Monday, August 31, 2015

Screens from Lara Croft Go

Nazgul

Official video for Downtown by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis





Pancake Prince



By Vaughn Pinpin.

Furiosa's War Rig



By Bruce (who is working on the tanker).

Marceline Dr. Martens



"Take a signature 8-eye shape with marceline print and contrast black fur lining on the tongue. Add a zip down the inside to make them easy to get on and off, and you've just made yourself an instant classic."

Highlights from the VMAs


The giant and everyone else from Downtown by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.





Tori Kelly's Giger-esque gold suit.





The astronaut dancers from Nick Jonas's Levels performance.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

"What if Stephen Hawking's voice box is actually the first A.I., using its robot brain to theorize on the universe and he's just riding along, as tripped out as the rest of us but unable to show it?"

"And the voice box is recommending that we don't create AI because it fears another AI would instantly recognize the voice box as AI and out it." Via.

Uber riders in Seattle had a chance to get a ride in a Mad Max-inspired car



Panther enthusiastically teething on a human hand.

Mortal Kombat X



New at Dead End Thrills.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Friday, August 28, 2015

"Survival Suit Batman"



Coming next year.

Star Wars: The Card Game - Arden Lyn



Jake Murray:
Card art for the "Jump To Lightspeed" set of Fantasy Flight Games' "Star Wars: The Card Game." This character was first introduced in the Masters of Teras Kasi Playstation game, and is notorious for having a pretty impractical costume. So I really had a blast getting the opportunity to redesign her into something that I think is more reflective of her actual personality and fighting style.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

"a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested"

NYT:
“I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,”
See also: Wikipedia's summary of glaring flaws in the famed Stanford Prison Experiment.

Lego Wasp



By Tim Lydy.

Link roundup

1. "Two top executives at Dole are on the hook for $148 million after a judge ruled that CEO and chairman of the board David H. Murdock, and the company’s former chief operating officer, C. Michael Carter fraudulently drove down their company’s stock price so they could shortchange shareholders and buy the business on the cheap."

2. "Welcome to your dystopian future. Reports from yesterday say that a US drone strike in Syria has killed a British-born computer hacker who had joined ISIS and was involved in that group's online activities"

3. A prestigious Los Angeles private high school had to drop its JV football team for lack of interested players:
“I think this is a bubble,” [the school's Athletic Director] said. “We feel this is a temporary situation.”
4. Grand Theft Auto 5 mod puts a Mass Effect Reaper over the skies of Los Santos.

New Batgirl and Seth Rollins challenges on the Injustice and Immortals iOS games

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The Indoor Kids with Max Landis

Aside from describing his pitch for The Fantastic Four movie, in this podcast, Max Landis explains that Twitter is a perfect tool for super villains.

"Greenpoint's Growing Taxi Graveyard"

Uber's impact on taxi drivers in New York:
As the number of drivers continues to dwindle, between 80 and 120 cabs sit empty on any given shift. Yossri recalls one day recently when there were only enough drivers to send out 24 cabs, and 147 of them sat empty.
...
When he can, Kiouvas moves the cabs directly from one spot to another while still abiding by alternate side parking rules. More often, he parks them in the dispatcher's crowded lot temporarily. When street cleaning ends at 1:00 p.m. dispatchers, mechanics, and body men pitch in to help Kiouvas get all of the cabs back onto the street—quickly, before neighbors' cars fill in.

Boston Comic Con sculpture commissions by Jesse Farrell



Jesse Farrell:
Here are my 2015 Boston Comic Con commissions! People made requests and I did my best to sculpt them on the fly. I got a great bunch of requests this year.

Black Manta
MODOK
Thanos
Godzilla
Raptor with comic books
She-Hulk 1
Captain America
Sailor V
Robocop
She-Hulk 2

Getting hired by Google by stumbling onto an ARG

TH:
One morning, while working on a project, I Googled “python lambda function list comprehension.” The familiar blue links appeared, and I started to look for the most relevant one.

But then something unusual happened.

The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”

I stared at the screen. What? After a moment, I decided yes, I was most definitely up for a challenge.
...
Over the next two weeks, I solved five more problems.

