When you use Facebook Live, there's a delay of a few seconds between the event and viewing the webcast. The Irish band The Academic harnessed this delay to perform a version of their song "Bear Claws" by layering the different instruments and vocals. The looping effect starts out as just plain odd, but builds to an interesting orchestration.
-via reddit
Data analysis company Gravwell ingested 22,000,000 comments sent to the FCC's docket on Net Neutrality and posted their preliminary findings, which are that the majority of comments came from bots, and these bots oppose Net Neutrality; of the comments that appear to originate with humans, the vast majority favor Net Neutrality. (more…)
Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the hit launch title for Nintendo's new Switch console, is already emulated on the PC, where it's been hacked to house random pop culture stuff. In this video, see Biggie Smalls vs. Thomas the Tank Engine, Minecraft Steve, Spongebob, and Shrek do battle.
There's something so awesomely dumb about this, joy and horror, fascination and boredom all at once. It embodies a trend that looks like it might be punk, or at least a new frontier in YouTube Poop. But this is mostly our novelty receptors getting plugged by a tornado of copies. A mashup without movement, manners without mode. A place where forms are honored and meaning forgotten. A flash of accelerant in the embers of web culture, cackling at the hope new things must emerge when the old is mixed.
Ruth from Openmedia writes, "This Thursday legislators in the EU Parliament are voting on proposals in the EU for mass content filters, and restrictions on links, all in the name of 'updating copyright. (more…)
On Twitter, game developer Charles Randall (Ubisoft, Capy, etc) posted the biting truth about why game developers do not talk about their work.
https://twitter.com/charlesrandall/status/911987526541430784
... gamer culture is so toxic that being candid in public is dangerous.
See that recent twitter thread about game design tricks to make games better -- filled with gamers "angry" about "being lied to."
Forums and comment sections are full of dunning-kruger specialists who are just waiting for any reason to descend on actual developers.
See any thread where some dumbass comments how "easy" it would be to, say, add multiplayer or change engines.
Any dev who talks candidly about the difficulty of something like that just triggers a wave of people questioning their entire resumé.
"Questioning" here being an absurd euphemism for "becoming a target of an entire faction of gamers for harassment or worse." ... while I'd talk candidly about certain big topics right now -- I know doing so would lead to another wave of assholes throwing shit at me. (And of course I face almost nothing compared to women/PoC/lgtbq+ folk)
But here's the rub: all the stuff you ever wanted to know about game development would be out there if not for the toxic gaming community.
We *love* to talk about development, the challenges we face, the problems we solve, the shortcuts we take. But it's almost never worth it.
I did a public talk a couple weeks ago to a room full of all ages kids, and afterwards, a kid came up to me and was talking about stuff.
And I shit you not, this kid (somewhere between 13-16 I'd guess) starts talking about how bad devs are because of a youtuber he watches.
He nailed all the points, "bad engines", "being greedy", you name it. I was appalled.
did my best to tell him that all those things people freak out about are normal and have justifications. I hope I got through a bit.
But I expect he went back to consuming toxic culture via youtube personalities, and one day he'll probably harass a dev over nonsense.
Part of the problem is just the social media problem: we are all stuck in the same room and the dumbest, nastiest people are loudest. But one thing that makes gamer culture so toxic is that it's a consumer culture that thinks it's a maker culture.
There's an expectation among many gamers they'll end up working in the biz, a nebulous suggestion of natural progress from playing to making games. This should be a good thing, but the well's poisoned by what they consume and so want to create. The established business of commercial game marketing, the machines and franchises and products, are all part of the dream. To be seen making games that don't meet these traditional commercial standards and forms, games which are not for them, is often experienced as an attack on their identity.
One manifestation of gamer culture's toxic identity politics are reactionary movements against assumed interlopers—feminists, minorities, concept artists and so on—who are interested in games but distinterested in gamer culture or the idea that their work must pay dues to it. Game journalists, expected to provide guidance but only within a thin and nerdily technical field of view, often meet similar rage when critiquing the things that gamers identify with or simply taking an interest in these new forms.
Gamer culture tends to identify with development and developers themselves, though, at least so long as they hold and deserve their jobs and fight for the team or at least stay quiet about politics. But a funny thing happens on the way to the forum: for some young gamers, the path to self-actualization is blocked by the complexity and technically-demanding nature of desirable game development roles. Or by the business's taste for capital, or its small size, or its big memory of the shit you say on Twitter, or any other reason wee Joe isn't going to just slide into a job at Ubi or Kickstart his way into the dream.
