spriteleigh

"Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology." Read the rest

Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation says, "We just helped the Project of Government Oversight (POGO) install SecureDrop. As you may have seen, they were just subpoenaed for over 700 whistleblower records related to the Veteran's Affairs scandal, which they have been critical to uncovering." Read the rest

Hayao Miyazaki, director of some of the most fantastic and beautifully executed animated feature films in history, is not known for creating short films.

According to io9, this animated short, which has recently become available on Vimeo, was an exercise to break a creative block Miyazaki experienced while working on Princess Mononoke.

The film was essentially done in the form of a music video for “On Your Mark” by Chage and Aska, but is its own self-contained story, and packs a lot of visual imagination into its seven minutes. Miyazaki ventures into the ‘futuristic anime” genre that he usually doesn’t work with, and puts many dedicated directors of the genre to shame.

You may want to watch it twice to get the gist of the story, and then several more times, just to be dazzled.

The short is available on Vimeo (at least for the moment) under the title “On Your Mark & Castles in the Air (CHAGE & ASKA PV)“.

For more info on the director, see my post on Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli).

[Via io9]

June 6, 2014 - 3:30pm

Behind the Price

Watch this very long and extremely detailed video look at what things are like backstage at a taping of The Price is Right.

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Check the Forecast

The new Sharknado movie has the best and most lazy subtitle in the history of media.

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John Green’s Favorites

The author of the beloved The Fault in Our Stars (and host of mental_floss on YouTube) shares his favorite bildungsromans. Sorry for the word gluttony there but that is literally the first time I’ve ever gotten to use the word "bildungsroman" since I learned it in college.

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Comics Without Context

If you just look at these isolated comic book panels they appear really odd and often completely inappropriate. Some of these are NSFW.

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Catchphrase Compendium

All of the best TV catchphrases collected together in one video.

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Walking Off

Here’s the story of the last U.S. soldier executed for desertion.

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Well, There’s Something You Don't See Every Day

I know one rickshaw driver that isn’t getting a tip.

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Happy 30th, Ghostbusters!

The movie has a landmark birthday this Sunday. Check out these facts you might not have known about the film, and get the inside story on the music video for Ray Parker, Jr.'s memorable theme song.

John Oliver was incandescent on the subject of Net Neutrality, Time Warner and Comcast on Saturday, and he has a new, less-boring term for Net Neutrality: "Cable Company Fuckery." This is not only brilliant, it's hilarious. John Oliver is a perfect blend of Jon Stewart and Charlie Brooker. A reminder: you can reach out and touch the FCC on the subject of Cable Company Fuckery, and EFF can explain how to do it. Read the rest

Peter "brokep" Sunde, the Pirate Bay co-founder who also started Flattr and made a bid for the European Parliament on behalf of the Finnish Pirate Party, has been arrested in Sweden. Sunde -- who is a friend of mine -- had been working his way through a series of unsuccessful appeals to his conviction for his role in running the Pirate Bay, which included a €10M fine. Sunde faces an eight-month sentence, which he was meant to begin serving in 2012.

I don't know what's next for Peter; his appeals have always turned on legal complexities that were somewhat esoteric. It may be that this is the last stop for him and that he will have to serve. He's written before about his struggles with depression. I hope that he is safe and as comfortable as he can be under the circumstances, and that he knows that he has friends and fans all over the world who care about what happens to him. Read the rest

June 1, 2014 - 9:00am

The words dished out to finalists in this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee were no joke. Can you do as well as the contestants did?

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Controversial opinion: is Batman not as great as everyone thinks he is? Discuss. 

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Some will find this trivial, but the nitpickiest among us may feel a tiny, smug thrill that the New York Times had a typo in one of its front-page headlines. 

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Warning: this 20-minute supercut of every single time Nicolas Cage has laughed in a movie may be too much for some to handle. Proceed with caution. 

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The cast of The Wonder Years reunited, and they all seem very happy. 

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Ballet isn't for wimps, and the dancers of the Washington Ballet are here to prove it by demonstrating the most difficult moves in their repertoire. Do not try this at home.

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For such a small country, Belarus seems to have an outsize determination to recognize each of its citizens who is the "best" at something: being a policeman, being a milkmaid, or simply being a young couple in love. 