The Book of Nightmares (in Lego)



By 6kyubi6.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Link roundup

1. "Masked Men Armed With Assault Rifles Rob Rolex Store in Century City, Get Away"

2. CA:
During the panel Walker, a black man, mentioned something about the character that I had never considered; [DC Comics hero] Cyborg is an emasculated black man. In his New 52 origin story, he lost the entire bottom half of his body, which means that before becoming Cyborg, he was castrated.
3. TA on Uber slowly replacing mass transit:
For instance, in the case of Obamacare, the interests of the poor, who need universal healthcare, have become aligned with the rich, whose companies have, in recent years, increasingly relied on independent contractors or part-time labor rather than full-time employees to reduce costs and increase profits; Obamacare has effectively accelerated the erosion of the concept of full-time employment in its fulfillment of one of the the former social obligations of employers. Put another way, why hire an employee and pay for their healthcare and social security when you can hire an independent contractor and let the worker and the government split the cost?
4. "'Aloha': Reliving This Decade’s Worst Movie Catastrophe"
It is not socially acceptable for a grown man to watch a twelve-year-old girl in her dance class for an extended period of time, through glass, from the street.

New book collects Andrew DeGraff's literary maps



Plotted: A Literary Atlas:
This incredibly wide-ranging collection of maps—all inspired by literary classics—offers readers a new way of looking at their favorite fictional worlds. Andrew DeGraff’s stunningly detailed artwork takes readers deep into the landscapes from The Odyssey, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Invisible Man, A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down, A Christmas Carol, and more. Sure to reignite a love for old favorites and spark fresh interest in more recent works as well, Plotted provides a unique new way of appreciating the lands of the human imagination.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

"'Paparazzi Proof' Penthouse in Los Angeles is Listing for $50 Million"

WSJ:
The developer declined to identify buyers, but said there has been a lot of interest from Hong Kong and Singapore. The project will break ground in October and wrap up in late 2017.

"The Day Someone Signed Me Up For An Ashley Madison Account (That Day Would Be Yesterday)"

TD:
Yesterday afternoon, I got a message telling me "Welcome to Day 1 of your Ashley Madison Experience." Someone using my email signed me up, using the rather creative account name "masnicator." I'm kinda surprised that Ashley Madison is still even allowing online signups (let alone not using an email verification system, or for that matter even keeping the site up at all). But, perhaps even more ridiculous is that in the "welcome" email, it highlights how the service is "100% Secure."

Perhaps even more amusing is that just three minutes after this fake registration, I also got a fake message from someone.

“Losers Welcome. Winners Will Be Mocked. No Assholes!”

George Martin threw a party to celebrate Hugo award losers:
Optimistic enough, in fact, to throw a Hugo Losers Party—a tradition he’d started back in 1976, but then let fall into other hands. Martin printed up invites—“Losers Welcome. Winners Will Be Mocked. No Assholes!”—hired a band, and rented a 12,000-square-foot historic mansion. Winners who showed up—including Kevin Liu, the translator of the Cixin Liu’s Best Novel-winning The Three-Body Problem—had to don rubber coneheads. Losers got magic markers to write on the cones.

"Goodwill goes upscale with new boutiques"

LAT:
The Orange County group has opened four high-end stores in the last two years and has plans for more, especially in the southern part of the county, where rents tend to be higher and residents wealthier.
...
The goal is to take advantage of luxury donations and get a leg up on the competition

"Food has replaced music at the heart of the cultural conversation"

EW:
I wonder if it’s because food and dining still offer true scarcity whereas music is so freely available everywhere that it’s become a poor signaling mechanism for status and taste. If you’ve eaten at Noma, you’ve had an experience a very tiny fraction of the world will be lucky enough to experience, whereas if you name any musical artist, I can likely find their music and be listening to it within a few mouse clicks.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Link roundup

1. Grantland:
Hustlers flutter around sports teams in every city. Sometimes they get deeply entwined in the operations. Financial fraud landed former L.A. Kings owner Bruce McNall and former Nashville Predators owner William “Boots” Del Biaggo III in prison. Baseball fan Bernie Madoff propped up the New York Mets with the largest Ponzi scheme in American history. Not two years ago, a judge ordered Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wilf to pay $84.5 million to resolve a real estate fraud described as “organized crime-type activities.” The IRS and the FBI raided a truck stop company run by Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, and the company later agreed to pay a $92 million fine to avoid prosecution.
2. The Awl:
A number of people on Twitter complained that this was their first-ever WhatsApp spam; others noted that the spam was fairly obviously an attempt to pump and dump a low-cap stock in a new and novel way.
...
Correct. Bitcoin penny stocks.
3. "Bulgogi + Scallion Pancakes + Quesadillas = The Ultimate Fusion Snack"

South Korea's propaganda loudspeakers at the DMZ

R:World News:
The initial announcements start with weather reports. Accurate weather reports that the NK neither has the manpower nor the computing power to gather and spread along the DMZ. This naturally convinces the NK soldiers to rely on the loudspeakers, if not for news and entertainment, for the weather. After some time, we can literally announce "DPRK soldiers, heavy rain is expected to fall in the evening, so please gather your laundry from the clotheslines" and they will come out of their little posts and start gathering their laundry. This is good rapport. Then come just vanilla news.

