Banksy Inside « The Drop Kings
The mysterious Banksy just released some new paintings on his website. You heard it right, Banksy painted on a canvas. All Banksy fans will appreciate. Here are a few of my favourites.
Dear Pixar: Leave 'Toy Story' alone
Because there is perhaps no longer any such thing as an untouchable or sacred property in Hollywood, not that there were many in the first place, Toy Story 4 is happening. It’s not surprising, what with 2010’s Toy Story 3 opening to near universal acclaim en route to crossing the billion-dollar mark worldwide. But for some viewers, it’s depressing all the same; for a franchise that started as a means of putting Pixar Studios on the map in 1995, heralding Disney’s new renaissance, audiences have come to feel an intimate connection with a film about friendship and sentient toys that also just happened to launch its own massive toy craze. This is ironic given the first film’s message about the importance of remaining loyal to one’s simple childhood diversions, even as toys were getting flashier and more elaborate with every passing year of the ‘90s. Perhaps most cynically (and appropriately), Disney revealed the film’s planned 2017 release in the midst of a conference call last week.
Switch Your Routine for Ours: Posters Made from TVs, Video Games, and Computers for Companhia Athletica Gyms
Art director Murilo Melo created this killer poster series for Companhia Athletica Gyms in Brazil by dismantling sloth-inducing televisions, video games, and computers and using their thousands of parts to create exercising humans, urging you to “switch your routine for ours”. The project took four months to execute and is well documented on this pretty awesome website where you can see production shots, download high-res images (recommended for detailed viewing), and watch a video. From concept to execution this is one of the more clever print advertising campaigns I’ve seen in a while.
This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave
What!? How is this even possible? Because science, my friends. Brusspup’s (previously) latest video explores what happens when a stream of water is exposed to an audio speaker producing a loud 24hz sine wave. If I understand correctly the camera frame rate has been adjusted to the match the vibration of the air (so, 24fps) thus creating … magic zigzagging water. Run the rubber hose down past the speaker so that the hose touches the speaker. Brusspup did a similar experiment last year where it looked as if the water was flowing in reverse.
beatlab - make music together
Is Pixar's Run of Greatness Over?
I’ve written before (more than once, I’m afraid) about the dispiriting decline of Pixar over the past few years. After a run of success over its first 11 films unparalleled by anything else in contemporary cinema—a run that culminated with the astonishing trifecta of WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3—the studio seems largely to have lost its way. It began with 2011’s Cars 2, the leading contender for the worst Pixar film to date. Things improved with Brave the following year, and then regressed again in 2013 with Monsters University. This summer proved to be the first since 2005 in which Pixar did not release a feature at all: The Good Dinosaur, which was slated for release in May—having already been relocated from a 2013 date—was pushed back yet again, until late next year. Which is a long way of saying that this week’s announcement that Pixar will be releasing another Toy Story installment in 2017 strikes me as very bad news indeed. The future slate looks still grimmer in this regard.
Mythical Creatures List, Mythical Creatures A-Z
In a Perfect World… | SadAndUseless.com
Created by Catrina Dulay (there are few more, so it’s worth to visit).
What Google’s New Study Tells Us About Why People Go to the Movies
Nobody likes feeling irrelevant, and when steering people towards good movies and away from bad ones is part of how you make a living, it’s more than a little dispiriting when it seems no one’s listening. But if the grosses for Trans4mers and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 weren’t enough, now here’s this: Google conducted a study, analyzing nearly two years of search data, to determine what makes frequent moviegoers choose which movies they’ll see. As you may have guessed, the carefully composed missives of yours truly (and my critical brethren) don’t really figure into the equation. The study, which Google conducted with Millward Brown Digital, was focused on “how moviegoers research and choose the films they watch.” Now, the wording of this statistic should be carefully parsed, as that 39 percent figure is apparently a portion of the already narrowed-down demo of “moviegoers who use video sites to look for more information about a film.”
Relativistic Baseball
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? - Ellen McManis Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics. The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. Suppose you’re watching from a hilltop outside the city.
Letters From Strangers
What ‘Mockingjay–Part 1′ Misses by Glossing Over Katniss’ Trauma
Throughout much of Mockingjay, the third novel in the Hunger Games series, the unraveling of Katniss Everdeen’s mind takes over the page. Even from the beginning, she strokes a pearl that Peeta found in the arena in Catching Fire and often repeats variations of her mantra: “My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. For the reader, Collins’ seesawing from another deeply violent or traumatic event for Katniss to still more pages of Katniss tweaking out as result of that event, can be enervating, even irritating. Finnick utters these words in the new film adaptation, too (Mockingjay–Part 1), but his statement has lost a little of its impact for the audience, mostly because onscreen we’ve seen less of Katniss’ messed-up mind. It’s a good adaptation. So, yes, seeing the story unfold onscreen improves the pacing of the book, adds more nail-biting suspense, and avoids getting mired in the minutiae of recovery from trauma.
