Al Molinaro, most famous for playing Al Delvecchio, proprietor of Arnold's Drive-In on TV sitcom Happy Days (1974-1984), has died. He was 96. Yeppp, Yep, Yep, Yep, Yep... Prior to his role on Happy Days, Molinaro starred on The Odd Couple as Murray the Cop.
https://youtu.be/uC2BMBdul0o
In 2004, Helen Linehan terminated a pregnancy she had conceived with her husband, IT Crowd/Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, after discovering that the fetus had acrania and could not survive for more than an hour after the birth. As sad as the occasion was, the pair were more traumatised when the moved to Ireland shortly after and discovered that if Helen had had her abortion there, she'd have faced 16 years in prison. (more…)
The always-brilliant David Malki ! of Wondermark writes "I love greeting cards, but what if you need one for a super unusual occasion, or have a very nuanced sentiment you want to convey? The answer: Tick-the-option greeting cards, made in the Wondermark style! They're so utilitarian, I like to think if you keep a few on hand, you'll be prepared for ANYTHING that comes up." (more…)
Amazon is offering an HD rental of It Follows for 99 cents. I'm ready to watch it for a 3rd time! Here's my March 2015 review of the movie:
I stopped being scared or creeped out by horror movies about 20 years ago, but when Carla and I watched It Follows on Saturday night we were both freaked out of our wits.
The premise is simple. If you have sex with a cursed person, a monster will begin walking slowly in your direction. The monster can take on the form of a stranger or someone you know. When the monster reaches you, it will kill you in a horrible way. You can run or drive away from the monster, but it knows where you are and will start walking towards you. To rid yourself of the curse, you need to have sex with another person. The monster will target them. If it kills that person, it will then come after you.
Lenika Cruz of The Atlantic says the monster of It Follows is "one of the scariest antagonists in recent cinematic history," because we don't know anything about it.
But what's most satisfying about It Follows is how its monster manages to inspire such slow-burn terror when it spends 90 percent of the film doing something decidedly un-scary: walking slowly, often out of frame. Even the absence of the linearly traveling, unrelenting "it" is no relief: The anticipation of its arrival slowly and brutally wears the audience down, like death by a billion spoon thwacks. It's hard to know what to call the thing at the center of It Follows—a spirit? A monster? A villain? Is it even really evil or just a human embodiment of inhuman malevolence? As the director, Mitchell, has said: "There's no logic to it—you can't really explain a nightmare."
The inclination of horror movies to explain and profile the dark force as much as possible often results in a didacticism that doesn't translate well onscreen. Just think of how many films feature a haggard, wide-eyed protagonist poring through old texts, newspaper clippings, or Internet searches, or tracking down old victims in hopes of finding an answer. The process of the investigation itself can be spooky. The little girl was pushed into the well by her mom? Shudder. Rather than cultivating fear in the gradual, deliberate reveal of gruesome details, It Follows' thrust comes instead from training the audience to recoil from the shadowy, blurry figure on the horizon, behind the characters, without fanfare or warning.
Another other big reason this movie was so terrifying is the ominous chiptune soundtrack by Disasterpiece. Listen to it here.
It is often observed that I do not like strangers to hug me! A recent study by Oxford University shows I'm not even close to alone. Many folks are uncomfortable hugging, or kissing, strangers too.
The Telegraph reports:
The biggest study ever conducted into physical contact suggests that most people harbour an underlying reticence at being touched by a stranger anywhere but on their hands.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to greet new acquaintances with a kiss on one, or even both cheeks. But the new research indicates that people are actually perturbed by such a high level of intimacy from a stranger.
A guy who works by day as a pharmacist in Korea makes these funny video compilations of himself singing Asian pop hits. His supercut is going super viral in Korea and Japan. (more…)
I've got no idea what the Kawasaki Festival is all about, but a float with a gigantic fiberglass penis shows up, so obviously it's a good one.
