Internet Mixtape

David Blaine Explains How He Held His Breath for 17 Minutes

I sure love TED talks, for a lot of different reasons. But one of the best reasons is that you can take a giant d-bag like David Blaine and put him on TED's stage, and it magically cures him, for the duration of his talk, of most of his douchebaggery. He actually sounds, at times, like he's not entirely comfortable with all the things he does to himself. 

What Not to Ask Batman this Time of Year

(via Digg)

Introducing the Inevitable: Three Worf Moon

You know you already thought of it, but didn't have the guts to make it happen. Twitter user dinoignacio has taken a necessary step for us all, and I, for one, thank him for it. So is anyone going to actually make this thing real so I can buy it, please?

 

(via Fernando Rizo, via Buzzfeed, via Twitpic)

Twits: Dramatic Readings of Celebrity Twitter Updates

This is more or less the best thing ever. The girl reading P. Diddy is great, but the Lindsay Lohan guy has something special going on.

(via Metafilter)

The Most Masochistic Video Game Ever

Once in a while, you come across something on the interwebs that's such a fundamentally bad idea that you couldn't possibly suggest that people explore it, yet you feel compelled to write a post about it because it's also so fundamentally awesome. So I'm writing a post about Lose / Lose, a new game created by Zach Gage, that you really, really shouldn't play.

Here's the basic premise: You're a little spaceship hurtling through space against a steady stream of alien spacecraft. You have a cannon and are free to use it, but each enemy is tied to a different file on your hard drive, and when you kill an enemy that file is immediately, irrevocably deleted. For real. It chooses files at random, so you have no choice in the matter other than whether or not to shoot in the first place. Oh, and if your ship is destroyed, the game application deletes itself.

Here's a video of what gameplay looks like. I literally cringe with each enemy death:

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

More detail, along with some rationale, from Zach himself:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

A wise computer named WOPR once said something very wise to me: "The only winning move is not to play." You would do well to listen, and to never play Lose / Lose. Unless....you're trying to reformat your hard drive and want something more engaging than an MS DOS terminal.

The Only Upside of Widespread Global Warming

...is that Bearsharktopus will lose its natural habitat: your deepest, darkest fears.

I know, it's a few days stale already, but last week, for no real reason, someone posted the following image to Reddit because he "knows Reddit likes bears and sharks."

Nice job! As expected, within minutes came the first build, Bearsharktopus:

Then, within a matter of minutes....Baconbearsharktopus, Smokedbaconbearsharktopus, and, naturally, Gentlesmokedbaconbearsharktopus:

But these were all merely appetizers to the main course, which, if we're honest with ourselves and with our culture, we knew was inevitable...Three Bearsharktopus Moon:

The circle is now complete. And I haven't even mentioned "Obama fights Bearsharktopus." So much lulz, so little time...

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Re-Imagined as a 1950's Serial

What if Forrest Gump was made in 1949, directed by Frank Capra, and starred Jimmy Stewart? Or if in the late 40's, Charton Heston introduced the Indiana Jones character in Raiders of the Lost Ark, racing Peter Lorre to find the Ark of the Covenant alongside Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn?

YouTube user whoiseyevan, a self-described "writer/filmmaker trying to get his big break,"  has put together an amazing series of trailers for popular movies from the 1980's and 1990's, re-imagining / editing them as if they were created in the 1940's and 50's

Here's his hacked trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark...given his avowed love of old adventure serials, I have to imagine George Lucas would really appreciate this labor of love:

A quick dive into the notes for this video explains that to make this trailer, whoiseyevan took publicly available clips the following movies: The 10 Commandments, Prince Valiant, Naked Jungle, Secret of the Incas, Jungle Queen, Zulu, Look to Lockheed for Leadership, Casablanca, The City of Brass, Mr. Moto takes a Vacation, Star in My Crown, A Pain in the Pullman, On Dangerous Ground, Patton, King Solomons Mines, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Greatest Show on Earth, David and Bathsheba, The Screaming Skull, When You Know, Mysterious Mr. Moto, Lawrence of Arabia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and Superman at Bay.

Here are some of his other trailer pre-makes, for Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump, respectively:

Insightful Post FAIL #42

Tonight I had planned on writing a post about what brands and the communications industry can learn from open source. Or if that didn't end up going well, I was going to write my manifesto about how the API has the transformational power to vastly improve our country's infrastructure. And if that got too boring, I was maybe going to offer a brief survey of weird American utopian movements.

But as you can see, tonight you'll find nothing about any of those interesting topics. No...instead, I bring you "Troops." This is much, much "better."

(via ToplessRobot)

Chiptunes Magnetic Fields Cover

Tom Milsom is so digitally whimsical its almost painful, but in a good way. Is that a compliment? I'm not sure, but I really like his chiptune cover of one of my favorite songs, the Magnetic Fields' "All My Little Words":

I did some shallow digging and found some of Tom's other work, as well. Precocious, talented and fluent in lulz, the nineteen year-old British musician / artist / vlogger reminds me of a younger Patrick Wolf, had Patrick Wolf been born six years later and not fallen in with gypsy bird people and feral film stars inhabiting a bizarro 1930's London hidden behind a half-bricked wall in Camden.

(via @trent_reznor)

Be Sure to Keep this in your Top Hat When you Travel Through Time

(click image to enlarge) 

The only flaw I can find with this is that its creators presuppose the presence of electricity and a modicum of understanding of in-depth scientific information. Although I suppose that if you've already created a working time machine, the latter won't be much of an issue.

Just don't touch anything! I don't want to all of a sudden have tentacles and speak butterfly language.