43 -0500

areasofmyexpertise:

WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE?

…

I hate to beat the conundrum further about THE HUNGER GAMES today. I read the books. I enjoyed them compulsively. I admire them a great deal.

But I also find them really and compellingly WEIRD.

I know everyone in the world has read these books, but in case not, I warn you that my rant below may accidentally reveal some gentle SPOILERS.

ON THE ONE HAND, my worry that they would be merely exploitative was almost instantly erased.

In the first book, Suzanne Collins’s almost insidious deftness at making the children who were murdered REALLY CONVENIENTLY AWFUL or REALLY CONVENIENTLY TRAGIC or REALLY CONVENIENTLY OFF-CAMERA troubled me.

But her emotional portrait of Katniss is always complex and real, and by the second book, the toll and trauma of all the violence around her is affecting and totally uncompromising.

And her portrayal of war—the actual, non-entertainment combat—and its necessities, its betrayals, and its stupidities is so beautifully un-beautiful and disembowelingly harsh that it not only makes up for the stagey-ness of book one, but brings it full circle.

ON THE OTHER HAND, for a book that can be so brutally and emotionally realistic, I’ve don’t know that I’ve read a story that feels so completely unconcerned with PLAUSIBILITY.

It’s an unusual post-apocalytptic story in which the apocalypse is not the hidden mystery, and the contemporary story not a warning of some kind.

(Unless the warning is: go easy on reality television, everyone, or else you will start murdering your children. In which case, I already have BATTLE ROYALE.)

This is actually fine and sort of great: I don’t want moralism in everything I read or see, and if I were a 16 year old living in Panem, I probably won’t give a feces about it either.

But it’s weird, because not even the BOOK seems to give a feces. Nothing about Panem feels familiar, or inevitable, or queasily unavoidable. It just drifts out there in the future, without any meaningful connection to our world. It exists JUST BECAUSE.

And that’s fine too: that kind of book is called a fantasy novel. It creates a world with different rules in which to explore a particular story.

But while it may be a key to her success that Suzanne Collins never engages in the obsessive, beard-twisting, world-building of a Tolkien or George RR Martin (go Jets), Panem leaves me with a lot of questions.

I brought it up in my last tumbl, and then went on to read lots of comments to that YGLESIAS link that echoed my own confusion.

-How large is District 12?

-Why does everyone seem to know each other there?

-Is there really only one town? And it produces ALL the coal?

-Why is it within walking distance of the fence that separates it from the wilderness?

-Who determines who lives in which District (and for that matter, the Capitol)? How are these populations monitored and maintained?

-Why is there not a District assigned to creating Panem’s most valuable asset: slaves?

-Apart from being mean, why would the Capitol ever massacre its miners and attack its only source of coal with FIRE? Does Centralia, PA mean nothing to them?

-And for all the times that the Seal of Panem is mentioned hovering ominously in the sky, what does it LOOK like?

I could be wrong, but I honestly don’t recall Collins ever describing it.

Look, after spending a year lost in the heraldic intricacies of the banners of Westeros, I suppose I can cotton to an attitude which amounts to “OK, it’s some kind of generic eagle (which is how the movie has it). Let’s move on to the children murdering each other.”

And these questions are not meant as a critique of the book. Because clearly Collins is a smart enough writer to answer them. It’s just that, for the most part, it seems like she just doesn’t BOTHER to.

Maybe we don’t see the seal because Katniss has stopped seeing it. Maybe the descriptions of the Capitol—and even the costumes—are vague and generic because they are being seen through the eyes of a 16 year old who never developed a vocabulary for beauty. She sure knows how to describe the one thing that matters to her, which is food.

But it also leaves the world of Panem feeling a little flimsy, contrived, and groundless: a massive, phony arena constructed to house a brutal entertainment for our benefit, and nothing beneath it but the access tunnels and mechanics of the plot.

(And let’s be honest, there’s a whole lot of deus in the machines of this book; most of them taking the forms of hovercrafts).

If this were a true SF novel, we would probably learn that the whole nation was designed as a social experiment by some race of alien tripods or maybe Europe. Maybe it’s Suzanne Collin’s real accomplishment that she resisted this cliche.

That she instead created this resonant story about real people in a fake world, a story at once harsh and naive, principled and ambiguous, that exists JUST BECAUSE.

Oh, no- Sunfell has a Tumblr. Run!: Meeting People Is Easy, Remembering Them Is Hard, Knowing Them Is Harder

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 08:56:00 -0500

Oh, no- Sunfell has a Tumblr. Run!: Meeting People Is Easy, Remembering Them Is Hard, Knowing Them Is Harder :

what she said.

I’ve also been playing with Sonar…an app that also tells you who has checked into places around you. But, I don’t have a habit of checking into places, so it’s kind of pointless for me. OTOH, sonar gives you Mitch Hedberg quotes instead of a splash screen when it starts…so there’s that.

parislemon:

I understood the value of Highlight immediately. Within hours of downloading the app, I walked into a cafe and ran into someone I had met before, but only in passing. Who was he, I wondered while talking to him in vague generalities so as not to give away my poor…

laughingsquid: Frankenweenie, Tim Burton Remakes 1984 Short to...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:30:34 -0600

laughingsquid:

Frankenweenie, Tim Burton Remakes 1984 Short to Feature Length Film

Lab-Grown Burger To Be Served In Six Months

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:33:24 -0600

Lab-Grown Burger To Be Served In Six Months:

I’m pretty sure this is how the Soylent company started.

"[T]he Death Star requires .03% of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States. In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it's not even a big deal."

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:18:43 -0600

"[T]he Death Star requires .03% of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States. In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it's not even a big deal.":

motherjones:

Most excellent article on our site today, vol. 1: “The Death Star is a Surprisingly Cost-Effective Weapons System,” by Kevin Drum.

Don’t get any ideas, Gingrich.

theatlantic: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” first appeared...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:50:36 -0600

theatlantic:

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” first appeared in The Atlantic 150 years ago this month.

Historian Dominic Teirney on why Julia Ward Howe’s composition is “America’s song in itself.”

laughingsquid: Just Another Pickup Line

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:26:30 -0600

laughingsquid:

Just Another Pickup Line

mattsbrickgallery: In non LEGO news. Creation is messy.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:06:08 -0600

mattsbrickgallery:

In non LEGO news.

Creation is messy.

Retreat 4 Geeks 2012

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:52:03 -0600

Retreat 4 Geeks 2012:

adactio:

As the year draws to a close, I find myself casting an eye back on the past twelve months. There are two events that stand out for me:

Mobilewood—the get-together in the woods of Tennessee that…

laughingsquid: The Christmas Card, A 1968 Animation by Terry...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:28:25 -0600

laughingsquid:

The Christmas Card, A 1968 Animation by Terry Gilliam

laughingsquid: MythBusters Accidentally Fires Cannonball Into...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:28:23 -0600

laughingsquid:

MythBusters Accidentally Fires Cannonball Into Suburban Neighborhood

sirmitchell: If these two had a show together it would be...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:12:30 -0600

sirmitchell:

If these two had a show together it would be cancelled within five minutes. Interrupted by a breaking news story about the thousands of people who died from laughter while watching it. But when they cut to the anchor, he’s slumped over on his desk, dead from only having witnessed the last 15 seconds.

This year’s winner could as a portable Black Friday/Occupy...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:47:57 -0600

This year’s winner could as a portable Black Friday/Occupy Everything campout shelter. Pepper Spray is just everywhere, nowadays.

laughingsquid:

2011 Zombie Safe House Competition