I’ll be honest — I’m not entirely that interested in the Scooby Doo Team Up DC crossovers for the most part. Usually when I come across one, I read the issue description, think, “But there’s no Harlem Globetrotters!” and move on. But not this day, friends. On this day, I find myself gazing upon Velma and Daphne wearing Amazonian armor, and I am pleased. Praise be to Hippolyta!
Scooby Doo Team Up #5 drops next week on July 2nd. Here’s the official blurb:
Wonder Woman’s homeland is under attack by mythological monsters that vanish into thin air before the Amazon warriors can fight back! Scooby, Wonder Woman and the gang must work together to solve this mystery…assuming Daphne and Velma complete their Amazon training in time!
Jinkies! What’s that you said? Amazon training? Be still my beating warrior heart.
Snowpiercer is nothing close to a perfect experience, but it’s a thousand times more memorable than most experiences you’ll have this summer at the cinema
The Weinstein Company
It is a rare and refreshing experience these days to go to the theater and see an epic science-fiction action film in the summer that is trying to make a point. I very much enjoy watching franchise cogs that work mostly because of how they slot into all the other moving parts around them; I’m also totally partial to nonsensical, explosion-filled garbage that distracts me with sound and flashing lights. But Snowpiercer is that rare experience you don’t get to have much in the summer anymore, a loud, clanging, original action flick that’s grabbing you by the lapels and yelling in your ears.
There’s been much made of Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho’s mixed first experience making an English language film, clashing with Harvey Weinstein over editing his movie into something more commercial. Supposedly this 125-minute cut is what the director is satisfied with, and that makes sense to me, because Snowpiercer is a demented nightmare vision of a Hollywood action movie, and it’s lost nothing of its committed, neo-Marxist message, which it tries as hard as it can to bash into your brain.
Snowpiercer is set after the onset of an ice age, triggered by humanity’s efforts to solve global warming, and set on a train that runs perpetually around the earth, doing one circuit per year, using some combo of a perpetual motion engine and recycled ice that it’s better not to think too hard about. The glorious advantage of setting the movie entirely on a train is that it’s so easy to make the class stratifications Bong wants to talk about clear. At the back of the train, conditions are grim; everyone’s got soot on their faces, people are missing limbs, they eat black jellied “protein bars” handed out by the military, and once in a while their kids get measured and snatched away for reasons unknown.
The film starts slow and with thudding obviousness. We’ve seen enough movies to get the impoverished conditions Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell) and Tanya (Octavia Spencer) suffer in, and we understand that they would want to rebel, guided by their wise old leader Gilliam (John Hurt). If that wasn’t clear, Tilda Swinton swans in with crazy false teeth and glasses, a funhouse-mirror Margaret Thatcher, spitting orders and braying about the “sacred engine,” reinforcing a caste system that has clearly existed since the train began its journey.
The rebellion happily gets started pretty quickly, and that’s when the fun begins. The best kind of dystopian film is one that reveals little details of its world bit by bit, peeling back layers to get to the central mystery underneath, and Snowpiercer’s train structure makes that all the easier. As Curtis and company storm and hack their way forward, the sets get more elaborate, weird industrial drugs and translator gadgets get dug up, and we’re joined by Bong’s longtime collaborators Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung (both featured in his best-known film, the brilliant monster movie The Host) as an engineer and a psychic who can help them get further forward, although they travel for their own reasons.
The joy of Snowpiercer is two-fold—watching the sets change and get more and more elaborate as the cars get richer and richer is fantastic, and all the money of this $40 million mini-epic has clearly been devoted to making these carriages as original as possible. The action is crunching, ear-splittingly loud and mostly very brutal, but it’s always well-staged and somehow Bong manages to change up his set-pieces even though they’re all taking place in, y’know, a train.
Evans is a nice brooding pair of shoulders to rest things on, but the joy of Snowpiercer’s ensemble is the weirdoes around him, particularly Swinton’s horrible dime-store rent-a-Stalin and Song’s hypnotized, drug-sniffing iconoclast. We build to a showdown at the front of the train with another recognizable actor who specializes in this sort of monologuing, who thinks himself as miserable in his opulent isolation as those at the back.
