spriteleigh

Slashdot recorded a must-watch video with Lawrence Lessig about the Mayday.US anti-PAC that is raising money to elect politicians who'll enact meaningful campaign finance reform. Read the rest

No, really, it is. This is what's lovingly referred to as 'outsider music,' and it's fabulous.

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The Creative Commons-licensed version of The Internet's Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger's documentary about Aaron Swartz, is now available on the Internet Archive, which is especially useful for people outside of the US, who aren't able to pay to see it online. Read the rest

Bitlit works with publishers to get you free or discounted access to digital copies of books you own in print: you use the free app (Android/Ios) to take a picture of the book's copyright page with your name printed in ink, and the publisher unlocks a free or discounted ebook version.

Fulllengthfilms, an obscure subreddit with next to no traffic shot up to more than 300,000 daily visitors after it was targetted for takedown by the MPAA. It is now the fastest-growing subreddit on Reddit.

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Fartzenegger is one of those videos you find online that initially makes you wonder why anybody would spend time making such a thing, but if you have a silly sense of humor, a nostalgiac love of Ahnold’s old movies and a few minutes to kill you might just see the merit of making such a ridiculous video.

Distractotron Channel sure did, they're the makers of this fine compilation video, and they want you to know that no actual farts were used in the making of this video. None. Just some Foley sounds at the touch of a button and excellent comedic timing.

Fartzenegger is a bawdy little guilty pleasure of a video with some genuinely funny moments, and if you can hear the farts in your head it’s almost as funny with the sound off!

(NSFW due to language and content)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

America's legal prohibition on phone unlocking has inched almost imperceptibly closer to reform, as a watered-down House bill approaches some kind of Senate compromise, that might, in a couple years, decriminalize changing the configuration of a pocket-computer that you own. Read the rest

Dj BC and Big D and The Kids Table have released two versions of a mashup track in celebration of the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter.

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A lot of folks enjoyed the video TV’s Greatest Catchphrases a couple of weeks ago. We were told it would be part one of two, which makes plenty of sense to me, as any such list will draw many demands for other favorite catchphrases to be included suggestions for a sequel. And now part two is here, from Tastefully Offensive! If your favorite TV catchphrase wasn’t in the first, it might be here. Or vice versa. Anyway, get ready for a whirlwind TV nostalgia tour! -Thanks, Robert!

Bittorrent Sync is a Dropbox-like service through which bittorrent users all over the world offer a little bit of their storage and bandwidth to host encrypted fragments of other users' files, and get the same service in return.

Before the Tour

You should know these things before you book your tickets to go tour the world’s most famous attractions.

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Animated Comments

Dorkly put together an illustrated guide to the 7 types of annoying internet commenters. I will be very disappointed if at least a few of these don’t present themselves below just for humor.

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Hacking Apart History

These “historical” films are some of the worst when it comes to capturing things as they actually occurred. Can we please add Argo to this list?

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I Double Dare You to Be Excited

This supercut of Double Dare prizes is super 1990ish.

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Great Scott

A regular limousine will never seem cool again after seeing this stretch Delorean.

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The Old Apple

Check out these fascinating photographs of 1890s New York City.

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Alrighty Then

You may not like Jim Carrey as an actor, but you’ll probably find some truth in what he spoke about in a recent commencement address.

What do Karl Lagerfeld, the Dalai Lama and Iggy Pop have in common, besides fame and critical acclaim? They’re all representing victims of physical abuse in this thought provoking ad campaign created by Amnesty International to raise awareness about the unjust torturing of prisoners.

The underlying message is that torture isn’t really effective because a tortured man will say whatever you want him to say, for example- Lagerfeld will claim that Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops are the height of elegance, and the Dalai Lama will claim that a man who doesn’t own a Rolex by the time he’s fifty is a total failure if you beat them badly enough.

It's a bit jarring to see the Dalai Lama all battered and bruised, but somehow this look really suits Iggy!

-Via Dangerous Minds

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What makes the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer so appealing? Is it the quick out-of-sequence cuts that give no context, but make you want to see more? Is it the comedy plopped into the middle of the action? Is it the goofy selection of '70s music? Maybe it’s all the above, instead of the movie itself, because YouTube member The Unusual Suspect recut scenes from Star Wars using the Guardians trailer style. The result makes me want to go back to 1977 all over again! -via Uproxx

Glossy print magazines, especially fashion and lifestyle magazines, are filled with advertisements for goods that you can't afford. Some of these magazines, such as Vogue, are hundreds of pages long.

Noah Veltman, a journalist, added up the costs of all of the goods advertised in popular magazines for the month of June 2014. Jenni Avins of Quartz used that data to compose a series of charts. Vogue is, by a wide margin, the most expensive. 

But it's not just because of the staggering size of Vogue. The individual items are pricier. 

It's notable that Vogue does not have the highest percentage of page-length advertisements. That contest goes to In Style.

-via The Hairpin

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Eager Beaver Films combines the story of Breaking Bad (just the beginning, so really there’s no spoilers) with the world of Mr. Men, a series of British children’s books and a TV series. The result is downright silly, considering Breaking Bad was never for children. Contains some mild NSFW language. -via Warming Glow

Ghostbusters 3's Reservoir Dog moment

We've featured claymation artist Lee Hardcastle [warning: auto-sound] on Neatorama several times previously, but the indie filmmaker is back with this gem.

Ghostbusters 3's Pulp Fiction moment

The whole thing probably got started when he thought, who ya gonna call to direct the long-awaited Ghostbusters 3 movie? When the answer is Quentin Tarantino, then we get this fantastic 1:44 animated video clip:

How many Tarantino-references could you recognize from Hardcastle's Ghostbusters 3 claymation?