According to artist David Shrigley’s message on the back cover of his book, Weak Messages Create Bad Situations, “We are in a bad situation and weak messages are to blame. Lots of individuals in society today are feeble-minded. They don’t know what the hell is going on ... It’s alright. I am here to help you.”
Weak Messages is an over-sized satirical “manifesto” or collection of Shrigley’s deep dark thoughts on all the little and big things that drive our world. Divided into eight chapters (Politics and Opinions, The Arts, Bugs and Insects, The World Explained...), each page contains a child-like drawing along with a hand-written simple opinion or declaration – one-page cartoons that can seem primitively funny at first glance. But read them as a collection and you suddenly find yourself in the depths of Shrigley’s mockingly blunt subconscious where truth, horror, and nervous chuckles abound. But fear not. Shrigley assures us that “If you listen to what I say things will quickly improve.”
Weak Messages Create Bad Situations: A Manifesto
by David Shrigley
Canongate
2015, 384 pages, 8.2 x 11.2 x 1.1 inches
$35 Buy a copy on Amazon
Auto maker General Motors today announced a recall of some 1.4 million cars in which a known oil leak problem can cause engine fires. All of the affected vehicles are over 10 years old, and the oldest were model year 1997.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is all, like, “I've had it with these mothafuckin' vapes, on this mothafuckin' plane!”
Citing in-flight fire hazards, DOT announced a ban on vape pens, e-cigarettes, and other similiar devices in any checked baggage of passengers or flight crew. (more…)
Following up on their highly successful data-driven charticle about toddlers shooting people to death in America, the Washington Post publishes a new infographic about all the people being shot to death by dogs.
The shell of the Earth is about 800 miles thick before it opens up to a massive hollow containing its own sun. Entry points are at the North and South Poles. The residents include the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, led inside by God, where they live for hundreds of years and enjoy such advances as "flying saucer technology." This according to Rodney Cluff, author of World Top Secret: Our Earth IS Hollow!: The Scientific, Scriptural and Historical Evidence that Our Earth Is Hollow!
Over at Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser interviewed Cluff for a wonderful feature about the fictional and non-fictional (?) history of the hollow Earth:
One of the most popular pieces of evidence for Hollow Earth is a supposed secret journal entry by Admiral Richard Byrd, who claimed to be the first person to fly over the North and South pole. According to believers, Byrd’s secret journal from 1947 included a report of flying into one of the Symmes Holes, and making contact with the race that lives inside the Earth.
Of course this too, has supposedly been covered up.
Through the mid-2000s and into the early 2010s, Cluff was actually a part of a long-gestating expedition known most recently as the North Pole Inner Earth Expedition. Unfortunately after a number of setbacks including backers and members of the team falling victim to calamities ranging from cancer to fatal plane crashes, the expedition was put on hiatus. Had the expedition been successful, the team would have chartered one of the world’s largest ice breaking ships straight to the North Pole, where they would have attempted to contact the denizens of the Hollow Earth through the hole they believed they would find. Cluff believes that the various setbacks to the project are the work of the international banking conspiracy, but is hopeful that they will someday be able to get funding, and a new expedition leader to help continue the project.
"The Hollow Earth is filled with giants, Germans, and a little sun"
The Kentucky county court clark who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples sent email on the matter using her work address, and the AP gained access to it under that state's freedom of information act.
It's "exactly what you would imagine them to be", in a battle-for-eternity kind of way, writes Mark Joseph Stern.
The battle has just begun…It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!! I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!…They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!! I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!…September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn’t return before then. I have weighted the cost, and will stay the course.
Obviously just doing her job there.
Inventor, director and tinkerer Bob Partington made what he claims is the world's slowest Rube Goldberg Machine. (more…)
CISA won't make you and I any more secure, and it threatens what's left of our online privacy. The very helpful sounding “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” will definitely help the government, though: it'll make it a lot easier for technology companies to share your personal data with the government, and everyone knows that this data never ends up in the wrong hands, so you're fine.
