All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof. All things are known because we want to believe in them.

In this mod of Grand Theft Auto 4, you play Princess Anna from Frozen. She sings a foul-mouthed version of her sister’s song “Let It Go” while going on a murderous rampage around Liberty City. Anna may not have Elsa’s powers or responsibilities, but she’s definitely ready to:

It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free

Of course, you don’t have to slaughter random people in boblester122’s mod. It’s not mandatory. But that’s what people do in GTA, right?

(Video Link)

I found this video at Kotaku, where you can also find a video of a spree-killing Elsa.

Content warning on the video: foul language.

Librarians are hardcore- just ask John Farrier, he’ll tell you. And the tattoos they get are sometimes pretty hardcore, too! Diane here got a tattoo of a Librarian tarot card, and others have skulls, books, hieroglyphics, quotations, and book art. I’d have to say my favorites are the images of librarians shushing patrons, because it’s classic. See the full range -24 librarians tattoos- in a list Jill Harness posted at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user arianne)

Gamers and scifi enthusiasts are familiar with the much-vaunted railgun — an electrically powered projectile launcher capable of propelling objects at speeds reaching Mach 7. We've seen the Navy's railgun in action before — but we've never actually seen it destroy stuff. Until now.

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They look like balloons, but these animals are actually made of blown glass. Chris Ahalt, an artist in Minnesota, made them. They're held aloft with wire. The sculptures sway slightly in order to simulate the real movements of balloons in a breeze. It's a playful concept that, Ahalt explains, reflect the innocent joy of childhood:

Balloons, to me, suggest celebration, children and wonder. The iconic animals that I pick appeal to those child-like sensibilities as well.  Most of us grow up with a favorite animal, and the idea of turning ones favorite animal into a balloon seems a fitting marriage that is hard to dislike.

Ahalt is a student of what he calls the Venetian approach to glassblowing. He studied in that city under the tutelage of Cesare Toffolo, a master of that school of glassblowing.

-via Lustik

Ricky sez, "Director Philip B. Swift has announced a feature-length documentary film called 'The Dark Side of Disney' based on Leonard Kinsey's travel guide of the same name, to feature topics like finding and buying dirt cheap park tickets and time shares, drinking around Epcot, having sex in the parks, obtaining and using drugs while on an Orlando vacation. The film has just hit Kickstarter, trying to raise $20,000. Last year Swift released 'The Bubble,' a documentary about the Disney-created town of Celebration just outside Walt Disney World."

The Dark Side of Disney [Amazon]

“The Dark Side of Disney” documentary film to explore adult side of theme park vacations, hits Kickstarter for funds [Ricky Brigante/Inside the Magic]

(Thanks, Ricky!)

True Detective + The Family Circus = timeisaflatcircus.tumblr.com

(thanks, @sfslim!)

Have you been watching Cosmos? Me neither.

But seriously, folks, it’s mandatory teevee in my home. I’m literally forcing the kids to watch it. Luckily there are no complaints. This is indoctrination at its finest.

Blackmagic's trick is to make cameras with great cinematic image quality at a relatively inexpensive price. The tradeoff is gear that is Satan's gift to ergonomics, with low-end audio inputs, terrible battery life and a limited set of features. Enter the Blackmagic Studio Camera, which includes a big 10" monitor, 4 hours on a charge, XLR inputs, and broadcast-friendly features lacking in the earlier models. With the offered grip accessory, one may even hold it with a human hand! The game-changing prices remain: it's just under $2k, with a 4K version for $3k. You'll still need to bring your own lenses and SSDs.

Also announced is the Blackmagic URSA, a higher-end model with a super35-size 4k sensor aimed at professional feature use. At $6k, it isn't as affordable to students and consumers as the other models (especially the $990 pocket cinema camera), but it compares well on paper to the five-figure price tags hanging off similar gear from Canon, Sony and others.

Oarfish are freaky sea dragons. You might remember them from the beaching incidents last fall, when two oarfish turned up on the coast of California within a week. That's a big deal, because the fish usually live far down in the ocean — at depths up to 3000 feet. It's relatively rare to catch them at a depth where humans have easy access. In this video, you can see tourists with a Shedd Aquarium travel program interacting with a couple of 15-feet-long oarfish in the Sea of Cortez. Definitely stick around to about 1:40 in the video, where you get some stunning underwater close ups of the oarfish.

