"I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character...One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people." Director Guillermo del Toro on how Pacific Rim deviates from typical summer blockbusters, and how Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, will be a formidable, complex character.
Pacific Rim continues to be compared to blockbusters like Transformers, but, if the focus on characters in the most recent commercials wasn't evidence enough, Guillermo del Toro has set the record strait in his interview with The Star. Pacific Rim is not a movie set to exploit its female lead or compromise her character any more than it will its male lead, and del Toro stresses that he made decisions at every turn to make sure his Kaiju versus Mecha movie didn't become just another summer movie. It's looking more and more like Pacific Rim will focus on adventure and interesting characters, without falling into the glorification of violence and two-dimensional characters that movies like Transformers lead us to expect in our giant-robot-filled summer films. Finally we can watch giant monsters fight Mecha and watch an interesting story unfold!
I have just added a yearly reminder to my Google Calendar: July 5th, 2013: Remember the Roomba. That’s the day gaming changed forever. The day that my eyes were opened to the true capabilities of a medium that has so often failed to live up to its promise. I’ve just wiped the Half-Life 3 beta, the only copy it turns out, off my PC to make room for the game I’m about to link to, because not even Valve’s latest and greatest game can live up to it. And, yes, I am procrastinating, because I want to keep it to myself for just a little bit longer. From the makers of Robot Vacuum Simulator 2012, the Citizen Kane of games, I present Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013. The Citizen Kane 3D of games.
How can you improve upon Robot Vacuum Simulator 2012? That’s the mountain Stolidus Simulations had to climb. The solution: a 3D engine, a multiplayer mode, and jazz music.
You collect the dirty lumps that have been cast on the floor, but really those lumps are really the dark heart of humanity, and you are the flawed hero subtly removing it from society’s gaze. You’re there, always working, never stopping. Never appreciated.
If there’s not an RPS league for this by the end of the day then you don’t deserve games.
A friend of mine who works for a moving company gave me this turtle + aquarium because he helped move a family that didn't want it anymore. I don't know anything about turtles or aquariums but you're welcome to come by and take a look.
'“Downtown is livelier — we feel as though we have been in Milan for the weekend,” said Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum'
The NY Times Real Estate section is the Rosencrantz to the Style Section's Guildenstern, the yin and yang of out-of-touch manufactured high class trend stories. This weekend, the world's most unintentionally hilarious newspaper put forth yet another brilliant missive about the struggles of the oh so rich centered around a particularly relatable concern: "You are seeing people ask themselves: Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?" said Michele Kleier, the president and chairwoman of Kleier Residential. "It has become a very sexy thing to do, especially for those people living a sedate Park Avenue lifestyle." [ more › ]
If you love the look of plants on your desk, but have a nasty habit of killing them through neglect, consider this faux greenery as an alternative. What look like tall blades of grass are actually unfortunately-named Pooleaf pens with long wisps of silicone coming off the end.
They’re just $5 each, which isn’t too shabby, until you realize you’ll actually have to spend well over $100 to fill a pot to recreate the beautiful lawn effect. On the plus side, it will be incredibly obvious if someone steals one of your pens. [via Gizmodo]
snorkmaiden: '"Part time" is a misnomer. They are typically full time jobs, some with forced overtime, even. Some of them are endless temp positions, some have mandatory breaks, a la Microsoft. The only reason they are classed in this way is so that corporations don't have to create head counts for more FTEs for whom they must provide real benefits and job security. It also looks better when there's not as big of a pay gap between the CEO and the least-paid employee. Because technically, the least-paid employee is the entry-level FTE, despite the fact that fairly senior temps might do much more work for much less pay.'
cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."
Рабочий вырвал мир из тьму и озарит его светом просвещения. / The worker has pulled the world out of darkness and illuminated it with the light of enlightment.
otters: "haters who are uninterested in medieval glasswork and the economics surrounding it to the left"
Quinns: Glass making! That's something we all have a passion for, right? I'm sure there isn't a child reading this who doesn't dream of growing up to make glass. Ah, the heat of the furnace! The otherworldy, suggestive nothingness of the... the glass. Where would we be without glass? We'd be sat in the dark counting our armpits, that's where.
Which is, of course, why the noble Uwe Rosenberg, designer of such crushing hits as Agricola and Le Havre, has announced his next game will be Glass Road: A game of supervising a glass workshop in 14th century Bavaria.
Now, I'll admit there's a small chance that you might not be excited by medieval glasswork. If that's the case, don't worry! Theme aside, this looks like a lovely game.
DragonCon has separated from its founder, Ed Kramer, who has been awaiting trial for sex crimes involving minors, and who received a large annual payout from the event. His continued financial interest in the event has been controversial for some time.
As hostilities rise in Egypt, Marya Hannun sees a parallel fight playing out on Wikipedia:
“To describe the events which allowed Morsi’s rise to power as a ‘revolution’ but those which led to his downfall as a ‘coup’ is clearly biased and violates NPOV [neutral point of view],” one user writes. “A number of the comments by those defending the use of ‘coup’ in the title and trying to shut down discussion frankly strike me as Wiki-lawyering.”