The gaping privacy flaws in CISA didn't stop the Senate from passing it by a wide margin today: 74 to 21. CISA now goes to a conference committee between House and Senate.
![Rowan County, KY Clerk Kim Davis [Reuters]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sY3rnFDkw4897gnlVeYdir0NBKfIFXLbak6x6Oep2J_-n2s_GvJ0-gWzKY5PMufEwwUmg3SSljWlhxGxzNj9aqbaNGDPLpc0Ld5upfOMDg54ztjX6LabBfX3fh64WtVfwDL75xilw=s0-d)
Here are the names of the Senators who voted against your rights on #CISA. Is yours on the list? Share their names. https://t.co/0gjiHRj231
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 27, 2015Here's the EFF's take, by Mark Jaycox:
CISA passed the Senate today in a 74-21 vote. The bill is fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying authorities. The bill now moves to a conference committee despite its inability to address problems that caused recent highly publicized computer data breaches, like unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.
The conference committee between the House of Representatives and the Senate will determine the bill's final language. But no amount of changes in conference could fix the fact that CISA doesn't address the real cybersecurity problems that caused computer data breaches like Target and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
The passage of CISA reflects the misunderstanding many lawmakers have about technology and security. Computer security engineers were against it. Academics were against it. Technology companies, including some of Silicon Valley’s biggest like Twitter and Salesforce, were against it. Civil society organizations were against it. And constituents sent over 1 million faxes opposing CISA to Senators.
With security breaches like T-mobile, Target, and OPM becoming the norm, Congress knows it needs to do something about cybersecurity. It chose to do the wrong thing. EFF will continue to fight against the bill by urging the conference committee to incorporate pro-privacy language. And we will never stop fighting for lawmakers to either understand technology or understand when they need to listen to the people who do.
Wired's analysis today is worth reading, too.
This is not over. #CISA still has to go through a conference committee. We won't stop fighting. Join us: https://t.co/5ziRqwK6U3 #StopCISA
— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) October 27, 2015
Alex from Copy-Me writes, "We've just released its fourth episode, called 'Pirates Are The Best Customers' - which talks about piracy and artists." (more…)
Republican presidential contender Chris Christie was told to leave a train's "quiet car" after people complained he was shouting into his cellphone, according to passenger Alexander Mann.
Mann told Gawker's Melissa Cronin that Christie seemed angry at his security detail, or something.
He got on last minute yelling at his two secret service agents I think because of a seat mixup, sat down and immediately started making phone calls on the quiet car. After about 10 minutes the conductor asked him to stop or go to another car. He got up and walked out again yelling at his secret service. He was drinking a McDonald’s strawberry smoothie.
CNN reports that New Jersey governor Christie, currently polling at homeopathic fractions, was on a 9:55 a.m. train headed out of Washington, D.C., after a TV appearance.
He walked onto the train with a McDonald's strawberry smoothie, already chewing out someone who was with him, possibly a security officer, about a mix-up in seating arrangements, according to Alexander Mann, a passenger on the same train who detailed the Christie incident to CNN in an email and in photos.
Mann wrote that just before the train departed, Christie boarded behind "two men who appeared to be Secret Service agents" -- though that's unlikely, since Christie doesn't yet have Secret Service detail; his staff said he traveled Sunday with one New Jersey state trooper -- and was "yelling at them about some sort of mixup with the seating arrangements and how they had let it happen."
The quiet car, however, is for travelers who are quiet. Gov. Christie's people apologized on his behalf in an update to Gawker's story.
Tiffiny from Fight for the Future writes, "New information has surfaced about Facebook's position on S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). Sources on the Hill tell us that Facebook lobbyists are welcoming CISA behind closed doors, even though Facebook has been lauded as opposing the bill after CCIA, an industry association they are a member of, came out against it.. CISA would give companies like Facebook legal immunity for violating privacy laws as long as they share information with the government. It's supposed to be for cybersecurity, but in reality companies would be encouraged to share information beyond cyber threat data and the information could be used for prosecuting all kinds of activities." (more…)
Confidential research files on human rights abuses in El Salvador were stolen from a human rights organization in Washington state, just weeks after that same organization sued the CIA for refusing to release documents related to those very same abuses.
