Christopher Lantz

Chuck Testa would definitely not approve of these terrible taxidermy jobs.

Gralbum is an iPad app that lets musicians add interactive storytelling elements to their records, launched by former Lou Reed collaborator, Sarth Calhoun. The project’s name is a conflation of the words “graphic novel” and “album,” with the app bringing multimedia elements like video, images animation and comics to the the musical experience.

A combination of animated graphic novel, art book, and music album, Gralbums enable musicians to meld their music with artwork and deliver an interactive experience on touch devices. They are a new creative medium for collaboration, multimedia art and immersive storytelling.

There are already some examples of the technology up on the Gralbum website. You can also follow the collective on Facebook and Twitter.

Documentary filmmaker and father Sean Phillips recorded clips of his baby boy Jonah making cute noises and pieced them all together to make it sound as if he was beatboxing like a pro.

Babies are cute. Babies that beatbox are just plain AWESOME. Meet the talented Jonah!

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Shot between February and March 2014, ‘Eye of the Storm’ is a short, wordless document of Iceland’s winter landscape. Set to an instrumental soundtrack by composer/cellist Shaun Diaz, Henry Juh Wah Lee’s film captures ice-covered terrain, time-lapsed footage of snowmelt and wide shots of brilliantly colored auroras in the skies above the Nordic country. As its name implies, storms of all sorts serve as a common thread for the piece.

In Iceland there are many kinds of storms. Ice, snow, rain, sand, ash, solar, magnetic, and more. Storms are agents of change. While often destructive and unpredictable, they also demonstrate the unyielding power of nature. They reveal nature’s beauty and its hand in creating the landscapes we see today.

via Vimeo Staff Picks

Windows XP, the ubiquitous operating system for computers from Microsoft, stopped receiving official support from the software company on Tuesday, April 8, 2014. Originally released in 2001, Windows XP received extended support long after the typical 10-year cycle that most Microsoft products receive. Given that it will no longer receive this support, it is recommended that users move on to a different operating system to avoid any potential security risks.

images via Wikipedia

via PCWorld

A group of young Swedish girls keeps punk alive in Lukas Moodysson‘s film We Are the Best! The story follows a couple of marginalized girls who deal with their social outcast status by starting a band. And while they’re pretty insistent that they are, indeed, the best, it looks like the band might mean a lot more to them than it does to anyone else. But that’s OK — that’s what punk rock is all about. Go your own way, forge your own identity, to hell with everyone else. The first We Are the Best! trailer is a lot of fun; watch it below.

Moodysson has made some really difficult films in the past. A Hole in My Heart, about a small group of people making an amateur porno film, is one of the hardest-to-watch films I’ve ever seen. And Lilya 4-Ever was a harrowing story of a young woman who is kidnapped as a sexual slave. While he’s made a couple of more easy-going films, too, the spirit of those super-intense films is visible even in the trailer for We Are the Best! Moodysson clearly knows his alienation, and the things these characters feel hit the screen in pure form, if this trailer is reliable. It’s just a bit easier to digest this time.

Magnolia will release We Are the Best! in select theaters May 30, 2014. Apple has the trailer.

From Swedish master Lukas Moodysson, We are the Best! revolves around three girls in 1980s Stockholm who decide to form a punk banddespite not having any instruments and being told by everyone that punk is dead. Based on a graphic novel, We are the Best! is a paean to DIY culture and the power of rebellion.

• This Week In Trailers: Mammoth, The White Ribbon, Love The Beast, Love, Starsuckers

The post ‘We Are the Best!’ Trailer: Punks Make Their Own Way appeared first on /Film.

[Video Link] Here's a video (well, real audio with some graphics) of the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloé during a 5.1 magnitude earthquake. It's pretty interesting to hear the gasps and murmurs of the audience followed by the lovely music continuing without a hitch.

A couple of things to note here: 
-Walt Disney Concert Hall was built only 10 years ago and is made to withstand seismic activity.
-I work for the LA Phil and had a hand in making this video.

“Be my guest… You can come out when you learn to respect me.”

In this video, BuzzFeed shows us things that Disney characters do that’d be creepy if we did them in real life. Locking someone in a room until they respect you, combing your hair with a fork, and talking to a parrot on your shoulder just don’t seem to work like they do in the animated fantasy worlds.

Sorry, but meeting someone in the middle of their food Lady and the Tramp-style is *not* acceptable behavior.

music by Kevin MacLeod – “Ranz des Vaches”

image via BuzzFeed

Announcement: Hi everyone! I have a new book out! It’s The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy: the culmination of my journalism on hackers and cybercrime, plus my work on sex and privacy. Find out more on the book’s Smart Privacy Tumblr, get it on Amazon for Kindle, or order it DRM-free and direct from my Shopify store. I self-published it, so help me spread the word!