Others have argued that it’s biased not to call the overthrow of Morsy a coup: The “military removing the president and installing a new one (even if not military), suspending the constitution and seizing control over various state apparatus, e.g. state TV fits the normal definition of a coup, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be anything in the constitution or other legal basis for these actions (to be clear I’m only referring to the legal aspect not the ethical or moral or whatever),” one Wikipedian points out. “It is called by the reliable media a coup d’état,deposing a president especially elected is a coup d’état ,and wikipedia only goes with neutral naming,” another notes. …
For what it’s worth, the debate isn’t limited to English-speaking Wikipedia users. The corresponding Arabic page on Egypt’s political upheaval is entitled, “The coup of July 3, 2013 in Egypt.” And the first heading under the corresponding discussion frantically reads, “Revolution or Coup?!”
'The EDA destroyed not only (uninfected) desktop computers but also printers, cameras, keyboards, and even mice. The destruction only stopped—sparing $3 million of equipment—because the agency had run out of money to pay for destroying the hardware.
'The total cost to the taxpayer of this incident was $2.7 million: $823,000 went to the security contractor for its investigation and advice, $1,061,000 for the acquisition of temporary infrastructure (requisitioned from the Census Bureau), $4,300 to destroy $170,500 in IT equipment, and $688,000 paid to contractors to assist in development a long-term response.'
The Economic Development Administration (EDA) is an agency in the Department of Commerce that promotes economic development in regions of the US suffering slow growth, low employment, and other economic problems. In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there was a possible malware infection within the two agencies' systems.
The NOAA isolated and cleaned up the problem within a few weeks.
The EDA, however, responded by cutting its systems off from the rest of the world—disabling its enterprise e-mail system and leaving its regional offices no way of accessing centrally held databases.
William Lynch resigned on Monday from his post as the CEO of Barnes and Noble, following months of plummeting sales of the digital Nook division, the signature piece of Lynch's push to bring Barnes and Noble into an e-future. The resignation is one of many signs that the company is changing tack yet again, after an aggressive move into the crowded field of digital sales failed to pay off in the end.
Lynch, who gave no reason for his resignation, led the company's web division until getting the CEO job in 2010. At the time, his entrance into the role read as abrupt, but clear shift in direction for the company. And while his exit is no surprise given the struggling company's decision to stop producing the Nook readers in-house, it, too, is sudden, in a way: Lynch is no longer CEO, effective immediately.
The company made a good handful of leadership reshuffles to accomodate the resignation. As for who gets top billing now at the company, Michael Huseby is now CEO of Nook media, and president of Barnes and Noble. Huseby was formerly the Chief Financial Officer for the company. Allen Lindstrom will take over as CFO in Huseby's place.
Historical Map: Oakland-San Francisco “Key System” Commuter Rail Routes, c. 1939—1940
A charming, if simplistic, map of commuter rail services offered by the Key System company. Some sources on the Internet date this to 1941: however, the prominent “Exposition Ferry from Ferry Bldg.” callout box would seem to link this map to the timeframe of the Golden Gate International Exposition held on Treasure Island between February 1939 and September 1940.
These dates mean that the Bay Bridge, the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco and the transbay commuter rail routes as shown on the map are all pretty much brand spanking new. By 1958, commuter rail over the Bay Bridge had ceased operations: the Key System replaced these services with buses, and were themselves taken over by AC Transit in 1960. AC Transit’s B, C, E, and F lines still roughly follow the corresponding Key System routes today.
Everyone knows that beer is God's drink of choice, but not everyone knows that God's beer of choice is a Boston lager named after puritanical founding father Samuel Adams. The Boston Beer Company, which owns Sam Adams, was recently forced to address a glaring error in their Fourth of July-themed advertisement: the ad omits any mention to God (or rather "their Creator").
Pushing a small wooden train around a track with one pudgy toddler hand, the sound of a steam engine choo-choo-ing from your mouth. Winding up a music box and holding it to your ear as a mysterious apparatus within plucks a recognizable series of chords from a steel comb. Whether of the Chugga Chugga Express or of a tiny mechanical orchestra, both a music box and a toy train set cast children in the role of a conductor. But what if these different types of conducting could be merged into a single educational experience?
That’s the idea behind the Sound Track, a mash-up that aims to teach kids how music works while it simultaneously teaches them motor skills. A wooden train set with a music box’s revolving cylinder for an engine, the Sound Track is a fantastic example of a great design that sat on the shelf for years until the right company came along to make it a reality.
The concept of the Sound Track was born back in 2009, when Ricardo Seola, a Brazilian student taking an industrial design course at Scuolda Politecnica di Design, in Milan, was asked to create a toy for children as his final project.
As a musician, Seola knew from the beginning that he wanted to make a toy that promoted the same fascination with music he himself had felt from an early age. "One of the most important aspects of my childhood was playing with musical toys," Seola remembers. "I wanted to come up with an intuitive toy, where every action made while playing it produced a clear musical reaction."