Bong’s point, that our stratifications are as much about isolating social classes from the others as they are about inequality, is well taken. He’s making no bones about drawing our eyes straight to his point, which is both refreshing and jarring, and his wacky mix of tones is tiresome at times, refreshing at others (one jaunt inside a schoolroom led by a cracked-out Allison Pill is both). Snowpiercer is nothing close to a perfect experience, but it’s a thousand times more memorable than most experiences you’ll have this summer at the cinema.
Thanks to Adafruit fan Paul Bartek for sending in his great project! Check out the full tutorial here.
I am a senior majoring in Computer Engineering from Chicago, Illinois. I follow your Rasp-Pi, BBB and Arduino blogs on a daily basis! I thought I would take a shot at creating a Raspberry Pi Tutorial / Blog.
The tutorial that I am sending in titled “OBD-Pi” is how to turn your Raspberry Pi & aftermarket head unit into an advanced display for your vehicles engine data.
pyOBD (aka pyOBD-II or pyOBD2) is an open source OBD-II (SAE-J1979) compliant scantool software written entirely in Python. It is designed to interface with low-cost ELM 32x OBD-II diagnostic interfaces such as ELM-USB.
I took a fork of pyOBD’s software from there GitHub repository, https://github.com/peterh pyobd, and used this as the basis for my program.
The program connects through the OBD-II interface, displays the gauges available dependent on the particular vehicle and displays realtime engine data to the cars aftermarket head unit in a interactive GUI.
I would be ecstatic if this made the Adafruit Blog under the Raspberry Pi category!
In 1983, at a showing of Strauss’ Elektra, the Canadian Opera Company changed opera forever. It introduced a concept that its creator termed surtitles, which projected translated lyrics alongside the performers. It allowed viewers to read the dialogue as they heard it sung in German, rather than having to read the plot beforehand or buy a paper libretto with the text. It also launched a veritable culture war.
To some, projections allowed audiences to appreciate operas on a new level. To others, they were a pointless, tasteless, even "pathetic" distraction. Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine was quoted in 1985 saying that the Met would show surtitles (often known as supertitles) "over my dead body." But today, supertitles are ubiquitous. Levine himself came around in 1995, when seat-back systems let individual patrons turn the titles off. A technology that was once despised had become indispensable.
Pygmalion for Glass showed at the Lifestyle-Trimco Mannequin Showroom, with a conventional supertitle production at Madame Tussauds.
The underlying lesson is not lost on Eric Einhorn, the founder and artistic director of On Site Opera. The New York-based company, founded in 2012, performs operas that eschew the traditional stage. For its latest project — an adaptation of Rameau's Pygmalion performed amidst wax statues and mannequins — it tested a new kind of translation, projected not on a wall but on the lens of Google Glass. Working with veteran supertitling company Figaro Systems, On Site Opera streamed its lyrics through a web app called MobiText, allowing them to be played on Glass or a cellphone. It’s not just an experiment, it’s a way for On Site Opera to expand beyond an English-only repertoire. "There are some companies that do translations in English, singing translations, and that’s not something that we want to do. We like the idea of doing it in the original language," says Einhorn. But the venues it picks — including Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club and the Bronx Zoo — can’t effectively support projectors. "It became a real question for us — how do we do that? How do we get titles to people effectively?"
"It's a technology that has a learning curve."
At a showing last week, the system worked surprisingly well. Readable but minimally distracting translations floated in the corner of my vision, allowing me to move my eyes instead of my head. And unlike a seat-back or projection system, it didn’t matter which direction I was facing. That meant that performers could walk down the aisle singing, or start dancing in the back rows, and there was no reason not to watch them. Glass has rarely felt natural to me, but this replaced a system that was already artificial and sometimes inconvenient, requiring nothing more than a glance upward. Few things seem like obvious fits for Google Glass so far, but this is one of them.