During his visit to Washington last month, China's President Xi Jinping vowed to stop the commercial trade in ivory in his nation, but didn't say much about when or how.
Arizona tried to illegally import a lethal injection drug that is banned in the U.S., but the state never got the drug after federal agents halted the shipment at Phoenix airport. The Associated Press has the documents, and the resulting scoop.
Arizona paid nearly $27,000 for sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that has been used to carry out executions but is no longer manufactured by FDA-approved companies, the documents said. When the drugs arrived via British Airways at the Phoenix International Airport in July, they were seized by federal officials and have not been released, according to the documents.
"The department is contesting FDA's legal authority to continue to withhold the state's execution chemicals," state Department of Corrections spokesman Andrew Wilder said Thursday.
Arizona and other death penalty states have been struggling to obtain legal execution drugs for several years after European companies refused to sell the drugs, including sodium thiopental, that have been used to carry out executions. States have had to change drug combinations or, in some cases, put executions on hold temporarily as they look for other options.
The Arizona documents obtained by the AP were released as part of a lawsuit against the corrections department over transparency in executions. The AP is a party in the lawsuit.
"Documents: Arizona tried to illegally import execution drug" [AP]
Ever wonder how “Birdman” director Alejandro González Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki got that one incredibly long continuous shot? Well, technically, they didn't.
Hopes&Fears has a beautiful feature up today on the lives of service dogs for people with psychiatric disabilities and mental illnesses.
Laurie Penny's science fiction story "Blue Monday" is a mean little kick up the ass. I workshopped this story with her last summer at the Clarion West workshop in Seattle and it doesn't get any less punchy on subsequent re-readings. (more…)
Peter writes, "We spent the summer doing user-centered design (researching, designing, prototyping and building) around fire-fighting - specifically rural and volunteer first-responder fire fighters."
(more…)
If you're looking to replace your chipped, mismatched drinking glasses with a new set, look no further than the classic Bormioli Rocco bar glasses. A set of six 16-ounce glasses will set you back just $20 on Amazon. They stack well, and are extremely rugged. Bormioli Rocco makes these bar glasses in a range of sizes, from 2.5 ounces on up.
In 1915, Swedish glass blower Alexander Samuelson designed the iconic Coca-Cola bottle. The form was inspired by the cocoa bean, while integrating the grooves in the glass apparently made it possible to patent the bottle design. Back then, it was referred to as the “hobbleskirt” bottle due to its similarity to a style of skirt worn at the time. Then in the 1920s, a magazine referred to it as the "Mae West" after the actress's figure.
"The Coca-Cola Bottle: Lasting Design" (Juxtapoz)
"The Story of the Coca-Cola Bottle" (Coca-Cola)
The jackalope, the mysterious cryptozoological combination of a jackrabbit with the horns of an antelope, has apparently been photographed at Ontario's Bruce Peninsula National Park.
According to Gillian Sutherland-Jones, a resource management technician at the park, the creature was first spotted in spring by a camper. Sutherland-Jones suggests that the animal may actually be a hare with "a birth defect."
Sure it is...
After the 14 year old maker/tinkerer was arrested on bullshit terrorism charges in his family's adoptive home in the small Texas town of Inving, many Americans spoke up in support of him, including President Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (more…)
Next season of Mythbusters is the last one. The fantastic television series starring our friend Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, and a wonderful cast of makers and explosives, will end after the 14th season, totaling 248 episodes and nearly 3,000 experiments. Congratulations, you guys. It was a fantastic run. You inspired, and will continue to inspire, huge numbers of people of all ages with your curiosity, wonder, and ingenuity.
"I’ve been going through genuine grief,” Adam told Entertainment Weekly. “Even food doesn’t taste as good.”
What will they do next?