...

Then the loudspeakers broadcast NK news.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Manny Calavera (Grim Fandango) paper toys



Free download.

"Directors of videos nominated for the MTV Video Music Awards are required to pay hundreds of dollars for a seat if they want to attend the ceremony"

"MTV declined to provide an official comment about the policy"

The Night That Speaks free game download



A frightening little game made to mimic Game Boy graphics. Download it here.

Half-Line Miami free game download





Download it here.

Link roundup

1. Nightmare fuel.

2. "Compton’s mayor and council members have been illegally boosting their salaries for years by paying themselves for commission meetings that sometimes lasted only about a minute, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said."

3. "An alleged informant against former Subway spokesperson Jared Fogle gave her first public interview on Thursday, telling ABC News the entire process took 10 years, including four-and-half years wearing a wire for the FBI."

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Using Super Mario Maker to build a Metroid-esque game



You can preorder Super Mario Maker at Amazon.

Shotgun shell marketed as designed for shooting down drones



"This is pretty crazy if it’s real"

Pac-Man 256 is great



iOS.

Brutalist architecture in Minecraft



"Hosted by BlockWorks, in partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Brutalist Build was an educational initiative set up to engage a younger audience with architecture. A Minecraft mulitplayer server was opened for 1 week, and players were encouraged to log in and build their own brutalist-inspired Minecraft builds on plots."

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

The abandoned Jurassic Park cartoon



William Stout:
I am beginning a series of sales for the original art I created for a proposed Jurassic Park animated series commissioned by Universal Cartoon Studios.

Koala attack on video ("Oh my god it's on the #%^&$ bike")

Horrorstor--if Stephen King wrote a thriller novel that took place in an Ikea

A fun page turner being developed as a tv series:
Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.
Available at Amazon.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Link roundup

1. List of scientists who saved billions of lives.

2. "Once upon a time, in the year 2007, people were really excited about Second Life."
Colleges were among those that bought the hype of the Linden Lab-developed virtual world. Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life.

Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns. I decided to travel through several of the campuses, to see what’s happening in Second Life college-world in 2015
3. Ind:
Anish Kapoor: Chinese authorities plagiarised my Cloud Gate sculpture
The artist has vowed legal action against the oil town Karamay, arguing that the new commission is a copy of Cloud Gate
4. "The Honolulu Art Museum sued a donor for $880,000, claiming he cannot prove the art for which it has been paying him $80,000 a year did not come from a smuggling ring."

5. "Later I got home and worked my Google and quickly discovered that I’d learned a brand new lesson in drug paraphernalia. The term 'rose in a glass' does in fact refer to just that, a silk rose in a glass tube, purchased in bulk from vendors in China. The rose, however, is incidental, because it’s the glass that serves the purpose the young lady at the store wanted to use it for — as a crack pipe."

6. Masters of The Universe He-Man Inflatable Power Sword available for preorder.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

"The Iowa State Fair won't allow Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to give kids free rides on his helicopter on fairgrounds"

"but the real estate developer has secured a nearby location."



Friday, August 14, 2015

There should be an infomercial featuring the extended cut of this commercial

The clothes make the man



Domhnall Gleeson in The Force Awakens and Dredd

"A Guide to the Christian Vlog Community Where the Biggest Blessing Is a Baby"

Gawker:
Sam and Nia’s decision to share their pregnancy news on YouTube was not a novel one, but their story—dramatic, emotional, tinged with a Christian pro-life sensibility—set off many a viewer’s bullshit detector.

Knights of Ren

Force Awakens spoilers.

"Forty Ranger students and four Ranger instructors were taken to the hospital Wednesday after they were hit by lightning during training"

AT:
The students were learning lightning protection protocols at the time of the incident.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Diving Namor Heroclix



New Marvel Heroclix available at Ebay.