At some point, installing sturdier railing might be a good idea for Austin’s Littlefield Parking Garage. The same garage we live-streamed less than a year ago as a car was dangling from its side just had a BMW fall from its seventh floor, reports the Austin American-Statesman. The driver was taken to a local hospital…
Jeopardy! hasn’t been a stranger to covering Star Trek before, but Tuesday’s episode might take the prize for hiding, in plain sight, one of the coolest The Next Generation references we’ve ever seen on the show.
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court will embark on a legal safari of sorts: animal rights activists, representing an Indonesian monkey named Naruto, are set to argue to the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that their monkey client should be recognized as the lawful owner of property.
The property at issue are a few infamous and viral selfies that the macaque monkey snapped of himself in the Tangkoko reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 2011. The monkey's self-appointed lawyers from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are suing David Slater, the British nature photographer whose camera was swiped by the monkey while the photographer was on a jungle shoot.
Slater has published a book with the pictures Naruto took of himself. Now the monkey—via PETA—is seeking monetary damages for copyright infringement from Slater and Blurb, the online publishing platform where the photos appeared.
World renowned photographer Miles Aldridge has captured Cersei Lannister, Arya Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, and other Game of Thrones characters in his own way, and it looks as surreal as it looks glamorous.
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“When thinking of how to photograph each individual I wanted to acknowledge influences of themes in the show while capturing the traits of their own unique characters,” said the photographer.
Aldridge’s distinctive over-saturated style is reminiscent of Hollywood sets from 1940s-1960s: it’s full of intense color, light, and drama. “The vivid color narrative in each [photo] brings the viewers into the world I have created for these actors while the careful placement and selection of each prop brings to life the mystical, dark world of The Game of Thrones.”
Everything was photographed with a Rolleiflex 6001 camera and a 120/180mm lens, set at f.16, and using Kodak Ektar 100 film.
Over the weekend, US Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called upon the Food and Drug Administration to investigate the new “snortable” chocolate powder product, Coco Loko, made by Orlando-based company Legal Lean.
The powder, released last month, contains cacao powder as well as ingredients often found in energy drinks, including taurine, guarana, and ginkgo biloba. Legal Lean says that Coco Loko offers “euphoric energy and motivation,” and safely generates a state “similar to the feeling of ecstasy.” Doctors, however, are unsure of the health effects, including potential harm to the nasal passage. And Schumer, who is no stranger to criticizing caffeine-based stimulants, called the powder “cocaine on training wheels” that presents dangers to children and should be ditched.
In a Sunday news conference, Schumer said: “This suspect product has no clear health value. I can’t think of a single parent who thinks it is a good idea for their children to be snorting over-the-counter stimulants up their noses.” In a letter sent Saturday, he urged the FDA to step in.
The Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just one flight, an uncrewed mission in 1988. The Soviet Union's collapsing economy doomed the program.
The Buran orbiter that made the initial three-hour flight was destroyed in 2002, when the roof of the hangar where it was stored in Kazakhstan collapsed. Like the United States, the Soviet Union didn't make just one Buran, they made several with the intention of eventually having a fleet of orbital vehicles. When the program was canceled, those vehicles, from mock-ups to nearly flight ready articles, were mothballed.
After about six hours (according to Steam) of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, I finally played a match last weekend in which I secured my first and second kills, ever. Meanwhile, folks are out here like:
Mike Ziegler is a collector and (apparently) a Nirvana superfan. One website once called him "probably the internet's most prestigious Nirvana trader of all time." Ziegler deals in videotapes, pictures, set lists, and other artifacts and ephemera from the time when grunge music was just beginning to form. Just check out his impressive collection of Nirvaniana.
His latest find is a videotape made on January 24, 1988, which shows the now-legendary band performing in an empty RadioShack in Aberdeen, Washington, a day after they recorded their first demo. But the video isn't a live show, it's what might happen in any teen's bedroom at any given moment—a pantomime of rocking out.
As you'll notice, Kurt Cobain jumps a bunch, and bassist Krist Novoselic also seems to be playing along—but their instruments aren't plugged in. It's only the drummer, Dale Crover, best known for playing with the band Melvins, who's actually making any noise. (Dave Grohl didn't join them on drums until the next year.) Recorded just a day after a show at the Community World Theater in Tacoma, which Ziegler also uploaded footage of here, this was intended to be a music video "of sorts," according to Ziegler.
