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General Entertainment

Watch/compare: “Used” by Sasha Sacket & two NIN videos

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Just caught this video on NewNowNext Music and nearly fast-forwarded through it but then it sucked me in.  It’s a pretty well-done video for a new artist and the song itself isn’t all that bad, either.  Goth-y people + piano = relatively okay!

But, wait a minute.  That spinning around on your back while mid-air sure looks familiar, no?  Nine Inch Nails much?  Watch it again at 1:30 and then watch “Closer” at the 1:28 mark:

The entire distorted Victorian theme really reminded me, too, of my favorite NIN video, “The Perfect Drug.”  All the way from 1997:

Assuming that Sasha Sacket wasn’t influenced by Trent Reznor and his band would be completely silly.  And thinking that director Sean Morris wasn’t inspired by Mark Romanek is on another level of absurd entirely.  It’s just funny seeing ideas from over a decade ago being trotted out as (convincingly) fresh.

Dusty, where are you?

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This is from a time when car-buying was apparently awesome.  From a GM sales brochure for the 1957 Cadillac Eldorado.    A bar.  In the glovebox.  Of an everyday passenger car.  This beats having vodka in the trunk, no?

Uh, media spotlight over here?

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At least according to the Australians, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has been hacked by aliens and is beaming back a signal to Earth that has been indecipherable for the last few weeks.  Despite a few launch difficulties, scientists have been able to get 33 years of stellar (pun intended) performance from a piece of 70s technology intended to last for 4 years – making it difficult to understand why the Voyager probe is now feeding only unreadable material to NASA.

So what’s going on?  Remember:

Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms […]

Is it possible that, on its way to Sirius, Voyager 2 encountered something or someone?  What’s going on in the heliosphere, anyway?  And where is Arthur C. Clarke when you need him?

(Thanks The Daily Telegraph, NASA and Wikipedia)

The trees will have their victory

Movies, Rant, Unexplained by

artist interpretation

I surrender to your mighty pollen, trees of Chestertown.  You win.  I cannot think today.  I cannot breathe.  I have a headache that starts directly behind my eyes, thunders across my entire skull and rampages down into the middle of my back via a brittle spine.  My eyes water and burn.  And I give up.

Name your terms and you can have my surrender.  I shall never again attempt to breathe your rightfully owned oxygen.  I will avoid standing in the shaded areas near you because I clearly deserve to be scorched by the Maryland sun.

And if I go berserk and come up with Mouse Trap-like ways to kill myself, don’t be surprised.  I mean, you have seen The Happening, right?  (I know, Zooey Deschanel again.)

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the trees are your new overlords.

Great idea/hate it

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Sometimes a creative endeavor falls entirely flat for me – all of the checkboxes for being something I’d like are filled in, but the end result just does not work. Oddly, nearly all of Radiohead’s work falls into this category. A more recent example is Tomorrow, In a Year.

This album, an opera based on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, should be spectacular given that fact alone. Add to the list of things going for it the collaboration between The Knife and Planningtorock – both huge favorites – and I really did expect to be in love.

And then I listened once while in the bath and have never gone anywhere near it again. That being the case, it’s a bit of a stretch to remember exactly what the offensive aspects were but I’m pretty sure it was a shrieky, warbly mess of weirdness (in itself something I’d be just fine with on a good day.)

Thanks anyway, Tomorrow, In a Year.

Re-imagining Apple’s website

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Want to learn about the hot Newton MessagePad that Apple just released?  Or order a pack of System 7 installation floppies (High Density!) for your LC II+?  Well, friend, Cult of Mac has created an Apple website circa 1993 just for you.

And if you are feeling even more archaic, be sure to check out their 1983 mockup as well.  Project Macintosh sure does look promising…

Making a magazine in 48 hours

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Gizmodo has tipped me off to the upcoming 48 Hour Magazine project.  To say that this looks like perhaps the best idea I’ve seen in a long time would be a gross (in all senses of the word) understatement.  Basically, a bunch of passionate magazine and publishing people are getting together for a weekend and hammering out a creative, insightful, current collection of submissions from writers, photographers, etc around the world.  No bullshit, no un-fun pieces – just a magazine for the sake of making one.

Like a beautiful summer day in the Pacific Northwest that you can carry around in your heart through the dreary-ass winter. Or maybe a hip flask is a better metaphor.

(Alex Madrigal on what this project is like for those in the business of magazines)

With all the talk of digital texts and magazines I’ve been rifling through as a result of the iPad’s launch, it’s refreshing to see a new take on producing a print product come together.  As a lover of the magazine, especially in its most experimental forms, this will be exceptional.  As one project founder, Mat Honan, basically pulls from my own childhood:

I grew up reading Rolling Stone, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Spy, and Spin. Magazines let me drop into a world without rednecks, and then hang out there for hours on end. While the Internet has largely taken over that cultural delivery vehicle role, I still find the experience of immersion you get from a paper magazine unequaled.

You can get involved, watch it live via UStream and, theoretically, buy the finished product when it’s all done.  I know I’m excited for this to kick off in two days!

On aliens

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I’ve been watching my way through the History Channel series Ancient Aliens (which I didn’t realize had become a series, instead finding myself wondering why the special was on again and again) and I keep thinking to myself what I always think when we depict aliens in media: why would they look anything like us?!

Luckily, io9 steps up to the plate with an essay entitled “We’ll Only Find Extraterrestrial Life If We Know What We’re Looking For” that points out just how limiting it is to think that any sort of non-Earth entity would share much in common with life as we know it at all. We really need to stop depicting aliens exclusively as greys, bugs or slightly altered people (Star Trek, I’m looking at you.) Quoth the post:

This would be especially true of lifeforms that aren’t based on carbon or don’t use water as solvent, whose biochemistry would be nothing like ours. For these, we would have to fall back to the highest-order definition of life: an open system with negative entropy, emergent properties and ability to adapt and evolve, with an inner code which ensures that there will be strong continuity of form and function as the organism reproduces.

Check it out if your inner science fiction geek gets belligerent about this topic, too.

Tim Gunn, superhero

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In case you missed it (or just totally forgot like I did,) I would like to take a moment to remind you that Tim Gunn will be wearing the Iron Man suit instead of his own in an upcoming comic series called Models, Inc.

It seems that Tim is going to be taking on the role of Charlie-figure for a band of models from across the Marvel universe. His first stop will be saving the day in Tony Stark’s suit when the bad guys crash a costume exhibition.

Most superheroes are fighting the same thing – good vs. evil – but who’s taking on crimes against fashion? Me!

Talk about making it work…