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There is something charming about bad horror movies. From the overused tropes to the laughable gore effects, they are hard to take seriously. Lakeview Cabin seems to get that, and is celebrating the stupidity with its episodic adventure starring teenagers evading and outsmarting a serial killer. Also, they take the time to zipline naked through the woods.

The episodes of Lakeview Cabin appear to take the story to various non-lakeview locales, including an urban area and a space station. Despite that, there always seems to be somebody ready to maim and murder the playable characters. Is that last one a Dead Space nod?

Lakeview Cabin Collection is currently seeking approval on Steam Greenlight.

At the end of each round of Titanfall, the losing team has to get to the evacuation ship and escape, while still being chased by the enemy team. The safest way to do it? Eject straight from your titan into the ship as it warps away.

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The post Norwegian Forrest cat. The cat from hell by FocusPocus Photography appeared first on ActingLikeAnimals.com.

If you had a PC in the 80s and 90s, you learned to expect certain sounds—the whir of the fan in the power supply, the gentle chittering of the hard drive, the grinding of the floppy drive checking for a disk, the satisfying beep! of the PC passing its power-on self-test. And, if you were lucky enough to install Windows 95, you eventually got that lovely sound composed by Brian Eno.

Here's a video that's mostly notably for its sound. An old PC boots up, and then a printer is powered on and runs through its murderous rampage of paper-feeding and roller-testing. This is a powerful nostalgia trip if you lived with these sounds like I did. Enjoy, and keep an ear out for the pet bird who seems familiar with this PC's sounds:

Pun Dog #12 (previously) [x]

Books can be complicated, and the culture surrounding literature and its various theories and ideas can even trip up Ph.Ds and Gaddis-quoting Brooklynites.

Sometimes, though, you need a little straight-talk to understand why your favorite author keeps getting described as having been decontextualized, which makes these particular statements by critics and writers on various literary concepts incredibly illuminating.

1. MODERNISM

“Make it new!”
— A phrase attributed to Ezra Pound that he in fact lifted from a 17th-century B.C. Chinese text, which in itself is a pretty good summary of modernism

2. POSTMODERNISM

[Describing the postmodern era:]
“On the one hand, there’s sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. Most of the old cinctures and constraints that used to exist—censorship of content is a blatant example—have been driven off the field. Writers today can do more or less whatever we want. But on the other hand, since everybody can do pretty much whatever they want, without boundaries to define them or constraints to struggle against, you get this continual avant-garde rush forward without anyone bothering to speculate on the destination, the 'goal' of the forward rush.”
— David Foster Wallace (above) in conversation with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

3. STRUCTURALISM

“Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to '"modernist" alienation and despair.’… Roland Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.”
— Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms

4. DECONSTRUCTION

“I’ve already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural—to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.”
— Jacques Derrida speaking on his own indefinable theory of deconstruction, which is often discussed in terms of what it is not rather than what it is

5. SURREALISM

…A method “by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.'”
— Andre Breton, the father of surrealism, in his First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924

6. DADA

“Dada Means Nothing.”
— Tristan Tzara in the Dada Manifesto, 1918. He doesn’t mean it has no meaning, but rather that it means “nothing,” i.e. the opposite of something; Dada was created as a rejection of the logic and reason that its artists believe led to World War I

7. AESTHETICISM

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. … Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

8. MAGICAL REALISM

“Surrealism runs through the streets.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9. HYSTERICAL REALISM

“Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity.”
— James Wood, describing the work of Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and others

As we reported, in just one day, LeVar Burton’s “Bring ‘Reading Rainbow’ Back” Kickstarter surpassed it’s $1 million goal on Wednesday — after just one day.

Cameras were rolling as Burton watched the number change to $1 million.

(NOTE: As of this writing, that number has more than doubled to over $2 million!)

[via Death and Taxes]

Perfect egg salad with a great balance of creamy and crunchy textures and bright, fresh flavors. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I don't remember much about the not-quite-classic-Woody-Allen film What's Up Tiger Lily, other than that secret agent Phil Moskowitz heads out on a mission with his sidekicks Suki and Teri Yaki to secure the recipe for the world's best egg salad. I also remember that he never actually reveals that recipe, which is a shame, because I've been on a quest for the best egg salad ever since I can remember.

Perfect is a word that I throw around a lot, and it's always with the understanding that it's a goal that can be strived for but never achieved. This particular recipe for egg salad is about as close to perfect as I've ever had. It's not fancy, there are no special ingredients, but it's well balanced, with a bright, fresh flavors, and a texture that spans from rich and creamy to crunchy and fresh.

Any good egg salad starts with perfectly boiled eggs with a just-cooked-but-not-chalky yolk and tender whites. Luckily, and not-so-coincidentally, I spent a great deal of time developing a recipe for them, so we're already off on the right foot.

Crushing It

The biggest question when it comes to how to put together an egg salad is how to chop your eggs. I started with four different methods, using a basic recipe that combined mayonnaise, diced red onions, and diced celery.

The first was to press them through the holes of a box grater. It's easy, it leads to even end results, but it also looks and feels...like an egg pushed through a box grater. The thin slivers are just off-putting.

Chopping with a knife works better in terms of finished texture, but it's a bit of a pain—eggs are slippery and don't like to sit still under the blade of a knife. Doing a large batch with this method is a chore.

Lastly, I tried smashing the eggs with a stiff whisk. This was by far the easiest and best method, producing a nice chunky texture with minimal effort. The one thing I wished it did better was break down the yolks into a creamy sauce that binds with the mayonnaise. Whisking harder helped, but then the whites broke down too much.

The solution? Getting dirty.

Crushing those eggs by hand is the way to go. Your hands are gentler than the hard wires of a whisk, allowing you to break down the yolks without over-crushing the whites. You end up with an egg salad that has nice big bites of egg white, all bound together in a rich, creamy mash of yolks and mayonnaise.

Fine Tuning Flavor

Almost there. All we gotta do is season this thing up. I generally choose red onions because I like the way the pretty red cubes intersperse with the yellow eggs, but I'd never really considered whether they were optimal in terms of flavor. I made a few batches of egg salad with a half dozen different types of onion (yellow, white, red, sweet, shallots, and scallions), and was surprised to find that the scallions were almost unanimously voted as the best of the bunch

Similarly, most folks prefer far fewer celery nubs than I personally include (and nobody seemed to like diced radishes added to the mix). I suppose majority rules here (though of course, you should always feel free to modify the ratios according to your own preferences).

Finally, most egg salads are heavy, leaden affairs. I wanted an egg salad that tasted bright and fresh, despite being rich and creamy. The key? A dash of lemon juice and lemon zest, along with a pinch of parsley.

And you know what? Damn the committee: I like radishes on my egg salad sandwiches, and they're going to stay there.

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

Thanks sg