Ziegler doesn't name the person who shot the film, but says he's always on the hunt for other recordings.
"If you happen have a Nirvana tape that you recorded that has been sitting in a closet/attic/basement for 25+ years, let me know," he wrote yesterday. "Happy to help get it properly archived and shared with the world."
Four years after the video was shot, Nirvana's Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous at the top of the charts, paving the way for the band to become, arguably, the biggest rock band in the world. RadioShack didn't know what they had.
The next book from the Legends of Localization team is called This be book bad translation, video games! and I'm all about that. You know what you're getting into straight away.
This is a 64-pager from Clyde Mandelin and Tony Kuchar that pinpoints amusing moments in video game translation history from the '70s to the modern era. Compared to Clyde's EarthBound tome, this should be a brisk, chuckle-filled read. It's $15 and available now on Fangamer, if you're so inclined.
The listing's gallery shots sure cracked me up. "You are a sucking baby." Come again?
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York
Hobby Lobby, the US crafts supply company known for its pro-Christian branding, apparently has a side interest in smuggling rare archaeological artifacts.
The company made headlines when it won a Supreme Court case in which it argued that the family-owned company should not have to pay for birth control for employees under the ACA, because doing so violated the owners' religious freedom as Christians. Apparently their Christian values did not extend to concerns about smuggling rare artifacts from the dawn of Western civilization.
by Eric Van Allen on Compete, shared by Eric Van Allen to Kotaku
Few photos from the forum ages of online gaming live in greater infamy than one of what appears to be a human duct taped to the ceiling of a dimly lit basement, his arms reaching out to lightly graze the keys of a Dell mechanical keyboard.
At long last, Overwatch’s gauntlet-wearing villain Doomfist is seeing the light of day. The new character has been teased since before publisher Blizzard even released Overwatch, and now, players can finally try him out on Overwatch’s public test region.
Postmates' on-demand alcohol service is now available well beyond California's borders. On top of an expansion to Miami in May, the internet delivery mainstay is now making its Drinks feature available in New York City (in Brooklyn and Manhattan) as...
How fucking stupid are these people. A 50 cal from a foot away..
Enlarge / Monalisa Perez (left), seen here the day before the shooting of her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III (right). (credit: YouTube)
A Minnesota woman has been charged with manslaughter after she shot and killed her boyfriend as part of the pair’s attempt to become YouTube celebrities.
According to court documents, Monalisa Perez called 911 on June 26 at around 6:30pm local time to say that she had shot Pedro Ruiz III. The two had set up two video cameras to capture Perez firing the gun at Ruiz while he held a book in front of his chest. Ruiz apparently convinced Perez that the book would stop the bullet from a foot away. The gun, a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol, was not hindered by the book.
Ruiz, who was found with a single gunshot in his chest, was pronounced dead at the scene.
On June 11th, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. The impetus for this invention was the birth of Kahn’s daughter, when he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent photos in real time. In 2016 Time Magazine included Kahn’s first camera phone photo in their list of the 100 most influential photos of all time.
Blizzard has revealed that D.Va from Overwatch will be the next character to be turned into a statue, and she'll be joined by her signature mech.
Pre-orders have just opened for the gamer turned soldier, however she comes with a catch. Unlike previous Overwatch statues like Widowmaker, which were priced at $150, D.Va will be a staggering $450, and will be the largest one to date, measuring 19" from floor to head.
In the age of network television dominance, the concept of a “fourth network” that could challenge ABC, NBC, and CBS seemed almost laughable until FOX hit the scene. But long before FOX was hailed as the true fourth network, there was DuMont, an underfunded and largely forgotten broadcast pioneer whose lost recordings have become the stuff of minor legend.
In an alternate universe, not that different from our own, DuMont would have stood right along CBS and the others as one of the original juggernauts of early television. Debuting in 1946, the network was actually started as a ploy to sell televisions. Before getting into the broadcast game, DuMont Laboratories, the company of inventor and TV tech pioneer Allen B. DuMont, was known for being one of the first firms to manufacture television equipment. Launching their own content factory to fill the screens it was selling must have seemed like a no-brainer.
In the late 1930s, DuMont began experimenting with small TV stations in the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas. Eventually, they all came together as the DuMont Network, which was officially created in August of 1946. By comparison, NBC and CBS launched around 1940-41, and ABC came on the scene around 1948, putting DuMont smack in the middle of the dawn of television programming.
