two episodes in and just still not very funny, but looking forward to the werewolves showing up.
The third episode of FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” is headed our way tomorrow night (April 10th) at 10pm EST, and it will mark the series debut of the show’s werewolf clan.
You can watch the teaser below. And if you’re a fan of the movie but you haven’t been watching the series, you might want to start playing catch up. It’s just as funny as the film!
In this Wednesday’s ‘Werewolf Feud’…
The fragile truce between the vampires and Staten Island’s werewolves is tested, and Colin Robinson finds romance with a new co-worker.
“What We Do in the Shadows” follows four vampires who’ve “lived” together for hundreds of years. After an unexpected visit from their dark lord and leader, they’re reminded of what they were initially tasked with upon their arrival in Staten Island over a hundred years ago – total and complete domination of the New World.
But what exactly is the best way to go about achieving said domination?
It was a sunshiny day in Berlin. A few scattered members of the media had gathered outside a 113-year-old picturesque brick building, in front of which stood a pyramid of German beer bottles. [Correction: Greg Koch emailed to point out that the pile were a blend of international mass market lagers, including Olde English 800.] After a few minutes, Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch maneuvered a forklift out the doors; balanced between the machine’s two steel beams, a boulder—or giant stone. Koch dropped the boulder on the pile, as Stone metaphorically smashing a millennia and a half of brewing tradition. This preceded an announcement: Stone Brewing, that iconoclast of the San Diego scene, was opening a brewery in Berlin.
Koch was going to teach Germans about beer.
“Maybe Germans would take exception to this comment, but Berlin is not really a beer city yet. There are very few beer cities in Germany,” Koch said at the time. American craft beer had been growing like crazy for a decade, and Koch gave a number of interviews offering lessons from San Diego. Germany was an old and tired beer country in need of revitalization. Reinheitsgebot was a con. Germans, exposed to American craft beer, would quickly dump their Reissdorfs and Bitburgers. Koch knew how to smash industrial American beer, and he was going to do it in Germany, too.
How did that work out?
The news was announced by Koch himself in a blog post. It is a remarkable document that underscores why this act of enormous hubris failed, failed so quickly, and how Koch seems to have learned very little from the experience. The title alone is a masterpiece of denial: “Farewell Stone Brewing Berlin: too big, too bold, too soon.”
In Koch’s telling, Germany 2014 was identical to America 1996, dominated by big breweries making cheap beer. “We started Stone in 1996 because we weren’t OK with the status quo of beer in the U.S. We felt Americans deserved better, so we brewed it for them. When we saw much of Germany stuck in a similar status quo of cheap beer, we were convinced we could help.” This is a misdiagnosis of the German market, and consequently a misdiagnosis of the cure. (US breweries founded a decade and a half before Stone might also wonder about this historical recap.) German beer has indeed been in a slump, and one that has lasted quite a while. But were Germans hungering for American IPAs? Was the problem with the Germanness of the beer, or something else? Had stone looked more closely, they may have been more cautious. Undoing centuries of beer culture is a lot different than building a successful brewery in a country with little beer culture.
It’s no surprise that the project failed given the contempt in which Stone held its new country. The oppositional approach that worked so well in California didn’t sell in Berlin. But instead of asking hard questions about why the brewery didn’t achieve the volume it needed, Koch blames the Germans. “The sheer cost of building and maintaining Stone Berlin to our standards didn’t let us grow it slowly…. The real challenge was the tendency of our contractors to stop everything when a problem arose.” Nowhere in Koch’s post is there any soul-searching about how Stone might have appealed to Germans or what they could have done differently. Blaming the contractors? Come on.
Worse than blaming others for Stone’s failures to understand the country in which they’d be doing business, Koch then does some special pleading. In this failure, he suggests, one can see the ultimate triumph of the Stone way:
Maybe we should’ve started smaller, aimed for the tree line instead of the stars. I know there will be countless people with I Told You So’s. If you run into one, give ‘em a nickel for me. Like broken clocks, naysayers end up being right sometimes.
