Star Wars Episode III review is up!

For those who have never seen a review on Red Letter Media, you are certainly missing out. So far, Mike Stoklasa aka "Plinkett" has reviewed Star Wars Episode I and II, Avatar and all of the Star Trek TNG films.

They are absolutely hilarious, especially if you are as big a nerd as I am. If I may make a suggestion, go ahead and watch the reviews for Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones before you watch the new review.

View all of the reviews on the website at redlettermedia.com
Also you can check out the official youtube page here





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Coyotes sometimes eat their own intestines

You heard me right. I found this out via an old friend of mine during the holidays.

Coyotes will apparently eat their own guts and intestines when shot or wounded. My friend was hunting once and he shot a coyote through the abdomen and when he finally found the animal, intestines were hanging out of its mouth.

"What the fuck?"

Turns out the bullet had exited the belly and taken some intestines with it, and the coyote ended up eating its own innards. Totally nasty and insane!





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I opted for the pat-down to save time

A very nice old man put his hands on me tonight and then he wished me a merry christmas.






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Escape Route North

A truly potent mix. Throw on some Swayzak beats to top it all off.





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Crispin Glover is awesome

This clip from Rivers Edge is off the wall ridiculous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF9NQ-VlS9c


What an awesomely messed up dude.





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WEAKSAUCE Podcast: Episode #2

This time on Weaksauce: we present the Futurebeats Megamix by Trinoculars from 2004. Feat. Aphex Twin, Terranova, Death in Vegas, Leftfield.

Arranged and Produced by Jon Apgar and Scott Willson.

WEAKSAUCE Podcast: Episode #2






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WEAKSAUCE Podcast: Episode #1

Welcome to the first Episode of Weaksauce: as an introduction, today we simply present "Dangerous Groups" by Trinoculars from 2004.

Written and Produced by Scott Willson.


WEAKSAUCE Podcast: Episode #1







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Weaksauce Logo

Warner Brothers finds 17 lost minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a salt mine in Kansas

I have several questions.

Why does Warner Brothers have a salt mine?

Why would you put priceless production footage into a safe in a salt mine?

Where the hell is Kansas?

You can read the /Film article here. 

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Dark matter is a scam

Yeah I said it. I think it is a total scam.

I don't really buy it as totally legit science. But what the hell do I know?

The conundrum here lies in an error in the mathematics of gravity and mass; the basic idea behind dark matter is simply to account for a large amount of 'missing mass' throughout the universe. Stars and Galaxies are observed to be travelling at unexpectedly higher rates of speed in comparison to the gravity generated by their mass. It's as if celestial bodies are clustered around invisible, undetectable matter.

It is estimated that 80% of the observable universe is made out of this 'dark matter'.

So isn't this just bad science? Isn't this just a placeholder until we actually figure out what the universe is all about?

The theory I am going with: fuck dark matter, it's all about the Red Dwarf.

A red dwarf is a main sequence star less than half the mass of our sun. Since they undergo fusion at an extremely slow rate, they are by far the oldest and most abundant stars in existence; making up the vast majority of all stars. They and can also become convective and actually 'recycle' energy - living for an estimated 10 trillion years!!! (the universe itself is only about 14 billion years old)

Totally awesome. 

And here is the kicker: astronomers at Keck in Hawaii have just discovered that there are three times as many red dwarves in the universe as previously estimated.

So that is why I am going with the red dwarf. They are extremely hard to detect, being only about 15% as bright as our sun, astronomers were only able to find red dwarves in our little corner of the milky way. But if these guys make up the majority of matter in the universe, then:

Red Dwarves = Dark Matter

In the end, dark matter turns out to be a fancy way of saying "We don't know yet."

Case closed. Now we can all sleep at night.




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Interview with John Titor (Part 3)

The following webcomic is based on John Titor's actual web forum postings on timetravelinstitute.com from November, 2000 to March, 2001.

 

 

So Mr. Titor, how exactly is this
worldline different from your own?

For starters, the fact that I'm here makes it different. I've also noticed little things like news events that happen at different times, football games won by other teams, things like that. 

I would guess the temporal divergence between this worldline and my original is about 1 or 2 percent. Of course, the longer I am here, the larger that divergence becomes from my point of view.

 

    

What type of vehicle is in the picture you posted?
 Does your machine allow you to control time travel?

It is a 1967 Chevrolet. And yes, it can be controlled. However, the distortion unit has operational limits. Imagine your path through time is through a cone. The farther away from the center of the cone, the more differences you will see in the worldline.

The C204 begins to "break away" at about 60 years. This means the level of confidence drops rapidly after 60 years of travel and the worldline divergence increases. In other words, if I wanted to go back 2000 years and meet Christ, there is a better than average chance I would end up on a worldline where he was never born.

Fascinating...

The computer units and gravity sensors "record" your trip and you are quite easily able to return to your point of origin. I am aware that research is being done on faster units with more accurate clocks. 

I imagine that they will be able to go back farther with a higher degree of divergence confidence.

Are you drawn back to your

worldline of origin for any reason?

Is instability a problem for you?

I'm not sure what you mean by stable. If you mean mentally, there are many things that bother me here but being with my parents right now is important to me. 

Physically, the only thing really wrong is the number of colds I get.

 

Are you able to return home?


Is there a radiation problem?

Yes I am able to return home. 

I'm not sure what radiation you mean. If you mean from the unit, it vents X-rays and Gamma radiation out of the rear. As long as you stay away from that, you should be okay. I keep a radiation detector with me to check my environment and make sure the unit isn't "leaking".

What does the light look like when you time travel?

The light bending only lasts a second. Its like driving under a tunnel and being in total black.