The network developed and produced a variety of shows ranging from early talk shows to inventive crime dramas to ground-breaking science fiction. There was Night Editor, an anthology program where the host, ostensibly the nighttime editor of a newspaper, would narrate and perform stories as though they were requested by viewers. There was the early crime drama The Plainsclothsman, told through the eyes (the camera literally showed viewers his POV) of the titular police officer. And there was Captain Video, often hailed as the earliest science fiction TV show, which followed the low-budget adventures of the Captain and his Video Rangers. DuMont also aired such groundbreaking programs as The Hazel Scott Show, often credited as the first network television show to be hosted by an African-American.
The network offered several shows hosted by the celebrity entertainers of the day, including Ernie Kovacs and Morey Amsterdam. The most successful star to come out of the DuMont era was Jackie Gleason, who developed his career-defining The Honeymooners concept on the variety show he hosted, Cavalcade of Stars.
The DuMont network ran hot and burned out fast. After churning out over 20,000 individual episodes of television over the course of a decade, it shut down. “In 1955 it stopped operating as a network, and the two remaining owned and operated stations were sold to Metromedia in D.C. and New York,” says Weinstein. The newly formed Metromedia company used DuMont's programming as the base of their business, which was later absorbed by none other than FOX in the 1980s. Despite its influential role in the early days of television, DuMont and its shows were largely forgotten, and worse yet, mostly lost.
Unlike today, when most everything is recorded and then broadcast at a later time, all of DuMont’s programs aired live, and were only occasionally recorded. If one of their programs had to be aired at a different time, or by an affiliate station, it would air via kinescope, which was literally just a recording of a television monitor showing the program. “What that meant was, the DuMont network or the airing station wouldn’t have the kinescope, or need to keep it,” says Weinstein. “It had little or no economic value after the initial broadcast. They may or may not get it back from whatever station happened to show the program, but the quality was so poor, and there wasn’t a demand for a repeat broadcast that there would be no economic value for holding on to them.”
Despite those odds, some of the kinescopes did survive. Most can be found in private collections, or in even stranger places. Weinstein says that over 300 DuMont kinescopes were found in an Iowa popcorn factory after having been kept by one of the network’s make-up artists.
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of shows the network produced. According to a popular myth, this is because the majority of the library was dumped into New York Harbor. This story seems to originate from Ernie Kovacs’ wife, Edie Adams, who told a second-hand story of the kinescopes' destruction during a hearing on television preservation in 1997. According to her, during DuMont’s sale, nobody wanted to pay for taking care of the recordings, so they were… dealt with:
One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem.
Still, Weinstein is skeptical of this account. To start, Adams stated that the purchase took place in the 1970s, a couple of decades after the network was actually sold. He also just doesn’t think anyone would have kept them around either way. “DuMont was also perennially underfunded. They never had a lot of money, and it’s unlikely they would have kept any sort of warehouse to store these old films," he says. "They were big, bulky, and take up a lot of space. So the short version is, not a lot survived.”
Weinstein says that at least one example of most of DuMont’s major shows have survived in archived collections at places such as New York's Paley Center. It’s difficult to say exactly how much has been lost forever. But as Weinstein puts it, that’s also the great thing about early media: you never know where more of it might pop up. “There could always be another popcorn factory in Iowa.”
It’s finally happening! Adult Swim has announced the release date for the much-hyped third season of Rick and Morty, as well as unveiled a brand-new trailer. In short, it’s the “darkest year” ever.
I really like this game. Maybe head back to it soon.
To celebrate the second anniversary of Rocket League, developer Psyonix has teamed up with Adult Swim to make some Rick and Morty themed customization items. Unlike previous cosmetic pieces, these will all be free common drops for completing offline matches, meaning most players should be able to get them without a lot of effort.
Coming July 5, the DLC will include toppers themed after the titular duo and other characters like Mr. Meeseeks, a Cromulon ("SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT") and Mr. Poopy Butthole. There will also be an "Interdimensional GB" rocket booster and the "Sanchez DC-137" wheels. Well, wubba lubba dub dub, indeed!
Shared just because of this picture of SNES classic with the discolored plastic that happened to every damn snes eventually.
