DarendukesGolf kills people.
In the two weeks since a sinkhole killed a man in Florida, two new sinkholes have received a significant amount of press. One was reported in Washington D.C., but who cares; it was relatively small and no one was injured. The other one occurred Friday, when Mark Mihal fell into an 18-foot sinkhole during a round of golf with his friends in southern Illinois. More » 
You won't be able to stop thinking about this low budget short film, Anamnesis, about a guy who invents a machine that turns him into a lowlife memory dealer.
It's got a gritty, realistic feel and a weird premise that sometimes doesn't quite work -- but then, when it does, it's a smart exploration of how memories shape who we are. What if you could ingest other people's memories? Would you change? How many things would you forget in the process of making room for these new recollections? Aren't our own memories of the past a kind of drug already?
Brad Champagne directed this short, and you can watch a making-of flick too.
In the first English-language film from Thirst and Oldboy director Park Chan-wook, a young woman’s chilling relationship with her uncle leads her into adulthood -- and a world of supernatural violence.
[Note: Major plot spoilers for Stoker. Proceed with caution!]
Prior to the release of Park Chan-wook's Stoker, everyone on the interview circuit bent over backwards to assure audiences this wasn't a vampire movie, not supernatural in the least. Given that Park had tackled vampires with gusto in Thirst (and that the title of the movie was Stoker), the question seemed fair. Mystery solved: since every character in Stoker parades their designer duds mid-afternoon with no side effects and the movie is suitably bloodless, I suppose we can grant the point on Not Vampires.
But Stoker is absolutely a film about monsters and the supernatural, and how they're the most natural things in the world.
This lushly-filmed family Gothic is at its heart a film about its taciturn heroine, India, and every beautifully-framed shot is made in grim sympathy for what it sees as her inevitable and surreal journey into adulthood, one pair of saddle shoes at a time. For though no fangs ever manifest or wolfish claws appear, India's coming of age demands she become monstrous, to survive in a world this movie knows is monstrous.
It might be possible to approach the film as a mundane-secular thriller. Stoker pays deliberate homage to the setup and structure of Hitchcock's bad-family-apple dreadfest Shadow of a Doubt, and Stoker's plot, if sketched only by the major reveals (You mean her mysterious arriviste uncle has killed before? You mean he will again?) straddles a line between potboiler-noir and an artsy sweeps episode. It's a fun line – there's a certain amount of camp integral to horror – but there's nothing inherently supernatural here.
Except, then the film actually starts. The supernatural is so integral to the film that India gives us an introductory voiceover explicitly introducing her superhuman senses. Some of them play out in the plot – including one darkly-hilarious chiller involving sharp hearing and a mobile phone – but others merely shade India's character. She hears things others can't (vicious mourners at her father's funeral), sees things others can't (in still life class, she draws the unseen pattern inside the vase), underscoring Mia Wasikowska's sharp performance as a young woman who is, at the point at which we meet her, utterly isolated and unknown even to herself.
Enter Uncle Charlie. (Everyone who's seen Oldboy, you can start nodding sagely about the approaching incest.)
He reappears at the wake for India's father, who's died in a freak car accident (you don't say!), leaving India in the care of her hothouse-flower mother Evie, a highly-educated lady of leisure about to fade away to nothing (played by the pitch-perfect Nicole Kidman, milking every awkward pause). In the blue-green house, Charlie is a pillar of gold from his preppy sweaters to his tan, a walking ad for 1920s plasticine perfection. And though India's creeped out by this too-smooth uncle who's moved in upstairs, she soon begins to realize blood is thicker than water (or the supernaturally-effective consumption of his offerings of rare meat and red wine that provides the initial conduit of feeling between them). And there's enough nuance behind Matthew Goode's reptilian gaze that it merits India's fascination, an undercurrent they're both more than aware of even as Charlie lays Charm Level Eleven on the way-into-it Evie.
Park Chan-wook's direction elevates this standard setup with gallery-worthy composition, with casually non-linear pacing that that make each frame a tiny drama of its own and keeps the slow burn from turning sluggish. The tension in the house is expertly built; every lightbulb is a pendulum of dread, every sun-drenched room a trap, every wide-shot dinner scene a minefield. In nature, though, a key sense of balance is restored: graves are peaceful, hunter's blinds are sanctuaries. One particularly evocative sequence of India in a playground at night follows her as she spins on a carousel, talking dreamily, floating in and out of frame with seemingly-supernatural ease.
But Wasikowska's more than a match for her surroundings, as we watch her doubts evaporating one by one, and follow her shift from the girl she is at the start of the story to the adult she declares herself to be when we first meet her. When she finds herself a target of a cadre of boys at school (with dialogue so unnatural even for this stylized film that it's entirely possible someone's dad subbed in and wrote it), she surprises them – and herself – with the cold violence of her response. Things escalate when one of the boys turns a makeout session into an assault, and as she fights back, Charlie appears like an avenging angel to help her finish the job.