Alienated and deeply in denial about it, these particular gamer culture defenders sense that that professionals fear and loathe them anyway, and this makes them fair game for the same abuse hurled at amateurs, punks and pretenders. But here, the doxa used to try and one-up the targets is a uniquely ridiculous mix of half-understood technical concepts and business management cliche. Kids railing against the loss of Assembly language to the developmental lexicon! This should be a clue, to technical or apolitical minds, about the quality of everything else the child curmudgeouns of YouTube say.
Which brings us back to the problem of the social media landscape, flat as the earth under everyone's virtual feet.
On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium published EME, a standard for locking up video on the web with DRM, allowing large corporate members to proceed without taking any steps to protect accessibility work, security research, archiving or innovation. (more…)
I know everyone came here to hear 3 Doors Down for the first time in 16 years, but this is really important too!
Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU is a 360,000€ study commissioned by the European Commission from the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys, whose mandate was to "research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content" -- the report was completed in 2015, but never made public. (more…)
In March 2016, HP sent millions of Inkjet and Inkject Pro owners a fake "security update" that was really a timebomb: six months later, in September 2016 (one year ago!), the "security update" code started rejecting third party ink, prompting nearly 15,000 complaints from HP owners. (more…)
Every three years, the US Copyright Office has to ask America about all the ways in which Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which bans bypassing DRM, even for legitimate reasons) interferes with our lives, and then it grants limited exemptions based on the results. (more…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTLQ4h4yKSk&feature=youtu.be
Everything is a Remix (previously) is an important, entertaining series of short videos that trace the ways the creation is built on earlier creation -- that "originality" is just mixing existing things in new ways. (more…)
Peggy Hill is a goddess of domestication, just like Nicki Minaj.
Vulture has found a really good niche in the mash up space and they proved it again with combining footage of King of the Hill with Nicki Minaj's "Hey Mama". It's great.
"Hey Mama" is a celebration of nesting. Taking care of others and getting plenty in return. Who matches that more than Peggy Hill?
Vulture's mash ups continue to be super fun to watch. Like when Doug called Patti Mayonnaise his "Trap Queen" or when Miss Piggy demanded of Kermit that "B*tch Better Have My Money"
You're doing the world a service you clever geniuses.
Leah Rothman was a segment director on the Dr Phil show for 12 years, until (she says) she and her co-workers were locked in a room by Dr Phil and screamed at and threatened by the show's host, who was upset by leaks from the show's staff. (more…)
Apple is suing Qualcomm for acting like a monopoly. Apple. The beef between the two tech companies is confusing, but even if you don't know a thing about business law, you can see how poor poor Apple's situation can seem amusing to outsiders -and even insiders. This is the latest from Jeff Lovfers at Don't Hit Save.
On a totally different subject, you can scroll down at the comic page and read the first part of Lovfer's Nashville flood experience. The rest of the story is promised for later. At least he's not crying over spoiled milk. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The Federal Trade Commission has announced a settlement with Lenovo over the 2015 revelation that the company pre-installed malware called "Superfish" on its low-end models, which allowed the company to spy on its customers, and also left those customers vulnerable to attacks from third parties, who could exploit Superfish's weakened security. (more…)
In June, China started vigorously enforcing its ban on VPNs, ordering mobile app stores to end access to VPN services that hadn't left a set of man-in-the-middle keys with the Chinese police. (more…)
Sure, movies can be copyrighted, but did you know monsters can, too? And even a particular version of a monster? Zombies were around before George Romero's 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, but he put his own spin on the idea. His version -shuffling corpses that menace humans in order to eat their flesh- became the zombies we see in movies like 28 Days Later, World War Z, and Zombieland, and TV shows like Z Nation and The Walking Dead. It all has to do with copyright.
YouTuber kaptainkristian (previously at Neatorama) explains how and why Romero's zombies became ubiquitous under the law of public domain. -via Tastefully Offensive
Tim Squirrell, a researcher at the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, used Google's BigQuery to analyze "every Reddit comment ever made—all 3 billion of them." He used the results to identify different alt-right groups and the language they use.
From Quartz:
Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isn’t just one voice: It’s made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.
In other words, there’s a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?