All sorts of companies contacted me looking to sell the Sound Track. But none of them wanted to develop it.
To a kid, making music can seem very mysterious, but the fundamental love of playing around with different sounds and listening to how they sound when strung fluidly together is something every musician and composer discovers first in childhood. "I wanted a toy that allowed children to discover for themselves how music was actually made."
At first, Seola chose a train as the vehicle for his concept for symbolic reasons: iI’s a classic kid’s toy with a popular musical heritage in children’s songs. But a train noisily going down a railroad made up of a diverse series of tracks is a satisfying metaphor for the way music itself is played. The concept coalesced itself around the train as a symbol.
Seola’s original design envisioned a wooden train with its cowcatcher replaced with the tuned teeth of a music box. Whereas a music box plays songs by passing these teeth over a revolving cylinder speckled with upraised notes, Seola wanted his train tracks to accomplish the same task.
His concept completed, Seola uploaded a crude video of what he called "The Original Sound Track" to YouTube, which soon after went viral on Twitter and various design sites.
Soon offers started pouring in to make the Seola a reality. There was only one problem.
"All sorts of companies contacted me looking to sell the Sound Track," Seola says. "But none of them wanted to develop it, and for a toy like this, engineering is crucial. It started as a design concept, not a mass-market product. If I could make it myself, I would have."
The Internet is full of concept designs that touch the popular imagination for a few days, only to have that imagination go unharvested. After a couple of years of quickening obscurity, Seola’s musical train seemed like it was on track for just that fate.
As one last try to get the Sound Track off the ground, the designer decided to submit the idea to Quirky, a New York–based company that socially develops interesting concepts with the goal of making invention accessible to everyone. Within six months of uploading the project, the Sound Track was on its way to becoming a reality.
"Quirky perfected the Sound Track," Seola says. "They took my concept and made it commercial without compromising what I was trying to create."
Improving upon Seola’s design, Quirky’s product engineers repositioned the Sound Track’s music-making comb and added a killer feature Seola had never thought of: the ability for kids to “reprogram” the train set’s tracks with any song they wanted, just by shifting pegs into different positions. Kids can either set the Sound Track to play classic nursery rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb," or they can write songs of their own, which the train will then play back for them as they push it along the track.
"Kids love to see things happen right in front of their eyes, and hear things happen with their ears," Seola says. "Music is so important for kids: it helps them develop important self-expression skills and improves their self-esteem. Since 2009, I’ve gotten emails from parents around the world asking where they can buy the Sound Track for their kids. And now, thanks to Quirky, I’m finally able to answer them."
The Sound Track should be available for purchase from Quirky later this year.
Situated in the western reaches of Tokyo, the Okutama Ropeway has been abandoned for nearly half a century.
Opened in 1962, the plan was presumably to tap into the massive population located a relatively short journey away, but the visitors never materialised. Or certainly not in the required numbers. The ropeway’s short, 600 metre, 6 minute hop from one seemingly random spot on a reservoir to another, clearly not enough to draw the crowds. And so, just 4 years later, it closed, leaving the two cable cars to sit where they were left on that very last day — silent and forever passenger-less.
Beautiful.
Strangely peaceful objects.
Objects that in their secluded, now very natural settings, make for lovely sights. And despite the massive financial losses the project must have suffered. Not to mention the disintegration of at least one persons dream. They are, unlike many haikyo/abandoned places, genuinely nice spots to visit.
via firehose ("FIRST-BALLOT ETERNAL RESHARE HALL-OF-FAMER")
For Slacktory, Bryan Menegus has made a supercut video of all the pie and coffee scenes in David Lynch’s early 1990s television series Twin Peaks. Slacktory also created a pie chart (get it?) of the frequency of on-screen coffee sips taken by each Twin Peaks character.
"I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character...One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people." Director Guillermo del Toro on how Pacific Rim deviates from typical summer blockbusters, and how Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, will be a formidable, complex character.
Pacific Rim continues to be compared to blockbusters like Transformers, but, if the focus on characters in the most recent commercials wasn't evidence enough, Guillermo del Toro has set the record strait in his interview with The Star. Pacific Rim is not a movie set to exploit its female lead or compromise her character any more than it will its male lead, and del Toro stresses that he made decisions at every turn to make sure his Kaiju versus Mecha movie didn't become just another summer movie. It's looking more and more like Pacific Rim will focus on adventure and interesting characters, without falling into the glorification of violence and two-dimensional characters that movies like Transformers lead us to expect in our giant-robot-filled summer films. Finally we can watch giant monsters fight Mecha and watch an interesting story unfold!
The NY Times Real Estate section is the Rosencrantz to the Style Section's Guildenstern, the yin and yang of out-of-touch manufactured high class trend stories. This weekend, the world's most unintentionally hilarious newspaper put forth yet another brilliant missive about the struggles of the oh so rich centered around a particularly relatable concern: "You are seeing people ask themselves: Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?" said Michele Kleier, the president and chairwoman of Kleier Residential. "It has become a very sexy thing to do, especially for those people living a sedate Park Avenue lifestyle." [ more › ]