— Greg Koch
He goes on to take credit for transforming Berlin into something like San Diego. He appears to take credit for the resurgence of Berliner weisse in its home town. He believes the failure of Stone’s business came at the expense of its success in transforming Berlin’s culture. “It is from this culture of beer selection, range, and quality that we saw our vision,” he wrote. “This helped drive us to create a destination with the largest selection of draft beer in German history. We’re incredibly proud of that big number because it means big diversity and, almost always, bigger quality.” The post even concludes with a video taking a victory lap.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with thanking your team and supporters and accentuating the positive in failed but bold and risky adventure. But Koch isn’t doing that. He’s avoiding the reckoning that might have been much easier to see if he had been less focused on the Stone way than the German way. Back when Stone Berlin was launching, Koch said: “People ask me all the time whether or not I’m afraid if people in Berlin or Europe won’t like my kind of beer. And my answer is no.“ Despite all the evidence, he still seems to believe that.
Who knows if Stone might have made the Berlin project a success by building a bridge between two cultures. But the failure to even try is surely the centerpiece of this story. BrewDog, which has modeled their business strategy on Stone, will take over the keys to the building. It will be fascinating to see what changes they make and whether they learn from Stone’s actual mistakes, or double down on the narrative of cocky disruption.
fuck sweet potato fries and please stop trying to make them a thing
Bob’s Burgers has
often returned to the concept of the simplicity of a Bob Belcher burger. Sure, there
may be witty names on the chalkboard, but it’s mostly about a well-seasoned
piece of meat between two pieces of bread. Times have changed for the art of
the burger joint, and Bob is understandably frustrated when his…
The best thing to add to a fizzling show battling series-low ratings, an announcement of future in-universe films that was met with a lukewarm response, and a spin-off that has yet to see the popularity of its predecessor is, quite obviously, yet another series. At least, that appears to be AMC Networks’ logic as they…
Either Gabe Newell has a side gig modelling underwear, or someone’s visualising his alternate destiny as an underwear model with the power of photoshop.
Valve co-founder and overlord, Gabe Newell, has had his face plastered all over the packaging of what appears to be a brand of underwear in China called Long Dian – LongD for short according to the box. You’ve got to have a big ol’ pair of balls on you to swan about with that emblazoned across your underwear. Or a long D.
A photo of the smalls was posted on Reddit by u/ChggnNggts, via PCGamesN. As the site points out, whoever created the artwork took the second image of Newell to pop up on Google search, and photoshopped the head onto the body of a portly gentleman advertising the size 4XL pants.
The other possibility is that Newell has a budding career as an underwear model to occupy the time when he’s not fielding Half Life 3 questions from fans of the series.
Responses on the post allude to Half Life 3 – as a sighting of Gaben in the wild always prompts at least one such comment – as well as a link to Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman big dickp playa moment, which is just perfect.
What Newell is going to do now that he’s been found out his face has been outrageously appropriated to flog underwear is anyone’s guess.
If there’s a scene everyone knows from Pet Sematary, it’s the one where Jud Crandall, wizened voice of New England wisdom, issues an ominous warning about the graveyard of the story’s title, a place in the woods where the buried don’t stay that way. A long version of the speech appears in Stephen King’s original…
loved the first borderlands. the second one wore on me much more quickly. but, there's been enough time now since i've fucked with this series that i'm genuinely excited to play this new one.
Gearbox and publisher Take Two will release Borderlands 3 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One September 13th, confirming the date mentioned in a deleted tweet earlier this week. On PC, the RPG/shooter hybrid will be a digital exclusive through the Epic Games Store until April 2020, when it will arrive on other digital storefronts.
theresa may was cursed by a witch to die seven days after brexit, so she will delay it as long as possible to prolong her liminal state of un-life https://t.co/7XAgbNOWXG
— infamous homophil(e)ologist (@thauma_idesthai) March 27, 2019
My friend got dumped last night and this morning we had a group facetime call where everyone shared how much we hated him and it was about two hours of going through what garbage this man is. At one point I said NASA is still looking for his hairline And now they're back together
Apparently, Sucralose was discovered when one researcher asked another to "test" a chlorinated sugar compound, but they misheard and tasted it instead.. pic.twitter.com/eJY4luZCzh
Sally Ride: "The engineers at NASA, in their infinite wisdom, decided that women astronauts would want makeup - so they designed a makeup kit... You can just imagine the discussions amongst the predominantly male engineers about what should go in a makeup kit." #RideOn#Classof78pic.twitter.com/dNZ51cWELH
Asian speakers switching their Rs and Ls is an old Hollywood trope that you may have seen in movies like A Christmas Story, Lethal Weapon 4, and even Lost in Translation. In this video, Joss Fong explains where that linguistic stereotype comes from and how it does and doesn’t apply to speakers of different Asian languages.
