Nathan

As part of the ongoing rebranding effort colloquially known as “we have more than just student films, you guys,” Vimeo announced today that it has purchased the streaming rights to 80 classic episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This isn’t news in and of itself, considering these are the same 80 MST3K episodes that were already available for purchase on iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Instant Video (and Vudu, for people who just have to be different). 25 of those 80 episodes are currently streaming on Hulu, and 15 of them are on Netflix.

So why should MST3K fans be interested in Vimeo’s offer, especially at the positively Amazon-esque price of $2.99 for a rental and $9.99 to purchase each individual episode? They shouldn’t—at least not yet. See, Vimeo has also secured exclusive streaming rights to the MST3K episodes that aren’t already available ...

FX’s The League has proven that a show about people doing a fun thing can be just as fun as doing that fun thing yourself, so now NBC has realized that it could easily rip off that basic premise and turn it into a totally original idea. According to TV Guide, the network is developing Pub Quiz, a show that is totally different from The League because it’s about a group of friends who do pub trivia instead of fantasy football. The script is being written by American Dreams’ Jonathan Prince, with Chris Moynihan—the creator of ABC’s short-lived Man Up—executive producing.

We should point out that Pub Quiz is just a working title, which is good, because that makes it sound more like a game show than a sitcom. Adding to this confusion is the fact that TV Guide compares it to Friends (since it ...

As anyone who’s visited an American shopping mall in the last few decades could tell you, the age of the arcade has long since passed. Despite the efforts of the occasional nostalgia-minded beercade or retro pinball hall, the days of shoving quarters into a Ms. Pac Man machine until your eyes bleed have gone the way of breakdancing, massive hair, and sexy young Jeff Bridges: forever lost to the abyss of time.

But we still have the movies, those champions of the once-trendy and now forgotten, to help us remember the joys of the stick and the thrill of the gun. The Huffington Post has put together a little love letter to the arcade on film, compiling a three-minute supercut of movie scenes taking place in or around the old amusement hall. Using films from 1974 to 1994, the video is a testament to the ringing, beeping, chaotic beauty ...

To everything there is a season, and with the return of ’90s fashion comes the return of the discontinued ’90s soda that isn’t Crystal Pepsi. Surge, the official soft drink of X-Gamers, candy ravers, and other assorted ’90s types, is coming back, complete with whatever “carbos” are. (Surge was launched in 1996 and pulled from shelves in the early 2000s.) The return of the totally extreme neon-green beverage marks the first time parent company Coca-Cola has brought back a discontinued brand. Surge will be sold exclusively on Amazon in 12-pack form while Coke gauges demand for the product, which is apparently strong enough to muster levels of youth activism unheard of in most social-justice circles.

The return of Surge is a triumph for members of the so-called SURGE Movement, a Facebook group over 133,000 strong that has been barraging Coca-Cola with four-hour call-a-thons demanding the return of their ...

Once someone crosses through the mystical threshold we call “celebrity,” they become public property. In exchange for adoration and a boatload of money, we feel entitled to discuss them, critique them, pry into their personal lives, subject their bikini bodies to intense scrutiny, and generally treat them differently from the rest of humankind. Maybe that’s why it’s so disorienting to see future stars in old television commercials, just kind of smiling and holding tubes of toothpaste like nobody’s aware of what a truly special and magical thing is going on right now.

The viral content machine known as World Wide Interweb is well aware of the potency of these gods-among-us, and has assembled what it refers to as “The Ultimate ‘Before They Were Famous’ Celebrity Videos Compilation” in their honor. (They forgot Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bubble Yum commercial, but whatever.) Some of the celebrities featured in the ...

There’s nothing more embarrassing than having your grandparents tag Grandmaster Flash on Facebook, unless Grandmaster Flash is actually your grandpa (it’s possible—he’s 56), in which case, congratulations. That’s pretty cool. This phenomenon is more ubiquitous than you might think, thanks to Facebook’s “helpful” auto-tag feature—when someone starts typing in a name, it will “suggest” (i.e. automatically fill in) the name of the person Facebook presumes you’re talking about, because it knows everything, including that deep down you secretly want to log on to LDS Singles and find a nice man who will let you live on his planet someday.

Anyway, Facebook’s first impulse when a user starts typing the word “grand” is to fill in “Grandmaster Flash,” a minor annoyance to the social media literate but an unsurmountable problem to, well, grandmas. (No offense to America’s elders, but they ...