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Whether or not the sunrise and sunset in New Zealand really are better than everywhere else, this time-lapse video sure makes it seem that way.

[Video Link] You can start to see the movies (here's a list) when you zoom in twice. Fun fact: it took my computer over a month to render this 5 minute version.

Read the rest

(Image Via GiuseppeQ)

(Image Via krakenkraked)

(Image Via TheWho)

Godzilla is still tearing it up on the silver screen over fifty years since making his mega-kaiju debut, and the success of his latest movie proves you don’t have to be a sex symbol to bring in big bucks at the box office.

After starring in the same old stomp a city, smash a kaiju flicks for over five decades isn’t it about time Godzilla branched out a bit and tried his hand at playing the lead role in, say, an epic biblical flick like Noah or a touching drama like Marley & Me?

Check out 40 Great Movies Made Better By Adding Godzilla, it's definitely worth the price of admission!

(Photo: Toei Kyoto Studio Park)

Seizo Fukumoto, 71, has been acting since the age of 15. For the past 50 years, he's developed a specialty: he's the guy who gets killed. It's not a large role, but in Japanese historical movies, there's always a need for an actor who can be killed convincingly. That's what Fukumoto does, and he's known for being an expert at it. Jun Hongo writes for the Wall Street Journal:

One of his signature moves is the "ebi-zori," or prawn bend, in which after being struck, he arches his body backward like a prawn, then goes into convulsions, twitching and grasping before dying.

"The way my characters die has a huge impact on the impression the lead character gives in a film," Mr. Fukumoto wrote in a 2012 essay. Ebi-zori is the perfect way to go, in his opinion, because the camera can remain focused on the hero's gallantry while the kirareyaku actor also gains screen time by turning his face toward the audience as he falls dead.

Now Fukumoto is getting the chance to have the lead role in a movie. Appropriately, it's about an aging actor who has spent his career getting killed. Rocket News 24 describes it:

Now Fukumoto is finally taking center stage in his most recent film, Uzumasa Limelight, which takes its name from the Charlie Chaplin 1952 classic Limelight and also seems to follow its plot to some extent. Fukumoto plays Seichi Kamiyama, an aging actor working in Toei Uzumasa Studios, Kyoto. Much like the real-life Fukumoto, for most of his career Kamiyama has been typecast as a guy who takes a sword to the midsection and falls in agony.

As the film progresses, Kamiyama takes Satsuki, a young actress, under his wing because she reminds him of great starlets in his past. He teaches her the art of sword fighting which gives her an edge over her competition and sets her on the path to stardom. However, by the time Satsuki achieves her own starring role in a television series, Kamiyama has retired. She decides to pull him back in front of the camera once again, only this time as her co-star, giving him the limelight he deserves.

(Video Link)

Here's the Japanese language trailer for that film.

(YouTube link)

Brienne and Podrick, the oddest of the many odd pairings in the series Game of Thrones, could be the perfect sitcom couple, don’t you think? This remix puts their potential spinoff to the tune of Perfect Strangers, which describes them well. Hot Pie makes the perfect “wacky neighbor” character! -via Uproxx

(Video Link)

Pixar's in the business of making family friendly animated films, so it's unlikely they'll ever put out a true horror movie, but if you recut their original films just so the mood changes dramatically.

Add some generic slasher flick soundtrack music, title cards full of ominous statements and a bunch of scenes taken completely out of context and you get what looks like a trailer for a decent animated horror version of Toy Story.

In this horror trailer for Toy Story, as edited by Bobby Burns, you'd expect the misfit toys from Sunnyside Daycare to be the bad guys, but it looks like having his string pulled one too many times has made Woody snap!

-Via Kotaku

(Video Link)

If supreme leader Kim Jong-Un allowed the citizens of North Korea to play video games, especially those evil games produced by the U.S., he might appreciate all the hard work and grand imagery contained within them.

It’s safe to say, however, that he won’t appreciate his appearance in the new video game by Moneyhorse Games called Glorious Leader!...even though he totally should.

I mean, the game co-stars his best buddy Dennis Rodman and features the Glorious Leader riding around on a unicorn with flaming hooves, smashing through all Capitalist swine who dare oppose the magnificent Hermit Kingdom.

It’s like an old school arcade run 'n' gun, only much better because it stars the mightiest man in the universe- Kim Jong Un!