Here are the groups and their favorite words:
4chan shitposters: kek, Pepe, deus vult, tendies, God Emperor Trump
Anti-progressive gamers: SJW, snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist, triggering, GamerGate, virtue signalling
Men’s rights activists: females, cuck, bitch, Chad, alpha, beta, omega
Anti-globalists: globalist scum, the establishment, puppets, elites, masters, George Soros, cultural Marxist
White supremacists: Islam, (creeping) Sharia, “deus vult”, “western culture”, various racial slurs
By Anthony Crider - Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally, CC BY 2.0, Link
In 2016, the Internet Archive convened a decentralized web summit to discuss ways to make the web less centralized and thus less vulnerable to censorship, corporate abuse and "shadow regulation" (I gave one of the keynotes). (more…)
"Pickup artist" YouTube channel MattHossZone (previously) has lost his copyright case against a reaction video posted by YouTube channel h3h3Productions. The closely-watched case is a big victory for fair use commentary on video platforms. (more…)
Enjoy this website that works only in airplane mode or when no network can otherwise be found: "You must go offline to view this page".
Do you want to be productive? Just go offline.
I'm one of those people who spends an hour on a flight getting annoyed at how slow and broken the internet is, finally gives up, then enjoys actually reading and working on my computer.
Eclectic Method writes:
I made a house music video remix using only sound effects clips from the Indiana Jones movies. The sound design is made by Ben Burtt who also made the iconic sounds for Star Wars. So some of the sounds are the same as the Star Wars SFX Remix I did. You might notice how much a plane engine from Indiana Jones sounds like a laser from Star Wars. Whilst making this I also noticed the same punch sound occurring in 3 of the Indy movies. I'm pretty sure Han Solo and Indiana Jones' fists make the same sound.
KFC is the coolest when it comes to their training program. New employees are given an Oculus Rift headset and asked to complete an eerie escape room, which is narrated by a sinister-sounding Colonel Sanders. The mission is to make the Original Recipe fried chicken from beginning (cutting open a bag of frozen chicken) to the end (picking up a pressure-fried drumstick), all in a futuristic kitchen that feels like the entrance room of Disneyland's Haunted House. "Only one step left. Will you escape or be trapped with me foreeeveeer," Sanders asks when the game is almost finished.
According to Eater:
The press release notes that this VR exercise takes workers through the chicken cooking process in just 10 minutes, as opposed to the 25 minutes it takes IRL, so perhaps the idea here is to speed up the training process (and to avoid potentially wasting product). Or hey, maybe somebody at KFC HQ just got a really good deal on a whole pallet of Oculus Rifts.
According to a KFC spokesperson, though, the VR won’t replace hands-on experience: “The game is intended to supplement the existing Chicken Mastery program, not replace it...This is intended to be a fun way to celebrate the work KFC’s more than 19,000 cooks do every day in every restaurant across the U.S. in an engaging way.”
You can find me at beschizza.com, but Martin Shkreli registered "robbeschizza.com" as part of what seems to be a quixotic effort to bother people who write about him. Cyrus Farivar reports that I'm in his Godaddy grab bag.
Shkreli has been offering to sell at least one of the domain names back to the reporters for thousands of dollars. In a public Facebook post, Shrkreli has offered to sell Emily Saul of the New York Post her domain for $12,000. She declined to comment further on the incident.
Robbeschizza.com was registered the same day I linked to a Business Insider story about his initial round of reporter-name domain registrations. Perhaps he just has a bad sense of humor! I wonder if he'll post anything silly there.
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/900772217730064384
Nick Bertke, also known as Pogo, is back with a new musical remix of the 1992 Disney movie Aladdin.
Since you know the story already, you'll enjoy this musical collage of movie snippets as a four-minute movie viewing with a beat. And since Bertke works directly with Disney, the visuals are a high-res kaleidoscope. And there's a surprise at the end. -via Tastefully Offensive
See more from Pogo.
This is literally almost too good. If society were chill with me watching this every day, all day, I definitely would. Still might. This also happens to be the second video in what I hope grows to become an ongoing series. The first was published four years ago, and has over 3.4 million views. So wouldn't be insane to assume, you or someone you know has seen it at least once. Either way, see below for a quick trip down memory lane:
Massive shoutout to Innagadadavida for the high caliber work. Keep it up, man.
US court records are not copyrighted, but the US court system operates a paywall called "PACER" that is supposed to recoup the costs of serving text files on the internet; charging $0.10/page for access to the public domain, and illegally profiting to the tune of $80,000,000/year. (more…)
Cinemetrics is an emerging field of media studies, and NerdWriter deftly applies cinemetrics to There Will Be Blood to mine it for insights. (more…)
If you're using an anonymity tool -- Tor or something like it -- to be anonymous on the internet, it's really easy to screw it up and do something that would allow an adversary of varying degrees of power (up to and including powerful governments) to unmask you. (more…)
60 UK tower blocks, including 9 owned by local governments, have failed a new round of more-stringent fire tests conducted in the wake of the Grenfell fire disaster. (more…)
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