A foreign accent is when someone speaks a second language with the rules of their first language, and one of the most persistent and well-studied foreign-accent features is a lack of L/R contrast among native Japanese speakers learning English.
It’s so well-known that American soldiers in World War II reportedly used codewords like “lallapalooza” to distinguish Japanese spies from Chinese allies. But American movies and TV shows have applied this linguistic stereotype to Korean and Chinese characters too, like Kim Jong Il in Team America: World Police, or Chinese restaurant employees singing “fa ra ra ra ra” in A Christmas Story.
However, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are completely different languages that each handle L-sound and R-sounds differently. In this episode of Vox Observatory, we take a look at each language and how it affects pronunciation for English-language learners.
watched the first episode of this and am honestly kinda disappointed.
The Taika Waititi-directed pilot episode of FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” television series kicked off last night, introducing a new group of vampires being followed around by a documentary crew in Staten Island. If the first episode was any indication, the series is going to be as hilarious as the film, as the cast is excellent and the humor pitch perfectly in line with the movie’s. In other words, if the movie made you laugh a whole bunch, the series will too.
The pilot episode primarily centered on the impending arrival of Baron Afanas, on his way to Staten Island to check up on the vamps and make sure they’re ruling over humans as he wants them to. Of course, that’s not exactly how things have been going – these vamps, after all, aren’t the brightest bulbs. Towards the end of the episode, the Baron emerged from his casket.
And yes, that was indeed the great creature performer Doug Jones, known primarily for his roles as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films and the Gill Man in The Shape of Water! Jones wore a creature suit/makeup designed by Todd Masters and his company MastersFX, and the company has provided us with some exclusive shots you can check out below.
The character was actually pretty creepy at first, speaking in an inhuman language and viciously draining a familiar, but of course, it wasn’t long before even the ancient master from the Old World flexed his funny side. The Baron is intent on ruling over the humans of Staten Island – and he might also want to rekindle his romances with both Nadja and Laszlo.
Doug Jones was merely the cherry on top of a hilarious pilot episode of “What We Do in the Shadows,” which also introduced a new type of vampire: the “energy vampire.” Mark Proksch plays Colin Robinson, roommate to traditional vamps Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Laszlo (Matt Berry), and he’s not so much a “vampire” as he is a really dull human who sucks the energy out of the room; in other words, the most boring, irritating guy at the office. It’s a clever gag that, I can be pretty sure, will remain funny for weeks to come.
And then there’s Harvey Guillén as Guillermo, Nandor’s human familiar. Guillermo yearns to be turned by Nandor, who clearly has no intention of granting his wish. Guillermo really looks to be the heart of the series, and Guillén is lovably hilarious in the role. The cast all around is fantastic, each of them feeling like worthy replacements for the film’s beloved characters.
“What We Do in the Shadows” promises to be a fun new weekly watch. Consider us on board.
Horror is so hot right now that even Matthew McConaughey is finally embracing it.
Matthew McConaughey has an interesting history with the horror genre, getting his start as a wacky member of Leatherface’s family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, an oddball sequel he and co-star Renée Zellweger famously distanced themselves from. It was McConaughey’s fourth film at the time, and it’s surely not the one he’s most proud of.
But it seems McConaughey *is* a horror fan, as he showed off last night on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” It was never actually addressed by Kimmel, but McConaughey was wearing a massive, bejeweled Jason Voorhees necklace during the interview, suggesting that while he may not be a big fan of Leatherface, he’s damn sure a fan of Jason and the Friday the 13th franchise!
Look, we already knew McConaughey was one cool motherfucker, but there’s “cool” and then there’s “casually wearing a bejeweled Jason Voorhees necklace in front of millions of people” cool. This is a whole new level of cool even for McConaughey, and right about now we can’t help but picture him as an older, more grizzled Tommy Jarvis in the next Friday movie.
Blizzard just re-released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft 2 through online gaming marketplace GOG.com. First released in the mid-nineties, the pair of real-time strategy games are now available for the first time digitally. In the first game, players return to the original Azeroth and must raise an army of humans or orcs to fight their enemies. The second Warcraft game, Tides of Darkness, takes place on the high seas, and sees humans and orcs joining forces with elves, trolls, dwarves, and other creatures.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a one-of-a-kind multiplayer puzzle game full of panicked bewilderment and a-ha moments. One player has control over a ticking time bomb; everyone else has to parse and explain how to disarm doodads using intricate rules from a bomb-defusal manual.