• When a chronic pain syndrome made sex excruciating, our writer found relief from the most surprising source. “The idea of injecting de-activated botulism into my pelvic floor was not one that thrilled me. Still, if it meant that Eric and I could have the kind of sex we used to have, it was worth a shot.”
  Botox Saved My Sex Life (DAME)

• Surprise, surprise, the mainstream porn industry is hating on Belle Knox for not being “one of them.” “(…) starting with adult performer Belle Noire’s crusade to “expose” Knox. After tweeting at Knox for weeks, last week she published an essay called “Behind the Scenes: Belle Knox,” alleging that Knox was “completely contradictory, irrelevant, and unknowledgeable of the porn industry.”
  Growing backlash against Duke porn star in adult film industry (Daily Dot)

• “You bent over to tie your shoe? Joke’s on you, let some rando pretend to penetrate you. Oh, you’re bending over to get something from your grocery basket? You’re just asking for a French comedian to make humping motions behind you.”
  Remi Gaillard’s ‘Free Sex’ Prank Is The Opposite Of Comedy (HuffPo)

• The average earnings of a full-time Phone Sex Operator (PSO) earns around $40,000 per year.
  Talking Dirty: The Women Who Still Make Bank as Phone Sex Operators (NAME)

• In December, the online travel company surveyed 1,000 air travelers and found that nine per cent of them reported being intimate on a plane at least once. “It happens more often on longer flights, of course. The transatlantic flights are the most popular, but it happens in business class as frequently or even more so than economy class, for instance.”
  Sex acts on airplanes not uncommon, experts say (CBC)

• These Awesomely Geeky Condoms Just Made Sex Even Cooler (Buzzfeed, image above via)

• “In the fashion industry, Terry Richardson’s sexual harassment is the symptom, not the disease.”
  Models Are Prey — And Not Just In Terry’s World (Buzzfeed)

• After one writer recently revealed that she’s made as much as $30,000 in a single month writing erotic ebooks featuring creatures like Bigfoot, it became clear that monster erotica has quietly become a hugely popular genre. But what attracts readers with sexy stories about mythological beasts?
  Why Is Monster Erotica So Popular Anyway? (io9)

• “Can sex save Denmark?”, the advert asks. Hotel rooms are one of life’s great aphrodisiacs – at least that’s the theory behind a new campaign from Danish package-holiday specialist Spies Rejser. Its latest TV campaign, Do It For Denmark, aims to encourage Danes to go on holiday in the hope that they might procreate while abroad.
  Sun, sex and a baby: the unusual package holiday for Danes (Guardian)

• Former porn performer “Melissa Midwest” Harrington is being dropped as the face of a multibillion-dollar Manhattan lawsuit against Match.com, making her the second woman since January to be removed from top billing in the case. Once among the top 10 most-searched names on the Internet, she recently demanded that she be removed from the class-action, trademark-infringement suit.
  Match.com lawsuit loses second lead plaintiff (NY Post)

• Nuts, the weekly that along with arch-rival Zoo shook up the men’s magazine market a decade ago but attracted criticism for their sexist portrayal of women, is to close.
  Nuts magazine to close (Guardian)

• “I compartmentalized my disability and my sexuality like it was my job until after college. Then I realized I wanted to actually have sex instead of just picking it apart in sociology class. So, like any self-respecting queer lady, I turned to the internet — and met Alex.”
  Know Me Where It Hurts: Sex, Kink, and Cerebral Palsy (Autostraddle)

• Photographer Meg Allen celebrates “those who choose to exist and identify outside the gender binary” through a series of stunning portraits.
  Photographing The Butch Women Of San Francisco (Buzzfeed)

sugarbone:

slappin my new sticker series up around the city

Hah that’s cute XD

New York City video blogger and web producer Evan Puschak (a.k.a. “The Nerdwriter“) has created a supercut video of words of wisdom an sayings from seasons 1-3 of Game of Thrones.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

In this video, BuzzFeed has a group of kids create their own sound effects and vocals for popular movies, such as: Frozen, The Avengers, and Fast & Furious 6. The end results are quite funny.

Garrison Dean has created a wonderful video for io9, based on a concept by Charlie Jane Anders, that reimagines the intro to HBO’s hit television series Game of Thrones as a classic 1970s-1980s TV sitcom.

via io9

via http://kaviarandcigarettes.tumblr.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=html&utm_campaign=new_submissions-ask&utm_term=from_tumblelog

via http://blog.gamefreaks.co.nz/post/20338275863/journey-fanart

Last week, the FBI arrested Robert James Talbot Jr., 38, of Katy, Texas. Talbot was the self-styled head of the American Insurgent Movement, which openly plotted to massacre Moslems at mosques and kill them with automatic weapons, sought to rob armored cars, and recruited followers to sow more mayhem. Talbot is a violent Christian fundamentalist who advertised his intention to murder people wholesale.

