Normally, DIY electronics projects require a lot of room to spread out and specialized tools, but this simple, tiny workbench by Instructables user gizmologist bucks the trend. It offers storage for tools and room for a breadboard, Arduino, and a few other gadgets, all in a portable package.
TechCrunch reports that the first four episodes of Game of Thrones' fifth season have mysteriously ended up on various Internet piracy hubs after first appearing online at around 6 p.m. Saturday. That's more than 24 hours before the show was scheduled to air at 9 p.m. Sunday.
In just a few hours, over 50,000 people had downloaded the files. Read More
i still think one of the most insane experiences i've had in my life was going to the LAPD office in Skid Row. While I'm far from a fan of the LAPD, they deal with an inordinate amount of crazy
Kinetic Sand is a fun and fascinating 3D building toy that looks and feels like wet sand, but behaves quite differently. It can be molded into all kinds of shapes and pretty much only sticks to itself and doesn’t dry out. Kinetic sand is almost entirely made of ordinary sand, but 2% of it is an organic silicone-based polymer called polydimethylsiloxane, which is also a major component in Silly Putty.
Kinetic Sand is also the name of a marvelous new interactive art installation in Paris. This entrancing gif shows a transparent sphere being rolled around a table that appears to have been dusted with sand, triggering animation that makes it look like the sand is swirling on and around the sphere, as though it’s been enchanted. It’s from a video preview of an interactive creation by French performance artists Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne of the the Adrien M / Claire B Company. Click here to watch the video.
This new kinetic table accepts input from up to 32 simultaneous touches and responds by creating different kinds of animation using small dust-like particles. The table will be on view starting in June at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris.
Don’t worry if you can’t make it over to Paris this summer. You can order your own Kinetic Sand to play with at home or at work. But we don’t recommend taking it to the beach, because you might lose it.
“This movie is crazy!” Producer Jason Blum told the excited WonderCon audience speaking about Unfriended, the latest horror release from his Blumhouse Productions.
“The fun thing about this movie, all of the movies that we do we have to see many, many times and—I’m not supposed to say this—after the sixth or seventh time, it’s not super fresh and exciting. This movie, as a viewer, you kind of get to direct it yourself because the whole movie is a computer screen and there’s Skype and all different things happening on the screen, but you get to look where you want to look on the screen and action is taking place all over the screen so it’s almost like you’re the director of a live TV event, which is a really fun experience to have in a movie theater, and super unusual, I think.”
Screenwriter and co-producer Nelson Greaves explained that the project was quite the undertaking in all aspects of production and not for the faint of heart. “We have had several editors, actually, every editor we’ve ever had who looked at our project has said ‘this is the most complicated, horrific project I’ve ever seen.’ (laughs) It was very difficult, both in production and in editorial…”
In addition to the unique way that the film will be presented, the way the film was shot was also rather unorthodox for feature-length film making as Greaves went on to explain. “Shelley [Henning] I’d say deserves a lot of the credit for it. We were in a single house together and we would do long takes, ten minute takes, and we were at lunch and Shelly came up to us and said, ‘Hey, could we try the whole thing in a single take?'”
“I was not trying to be cool,” said actress Shelley Henning of her suggestion that inspired the way the movie ended up being shot. “I was just trying to save my strength. I mean, starting from the middle of a scream is not that easy. So, going from the beginning to the end was actually creatively liberating. I’ve never done anything like that before and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it again.”
Co-star Moses Jacob Storm agreed and added that the strange way the movie was shot allowed for the technological bonding of the cast during downtime on set. He explained, “There’s no film that’s ever been shot this way before so it took a lot of trial and error to set up the technicalities of it so in that time, we were all texting back and forth and talking via Skype just getting to know each other…”
“It was very forgiving in a lot of ways but also challenging in a lot of ways,” Henning chimed in.
The plot of Unfriended circles around a teenage girl, Laura Barns, who is publicly shamed on the internet and ultimately commits suicide. Is the ghost of Laura haunting her social circle online? And who, exactly, is Laura Barns? While managing to avoid spoilers, Greaves summed it up by saying, “I think Laura Barns is everything that’s scary about the internet. She’s all your secrets. You guys out there, you all use incognito mode. You all clear your histories and you all delete things and Laura sees all of that. I think Laura is everything that’s scary about the internet.”
Producer Jason Blum later added, “It’s very scary and it’s very low-budget, very different. I like to think that the movies we do, whether we come on after or whether we produce them, feel unique and I think this is definitely as unique as it gets.”
Sure, you’ve heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a million times already, and a million more covers of the song on top of that. And there’s probably still more to come, after the new Nirvana docMontage of Heck comes out. But have you heard it covered by floppy drives? Arganalth recreated the song by using six floppy drives and two hard drives in a suitcase. It sounds pretty good, like a decent MIDI version, and the lyrics are just as comprehensible as in the original song.