-Via Topless Robot

From Creative Commons's Elliot Harman: "The idea of The Public Domain Jam is to encourage developers to create games based on public domain assets and stories, and optionally give the games themselves back to the public domain via the CC0 waiver; there's a $1000 prize for the best CC0 game."

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "For five years, Professor Frank Bennett, a distinguished legal scholar at Nagoya University School of Law, has been trying to add Bluebook Support to Zotero, the open source citation tool used all over the world.

Read the rest

For months, I've been following the story that the Mozilla project was set to add closed source Digital Rights Management technology to its free/open browser Firefox, and today they've made the announcement, which I've covered in depth for The Guardian. Mozilla made the decision out of fear that the organization would haemorrhage users and become irrelevant if it couldn't support Netflix, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, Amazon Video, and other services that only work in browsers that treat their users as untrustable adversaries.

They've gone to great -- even unprecedented -- lengths to minimize the ways in which this DRM can attack Firefox users. But I think there's more that they can, and should, do. I also am skeptical of their claim that it was DRM or irrelevance, though I think they were sincere in making it. I think they hate that it's come to this and that no one there is happy about it.

I could not be more heartsick at this turn of events.

We need to turn the tide on DRM, because there is no place in post-Snowden, post-Heartbleed world for technology that tries to hide things from its owners. DRM has special protection under the law that makes it a crime to tell people if there are flaws in their DRM-locked systems -- so every DRM system is potentially a reservoir of long-lived vulnerabilities that can be exploited by identity thieves, spies, and voyeurs. Read the rest

(YouTube link)

Aspiring actor and film director Anthony Trombetta took the audio from the new Godzilla film trailer and edited in slips from the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie Jaws. They go together quite well! The result just shows us how regimented the art of storytelling has become in a monster movie. Or at least in constructing the trailer. -via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

What if Star Wars had been directed by Quentin Tarantino? It’s an imaginary exercise, as Tarantino was 14 years old when the first movie premiered. But this would be the trailer. YouTube commenters think it’s great, but I don’t quite get it. What makes this a “Tarantino” trailer? The music? The fact that Samuel L. Jackson is cast? Help me out here- I’ve seen only two Tarantino movies and enjoyed one of them. -via Digg

The annals of stupid, sloppy patents have a new world-beating entry: Amazon has received a patent on taking pictures of stuff on a white background. The patent's particulars specify a well-known lighting arrangement that minimizes shadows and post-production cleanup. As DIY Photography points out, there's a huge corpus of prior art on this that Amazon didn't disclose in its filing, and the USPTo appeared to have done no due diligence before giving the company a 20-year monopoly on a common studio technique. Read the rest

A murder of Congresscritters and Senators have told Internet ad-brokers that they expect them to behave as though SOPA passed into law (instead of suffering hideous, total defeat); they want the companies to establish a secret, unaccountable blacklist of "pirate" sites. The group comprises Congressmen Bob Goodlatte and Adam Schiff, and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Orrin Hatch. This isn't just a terrible idea, it's also an obviously illegal antitrust violation, as Mitch Stoltz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out: Read the rest

François Dourlen, a photographer in France, pulls up on his cell phone iconic scenes from movies and television shows, holds the phone up to appropriate backgrounds, then snaps pictures. The results are both striking and funny. Fantasy becomes reality all because you chose to watch the right or terribly wrong show.

You can see more photos in the series here.

-via 22 Words

[Video Link] The fact that I don't understand what they are saying made it more interesting to me, because I paid more attention to their increasingly aggressive body language. (Via Bits and Pieces)

Redditor RedditAuthority created twogalleries of 21 movie posters. S/he turned the scenes depicted on these posters into animated .gifs. These include recent releases, such as Looper, old movies, such as Psycho, and emerging classics like Back to the Future.

-via Fubiz

Dictators like Castro, Hussein and Gaddafi don’t seem like the kind of guys who seek comfort from  stuffed animals when they’re feeling picked on and unloved, but Chunlong Sun’s hilarious photo series “Celebrity” reveals their dark plushie secrets. 

These are the “forbidden portraits” of the infamous, the skeletons in their dictatorial closets that they don’t want their enemies to discover, the humanizing moments that undermine their ability to rule with an iron fist.