Earlier this year, Hasbro invited players to stick some bullshit word into the official Scrabble dictionary, and “geocache” was the dumb word that they chose (or, to be more accurate, it was the dumb word that a bunch of ballot-stuffing geocaching enthusiasts chose). Since it’s an eight-letter word that requires both of the game’s “C” tiles (or a blank), “geocache” is practically useless in Scrabble. But as the Associated Press reports, more significant changes to the game’s lexicon will be on offer when a revised edition of Merriam-Webster’s official Scrabble dictionary comes out next week.

The Webster folks say that 5,000 words have been added in this update, the most notable of which are four two-letter words: te, da, gi, and po. Because two-letter words are an essential part of any decent Scrabble player’s plan of attack, any amendment to the list of acceptable ...

Companies spend millions of dollars crafting the perfect 30- to 90-second television advertisements, so it’s refreshing to see that a simple edit to those ads can derail a carefully crafted intended narrative in favor of darker or more absurdist messages. Take this cut of a famous Cheerios campaign, in which Gracie now learns a terrible truth.

The above video sprang from Reddit’s r/CommercialCuts, which challenges users to make a simple video and/or audio edit to popular commercials to produce something “comical and different than the original commercial intended.” Some cuts are gleeful “fuck yous” to the products being sold—

—while others become spot-on parodies, as in this heart-warming tale of children receiving a box of meat from Wal-Mart for Christmas.

Then there’s the outright juvenilia, ruining youth’s simplest pleasures.

See more as they develop at r/CommercialCuts. [via Digg]

Heeding the call of confused aunts everywhere, Facebook is testing a new feature that will append a “Satire” tag to satirical news articles, automatically rendering them very, very funny. “We received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement explaining the decision, citing all the people who will now be able to share in the laughter, now that they’ve been told explicitly that this is what they’re meant to be doing.

As first reported by Ars Technica (via Mashable), Facebook has been testing out the use of the “[Satire]” tag for over a month of corporate-approved mirth, though its implementation is often as subtle as the humor that will soon no longer prove an issue to its users. The tags won’t appear until after a user has already visited a satirical news ...

Last Friday, actor Jeff Bridges was given the honor of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a Los Angeles Dodgers game, an event for which he showed the necessary deference by wearing a baseball glove on his head. Not to be outdone by the recent first pitches of 50 Cent, Jack White, and Robocop, Bridges opted to keep things playful and invoke The Dude, his beloved character from the Coen Brothers 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Even though Bridges was there to promote the upcoming film adaptation of The Giver, he opted to forgo any solemnity, and after a rather animated windup, he came barreling off the mound and bowled the baseball right into the batter’s box. Jokiness aside, Bridges’ Lebowskian effort was still less of a shambles than 50 Cent’s, but maybe that just means that Bridges masturbates with less frequency and/or vigor than 50.

Sometimes, the simple things in life are best. And this video, which features a fight scene from The Matrix Reloaded dubbed over with sound effects from 8- and 16-bit video games, is very simple indeed. Actor and video editor Phillip Raupach samples liberally from games like Contra, Street Fighter II, and Super Mario Bros. to create an alternative soundscape for the basic cable mainstay, possibly to draw comparisons between the hyper-stylized worlds of video games and the alternate digital reality where much of the Matrix movies take place, but really because it was an assignment for his Audio Production class at San Francisco State University. Either way, it belongs to the Internet now.

[via Laughing Squid]

With Tinder and Grindr just the tip of the throbbing mound of hookup apps out there, it’s easy to forget there was a time when you couldn’t just stick your phone down your pants and send pictures of your genitalia to strangers. That time was called 1997, and The Found Footage Festival has unearthed a VHS relic that reminds us how hard our forefathers and foremothers had to struggle just to engage in anonymous dirty talk online.

Procured from a thrift store in Minnesota, How To Have Cybersex On The Internet features a fresh-faced, sweater-clad female host who exposes viewers to the thrilling world of cybersex before exposing her (censored) topless self. However, while her chenille sweater comes off, her mom jeans stay on, which is the exact opposite of what most people do alone in front of the computer. But who are we to judge what constituted ...

Although found-audio pioneers The Books stopped making their experimental collages together in 2012, member Nick Zammuto has spent the last few years producing (relatively) more traditional pop music with his self-titled band. Both the eponymous first album and the upcoming Anchors have shied away from the heavy sampling that defined Zammuto’s earlier group, but the musician has found a way to keep his “use what you find” aesthetic alive by making a music video for the band’s new single, “The Great Equator.” It’s composed entirely of microscopic images taken of stuff lying around his house.

