firehose

History will tell you that John Lennon and Tupac Shakur were both gunned down by assassins, that Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain were both so depressed that they committed suicide—yet what if they actually just wanted to escape to a tropical island, where they could spend the rest of their days drinking frosty almost-beers? That’s the alternate theory proposed by this commercial for Bavaria Radler, which finds all of the above, along with Elvis and Bruce Lee, living in blessed seclusion, far from the madding crowds, but always near a cold bottle of fruit-flavored beer.

The resulting ad is a concoction of humor and celebrity desecration that goes down every bit as smooth as a brew mixed with lemon-lime soda. Marilyn rubs sunscreen on 2Pac’s “Thug Life” tattoo. Lennon (who, honestly, looks more like Brian Cox with a hippie wig) calls the bartender over with “Hey Jude ...

The famous cryptographer Hal Finney, the second user of the virtual currency Bitcoin, lives in the same town as Dorian Nakamoto, the man Newsweek says is responsible for creating Bitcoin. Andy Greenberg of Forbes had a hunch that Finney might be the ghostwriter who polished Dorian's non-native English prose. But when he went to meet Finney, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he became convinced otherwise. The result isn't the scoop Greenberg wanted, but it's a fascinating portrait of an extremely accomplished man.

An unknown issue with Twitter is causing heavily retweeted posts to disappear from the site, including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering tweet from the Oscars this month. The permalinked page for the tweet, which included a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper of DeGeneres, Brad Pitt, and other stars, now leads to a notice reading "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" The same issue appears to be affecting The Verge and other accounts with large followings when their posts receive a significant number of retweets. Twitter tells The Verge that the vanished tweets are a known issue and that the company is looking into it.

Emoji — the tiny art that can be stuck in texts, emails, and elsewhere to emote thoughts, feelings, and replace entire words — doesn't have a whole lot of diversity when it comes to the humans who are depicted. Very few of those characters, which originated from Japanese phone carriers, are non-Caucasian, though it might not be that way for long. Speaking to MTV Act, an Apple spokeswoman says the company has been "working closely" with the Unicode Consortium (of which it's a member) to update, and perhaps expand the emoji character set:

Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.

The last big update to Apple's emoji collection came in 2012 when the company added gay and lesbian couples as part iOS 6. That update also made emoji available to all users without any hackery. Previously, users needed to install third-party apps to enable the specialized keyboard set.

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson said today that he is shelving plans to work on an Oculus Rift version of his hit game, following the VR company's $2 billion acquisition by Facebook.

Writing on his blog, just a few hours after the Facebook announcement, Notch stated that while he had been excited about Rift and had backed the project at a high level on Kickstarter, he is disappointed by Facebook's involvement.

"I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook," he wrote. "Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven't historically been a stable platform. There's nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me. And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

Notch wrote that he visited Oculus' offices recently, and was impressed with the operation. He spoke with John Carmack about the challenges of VR technology and design.

"Of course, they wanted Minecraft," he added. "I said that it doesn't really fit the platform, since it's very motion based, runs on Java (that has a hard time delivering rock solid 90 fps, especially since the players build their own potentially hugely complex levels), and relies a lot on [Graphical User Interface]. But perhaps it would be cool to do a slimmed down version of Minecraft for the Oculus. Something free, similar to the Minecraft PI Edition, perhaps? So I suggested that, and our people started talking to their people to see if something could be done. And then, not two weeks later, Facebook buys them."

He offered praise and congratulations to the Oculus team, who he described as a "dedicated and talented group of people," but added that "this is where we part ways."

"Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts," he wrote. "Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build."

Notch said that he would continue to work on other VR projects, and added that "competition is a very good thing." He linked to an Oculus app called Minecrift.