Adam: I’m definitely going to do more television, behind and in front of the camera. I love producing this show and figuring out how to structure the episodes. I’m going to jump into the website Tested.com. I’m looking forward to visiting Comic-Con.
Jamie: There’s a scripted show we’re executive producing at CBS that was announced, and that’s exciting. I can’t talk about it yet, but when it comes out it’s going to knock some people’s socks off. As far as me personally, there’s some outside projects I’m starting to ramp up. There’s an Office of Naval Research project. I’m developing some new kinds of robotic firefighting vehicles to help with the massive forest forests we’re dealing with in the West. I’m keeping the M5 [special effects company]. I’m a builder, first and foremost. There are people I have to work with filming [Mythbusters] that are interested in how to build things for the sake of the story rather than what I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t want to sound sour grapes about it, but for a show, you have to tell a story. You present it in a way that’s interesting and easy to follow. But I want to circle back to actually doing build projects where I don’t have a bunch of film people getting in my way and manipulating what’s going on.
Wikileaks has posted a collection of documents ganked from CIA director John Brennan's email account, which was reportedly hacked by a "teen stoner" earlier this week. (more…)
Petra Laszlo is the unpleasant human who tripped a Syrian refugee called Osama Abdul Mohsen as he walked past her with a child in his arms. (more…)
Tara Tiger Brown is the founder of nonprofit organization LA Makerspace, the premier STEAM service provider for the Los Angeles Public Library. She’s also the co-founder of Kithub, creative electronics kits for kids, and co-founder of Connected Camps, which has online camps for kids including a Minecraft coding club. (more…)
Join a group forging through the desert in search of a pyramid, as your skin begins to blister mysteriously away. Or explore the ruins of a sigil-painted village as the slick bodies of giant hornets lurk, swollen and sleepy with blood. Wander the suggestion of a mysterious village in continuous rain, urged onward by a pale, sad voice.
These are the delicate, expressive horror games of Kitty Horrorshow, whose works have become some of my favorite discoveries of 2015. Most people acquainted with games have specific ideas of what horror looks like—zombie crawls with scarce ammo, visually-dark psychological explorations punctuated by jump scares, or intentionally-clumsy relics dredged from the Japanese console age. Horrorshow's works—most of which can be completed in less than half an hour—feel delicate and literary by comparison. The fact technical sophistication isn't a primary focus makes the spaces she creates feel like abstract art—like the iconic monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, forbidding in its plainness.
CHYRZA is a slow meditation among blood-colored obelisks that builds dread toward a striking conclusion, and in Hornets Horrorshow draws incredible imagery with her words. We didn't review the striking Rain, House, Eternity at Offworld, but Kill Screen's Chris Priestman does an excellent job of describing how the restrained, atmospheric game provides a sort of subtle emotional processing, and how it represents an evolution on her earlier portfolio.
With each release her works grow in strength and efficacy until they stay with you. If you haven't played any of these games, there's no better time to try—again, you generally need less than an hour, and they are free or pay-what-you-want here.
"I feel pretty hollow if I'm not actively working on creating something," Horrorshow tells me. She'd planned to be a writer, but traditional channels had their limits: "I didn't just want to tell stories, I wanted to frame them with whole worlds the player could explore and inhabit."
Like many modern independent developers, Twine was a "gateway drug" to the design space for Horrorshow, who grew up with games like Myst, EverQuest, Blood, Doom and Thief among her favorites. "I realized that I got a thousand times more satisfaction from creating environments with stories in them than I ever got from writing linear prose," she says. "Finally I decided to take a shot at making actual first-person 3D games, since I've always loved video games and was always most impressed by the ones that made me feel like I existed somewhere."
"After a few flailing attempts to learn Unity I started working on the floating temple in Dust City. I imported a really simple column I'd modeled and quickly realized that if I wanted to, I could make it out of glass or marble or crystal or gold, I could make it the size of a skyscraper, I could duplicate it a thousand times. That was pretty much The Moment."