The video, premiering this week on Motherboard, is made up entirely of well-edited stills and videos taken via scanning electron and dissection microscopes. All of the images—which include magnifications of coins, vinyl records, and magazine photos—were collected personally by Zammuto, who worked as a microscopist for an art conservation lab ...

What happens when a mathematician slices a Mobius strip into an edible torus, i.e., a math-thingy into a bagel? Not—as a non-mathematician might suspect—the creation of an Infinity Bagel that can be consumed forever. But it does result in an interlocking shape that can hold a greater amount of cream cheese than your standard horizontal cut.

The result is what creator and Stony Brook University professor George W. Hart dubs the “Mathematically Correct Breakfast,” a dubious claim considering that circles are mathematically rad to begin with, and that this new “perfect” bagel seems harder to actually toast and eat than the layperson’s bagel. But there is that greater spreadable area to consider.

Learn how to make the cut at Hart’s site or through the video below. [via Mathematics & Nature]

Submitted by: Iron-man01

In a trend that, as we reported a few months ago, has also resulted in a bunch of baby “Skylers” crawling around, in 2012 more American parents named their daughters after characters on Game Of Thrones than “Betsy” or “Nadine”—both super boring names that have never appeared on any TV shows about dragons. 

According to data from the Social Security Administration, in 2012, 146 Khaleesis were born in the United States, an exponential increase from the five Khaleesis born in 2010. Interestingly, zero Khaleesis were born before 2010, a good 14 years after George R.R. Martin published his first Song Of Ice And Fire book, confirming that people care way more about TV than books. Meanwhile, a mere 21 newborns were named “Daenerys” in 2012, suggesting that, overall, parents would prefer their daughters live empowered, post-raw horse heart-eating lives. 

The use of “Arya” has also been on a ...

Ever watch an episode of a game show and think “Sure, this is fun, but who has time for all of this banter?” Once again the Internet has provided a solution, helping out those who are merely interested in the results of daytime television. YouTube user GorgeousWig has produced the most efficient episode of Family Feud, which means it’s also clearly the best episode, as everyone knows efficiency is directly proportionate to entertainment. By cutting out the contestants’ reactions to answers, the tension-filled moments before and after an answer is revealed, and pretty much all of Steve Harvey, the half hour episode now clocks in at just under three minutes. 

This lightning round approach keeps things tidy while also cutting down the amount of time viewers have to yell at the participants for not saying what is clearly the #1 answer. There is a real sense of whiplash energy ...

Popular TV shows get adapted and remade for other countries and languages all the time. On the surface, it’s an easy formula for success—take something that already works, tweak it for the new market, and watch the money roll in. In practice, cultural differences can produce shows that are bizarrely different from, or pale imitations of, the source material. This article, written for Philadelphia’s independent weekly City Paper by A.V. Club contributor Emily Guendeslberger, details the train wreck that occurred when Russian producers tried to make their own knock-off version of a show with an almost-ludicrously American sensibility—It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

The Russian show, It’s Always Sunny In Moscow—or, as Google Translate puts it, “In Moscow Always Sunny”—copies characters, plots, and even camera shots from the brilliantly vulgar FX series created by “Rob MakElhenni, Glenn Houertonom, and Charlie Dai”. Unfortunately ...

Neil Cicierega has been deftly skewering the Internet’s obsession with ‘90s navel-gazing for a while now, and over the weekend the sample-driven satirist emerged from the tiny chamber lined with TVs where he presumably lives to give the world “Mouth Silence.”  

“Mouth Silence” is the sequel to “Mouth Sounds,” the mixtape that made “SomeBODY” the new “It’s been...”; like its predecessor, “Mouth Silence” has an unofficial theme—Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life”—and a mischievous sense of humor. Highlights include the Red Hot Chili Peppers/Nine Inch Nails mashup “I Wanna Funk You Like An Animal” and a mashup of “Sexual Healing” with “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” that will validate all the Disney conspiracy theorists out there. 

But “Mouth Silence” also sees Cicierega expanding his musical palette beyond ironic (if thematically consistent) ‘90s mashups. A Pokemon-themed track includes sound bites from multiple news reports ...

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders about the actual business of entertainment in hopes of shedding some light on how the pop-culture sausage gets made.

Despite never winning the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti is one of the world’s best competitive eaters. He holds world records in chicken wings, chocolate, corned beef sandwiches, grits, oysters, and ice cream, and has downed 275 pickled jalapeños in just eight minutes. He’s eaten 11 pounds of shoofly pie in eight minutes and recently chugged 2.5 gallons of chocolate milk in just three minutes.

His latest project is Taco In A Bag, a gourmet ...