Many New Yorkers’ worst fears came to pass on Saturday when an elderly man perpetrated a dildo attack on a subway car full of unsuspecting passengers.
According to eyewitness Aymann Ismail, it was around 9 p.m. that she first spotted the penile terrorist, who appeared to be having a fairly good time already, board the train and whip it out for some young men trying to take selfies with him:
An older man of indeterminate ethnic origin [but probably East Asian?] boarded the train at Atlantic Avenue; the man seemed “fucked up on some kind of drug,” loose-limbed and sloppy. Some young men sitting next to him began making fun of him. One of the dudes took out his phone to snap a selfie with the older guy. At that point, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a massive dildo. The young guys and other people nearby ran away, laughing.
Perhaps emboldened by this validation, he continued brandishing the large, flexible, black dildo:
The man then started waving the big black dong around, pointing it at people and pretending to jerk it off. The man also kept standing up and clenching his butt cheeks.
Finally, he developed a more advanced protocol to maximize the delight inflicted on each new wave of incoming train friends:
Every time the train pulled into a station, he’d put the dildo away, sit quietly, let people board, then whip it out and wave it around, startling the new passengers.
“It honestly doesn’t look like any dildo I’ve ever seen,” noted Animal’s house sex toy expert. Spooky.
While I don’t feel qualified to comment on the dildo’s potentially extraterrestrial origins, my extensive psychonautic background leads me to conclude that Dr. Dong here was shrooming his face off. There’s only one substance on this planet that produces just such a combination of feral giggling, sly strategizing, and generous desire to include those around you in your beautifully hilarious–if tragically ephemeral–world. Compare his stance and expression to that of an associate of mine after ingesting a known dose of psilocybin. In this man’s mind, he’s a wise elf on a journey to Arcadia, armed with only a magic snake to protect him.
God speed you, fair elf lord. May your quest be ever fruitful and may you not end up in central booking.
Last October, David Lynch announced the return of his iconic '90s television phenomenon in the most Twin Peaks fashion imaginable: a tweet with a haunting minute-long teaser and the hashtag #damngoodcoffee. But one thing about the teaser captured the show better than anything else: the theme song.
Everything about the show is encapsulated in that theme — the tension, the melodrama and the sinister beauty. Though Lynch's involvement in the reboot is in serious doubt, the show might still work as long as its other elements are left intact. None of these are more vital than Angelo Badalamenti's music. His compositional style played a fundamental role in shaping not only the show's aesthetic but the whole of music history since the show debuted.
Source: YouTubeA touchstone for artists: The soundtrack to Twin Peaks is arguably the most influential soundtracks ever to grace television. Read More
More practice on Scrub Jays for the World Championships of Taxidermy in May. (Do not try this bird at home: these birds are federally protected and you must have proper permits to work on them) #wtc2015prep (at Prey Taxidermy)
This morning, I made a 30-minute appointment at the Apple store for a “fitting” of the Apple Watch Edition—a gadget which starts at $10,000. I could never afford one, much less the $15,000 watch I actually tried. Apple didn’t seem to mind.
Hummingbirds change the position and motion of each wing independently as those wings beat 40 times a second. And they do it in the space of one wingbeat http://nyti.ms/1GUOJIm
What they're not so great at, at least anymore, is damage control.
Thanks to the popularity of Alex Gibney's HBO documentary,
Going Clear, the Church of Scientology is now facing its greatest PR crisis to date. And like every other hurdle thrown the organization's way, Scientologists are handling the situation the only way they know how: by throwing huge piles of untaxed revenue at it.
Frankly, though, their PR strategy is shockingly bad. The Church's current method of digital damage control only underlines the fact that they are desperately out of touch with, well, pretty much the entire internet.
Google Ads
Scientology has been dumping an
embarrassing amount of money into Google advertising for years, but they've really stepped up their game lately. In the past, the organization paid to appear in response to search queries like "Church of Scientology" and "Is Scientology a Cult?" displaying ads with links to www.scientology.org.
Those ads encouraged viewers to find out about Scientology "for themselves." You know, by reading church-approved documents on church-approved sites by church-approved leaders.
[body_image width='600' height='284' path='images/content-images/2015/04/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/03/' filename='the-church-of-scientology-is-hilariously-bad-at-online-damage-control-403-body-image-1428099560.png' id='43087']Search results for those same terms no longer bring up ads for Scientology. Instead, the Church has shifted the vast majority of their digital advertising to combat searches for Going Clear.