Video Link

[Video Link] We love PES, maker of whimsical, inventive stop-motion videos. His latest is a commercial for a hotel.

Bryan Seely, a Microsoft Engineer demonstrated an attack against Google Maps through which he was able to set up fake Secret Service offices in the company's geo-database, complete with fake phone numbers that rang a switch under his control and then were forwarded to real Secret Service offices, allowing him to intercept and record phone-calls made to the Secret Service (including one call from a police officer reporting counterfeit money). Seely was able to attack Google Maps by adding two ATMs to the database through its Google Places crowdsourcing tool, verifying them through a phone verification service (since discontinued by Google), then changing them into Secret Service offices. According to Seely, the disabling of the phone-verification service would not prevent him from conducting this attack again.

As Dune Lawrence points out, this is a higher-stakes version of a common spam-attack on Google Maps practiced by locksmith, carpet cleaning, and home repair services. Spammers flood Google Maps with listing for fake "local" companies offering these services, and rake in high commissions when you call to get service, dispatching actual local tradespeople who often charge more than you were quoted (I fell victim to this once, when I had a key break off in the lock of my old office-door in London and called what appeared to be a "local" locksmith, only to reach a call-center who dispatched a locksmith who took two hours to arrive and charged a huge premium over what I later learned by local locksmiths would have charged).

A detailed post by Dan Austin describes this problem, points out that Google is more than four years late in delivering promised fixes to the problem, and offers solutions of his own. He suggests that the high Google Adwords revenue from spammy locksmiths and other services is responsible for the slow response to the problem.

All of this ends up costing real local businesses their business, he says. Search for “locksmith in Denver, CO” in Google Maps, and you get more than 600 results. Virtually none of them, Austin says, are for licensed local locksmiths. Instead, your search for someone to get you back into your car in Denver pulls up numbers for a fake local business. Your call gets routed to a center somewhere far away, someone who’s not necessarily a licensed locksmith gets sent to help you, and charges you far above what you were quoted over the phone.

Austin says that Google’s inaction stems from the fact that the company is actually making money off the scammers through sales on Google AdWords for search terms such as “locksmith.”

“Google’s basically getting a not insignificant amount of their income from scammers—if you look at locksmiths, 99 percent of them are scammers,” says Austin. “It’s an investment of time and energy and resources to actually go through and verify all the legitimate locksmiths in the U.S. Google doesn’t really want to get into it—they don’t see it as a security issue.”

How Scammers Turn Google Maps Into Fantasy Land [Dune Lawrence/Business Week]

(via Hacker News)

A problem crops up when filmmakers try to adapt epic fantasy worlds to the big screen—particularly beloved, richly-imagined literary ones. Sacrifices must be made. Characters are cut, and plotlines are re-routed. Scenes and places don’t match what readers have pictured with their minds. Fans of the original book cry foul.

In the case of director Alejandro Jodorowsky, he had a vision for Frank Herbert’s masterwork Dune that was so over the top, so surreal (and, at times, so absurd), it probably would have blown the minds of critics before they had a chance to grumble.

That is, if Jodorowsky’s translation and transmogrification of Dune had ever been made. It never was.

Finally, the story of the greatest science fiction epic never made has finally been told. Jodorowsky’s Dune is a new documentary about that beautiful, crazy-ambitious, disaster of an adaptation.

“They did everything right, really. Maybe a little too, right, you know?” said director Frank Pavich, when I reached him earlier this week via telephone from New York City.

“They” were Chilean cult filmmaker Jodorowsky, the self-taught visionary behind El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), and his French producer Michel Seydoux. This was 1975, and Jodorowsky had assembled a dream team of actors and artists to bring alive Herbert’s tale of a feudal-like interstellar culture driven by the market for a valuable substance caled the “spice.” David Carradine was to play Duke Leto, Jodorowsky’s 12 year old son Brontis was cast as Paul Atreides, Udo Kier (Andy Warhol’s favorite actor) would be Piter De Vries, and Orson Welles was slated to play Baron Harkonnen. (Apparently, Welles was lured by promises of on-set French bistro food.)