Hello everyone,
Nintendo announced the SNES Classic on Monday, easily the biggest retro news of the year so far. Before the announcement though, our own Jonathan Holmes did some investigative journalism and broke the story early. Was his article the reason the system was announced on Monday? Who can say? But he'll be on Retroid tonight to talk about the miniature console this evening along with Topher, Alex, and special guest Stella Turvey.
We're interested in what you think of the mini SNES. Nintendo's made it clear this time that it'll be a limited-time promotional item, but have vowed to make more of these than the NES Classic, which was sold out everywhere last year. As of this writing preorders haven't yet opened in North America, but if you can risk taking a break from hitting F5 on Amazon's preorder page, why not ask us a question below?
If you've missed any of our previous episodes you can listen tothemhere or subscribe to our RSS feed. You can also ask questions and follow the show @RetroidPodcast to be the first to know when an episode is posted.
When he isn’t staying perpetually employed, Rob Lowe spends a lot of time thinking about how much he loves his kids and how fascinated he is by paranormal creatures like the Loch Ness Monster. It was only a matter of time before he brought these two passions of his together as a reality TV show.
Trollpikken, which Google translates as "Troll the cock," was a rock formation in Eigersund, Norway, about 200 miles southwest of Oslo. The rock, you'll notice, resembled a penis.
But on Saturday a jogger discovered that Trollpikken was no more, having been felled by an apparent vandal. The video below shows grooves in the rock that appear to be from a drill, as Trollpikken rests sadly on the ground.
Who could've done such a thing? Police don't have any suspects, but are looking for tips from the public, according to The Guardian.
Locals, meanwhile, have been busy raising money to have the rock repaired, getting the equivalent of $20,000 already, according to HuffPost, or about two-thirds of what they requested.
Which means that, soon enough, Trollpikken will probably be back, with the aid of some helicopters, bolts, and mortar.
And while the vandal may never be caught and their intentions remain unknown, they've assured that Trollpikken is now more famous than it's ever been, meaning that Eigersund's plan to use the rock to attract tourists just got a huge boost.
While cheetahs might look like majestic and dangerous beasts, actually, they are very nervous beings. They get so anxious, they don’t know how to socialize with each other and get too stressed to have sex. That’s why they needed help as they’re becoming extinct – and the solution came in the most unexpected form…
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Seeing that cheetahs need some assistance, for years now zoo keepers have been assigning these animals their very own… emotional support dogs. “It’s a love story of one species helping another species survive,” said Jack Grisham, vice president of animal collections at the St. Louis Zoo and species survival plan coordinator for cheetahs in North America.
“A dominant dog is very helpful because cheetahs are quite shy instinctively, and you can’t breed that out of them,” explains Janet Rose-Hinostroza, animal training supervisor at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. “When you pair them [cheetahs with dogs], the cheetah looks to the dog for cues and learns to model their behavior. It’s about getting them to read that calm, happy-go-lucky vibe from the dog” – and that helps them be more confident and willing to get it on.
That’s right, cheetahs, learn from the doggies and procreate!
There are a few reasons to be bullish about augmented reality. It’s just neat is the most important reason. Its practicality is another great factor. But above all, the fact that Apple is about to unleash its app developers to go crazy with AR in iOS 11 means that a ton of content should be coming. This humble…
A Spanish judge just ordered the body of Salvador Dalí to be exhumed for a paternity test. The order comes as a result of a lawsuit filed by a woman named Pilar Abel, a tarot card reader who claims to be Dalí’s illegitimate daughter. In court, Abel claimed that her mother was working near the Dalí family’s vacation…
Update: In a statement provided to Polygon, Nintendo said it is not "providing specific numbers, but we will produce significantly more units of Super NES Classic Edition than we did of NES Classic Edition." The company said the new hardware will be produced at least through the end of 2017 and said "at this time, we have nothing to announce regarding any possible shipments beyond this year."
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly round up of all things merchandise. This week we’ve got even more San Diego Comic-Con exclusives to drool over, some new Lego from the upcoming Ninjago movie, and the best plastic recreation of Bruce Campbell’s face the world has ever seen. Really!
It looks like even cartoon characters miss the ’90s. Rocko’s Modern Life, cancelled after four seasons in 1996, is set to return with an hour-long special, Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling, and Nickelodeon has brought back the original cast for one more adventure in O-Town.
Postmates' on-demand alcohol service is now available well beyond California's borders. On top of an expansion to Miami in May, the internet delivery mainstay is now making its Drinks feature available in New York City (in Brooklyn and Manhattan) as...
