Actor John Krasinski was in the cast of The Office and A Quiet Place. Someone took clips from an episode of The Office in which everyone was trying not to talk, and combined them with the trailer for the movie, A Quiet Place, where making the smallest sound could get you killed. The result is funny and creepy.
Whenever you install and use iTunes you're forced to agree to Apple's user agreement to continue, a lengthy document that is essentially just a long-winded way for Apple to cover their butt.
I've never read this entire document, and chances are neither have you, but illustrator Robert Sikoryak has and somehow it inspired him to create a comic book version of that ridiculously long legal document.
Robert rendered his "unauthorized adaptation" of the iTunes Terms and Conditions in the style of many famous cartoons and comics, from the Simpsons to Peanuts to Dick Tracy, and his graphic novel is making people actually want to read the document!
-Via VICE
There's something about the name "floppy diskette" that has always sounded a bit crude, and I couldn't help but crack a smile at the mention even when people shortened it to "floppy".
Does that mean I have a perverted mind?
Perhaps, but no matter how pure your mind is you'll agree that "floppy diskette" is an unfortunate name for a product after hearing this woman repeat it over and over again in this video tutorial edit from back in the good ol' days of computing.
-Via Geekologie
The villains are often the best part of any fiction (not so much in non-fiction). We don't necessarily "like" them, but we love to watch them. In comic book movies, they are so over the top that we can't turn away. Robert Jones found the best clips of comic book villain in film and made us a delicious mashup.
Maybe we love villains because they let us vicariously indulge in our more selfish instincts. We can see what is possible when ethics go out the window. It's safe because in comic book movies, we know that eventually justice will be restored. The song used in the video is "Saints of the Sinners" by The Faim. -via Laughing Squid
During the Napster wars, Bruce Schneier famously quipped, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water less wet." (more…)
Earlier this week, YouTube updated its policies surrounding what sort of gun-related nonsense people are allowed to get up to while using their services. Selling gun parts? Outta here. You wanna show folks how to build a gun? Take it outside. Are you a bumpstock or a semi-automatic to fully automatic modification enthusiast? Not around here you ain't. What's a group of gun oil-huffing video makers supposed to do?
Wind up in cahoots with pornography peddlers, apparently.
According to the BBC, video makers who once leveraged YouTube to educate the masses on how to make their own suppressors or illegally modify firearms are now looking to Pornhub as a new home for their gun-related videos:
Karl Kasarda and Ian McCollum, who run the gun review site InRangeTV, said they had started posting their videos on Facebook and pornography site PornHub.
"We will not be seeking any monetisation from PornHub... we are merely looking for a safe harbour for our content and for our viewers," the pair said in a statement.
Firearms manufacturer Spike's Tactical said the change reflected attempts to "slowly chip away at our freedoms and erode our rights".
Eroding their rights. Please. YouTube is a public forum, but not a public institution. Saying that it's responsible for chipping away at your freedom because you're butt hurt that you can't use it to sell gun parts or blather on about your AR-15's custom rails anymore is like being pissed at a Starbucks for not allowing you to run a brothel out of their bathroom. Anyway, if you're looking for a one-stop shop for your whacking and whack-off needs, your ship has finally come in.
Photo via Flickr, courtesy of brian.ch
It's completely counterintuitive to take a hilarious comedy and strip all the funniness out of it. But that's exactly what Testudo Aubreii did with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It works for several reasons. First off, it was only the Pythons' droll, deadpan delivery that made this project possible. The incongruity of the original film recut with the pompous hyperbole of the modern trailer format is just ridiculous. Then, for the many of us who are very familiar with the movie, each clip reminds us of the scene it's from, so we have to laugh anyway. -via Digg
Remember when Tommy Wiseau dressed up as The Joker and delivered some iconic lines from The Dark Knight in his most-imitable style? The fine folks at Bup cut Tommy into the movie, and it's as hilariously horrifying as expected. (more…)
This is a truly weird idea. Mehdi, also known as DrMachakil (previously at Neatorama) found movie scenes and songs that contained the exact same line, and mashed them together. The result... uh, it's weird, too, but it sometimes works strangely well. When it doesn't, well, its still strange.
I hope he does a follow up with more of these when he finds them. -via Laughing Squid
Han Solo and the Beastie Boys don't have anything in common other than their connection to 80s pop culture, but when you bring these two forces of freshness together they make a pretty good pair, err I mean quartet. Quintet? Yeah, that one.
Anyhoo, the Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer felt a bit lacking on its own, but when Chris Galegar of War Starts At Midnight recut the trailer to the Beastie Boys song Sabotage the fans were like "I love you" and Chris was like "I know".