Despite this, Glass’ rough edges showed through. On Site Opera’s original plan, at one point, was to get enough Glass sets for an entire audience. But the price tag — potentially $150,000 — wasn’t even the biggest problem. "It’s a technology that has a learning curve," admits Einhorn, a Glass owner himself. Most attendees would be getting a crash course in fitting and navigating an unfinished device they’d never used. "It was a blessing in disguise that we were unable to secure those 100 pairs of Glass that I was hoping we would get. It would have turned into a tutorial nightmare." My biggest problem was power: the roughly 45-minute, one-act opera drained half my battery.
Eric Einhorn of On Site Opera and Geoff Webb of Figaro Systems.
Despite being advertised as "Pygmalion for Glass Explorers," most people weren’t actually wearing Google Glass. Einhorn estimates there were 10 to 15 people wearing headsets in the 50-person audience at my show; I saw slightly over a half-dozen in an informal count. At a second 100-person show over the weekend, On Site Opera passed a few sets out to the audience, where around a dozen people tried it for at least a little while. Most people spent the opera periodically looking down at their phones to see the translations, an experience that, while it didn’t look bad, seemed significantly less seamless.
Future operas could take place in open settings or across multiple rooms
If Glass becomes common — which will almost certainly require improving the hardware and user experience and slashing the price — the ratio will change. But right now, it raises an obvious question: what are you trading off by asking audiences to rely on their own hardware? On Site Opera is geared towards a wide range of ages and experience levels with opera, and Einhorn says he’s working to make sure no one gets left out, even with more widely available technology. On Site Opera might not be able to provide Glass, but it’s considering lending attendees iPads or simple printed librettos. "There might be people in any portion of that audience base that either don’t have a smartphone or don’t want to use a smartphone," he says. "There are people who the idea of that is not quite nice, to them. They want to turn their technology off and experience the event."
What On Site Opera gains is the chance to experiment with new, more dynamic productions. It may have taken place in a temporarily converted showroom full of mannequins, but Pygmalion took place mostly on a traditional stage. Now that Glass and Figaro’s online supertext system has passed its first test, the team is looking at more unorthodox settings — like an opera where performers pass through multiple rooms over the course of the story. "The idea of not having to set up six different projectors and have all that equipment, for all of it to run off of a single computer, is really exciting," says Einhorn.
But all this, he notes, depends on what Google does with the technology. Given that, was he disappointed when Glass wasn’t mentioned at all in the I/O keynote? "I was a little disappointed. I was just surprised, more than anything," he says, referencing Glass’ recent launch in the UK and the improved version that came out the day before the keynote. "It just seemed like there would at least be some mention of it."
For now, Glass is a niche and polarizing device. In addition to raising privacy concerns, it’s frequently seen as strange or tacky, and Einhorn says he’s seen some pushback from people both online and in the industry. But though On Site Opera will continue to gauge audience reception to Glass, he hopes that like supertext, Glass can win over critics. "Some people think Glass is a wonderful thing, like I do, and other people don’t really care for it. So the idea of implementing a technology you don’t like into an art form that you love … people get very passionate about their opera, which is what makes it so great," he says. "What’s fantastic about it is when something in opera can start a conversation this way. It’s certainly not a staid museum relic anymore."
hi saucie 'Finally Bar Vivant has a unique, and possibly raucous, event to wrap the week up—they're having a ‘TXOTX’ party, which is based on how cider is traditionally drunk in the Basque region of Spain. Basically the cider shoots from a barrel and you catch as much as you can in your glass. Bar Vivant, 2225 E Burnside, June 29, 4-7pm, $20 for all the cider you can catch, plus one tapas'
Yes, there is still time to enjoy the hard cider festivities—there’s a bunch of good stuff happening over the weekend. Here are a few highlights, but check out the website here, for the comprehensive list.