When you google "going clear," a sponsored ad from the Church of Scientology appears above all other relevant search results, including HBO's own site. But the ad doesn't go to
www.scientology.com. Instead, it's linked to the website for Freedom Magazine, the Church's most dogged property in combatting "suppressive persons."
These paid ads, which feature text like "Is it a real documentary? Watch the video... The Story HBO Ignored," also include sub-links for many sources featured in the documentary. Each link takes readers to a specifically targeted smear campaign for Gibney's subjects. CoS is also targeting each contributor, independent of their connection to the film as well. Google search "Marc Headley," a former Scientologist, and you'll see an ad that says "His claims were thrown out of court" before linking to freedommag.org.
If you're gullible enough to actually click on the hyperlink, then you're taken to a special section of freedommag.org, dedicated solely to bashing anyone who's ever starred in, contributed to, or even thought about the words "going clear."
Headley, for example, is referred to with the catchy epithet "The Soulless Sell Out." Sarah Goldberg is labeled "The Home Wrecker" and Mike Rinder, "The Wife Beater."
Domain Names
Like most organizations, the CoS preemptively purchases domain names that could be used against their wishes. For example, the Church owns several domains relating to Lawrence Wright, who was never a Scientologist but who wrote the book on which Gibney's documentary is based. They also own domain names like
www.scientologyisgay.com and www.volunteerministerssuck.com. A single official email address for the CoS has almost 3,000 URLs registered to it, and many of them include the names of apostates, like Mark Rathbun.
That said, it looks like ScientologistsLie.com, LRonHubbardCult.com, and ScientologySucksDick.org are all still up for grabs.
YouTube Ads
The Church's ads on YouTube are somehow even worse than the ones listed on Google. The audio and video ads generally make topics more relatable and easily understood, but Scientology's "Going Clear Documentary" ad provokes more questions than it answers.
Less than a minute in, the menacing, off-camera voice switches from attacking Alex Gibney to accusing his father of being a spy... or something like that? The Church's YouTube ad, which was heavily leveraged on YouTube and various CoS properties, was only viewed around 5,000 times before the documentary aired. Despite receiving the most media attention it's had in decades, at the time of publication the video still has fewer than 60,000 views, compared with the
Going Clear trailer's 682,000.
And their
official YouTube channel isn't much better. Scientology claims to have more than 8 million members, but only 20,000 of them are willing to subscribe to a YouTube channel this boring. These guys make videos of babies being frightened by their own farts, and even they have more than 300,000 subscribers.
Social Media Accounts
The Twitter account
@FreedomEthics was launched on January 16 to combat those who lent any help to Going Clear. In the few months that it's existed, Freedom Ethics has sent out 871 tweets, which have gone to just 712 followers.
Leading up to the documentary, most of their updates were just silly stock photos of someone sleeping in an empty theater, with text that reads, "#AlexGibney #GoingClear Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"
[tweet text="
#AlexGibney#GoingClear – talking heads, insufferable music, way too long. Zzzzzzzzzzz... pic.twitter.com/mKBAXDX0lj" byline="— Freedom Media Ethics (@FreedomEthics)" user_id="FreedomEthics" tweet_id="582013562291249152" tweet_visual_time="March 29, 2015"]
The rest of the tweets personally attack contributors to the film. There's one photo, which shows Mike Rinder drinking a Bud Light (as if that's damning evidence?) and many others, which make outlandish claims about ex-Scientologists and
Going Clear sources.
[tweet text="Same # of people watched
#BruceWillis movie 'Red' Sunday night on #TNT as #HBO's #GoingClear. pic.twitter.com/O9yf7K0WXb" byline="— Freedom Media Ethics (@FreedomEthics)" user_id="FreedomEthics" tweet_id="583072557701562368" tweet_visual_time="April 1, 2015"]
In the end, what has Scientology accomplished with all of this digital damage control?
Well, when I googled "Is Scientology a Cult," this is what popped up:
A little bit of Game of Thrones popped up in Northern Ireland this week: Dragon eggs.
Specifically, Targaryen-farmed dragon eggs were up for sale in Belfast's St George's Market, nestled among fresh produce, for the day.
The eggs are the latest in a series of Game of Thrones promotional stunts that seem to be taking over the area. Belfast has already seen three-eyed ravens perched on signs leading to filming locations and swords put away in the sharp object bin at Belfast City Airport.
With the show just getting ready to premiere, it's likely we haven't seen the last of Westeros bleeding into Belfast.
i think now you also can't buy pot if you're not from the netherlands...
A crowd of sex workers and their disguised supporters took to the streets of Amsterdam Thursday to protest the city’s new plan to close down their windows in order to clean up the infamous Red Light District.
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Her insurance isn't gonna cover this. [ 
The founder of NYC's Bowery Ballroom is opening up a new club in Westlake. [ 