Sometimes you need an army to solve your personal problems, but sometimes all it takes is a little cuddle time with your favorite plush toy!

-Via Laughing Squid

Every year, Canada's Munk debates feature high-level, high-profile debates on burning policy issues. This year, they debated surveillance, and the participants were Glenn Greendwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian on the anti-surveillance side and former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on the pro-surveillance side. Although the debating partners do a lot in this, the real freight is carried by Hayden and Greenwald, both of whom are more fact-intensive than the others.

I have a bias here, but I think that Greenwald wiped up the floor with Hayden (the post-debate polls from the room support this view). It was particularly useful to have Hayden being grilled by a well-informed opponent who was allowed to go after the easy dismissals and glib deflections. Normally, he gets to deliver some well-polished talking points and walk away -- this was something I hadn't seen before.

This is just about the best video you're going to watch on the surveillance debate. It kicks off around the 30m mark.

Watch Live: Glenn Greenwald Debates Former NSA Director Michael Hayden

Michael Geist writes, "The recent revelations regarding massive telecom and Internet provider disclosures of subscriber information has generated a political firestorm with pointed questions yesterday to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the House of Commons. While Harper tried to provide reassurances that warrants were obtained where necessary, the reality is that the law includes a massive exception that permits voluntary, warrantless disclosure of subscriber information."

That suggests that the majority of the nearly 1.2 million requests in 2011 were not accompanied by a warrant. Moreover, the telecom and Internet providers have shrouded their activities in secrecy, refusing to disclose the disclosures to affected subscribers and hiding behind aggregated data to avoid scrutiny of their individual practices.

The issue is likely to continue to attract attention, particularly since the government is seeking to expand the warrantless disclosure framework in Bill C-13 (the lawful access bill) and Bill S-4 (the Digital Privacy Act). One further issue that should not be lost within the disclosure is the stunning admission that at least one Canadian provider may be allowing the government to mirror or copy of its subscriber communications.

Is a Canadian Telco Allowing the Government To Mirror Its Subscriber Communications?

(YouTube link)

Neil Cicierega mashed up “Chop Suey” by System of a Down with Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock.” They work really well together, although I must admit that I can easily tell which parts belong to which song. The parts I am familiar with are Elton John, the rest is “Chop Suey.” Yes, I admit I’ve never heard the song, so I don’t know whether it’s been altered to mix better or not. -via Daily of the Day

Lawrence Lessig has announced the next step in his campaign against corruption in American politics with the launch of MAYDAY, a Superpac intended to raise enough money through small donations (and, eventually, major ones) to elect a large enough roster of congressmen and senators that they can pass meaningful campaign finance reform, making Superpacs and other perversions of democracy a bad memory.

MAYDAY is trying to raise $1M in the next 30 days, and to build this sum into a "moneybomb" that can be dropped onto the 2016 elections. They're doing it through a Kickstarter-like mechanism, so your pledge only comes out of your bank account if the full amount is raised. They're calling it a moonshot. It's audacious, improbable, and desperately needed. I only wish that I could donate (I'm a foreigner). Tell you what, if you throw in an extra buck for me, I'll add an extra hundred pounds to the UK equivalent when and if it launches.

In 2014, we want to make fundamental reform the issue in 5 congressional races.

From that, we'll have a better sense of what victory in 2016 will take. And we'll put Congress on notice that in 2016, we'll be back.

So for 2014, we have two fundraising targets:

The first is $1 million by the end of May. If we meet that goal, that $1 million will be matched, and we'll move to the second target.

That second target is $5 million by the end of June. If we meet that goal, that $5 million will also be matched, and our fundraising for 2014 will end.

We will then have the funds we need to hire the best campaign shops we can to use 100% of these kickstarted funds to win in these 5 districts.

Mayone.US

The Launch of the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC

Browse through a selection of crime scene photos from any major city and you’ll find a bunch of locations that look familiar, since most major cities have a degree of similarity to their architecture and layout.

However, if you superimpose them over a photo of the location in present day you’ll see a rich story unfolding about a city’s history, and the sordid crimes committed on those mean streets.

Historian at the New York Press Photographers Association Marc A. Hermann has been busy compositing vintage crime scene and modern photos together in an interesting series that reveals New York's colorful- New York City then & now: Famous Daily News photos brought back to life.

-Via Dangerous Minds