Cider pub Bushwhacker obviously have a load going on—perhaps the most fun is on Friday, when the Brewvana bus collects drinkers from the pub (they are given a can of Cascadia to keep them happy) and drops them off at Reverend Nat’s taproom. Here, they get to taste some British ciders, before hopping back on the bus to try some completely different French ciders at Bushwhacker. There are native cheeses, too! English and French Cider Experience, Bushwhacker Cider, 1212 SE Powell, June 27, 6pm, $25
St. Honoré Boulangerie has been embracing Cider Week, offering unique cider cocktails and desserts all week. They also have a cider happy hour with live music from Djangophiles (French-style gypsy jazz) and pourings from five cider makers. Plus, there’s an Alsatian happy hour food menu. St. Honoré Boulangerie, 3333 SE Division, June 27, 6pm, $6 tasting fee
Reverend Nat’s themselves will be celebrating their taproom’s first anniversary with a special event on Saturday featuring rare ciders from the cellar, the unveiling of a new 12-tap cider keg cooler serving other Northwest ciders, and free pizza. Reverend Nat’s Cidery & Public Taproom, 1813 NE 2nd, June 28, from 12 noon
Phantom Rabbit Farm and chef Mark Wooten are offering a multi-course dinner paired with ciders from Reverend Nat’s (yes, again. But the cider is great, so who cares). Dishes will be based around whatever has been harvested that day from the farm in the West Hills, as well as locally sourced beef and fish. Phantom Rabbit Farm to Table Dinner, 13130 NW Springville Lane, June 29, 5pm, $85
New urban cidery Alter Ego (whose members have winemaking experience for Helioterra, Whoa Nelly Wines and Guild Winemakers) released their first two ciders this week, a fresh-pressed apple cider and a raspberry version. They are both now available on tap at Coopers Hall, where it's made, but 1856 has a special tasting where you can meet the cider makers. 1856, 1465 NE Prescott, June 29, 3-5pm
Finally Bar Vivant has a unique, and possibly raucous, event to wrap the week up—they're having a ‘TXOTX’ party, which is based on how cider is traditionally drunk in the Basque region of Spain. Basically the cider shoots from a barrel and you catch as much as you can in your glass. Bar Vivant, 2225 E Burnside, June 29, 4-7pm, $20 for all the cider you can catch, plus one tapas
'There is, sadly, no way I am going to play an even remotely substantial part of Elite Dangerous while wearing an Oculus Rift, or at least not this version of the Oculus Rift, because although I’ll have these magical moments, I just won’t get anywhere. I can’t fight like this, I can’t know where I’m travelling to like this. It’s a song that begins beautifully, breathtakingly, but descends into atonal clanging after the first verse. The goggles, they do something, but not quite enough.'
Amid my frequent worrying that the rise of the YouTuber means I’m going to starve to death in a couple of years’ time, I take occasional solace that there’s one aspect of games that even those new frontier-folk can’t replicate the experience of either – VR with a game that truly suits it, which in this particular case is Elite: Dangerous. Words or videos cannot describe it, but so help me I’ll give it a shot anyway.
I have a love/mild disdain relationship with the Oculus Rift, a first-gen version of which I’ve had sat around for some time but very rarely use. Whenever I do rig it up – which involves far too many trailing cables, and that’s part of the problem – I will then spend a short while marvelling at the first couple of minutes of whatever I’m playing with it. Ooh! *Gazes*. Wow! *Cranes neck in all direction*. Incroyable! *Moves head in slow figure-8 pattern*. Then I’ll try to actually play the game and it all goes horribly wrong.
Most of that’s down to the ultra-low resolution of this initial model meaning text is unreadable unless it’s typed a mile high. Some of it is because very few games have full, official support for the headset, so their interfaces and menus precariously dangle somewhere at the furthest edge of my over-exerted peripheral vision. A lot of it is because successfully using a keyboard or gamepad when you’ve got a piece of black plastic strapped to your eyes is about as easy changing a tyre during a total eclipse.