Spacecraft concept art by British artist Chris Foss   

Jodorowsky’s vision extended to the soundtrack. A different band or composer was to invent music representing each of Dune’s major families. Straight off of their “Dark Side of the Moon” success, Pink Floyd would write and perform the House Atreides theme. The French prog rock band Magma would cover the House Harkonnen. The British avant-rock group Henry Cow and German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen were also approached  (Contrast this with the band chosen for the 1984 David Lynch version of Dune: Toto.“I bless the spice down in Arrakis. Gonna take some time to do the things we never had...Ooh ooh ooh”)

Even Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali had agreed to be in the movie.

Orson Welles was slated to play the antagonist, Baron Harkonnen (Photo: Gary Graver)   

Pavich’s documentary focuses largely on Jodorowsky, now 85, who recounts his courtship of each of the film’s key players. He spins one unlikely story after another. “Whenever you think that he’s embellishing it, you kind of roll your eyes and think, ‘Well, this possibly can’t be true,’ somebody else would back it up,” said Pavich, whose previous feature was N.Y.H.C., a 1999 documentary about New York Hardcore music scene. “These stories really did happen like that. It was a weird time. I think that the circles [Jodorowsky] was travelling in—of course he would be at a weird party in Paris, where Mick Jagger would be.”

Fanboys and girls would have drooled over the visual team. A then-obscure H.R. Giger designed the creepier Harkonnen settings. Dan O’Bannon, known at the time for his work with John Carpenter on the sci-fi film Dark Star, was brought on as the special effects wiz. (Jodorowsky rejected Douglas Trumbull because he found him too full of himself.)  British artist Chris Foss designed the space craft. And Jean Giraud, aka French comic book artist Moebius, brought Jodorowsky’s dreams to life in some 3,000 storyboard drawings that perfectly capture a character or scene with a few quick pencil marks on the page.

Concept art by Swiss artist H.R. Giger   

These drawings showed every shot in the film, every composition, every angle and every camera movement, as well every line in the script. Along with concept art and sketches of costumes, spaceships, vehicles, palaces and landscapes, the storyboard drawings were then bound into a 30-pound book that Jodorowsky used to shop his mammoth project to financiers and Hollywood studios. Twenty copies were made.

At that point, two years of pre-production had run up a tab of $2 million. The overall budget has been estimated at $15 million, “because nobody really knew how high it could possibly get.” Mind to you, this was 1975, two years before the success of Star Wars. Blockbuster sci-fi epics were hardly the slam-dunks they are today. In that era, a $15 million price tag would have been an “insanely huge,” Pavich said. Amazingly, $10 million was raised from Jodorowsky’s money and European backers. They needed the final $5 million, from “a studio partner, so they could get the film out on US screens.”

That money was never raised.

Jodorowsky and Moebius   

Production was shut down just as filming was about to begin in Algeria. “They had the cooperation of the Algerian government,” Pavich said. “The Algerian army was going to play Harkonnen extras.”

Today, of those 20 original bibles, only two remain. Seydoux has one. Jodorowosky kept another copy all these years in his Paris apartment, where much of the Jodorowsky’s Dune takes places.

“I wanted to make something sacred,” Jodorowsky says during one of his many bombastic moments. “Dune will be the coming of a God.” When he tries to persuade Pink Floyd to come on board, he describes his project as “the most important picture in the history of humanity.” Modest, the man is not. But shining through Jodorowsky’s often poetically-broken English are his indefatigable spirit and enthusiasm, which win you over in the end.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (Photo: David Cavallo)

“He speaks whatever he feels like. Sometimes he doesn’t even know. It’s in French, and English, and Spanish – he kind of goes all over the place,” said Pavich. “He doesn’t have a self-censor button.” In between the interviews with Jodorowsky (whose intimates call “Jodo”), we hear from producer Seydoux (also a producer of Pavich’s documentary), Giger, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz, Nicolas Winding Refn, and others.

All the while, that tome gains psychic weight. Its pages which we occasionally glimpse become more poignant, and more pregnant with possibility. Why? Because Jodorowsky never shot one foot of film for his adaptation of Dune.

Storyboard of Dune (Photo: David Cavallo)   

“As we were making the film, we learned there was nothing. Nobody had any record of anything.” Pavich found no photographs of the artists at work, nor of the location scouting in Chile, Mexico and Algeria. Jodorowsky’s document was all that remained.

“What an amazing object that is,” said Pavich. Between its covers, in these drawings, the film still lives.