Each side has information the other doesn't (the helpers can't see the physical bomb and the bomb holder can't see the rule book), so attention to detail and effective communication are crucial to winning. It's the type of game that only gets better as you develop a weird shorthand with your group. There's also a range of options to make the challenge more (or less) complex, so it stays fresh.
While it has traditionally been a VR-centric experience, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodesdropped that requirement with releases on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Next up, the game will offer "fully-featured" mobile versions later this year. You won't need a VR headset to play on iOS or Android.
It's a great rambunctious party game and opening it up to mobile will make setup that much easier.
jesus, its a miracle the thing was ever made after seeing this.
Today we’re mourning the loss of Joe Pilato, most known in the horror world for pitch-perfectly playing the unforgettable antagonist Captain Rhodes in George Romero’s Day of the Dead. Pilato also had smaller roles in Dawn of the Dead and Wishmaster, but one thing you might not know about Pilato’s career is that he was at one point attached to From Dusk Till Dawn.
Actually, Pilato played the original Seth Gecko!
Way back in 1991, five years before the Robert Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn was released, makeup master Robert Kurtzman tried in vain to get the Quentin Tarantino-penned project off the ground as a low-budget feature film, and it was Kurtzman who directed a promo trailer for the proposed project as a means of acquiring the necessary funds.
For that 2-minute pitch trailer, Kurtzman brought in Joe Pilato to play the vampire-slayer Seth Gecko, the character who went on to be played by George Clooney in the 1996 film.
“I came up with the Dusk as a directing vehicle for myself,” Kurtzman explained years back. “And in the late summer of 1991 at the tail end of shooting Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness I borrowed a dolly and some track from production (with Rob Tapert’s permission) and pulled in a favor from Panavision for a camera and shot a promo short for the film. I had no money and I built the sets at KNB using whatever I could find. I had to put up the set on Friday, shoot on Sat. and have everything cleaned up on Sunday so not to disrupt KNB’s work on Monday. The effects are crude as it was all posted on video and at the time CGI was a ways off.”
now I must find some of these and make them my own.
These are available at Amazon. For example, Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders:
The wife of a wealthy Los Angeles businessman is found murdered in her bed with her lover, with the words Helter Skelter painted in blood on the walls. Columbo, America's favorite TV detective, must ask himself whether the horror of the Manson himself is ordering a fresh new round of atrocities from his San Quentin prison cell?
To solve this case Columbo will have to face evil incarnate: the madman known simply as "Charlie."
And The Grassy Knoll:
After the murder of controversial talk-show host Paul Drury, Lieutenant Columbo must unravel the thirty-year-old mystery of the assassination of President Kennedy, a crime whose perpetrator Drury had been about to expose on his final show
will stay on record saying overwatch is the best game ever.
Blizzard has been waging a war against toxic players for a while, but how is it faring, exactly? Quite well, it seems. The company's Natasha Miller has revealed that the number of matches with "negative behavior" has dropped 40 percent since the addition of endorsements, the "looking for group" feature and penalties for prematurely quitting matches. Players were not only encouraged to play as a team and stick through the entirety of matches, but could find teammates who were more likely to complement their skills and gameplay styles.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares in Germany's Bayer's fell more than 12 percent on Wednesday after a second U.S. jury ruled its Roundup weed killer caused cancer. Tuesday's unanimous jury decision in San Francisco federal court was not a finding of Bayer's liability for the cancer of plaintiff Edwin Hardeman. Liability and damages will be decided by the same jury in a second trial phase beginning on Wednesday. Bayer, which denies allegations that glyphosate or Roundup cause cancer, said it was disappointed with the jury's initial decision. Bayer acquired Monsanto, the longtime maker of Roundup, for $63 billion last year. The case was only the second of some 11,200 Roundup lawsuits to go to trial in the United States. Another California man was awarded $289 million in August after a state court jury found Roundup caused his cancer. That award was later reduced to $78 million and is on appeal.