Even so: those first few minutes. ‘Immersion’ is a bit of a dirty word to me, because it’s a term that’s been much-abused by marketing people over the years, squandered on anything from “ludicrously long and involved storyline about nothing” to “really big explosions” to “but look, you can see your own legs!” Perhaps the fight to reclaim to it, to make it once again mean “I really do feel as though I have been transported to another place and now exist within it, at least until I realise I’ve lost track of where my hands are on the keyboard so I’m going to have to take these damn goggles off”, can begin here.
Let me stop moaning and get back to the wonder of modern VR. I’ve never written about it before because I’m not sure how to. Yeah, there’s all the practical stuff, about wires and artificial blindness and discombobulated menus, but the part that matters, the part that’s about my brain saying “wow wow wow” in a hundred different wordless ways, how do I that? How does one of those charismatic YouTubers who’re inadvertently destroying my hopes of a stable career do it either? Well, probably by actually saying “wow wow wow” in an engagingly sonorous tone, but even so: we’re in the realm of the purely sensory and first-hand experience is the only way to get any true sense of what it’s like.
My case in point today: finally getting around to rigging up the Rift with Elite: Dangerous, as part of my impending forays into its ‘Premium Beta.’ It took some fiddling, because it always does (and this remains the major reason I struggle to see this tech ever going mainstream, regardless of how many Zuckerbucks are ploughed into it), but once that was done, I found myself sat in space. Sat in space. Low-resolution space with a distracting visible pixel grid, yes, but space. Star-speckled, inky-black enormity above and around me, the soft hum and twinkling lights of a ship’s cockpit below and also around.
The game even rendered a body – arms, torso, legs – which seemed to connect to my own neck at just the right point, and while they were not my own hands I saw twitch around the throttle or toy with the rudder, they did feel a part of me. I knew I could do what they were doing, I knew that they would react to and replicate my pushing forwards on the thrust or yawing the stick to the left. A gap between man and machine was bridged, at least in part and at least for a time. And all I did for a good fifteen minutes was sit there, beneath the stars – in the stars – and look around. Living the smallest part of a dream humanity has always had: to be up there, to leave land behind, to feel like part of the infinite.
See? You see? I am trying to describe the indescribable, and all I can manage is cloying purple prose. The Rift/extremely pretty space game combo is doing something to my senses that I haven’t experienced before, and I don’t know how words or video can possibly convey that.
In any case, the spell was broken the first time I tried to target something. Oh, it’s a lovely thing to simply turn my head down and left and see the targeting menu pop up in a gold-orange hologram shimmer, such a natural gesture and such an improvement upon the non-VR version of the game’s protracted button combo. A split-second after that though, suddenly I’m squinting to read the text, squinting to see where my selected target is on the mini-map, and most of all crushingly aware that I’m in a videogame, wearing something that makes me look like I’m doing budget Daft Punk cosplay, and battling the rising urge to wrench the thing off and just get on with playing the game and shooting some spaceships without complication.
Instead I gritted my teeth, squeezed my eyes into ferocious shapes until I could make out words that might be ‘Request Docking’, and proceeded towards the vast, rotating hexagon that was the nearest space station. My problems faded away as I made the approach, this majestic collision of nature unbound and humanity’s greatest technological vision (or at least a vision of that vision). Part of its great effect simply boils down that I’m moving my head as though I’m moving in space, which is a profoundly different thing to pulling a mouse of stick and making space move across a screen, but it’s coupled with the Rift’s total takeover of peripheral vision. A lot of it, too, is that Elite: Dangerous is a game which has clearly decided “let’s get the feeling of being in space right before we shovel feature after feature into this thing.” It looks right. It moves right. It sounds incredible, which is a big part of why it feels incredible.
In and around the space stations, “looming” is the only appropriate word, but it doesn’t begin to convey the enormity. What my eyes saw and believed was an impeccable science fiction fantasy: what anyone else walking into the room would have seen was a man with a box strapped to his head, holding what looked like a toy machine gun sawn in two in his hands, mouth gaping, head yawing wildly, completely lost to something that wasn’t there.
I feel no shame. Whatever I looked like, I was having an incredible journey to another universe, and that seems more important than a passer-by thinking I looked like a right dildo.