Pavich brings some of that imagination to life by cleverly, but not obtrusively, animating Moebius’s pencil sketches. “I didn’t want to sort of CGI-ify the whole thing. Because then it becomes someone else’s vision—my vision, or someone else’s—when it really should be Alejandro’s.” His approach, via the animation of Emmy Award-nominated Syd Garon, was to take the original artwork and “just breathe enough life into it” to “lift it off the page.” The viewer sees some movement, and a glimmer of what Jodorowsky’s film would have been like. “Then hopefully your imagination carries it the rest of the way, because that’s where the movie exists—in his imagination, and yours, and all the viewers’.”

As Jodorowsky rails against those who got in the way of his vision, the documentary becomes as much about an unmade movie as it is a meditation on hope and hubris. “Why will you not have ambition?” Jodorowsky admonishes the viewer, Yoda-style, towards the end of the film. “If you fail, it is not important. You need to try.”

David Carradine and Jodorowsky   

As for those 18 other copies of Jodorowsky’s Dune, they disappeared. As Pavich conjectures, the drawings and designs could have made the rounds in Hollywood. George Lucas might have seen the book. Steven Spielberg might have seen it. Ridley Scott, too. Or their minions. After all, O’Bannon, Giger, Foss and Moebius went on to work on Alien. O’Bannon was also writer for Heavy Metal, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars, Total Recall and other films, and even did a little computer graphics for Star Wars. Chris Foss did design work for Superman, Flash Gordon, and the Kubrick version of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. A comic called “The Long Tomorrow,” written by O’Bannon in 1975 and illustrated by Moebius, was said to influence Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. And so forth.

Concept art by Chris Foss   

From that design team, and sprouting from Jodorowsky’s psychedelic brain, came a hundred science fictional ideas, aesthetics, and family trees. But Pavich doesn’t think Jodorowsky’s Dune inspired thievery.

“I don’t think that they’re pillaging it and stealing ideas. I think they’re taking it and they’re being inspired by it,” he said. “Sometimes things seep in and you don’t even realize it.” That’s what makes Jodorowsky’s Dune an interesting story, Pavich added. “It’s not an unmade film that just ended, it’s an unmade film that just keeps on living. And you see its children in other films.”

Concept art by Giger   

As for Dune, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis bought the rights and hired David Lynch to direct it. Which Lynch did. Fans of the original book cried foul. Dune also became a three-part TV mini-series in 2000.

As for Alejandro Jodorowsky, he went on to direct a few other films, including last year’s The Dance of Reality. But thinking about his Dune, I wonder how all of Jodo’s wild images would have been captured by circa 1975 technology. Probably poorly. In a way, I’m glad the film was never made.

The best version of Dune is the one still in my head. Or, I should say, in all of our heads.

Giger in his studio   

Concept art by Foss   

Concept art by Giger   
All photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics   

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In Dekalb County, GA, a driver of a white Toyota pickup popped a curb, hit two toddlers, then stopped to chuck a beer bottle out the window before driving away. It's hard to think of any series of actions more awful. Let's find this bastard.

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Last week, the US Navy flew a model airplane with a small 2-stroke engine. That's not normally news, except for one big detail: the fuel the plane burned was made from seawater via a process the Navy has been working on for years . Let's look a little into what this sorcery is, and if it'll ever power our cars.

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We’re back at the Huzzik Empire’s Supreme Court for another wacky ruling! Next thing you know they’ll be declaring donuts to be sentient and monkeys to be hot dogs.

They may be right about hot dogs.

You know what you should do? You should buy something from our store. Maybe a t-shirt for the warm weather?

The Business Software Alliance -- a proprietary software industry group -- has pulled a controversial ad that promised cash to people who snitched on friends and employers who used pirated software, after they were credibly accused of pirating the image used in the campaign.

The ad used a photo of a pot of gold, captioned with "Your pot of gold is right here baby. Report unlicensed software and GET PAID." The photo used in the ad was of a cake baked by Cakecentral user Bethasd (the cake itself is pretty amazing! "St. Patrick's Day Pot O' Gold - Chocolate Guinness cake with Bailey's Irish Buttercream").

The BSA has refused to comment on its use of the photo, or to confirm that it was licensed prior to use, but they immediately pulled the ad after being asked about it. Meanwhile, Torrentfreak "encourage[s] 'bethasd' to get in contact with the software industry group, and demand both licensing fees and damages for the unauthorized use of her photo. Surely, the BSA will be happy to hand over a pot of gold to her."