-Via io9
Redbox buys DVDs and then rents them through automated kiosks, including DVDs from Disney that come with download codes to watch the videos through a DRM player. (more…)
Continue reading How the Internet Archive Infringed My Copyrights and Then (Kind Of) Blew Me Off
Every three years, the US Copyright Office creates temporary exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking DRM, provided that people can show that they've been prevented from doing something customary and legitimate with their own property. (more…)
In Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools? -- a new post on EFF's Deeplinks blog -- I describe the bizarre, unfair and increasingly salient US Copyright Office DMCA exemptions process, which is underway right now. (more…)
I'd say things peaked in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks for proposals for exemptions to Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM; in 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a broad "jailbreaking" exemption to modify the firmware of phones and tablets; this year, we're asking for that permission to be extended to smart speakers like Alexa/Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePods, and the smaller players in the market. (more…)
First it was Montana, then New York, then California -- and now New Jersey has become the latest state to enact state-level Net Neutrality rules in defiance of Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who not only killed Net Neutrality despite the obvious fraud and deceit in the regulatory process, but also insists (as his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler, did) that states do not have the right to override federal communications policy. (more…)
It uses Full-Text RSS and PDF Newspaper to extract the article's content and produce a clean HTML copy. It then relies on Headless Chromium to generate the PDF. To avoid situations where an article will use an extra printed page for a small overrun, Simple Print produces 3 PDFs with slighly varying font sizes and keeps the copy with the fewest pages and largest font size.
Realizing that his angst ridden readers from the mid to late 1990s have settled in nicely to Jack's slim legged corduroys, Chuck Palahniuk wants to expose their progenies to probably the only book he has written.
It's filled with love, rainbows and fights.
https://youtu.be/F8JCh0owT4w
Motherboard's short documentary, "Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech's Repair Monopoly" is an excellent look at the absurd situation created by John Deere's position that you can't own your tractor because you only license the software inside it, meaning that only Deere can fix Deere's tractors, and the centuries-old tradition of farmers fixing their agricultural equipment should end because Deere's shareholders would prefer it that way. (more…)
For a couple years now, I've been collaborating with EFF to produce a Catalog of Missing Devices: products that do something legal and useful and desirable, but don't exist because to make them, you'd have to break DRM, something US law bans. (more…)
Artist Jenny Odell created the Bureau of Suspended Objects to photographically archive and researched the manufacturing origins of 200 objects found at a San Francisco city dump; last August, she prepared a special report for Oakland's Museum of Capitalism about the bizarre world of shitty "free" watches sold through Instagram influences and heavily promoted through bottom-feeding remnant ad-buys, uncovering a twilight zone of copypasted imagery and promotional materials livened with fake stories about mysterious founders and branded tales. (more…)
Earlier this month, a game called HAPPY WORLD by Jimi Masuraki was released on itch.io. When I first downloaded it, I honestly thought I might play it for 15 minutes during my free-block at school, at then uninstall it and be done. But after five or ten minutes of completing simple quests and making the digital people happy, I realized that this wasn’t another free lackluster game.
Not only did the adorably simplistic art style and funny nonchalant conversations between the player and the entities in the game cause me (and a few of my classmates) to laugh out loud, but once I got home and got further into the story, I found that there was intentional – and dark – lore in the game that was left for the player to discover on their own. I immediately knew that I was going to have to finish the game to unravel all the secrets — and in just less than an hour I did — but it wasn’t the ending that I was looking for. I restarted the game and started my attempt to figure out how to trigger the game’s true ending, and I was not at all disappointed.
I do not plan to spoil anything here, but if you are looking for a quick, free, and overall fantastic game to play, I recommend HAPPY WORLD. It’s an incredible mix of a happy-go-lucky simple world, and a darker, more depressing one hidden underneath. I truly doubt you’ll be disappointed. You can download it for free here.
Also, you can go to Jimi Masuraki’s Patreon page here, because he makes pretty great, fun games that you really can’t find anywhere else.
A group of activist lawyers/documentarians have made a vocation of fighting copyfraudsters in the courts, first forcing Warner Chapell to relinquish its bogus claim over "Happy Birthday" and then targeting Ludlow Music Inc. and The Richmond Organization who had spent decades fraudulently collecting licensing fees for the public domain civil rights hymn "We Shall Overcome." (more…)
The US -- allegedly a bastion of the "free market" -- has one of the world's lowest levels of economic competition, thanks to the triumph of the Chicago School economists, who used shitty math to convince Ronald Reagan and his successors that the only time a monopoly is a problem is when it raises prices. (more…)
Yeah, 'Monster' sounds about right. Five women are suing beverage maker Monster Energy over a workplace culture where discrimination and sexually abusive behavior by male executives proliferated with impunity.
spriteleighIf you watch this, do not show it to me.
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