Although for Horrorshow game development represents an evolution on linear writing, her writing is still the star of her work—to me, her game worlds feel like ideal vehicles to deliver poetry and prose in new ways. She cites Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Clive Barker, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, James Tiptree Jr., and Joyce Carol Oates as some influences, as well as Lovecraft ("though not as much as a lot of people think").
"I've spent most of my life being obsessed with Silent Hill, and I still feel like it's more of a home than most places I've ever lived," she says. "I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Porpentine, whose writing is impossible not to be changed by, particularly if the use of language is important to you."
"I like to watch Thundercats and daydream about Third Earth, because that show is full of really fun, beautiful, imaginative environments. I read a lot about ancient civilizations, architecture, and the psychology behind things like horror and the uncanny, and that's usually pretty inspiring."
Kitty Horrorshow says she explicitly set out to create horror games, which gratifies my own interpretation of her work. "I had fantasies of becoming widely known as some kind of modern Horror Mistress, like the video games answer to Wes Craven or Stephen King," she says. "Anymore though, I try not to lock myself down as much. If I get a story idea that I really love I'll go for it, horror or otherwise. That said, I think I've saturated myself in horror's ideas and motifs for long enough that I'll probably never get away from it completely or very far, which I'm okay with. The bottom line is I really want to create stories that are fantastical and that inspire wonder. Whether or not they do so by being frightening, I figure out at the time."
If there can be said to be a unifying feature about her works, it's the way they all feel like mysteries—what motivates me through her strange and occasionally-surreal worlds is the desire to find out what happened, is happening, will happen. One of the common problems with popular horror is "the ending"—when to reveal a twist, how to conclude the experience thereafter—and I love the structural elegance with which Horrorshow tackles this challenge. "
I suppose I sort of start with the answer and work backwards. When I have ideas, they're usually very broad and blunt ('A huge pyramid shows up in a desert and starts being a jerk')," she says. "As the writer I already know what's happening when the game begins, so as the game designer my job becomes imagining the player's starting perspective and figuring out how to portion out the information that eventually leads to their understanding."
"Luckily for me, this usually isn't much harder than just writing a short story and then dividing it up into a paragraph or two at a time, and as long as the story's properly paced things work out okay," she says. "Every portion just needs to contain one more step, one additional idea or puzzle piece that will eventually paint the whole picture... I imagine I'm creating some kind of ruin or archaeological site that the player's visiting, but then try to work the player into the story of the place somehow, so that they're connected to the setting rather than just a visitor."
The larger themes I've divined from the games I have played—thoughts on faith, community, depression—are "largely accidental", says Horrorshow, who says she never goes into creating something with the intention to deliver a "message or moral."
"That said, I like to think there's an element of subconscious deliberation at work, because a lot of the time I'll get half-way through making a game, and then suddenly its 'meaning' will dawn on me," she says. "I like this approach because a lot of the time it's cathartic and surprising. I didn't realize what Rain, House, Eternity was really about until I had nearly finished it, and it was a powerful, deeply personal moment for me, and it also allowed me to make an ending that was much more appropriate than what I'd planned."
Kitty Horrorshow is currently working on a haunted house story ("haunted houses are my all-time favorite horror idea)" presently titled Anatomy, which she hopes to release for Halloween. She also plans to collaborate with ceMelusine (another Offworld favorite creator) on a project she suggests horror fans will like.
Her work is funded via Patreon, and she's just begun focusing on games full-time, so financial support will help to nurture and sustain Kitty Horrorshow's amazing continued works. Visit her page here and consider becoming a patron. Almost all of her games are available for free or pay-what-you-want from her digital storefront here.
Our man in the White House, Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alerts us to the Administration's celebration of Back To The Future Day that includes:
* The release of President Obama's updated Strategy for American Innovation
* Tom's post on the White House blog about the power of imagination, titled "Science Fiction to Science Fact"
* A series of online conversations with scientists and innovators about the future!