Bayer had claimed that jury was overly influenced by plaintiffs' lawyers allegations of corporate misconduct and did not focus on the science. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called such evidence "a distraction" from the scientific question of whether glyphosate causes cancer. He split the Hardeman case into two phases: one to decide causation, the other to determine Bayer's potential liability and damages. Under Chhabria's order, the second phase would only take place if the jury found Roundup to be a substantial factor in causing Hardeman's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The jury found that it was on Tuesday.
horror movie based on this concept incoming in 5... 4... 3... 2...
dryriver shares a report from CNN: About 1,600 people have been secretly filmed in hotel rooms in South Korea, with the footage live-streamed online for paying customers to watch, police said Wednesday. Two men have been arrested and another pair investigated in connection with the scandal, which involved 42 rooms in 30 accommodations in 10 cities around the country. Police said there was no indication the businesses were complicit in the scheme. Cameras were hidden inside digital TV boxes, wall sockets and hairdryer holders and the footage was streamed online, the Cyber Investigation Department at the National Police Agency said in a statement. The streaming site had more than 4,000 members, 97 of whom paid a $44.95 monthly fee to access extra features, such as the ability to replay certain live streams. The site had more than 4,000 members, 97 of whom paid a $44.95 monthly fee to access extra features, such as the ability to replay certain live streams. Between November 2018 and this month, police said, the service brought in upward of $6,000.
welcome to 2019, where every profitable company with cash flow must buy its way into every profitable business sector, for some reason.
Google's Stadio cloud-gaming service may be intercepted by a similar service from Walmart. According to a report from US Gamer, the American retail giant is looking into launching its own cloud gaming service. From the report: Multiple sources familiar with Walmart's plans, who wish to remain anonymous, confirmed to USG that the retail giant is exploring its own platform to enter in the now-competitive video game streaming race. No other details were revealed other than it will be a streaming service for video games, and that Walmart has been speaking with developers and publishers since earlier this year and throughout this year's Game Developers Conference. Walmart's discussions with developers for its streaming service have been secretive, and it's unclear how far along the service is in-development. But our sources are confident that this is a space Walmart is trying to move into.
Though Walmart might sound like a strange company to be jumping into the streaming tech space, the move isn't wholly unexpected. In recent years due to competition from Amazon, Walmart has been increasingly looking into more tech-focused markets beyond its traditional physical retail chain. Over time, Walmart has integrated its physical stores with its large online presence, offering deliveries, app integrations, and in-store pick up services. Walmart also has a technology arm in Silicon Valley called Walmart Labs, which has 6,000 employees and develops tech for Walmart's digital presence. In addition it boasts tools like Cruxlux, which is a search engine designed to reveal the connection between any two people, places, or things. Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data. Data centers are a centerpiece of Google's Stadia streaming service and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple also own powerful data facilities, all of whom are also coincidentally working in streaming technology.
"A Reddit user recently posted a seemingly innocent question to the subreddit Too Afraid To Ask, and it blew up into one of the greatest debates of our time"
It sounds dirty, but we swear it’s not. A GoFundMe campaign seeking to change the name of Dripping Springs, TX, a tiny Hays County hamlet west of Austin, to Pound Town. Yes, we’re aware that’s what your uncle calls his bedroom, but the goal here isn’t to make Mom blush, but rather to honor town founders Dr. Joseph and…
1. this has become such a "viral" thing that almost the entire first page of results for "florida man july 20" were about the meta idea of googling "florida man" and your birthday.
2. the 10th result was "Man faces animal cruelty charges after tackling brown pelican in Florida: report"
More on the fake wall from @NYPDTransit: It was built out of plywood by the @MTA on March 12 inside the Court Street station on the R train, and essentially created a small room or enclosure with a door to the outside
Stormind Games’ Remothered: Tortured Fathers will finally have a Switch release. The devs announced today that they’ve signed a deal with Japanese game publishing company DICO Co. Ltd to bring the title to Nintendo’s handheld later this year.
The game will first see a release on the Nintendo eShop in Japan, with a worldwide release slated soon after. We took a look at the PC version of the game last year. Remothered: Tortured Fathers is also available for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Based on Ken Kirzinger’s portrayal of Jason in Freddy vs. Jason, NECA has just unveiled their latest Ultimate Jason Voorhees action figure, which includes THREE different masks!
NECA explains, detailing the upcoming 7″ figure, “This new Jason figure is even more sizable than other Ultimate Jasons, as appropriate for a horror showdown on the movie’s scale. He comes with 3 removable masks, 2 machetes (regular and bloody), teddy bear, and fire effect that can attach to either machete to recreate the final blistering battle.”
This bad boy will be shipping out in Quarter 3, 2019.
Nintendo proved that its cardboard Labo kits could actually be decent gaming accessories -- especially for kids. But the idea of using Labo to bring VR to the Switch sounds even more far-fetched. Could an under-powered system with a low-resolution screen actually produce believable virtual reality? It turns out, it can.