Yeah, I know, they should have sent a poet. And yeah, c’mon, you knew full well that quote was coming at some point.
There is, sadly, no way I am going to play an even remotely substantial part of Elite Dangerous while wearing an Oculus Rift, or at least not this version of the Oculus Rift, because although I’ll have these magical moments, I just won’t get anywhere. I can’t fight like this, I can’t know where I’m travelling to like this. It’s a song that begins beautifully, breathtakingly, but descends into atonal clanging after the first verse. The goggles, they do something, but not quite enough.
It will improve, hopefully when that second-gen headset is released, and though I retain many doubts about whether the Rift can be fleshed out to find mainstream acceptance or suitability for most games, I do suspect Elite will prove to be its first milestone game. It’s recreating something so specific and so otherwise impossible – something that is really part and parcel of what this game is trying to do, rather than just an additive gimmick.
More from Elite Dangerous – this time goggle-free – very soon.
BEAVERTON, OR—Saying that he has to deal with this shit every single night, local 6-year-old Andrew Neel was exasperated to learn Thursday that the bedtime story his mother would be reading him was once again from the fucking Bible, sources confirme...
What do the ISS astronauts do in their free time? Sometimes, they like to act out action movie scenes—and the part where a character falls to his death is much more fun in microgravity. That's when they aren't playing with their floating food or doing weightless backflips.
via Matthew Connor: "UGH fuck these people so much"
tw: harassment
“We were able much more in a close situation to be more personal with the individuals going in,” he [Ray Neary, protester] said. “I noticed that immediately. There’s a certain freedom to it, where you’re not yelling and sounding like you’re obtrusive in some way.”
WBUR reports from outside the Planned Parenthood clinic on Commonwealth Avenue today.
This tutorial from Make Tech Easier shows you how to install the java development kit on your raspberry pi:
The Java programming language was first released back in 1995, and since then it has grown to become a giant among giants. According to Oracle, there are more than 9 million Java developers worldwide. And because of Android, there are millions of smartphones which run Java, while simultaneously every Blu-ray player in the world ships with Java. Last, but not least, Java is available for the Raspberry Pi!
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
I don't think I have the patience or the money to battle them, but does anyone have any experience in this area?
I'm thinking I should drum up a "please give me credit" form letter, but I don't even know where to begin with the legalese.
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but with such a wide audience I feel like I could be rolling in a bit of business from it.
Thanks internet strangers.
EDIT: No. Seriously. Thank you internet strangers. So much amazing advice! Also, so many of you have popped over to the Facebook to defend my honor. We have so much amazing art in this town, I'm absolutely flattered by this response.
And to those asking, Stuffy was found! He's doing great. His family is thrilled to have him back and he seems glad to be home too! <3
EDIT 2: I sent an invoice to several different employees, and within 30 minutes recieved:
"Hi Amy: We are looking into this now. You should hear back from someone at IFC soon. Thanks, *removed IFC employee name"
EDIT 3: "Hi Amy,
I oversee all Portlandia social media posts on behalf of IFC.
We are sorry for the misuse of your image. We reached out to the person who orginally posted this image on Instagram and thought we had the appropriate permission to repost.
Given that it's Friday evening over here, could we talk first thing Monday morning regarding payment? Again, apologies for the confusion.
Thanks
*removed IFC employee name"
If they pay me the $300 I'm aksing, $100 will go to Stuffy, $100 to the shelter that saved him, and I'm keeping $100 for my troubles. :) Keep your fingers crossed!
I guess that means that I'll see y'all on Monday. Thanks again for all the help today, Reddit. Back to waiting....
EDIT 4: I asked who they got permission from, and it's right here. You can't tell from my censoring, but this user is pretending to be a cat.
I'm hoping this doesn't turn into a witch hunt for them, as I'm going to send them a message personally. I can't expect everyone to have good etiquette about this sort of thing. I still don't understand why IFC didn't try to reach out to someone named "amy" rather than this fake cat IG profile and a half cropped logo. It seems pretty obvious to me. :/
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy
The Weinstein Company 
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