Representing major software companies, the BSA is using Facebook ads which encourage people to report businesses that use unlicensed software. If one of these reports results in a successful court case, the pirate snitch can look forward to a cash reward.

Below is one of the promoted Facebook posts that appeared in the timeline of thousands of people on Saint Patrick’s Day. It features a homemade cake in the shape of a pot of gold and sends a clear message to the readers.

“Your pot of gold is right here baby. Report unlicensed software and GET PAID,” the post reads.

Busted: BSA Steals Photo For “Snitch On a Pirate” Campaign [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]

Scammers have found another opportunity to steal personal information. The Better Business Bureau warns: users may be led to a phony webpage that resembles the real Netflix login page. Phony customer service reps are on hand, too.

Joh Robert Thompson started with this rough sketch for a GPS unit that had not just the voice, but wisdom of Morgan Freeman back in August, and he’s since refined it to this ad, which features not just a Morgan Freeman GPS, but a Liam Neeson one for good measure:

There’s WAY more “you gotta be thin” crap in our culture for women but we can’t ignore the unattainable body images that guys have to put up with too. There is just no physical way for most guys to get that friggin V torso without giving up on friends and family in exchange for a relationship with a gym.

 

David "Davidope" Szakaly is a talented Hungarian animator who specializes in trippy, freaky GIFs that pulse and twist and melt your brain.

Szakaly began experimenting with the vector animation program Macromedia Flash back in 1999 where he used the software to create presentations, banners, and other creatives for clients. It was nearly a decade later when he decided to dedicate more time to experimenting with motion graphics and found that Tumblr was a great platform to share his quirky gifs. While he still works in the corporate world on other digital projects, he has also found commercial success making animations for clients around the world. Though it’s his personal work that really stands out. If or when gifs end up on gallery walls, it will be hard to deny Szakaly’s role in getting them there.

Where Art Meets Gif: The Hypnotic Animated Gifs of David Szakaly [Christopher Jobson/Colossal]

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Ryan writes, "I was a backer of the Veronica Mars movie, one level of backer got you a digital download of the movie. They ended up going with Warner Bros owned/backed Flixster. So for me I have an apple TV and a Roku. Flixster doesn't support appleTV or airplay, the Flixster channel for the Roku will crash anytime you try to watch anything. Flixster also will not allow you to watch the movie on a computer that has dual monitors."

The studio will allow you to buy a better experience on a non-Flixster service, send them the bill, and get a refund (but only if you complain first).

There's a copy of the movie on The Pirate Bay with more than 11,000 seeders, which means that this Flixster business is doing precisely nothing to deter piracy, and is only serving to alienate megafans who voluntarily donated money to see this movie made, and to subject the studio itself to potential millions in administrative costs and refunds to investors who were forced into the retail channels.

The studios can't conceive of an "audience" that has an active role in, or any right to, the media they enjoy: not even when that "audience" is more properly viewed as the product's investors. What's more, they're the angel investors who bought in when the product was highly speculative and assumed 100% of the risk; the studio is just the VC who came along to put in a round of safe money after the project had proven out. In any real business-setting, the angels would be suing the pants off of the VCs and winning.

DRM has become a cult-belief among some studio execs, a point of pride without recourse to rationality. When your religious dogma causes you to lock the movie's investors out of the movie itself, perhaps it's time to reconsider your dogma.

They claim this is all studio restrictions but I find that laughable being that the movie is a Warner Bros movie Flixster is a Warner Bros service and If I purchased the movie on iTunes or Amazon or downloaded via a bittorrent I could watch it on my AppleTV in HD

Many unhappy comments regarding this choice on the kickstarter page also.

There's also no GNU/Linux version of Flixter, so your reward for being a GNU/Linux user who gave your personal, actual money to make this movie is a kick in the pants.

Warner Brothers to “Veronica Mars” Backers: Okay, Okay — Use iTunes or Amazon if You Want

Happy 3.14! Next year is 3.14.15!

Need a place to urinate at Mardi Gras? Check out AirPnP — a "bathroom rental" service that matches people who need to pee with people willing to open their bathroom up to pee-ers. Looking at the map of options, the fee for use seems to run between "free and we will even give you a beer" up to $5, depending on the bathroom.