Kudos to the FBI for arresting this fellow, but as Death and Taxes point out, where the hell was the national panic that attends every arrest of a jihadi terrorist, no matter how cracked and improbable his plan happened to be? Nowhere to be seen.

Now, if this was a recognition by the press that lone kooks are not an existential threat to the world -- even if they are capable of committing horrible, isolated crimes -- I'd be standing up and cheering. But if Talbot had been a brown-skinned conservative Muslim who'd been arrested after planning to attack Christian churches in America with bombs and machine-guns, I suspect there would have been screaming front-page headlines and round-the-clock intensive CNN coverage for days, not to mention grim, determined reporting on Fox News.

Dialect coach Andrew Jack offers a tour of the British Isles through the various accents of its residents in this fascinating short video. Jack has provided dialect training on many film and theater projects, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for which he developed the Middle Earth accents. The video was created by PJamBarker and is based on a BBC Radio 4 feature.

via reddit

Christopher E Smith is the white father of a black, biracial son, and it is through his son's experience of being black in America that he has learned just how pervasive and humiliating and violent officialdom is to black Americans, a fact embodied perfectly through New York City's notorious, racist stop-and-frisk program. Smith describes how his son, interning on Wall Street, has been repeatedly stopped by police, once made to lie face down on the filthy sidewalk in his best suit while police went through his pockets (former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg was a staunch supporter of this program). He describes the experience of his black in-laws, who are stopped by police-cars en route to family gatherings, who have guns aimed at their heads, and who are then released with a shrug and a nonsensical excuse. He describes how driving over the US/Canadian border with his son is totally different from driving on his own, and how the customs guards routinely stop the two of them, and make them wait out of sight of their car while it is searched.

As an aside, I've experienced this myself. I've driven across the US/Canadian border literally dozens of times and the only time I was stopped was when I gave Nalo Hopkinson and David Findlay -- who happen to be black -- a ride to a Clarion reunion at Michigan State University. At both border crossings, the car was searched from top to bottom, with officers taking out books and shaking the pages to look for contraband. It's never happened since. The only difference between that drive and all the others was that there were some brown-skinned people in evidence.

Smith proposes a thought experiment in which stop-and-frisk searches were mandatorily applied in keeping with overall demographics, so for every three black people that the NYPD pull over and humiliate without warrant or suspicion or probable cause, they would have to do the same to ten white people -- and suggests that this would end the program of stop-and-frisk in a heartbeat.

I think he's right.

Proponents of stop-and-frisk often suggest that the hardships suffered by young men of color might be tolerable if officers were trained to be polite rather than aggressive and authoritarian. We need to remember, however, that we are talking about imposing an additional burden on a demographic that already experiences a set of alienating “taxes” not shared by the rest of society.

I can tell myriad stories about the ways my son is treated with suspicion and negative presumptions in nearly every arena of his life. I can describe the terrorized look on his face when, as a 7-year-old trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in front of our suburban house, he was followed at 2-miles-per-hour from a few feet away by a police patrol car—a car that sped away when I came out of the front door to see what was going on. I can tell stories of teachers, coaches, and employers who have forced my son to overcome a presumption that he will cause behavior problems or that he lacks intellectual capability. I can tell you about U.S. Customs officials inexplicably ordering both of us to exit our vehicle and enter a building at the Canadian border crossing so that a team of officers could search our car without our watching—an event that never occurs when I am driving back from Canada by myself.

If I hadn’t witnessed all this so closely, I never would have fully recognized the extent of the indignities African-American boys and men face. Moreover, as indicated by research recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the cumulative physical toll this treatment takes on African-American men can accelerate the aging process and cause early death. Thus, no “special tax” on this population can be understood without recognizing that it does not exist as a small, isolated element in people’s lives.

What I Learned About Stop-and-Frisk From Watching My Black Son [Christopher E. Smith/The Atlantic]

(Image: stopfrisk_june17_DSC_1073, Michael Fleshman, CC-BY)

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All Time 10s has created a new video that shares ten things you may not have known about Game of Thrones. Previously, we wrote about All Time 10s’ list of facts about Sesame Street, The Simpsons, South Park, and The Oscars.

music by Christopher Ashmore and Benjamin Marks – “Flying Fortress“

“Busk” is a documentary short by Icarus that explores the lives of five musicians making their living by performing on the streets and subway stations of New York City. Released through Vimeo in 2013, the doc follows a diverse group of performers, including Japanese beatboxer Reo Matsumoto, bluegrass banjo player Morgan O’Kane and bucket drummer Anthony Smith-Little.

via Vimeo Staff Picks