Via Fast Company.

Cable lobbyist-turned-FCC-Chairman Tom Wheeler can promise to override state laws prohibiting publicly owned ISPs, but it doesn't matter if all the big cities are locked into ten-year franchise agreements with cable and phone companies. As an Electronic Frontier Foundation editorial points out, US mayors can and should take steps to make municipal broadband a reality, putting competitive pressure on America's foot-dragging, worst-of-breed ISPs. Many cities are sitting on a gold-mine of "dark fiber" that can be lit up to provide blazing-fast connections, and even in places where state law prohibits municipal Internet service, there are loopholes, like the one that Chattanooga, TN used to light up a gigabit network that's 100 times faster than most Americans can get. Read the rest

Three weeks ago, Molly Ortberg of The Toast amused us by retelling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as though it had been written by the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand. She's working her way through all seven of J.K. Rowling's famous fantasy series in this manner. So far, she has also composed Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Collectivism.

Ortberg took a break from that project to reveal the Objectivist wisdom in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Here's a selection from Alice's confrontation with the Duchess:

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis–”

“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”

“You have no right to do that,” Alice said calmly. “The removal of heads does not fall under the purview of government.”

The Duchess gasped.

“A society that robs an individual of her head,” Alice continued, “or in any way attempts to limit the freedom of her head, is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang rule. You cannot promote the aristocracy of non-value at the expense of individual liberty.”

The Duchess fell silent.

“I am going to build a railroad here,” Alice said. “There is nothing you can do to stop me.”

“By the way,” Alice said as she turned to leave, “The appropriate posture of a worthy woman to a worthy man is hero-worship, not in chopping off his head. She never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. A properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother—or leader. There will never be a woman president.”

-via American Digest

Greenhouse is a browser plugin created by Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer. It seeks out the names of elected US officials on any web-page you load in your browser and adds a pop-up link to their names listing the major donors to their campaigns. It uses 2012 election-cycle data drawn from Opensecrets's repository.

I've long suggested something like this as a way of improving political coverage. Indeed, you could imagine it going both ways -- any time the name of a company or individual who had made some big campaign contributions shows up in a webpage, you get a list of their political beneficiaries. Ideally, this would be an open framework to which data from any political race could be added. Read the rest

In my latest Guardian column, "How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage," I discuss the petard that the French publishing giant Hachette is being hoisted upon by Amazon. Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with "Digital Rights Management" that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can't afford to pull its books from Amazon, because its customers can only read their books with Amazon's technology. So now, Hachette has reduced itself to a commodity supplier to Amazon, and has frittered away all its market power. The other four major publishers are headed into the same place with Amazon, and unless they dump DRM quick, they're going to suffer the same fate. Read the rest

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The 1922 German expressionist movie Nosferatu is a classic horror film, but it’s an hour and a half long. Of course, everyone should see it all the way through at least once, but if you’ve seen it before, you can relive the experience by watching this four-minute version. And, sadly, if your busy schedule and/or attention span is too short to ever get around to watching the original, this may be the closest you’ll ever get.

Mario Wienerroither condensed the whole movie using a few illustrative clips, and added some rather odd (and often comical) sound effects, which will be appealing to those folks, like my kids, who can hardly handle black-and-white, much less a silent film. Wienerroither calls this a “silentless film.” Don’t bother turning the lights off, as you’re more likely to laugh than to scream. -via Laughing Squid

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It's a show about a large, extended family that struggles with occasional internal conflicts, along with treachery and murder. Yes, it's The Brady Bunch. Actor and geek celebrity Wil Wheaton brings us this mashup of two popular shows for his new program, The Wil Wheaton Project (warning: auto-sound).

Content warning: NSFW language.

-via The Mary Sue

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps has publicly excoriated Congress and the FCC for the state of Internet access in America, which he called "insanity," saying that America's political class "should be ashamed of ourselves." Copps was speaking at a DC event examining the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which created the short-lived practice of requiring American telcoms operators to share their lines with new entrants, allowing many competing DSL providers to flourish. This practice ended in 2005, and led to today's situation in which most Americans have 0, 1 or 2 broadband options. Read the rest

Starting today, "The Internet's Own Boy," Brian Knappenberger's award-winning, acclaimed documentary about Aaron Swartz, is available as a Creative Commons-licensed (CC-BY-NC-SA) video download.

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The editing geniuses at The Tonight Show have done it again, making NBC news anchor Brian Williams perform Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” But he’s not alone, because others of the NBC news team lend a hand here and there. -via Warming Glow

See also:Other rap sings by Brian Williams.

Stephen sez, "Around 13 years ago, I wrote a GPL video game called Project: Starfighter. It is a multi-directional shoot 'em up, with an intricate plot and a diverse cast of characters. Since its release, the game has been ported to a great number of platforms, including the Xbox, Pandora, and Sony PSP. It is now maintained on Sourceforge." Read the rest

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Fadi Saleh edits existing video to make President Obama sing different songs on his YouTube channel baracksdubs. Ellen DeGeneres commissioned him to make one for The Ellen Show, and the result is Ellen singing the Katy Perry song “Birthday.” -via Viral Viral Videos

Apple has announced that it will spoof the MAC addresses emitted by its wireless devices as an anti-tracking measure, a change that, while welcome, is "an umbrella in a hurricane" according to a good technical explainer by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jeremy Gillula and Seth Schoen. Read the rest