Their nearly-wordless sympatico clarifies this unexpected and deep connection for India, and how she's changed. That it's sexual, there's no doubt (this is probably not a date movie), but she also begins to realize the significance of the faltering estrangement between herself and her mother and her childhood hunting trips with her father – an attempt to channel a darkness he must have seen before, and training in an autonomy she hadn't noticed at the time. And with this knowledge of her monstrousness, and some third-act revelations about Uncle Charlie, India must decide what to do with the first decision that's ever been wholly hers. Gotta love a movie in which the girl becoming monstrous is considered a triumph, not a tragedy.
The answer might not be pretty or particularly unexpected, but Stoker sides firmly with India in its embrace of the odd and the off-kilter, the too-pretty and the wilting; it's a world that welcomes a very natural supernatural, and a monster of her own making.
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Each week, one randomly-chosen member of the Gears of War: Judgment community will wear a special multiplayer skin called the Epic Reaper - yet the ghoul is more than just a skin. The Epic Reaper has "special abilities and physics" that will make him (her? it?) "not very easy to kill," this Epic blog post notes.
Gears of War: Judgment multiplayer unleashes the 'Epic Reaper' originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Curiosity Rover has just accomplished exactly what it was set out to do. According to NASA scientists, the probe's latest analysis of a Martian rock sample shows that ancient Mars was once capable of supporting living microbes. It’s not confirmation of life; rather, it's evidence for the Red Planet's historical potential to host life.
Last month, Curiosity drilled some samples out of a sedimentary rock near an old river bed in Gale Crater. This geological area used to feature a series of stream channels, leaving behind finely grained bedrock indicative of previously wet conditions.
Using the rover’s onboard instrumentation, NASA scientists analyzed these samples to detect some of the critical elements required for life, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon. Back here on Earth, microbes use sulfates and sulfides as sources of energy.
And indeed, this was the the very essence of the mission. Curiosity is basically serving as a robotic geologist, equipped with such tools as the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) system and the Chemistry and Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument (CheMin) which it uses to identify and measure abundances of various minerals on Mars.
As geobiologist Roger Summons of MIT told io9 just prior to the mission, Curiosity can perform basic geochemistry as it evaluates the Martian landscape and atmosphere for its potential to harbor life at some point in the planet’s past.
"Once we have more geologic information, then we can start to make valid hypotheses about the early conditions for life on Mars,” he told us.
And indeed, that information is starting to come in, and it looks very promising.
Data returned from SAM and CheMin suggest that the ancient river system that Curiosity finds itself in, or what might have been an intermittently wet lake bed, could have provided enough chemical energy and other conditions suitable for microbial life. Rocks found in the area are comprised of a fine-grained mudstone containing clay and sulfate minerals, along with other chemicals. Moreover, this area wasn’t oxidizing, acidic, or salty.
According to NASA scientist David Blake, clay minerals make up at least 20% of the composition of the sample taken by Curiosity. This clay could have formed when water on Mars mixed with other minerals.
In addition, scientists detected a mixture of oxidized, less-oxidized, and un-oxidized chemicals, compounds that can provide the energy required to sustain microbial life.
Moving forward, Curiosity will explore the Yellowknife Bay area in anticipation of its venture towards Mount Sharp where NASA scientists expect the probe to find more clay and sulfate minerals.
Source and images: NASA.
"Piggy poop balls," the internet's most famous and moving photograph of a pig whose own poop is sitting on its shelf-like balls, has appeared in such storied publications as Gawker, Deadspin, and Gawker since it first appeared online in 2011. And now, it finally has a backstory, thanks to Buzzfeed's Katie Notopoulos, who tracked down Jeff Reardon, the man who photographed the pig with poop on its balls: More » 
Have you always felt that the Scooby-Doo cartoon series would have been better served by the incorporation of a murdered father character in lieu of the combative Scrappy-Doo? Time to test our your theory, weird kid: The Notorious B.I.G.'s teenage children are set to star in a new animated musical series called House of Wallace —and Biggie will appear as a ghost. More » 
Enormous jewels that people have to hide in pots? Or worse, bury in the grass, outside? That's not how you manage an economy, Hyrule. In fact, it's the fastest way to ensuring your Kingdom one day winds up at the bottom of the ocean. More » 
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Sterling Archer, the star behind the animated spy sitcom airing on the FX network (also called Archer!), is hands down one of the biggest jerks on TV. We're talking like, someone so awful that he makes Walter White from Breaking Bad look like a nice, upstanding guy. More » 
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DarendukesHoly shit. That is uncanny.
If I were Heather Large, an expecting mother in Illinois, I'd have mixed feelings about the above ultrasound. On the one hand: Your child is probably going to be very powerful! On the other hand: Evil. More » 
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