Twitter account @TNG_S8 is posting purported plots to Season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which, fo course, only aired for seven seasons).
They are hilarious*
(*to Trek fans)
It’s “Thriller”. You can’t go wrong! And, if you don’t have 15 minutes, well, first stop lying to me, of course you do. And second, here’s the best part of the whole video, in 1/15th of a minute:
While needlessly violent, I’m pretty sure this is an accurate representation of that one time the video’s creator dropped acid and got lost in an A&B Sound.
(from Devour, via someone on Facebook)
One Jordan Lloyd has a seriously intense collection of vintage logos on Flickr, including the one above, which I can’t source (go ahead, you try Googling for “pants off” — with or without the percentage sign — and see what you get), but which I picked to top off this post just because it amused me after reading Amy’s flowchart post below.
There’s a ton more if you follow this little link here, though. Check out a sample, below:
Mmmmmm, I love that look!
(via Draplin)
Apr 242011
Mar 302011
I have long known what a differential gear does — it keeps one wheel from slipping when you turn a corner — but I’d never really understood how.
This video finally clears that up for me. Fantastic!
(via BB)
Mar 232011
This is a really near hack to get footage from an old film into a modern digital format. James Miller has perfected a method to run the film past flat white LEDs and project it through part of a lens so that it falls perfectly on the sensor of his Canon 5D.
Well done, sir.
It’s a new hipster epidemic: Baby and couples photography that features vintage luggage and rural locations — especially railroads.
So, of course, the only rational response is to start a single-serving Tumblr: Lost Models.
I particularly like the snarky comments, like this one:
Photographer: “This is the exact moment they got hit, but the train was bugging me so I cloned it out.”
Heheh.
(via Coudal)
Mar 172011
I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of blackstronauts before they are forgotten. It’s all too easy to forget just how far we’ve come in terms of racial integration. But of course, that obscures just how far we still have to go.
For more on the Old Negro Space Program, check out the Wikipedia page.
(via MeFi)
A well-executed main title sequence is one of my real pleasures in watching a movie. Especially on the big screen. What a treat to see so many put together in a meta-sequence, set to that funky music (by RJD2).
It was done by Ian Albinson, the editor-in-chief of Art of the Title, for SXSW.
(via Coudal)
I have had this map up in a tab on my browser for long enough to have forgotten the source of it. Although, from the URL, it was hosted at SciMaps.org — unfortunately, I can’t find it there.
Still, very cool work!
I can’t think of a more common poster to have hanging up in the rooms or dorms of my (misspent) youth. Can you believe it’s been 15 years since the movie Trainspotting came out? Yikes. I listened to that soundtrack about a gazillion times, and I can still probably recite the order those songs were in. (There were some good ones, too … “Perfect Day”? Wow.)
One thing I hadn’t thought of was just how iconic these posters were — and how influential. I guess when you’re the right age, you just assume that things that resonate with you will of course be influential.
Looking back on these posters from a decade and a half on, it’s pretty amazing how well they still stand up — how modern they still look, how fresh. So it’s interesting to read an interview in Creative Review with the design team behind them. There was a lot of hard word, obviously, a lot of inspiration, and a lot of luck:
We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned.
Then go watch Star Wars and think about how Obi-Wan used to be a heroin addict. It adds layers to that film. It is equally informative to see Trainspotting’s Renton as a proto-Jedi who turns to drugs because he can’t make sense of the Force.
Mar 062011
In the early stages of our relationship, Grant and I would make each other mix tapes. Well, mix playlists, really, for our respective Ipods, but the sentiment was the same.
It’s kind of a lost art, the mix tape. I remember making them from songs on the radio when I was younger, waiting and listening all night until I got the song I wanted. And I would always be so angry when the DJ kept talking over the intro of the song. Actually, I still hate that.
Luckily, there are a certain group of people who are still making mix tapes (and I just realized how funny it was that we still call them “tapes”) and sharing them online. Mostly I think it’s people who grew up making tapes for their friends, who are now utilizing the Internet to keep sharing. Heather over at I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, makes awesome mix tapes. Then I came across a cool project from Tyler Hellard, the writer (and fellow Canadian!) of the blog Pop Loser.
Tyler too loves the mix tape. It’s such a personal and special way to share the music you love with the people you love. So he decided to start 52 Mix Tapes, where he will post (with the help of contributors) a different mix tape every week. It’s been really cool to see the variety of mixes, from Metal, to “Ones” which is all side one, track ones, inspired of course by High Fidelity.
I definitely encourage everyone to check it out, just to see the variety of music people enjoy, and the different themes they work in.
Mar 042011
The first half of this clip is a Pabst Blue Ribbon television ad from 1976. The second clip appears to just be unrelated rocketbelt video with unrelated-to-that-even audio from “To Tell The Truth.” I like the non sequitur.
Also: I miss stubbies. But I had no idea that American beer used to come in a stubby!
(via Coudal)
Mar 032011
Astonishingly, you can install MS-DOS 5.0 on a virtual machine, “upgrade” to Windows 1.0 and then follow the Microsoft upgrade path through all the major Windows versions — including 3.1, 95, Vista and 7 — to get to a fully functional Windows machine.
Your Win7 install will have some remnants of older Windows installs (Reversi!) but it tends to function just fine.
Colour me impressed.
(via tdw)