While the machine is on, everything is black. When the machine is turned off, it is the reverse affect [sic]. It appears you are driving out from a bridge. To tell you the truth, I'm usually sleeping when the unit turns off but yes, it does appear that the world fades in from black.

 

Do people know where you are?


Can you communicate with your home?

No. They do not know where I am and I cannot communicate with them. Interesting idea though. From their point of view, I will return almost exactly at the same moment I left. 

From their viewpoint, I will only have aged more than expected.

- - - -
 

Stay Tuned for Part 4 coming soon! 

For the full transcript of John Titor's postings, head over to johntitor.com.

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Don't ever go to Dyatlov Pass

While I'm sure this is a classic case of Occam's Razor, it is still trippy/scary as hell.

In January of 1959, Igor Dyatlov began a ski trek across the Ural Mountains in northeast Russia with eight other graduates from the Ural Polytechnic University. They were never seen alive again.

When the group did not return by the scheduled return date of February 12th, a search party was sent out to investigate.

This is where the story gets weird. The search team reached the camp on February 26th;  the tent found empty, apparently torn open from the inside. The first two bodies were found a few hundred metres away in a group of pine trees, evidence of a campfire was beside them. They were dressed only in their underwear.

Three more bodies were also found closer to the tent, suggesting that they were trying to return to camp. They were merely half-dressed, wearing one shoe or an undershirt. The final four bodies were not even discovered until May when the several meters of snow covering the mountain had thawed. Stranger still, all of them seemed to have a fucked up brown-orange tan on their skin and allegedly had small levels of radiation in their bodies.

One of the skiers was found without a tongue. Another had a cracked skull. Two more still had broken ribs. Hypothermia was the obvious culprit, but the Russian government actually later released a statement claiming an 'unknown compelling force' was the ultimate cause of death. The files were then locked in a badass secret Soviet archive until 1991.

This is where the story gets out of hand. There are reports of strange metal fragments found scattered throughout the area, 'suggesting' that there were military tests in the vicinity. There are also reports of other skiers forty or fifty kilometres south of their location seeing strange orange spheres of light in the sky to the north, in the direction of the camp.

This story is a great platform for wild ideas and conspiracies; it is perfect for any junkie (nutcase?) of the paranormal. So folks like to irresponsibly attach UFOs, the friggin Yeti aka Sasquatch, crazy Russian military weapons tests, etc. to this bizarre incident.

Don't get me wrong, as the poster in Mulder's office says, "I want to believe". I do, I really do, but I value my skepticism too much for that.

Read more about the Dyatlov Pass incident at the St. Petersburg Times
and wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident





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RIP Mark Dailey, the voice of CityTV

This one is mostly for Toronto folks, nobody knows who he is out west. He will be missed. It makes me sad to think I will never again hear the words "This is CityTv, everywhere."

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Code 46 is Amazing

My movie recommendation for December is Michael Winterbottom's 2003 film Code 46 starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. I was suprised to find that, after asking around briefly, the majority of film fans I know personally have not seen or even heard of this movie. 

Code 46 is set in a future where cloning procedures are so commonplace, that rules and regulations must be laid out and enforced to prevent any 'incestuous' relationships. Climate change has fiercely taken hold in the hinterlands. Sunlight has become harmful and people are forced to live and work during the nighttime hours. 

Only citizens that meet the the strict IVF (In-Vitro Fertilization) requirements are given "cover" or travel visas to live inside major cities. Anyone who does not pass these requirements is deemed a refugee and they are literally banished to the desert; not permitted to enter any urban areas. 

These rules and regulations are known as Code 46*. 

Tim Robbins plays a happily married fraud investigator sent to Shanghai to find a lonely cover forger played brilliantly by Samantha Morton. What I find most interesting about the entire film is that once the two characters begin a relationship, they soon discover that their love for each other is not only prohibited because of professional reasons, but BIOLOGICAL ones. 

Completely shot on location in Shanghai, China and Dubai, UAE, Code 46 is a stunning, real-world take on the ultimate endgame in regards to human cloning. Can love exist between clones of the same human DNA? A truly powerful question...

Code 46 is a true head trip and is, in my opinion, the greatest sci-fi romance ever made. 

I really don't want to give too much away, but the tension and brilliance in this movie come from the implications that the love story itself is an illegal breach of Code 46. This movie is fucking incredible. 

*Human DNA contains 46 chromosomes

Click here for more on Code 46 (2003) via IMDb.

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Light Painting with your iPhone

Kinda cool, basically splits a word or sentence into slices and plays it back on the screen in sequence. Set up a long exposure shot using a DSLR, and once you drag the iPod across the frame, actually quite tricky, you are left with 3D floating text like this. 

You can get the App here, but don't think I would pay for it though. (I found it on a one-day promo thing)

iTunes - Holographium

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Interview with John Titor (Part 2)

The following webcomic is based on John Titor's actual web forum postings on timetravelinstitute.com from November, 2000 to March, 2001.

 

 

Welcome back to the Ryzak Report.

I'm Ryzak Fennelflak.

We are continuing our interview with John Titor, who is visiting us from 2036.

Now what exactly is your time like?
Can you even remember?

Of course. I remember it very clearly.


It is difficult to describe 2036 in detail without spending a great deal of time explaining why things are so different.

 Well I would think you of all people have more time than any of us, so please do.

How exactly are things different?


Where do you live?
What do you do?
What is the world like?

I live in central Florida with my family where I'm currently stationed at an Army base in Tampa. 

A world war in 2015 killed nearly three billion people. The people that survived grew closer together. Life is centered on the family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents.

There is no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock is grown and sold locally.

People spend much more time reading and talking together face to face.

Religion is taken seriously and everyone can multiply and divide in their heads.

Will you show us more of the operations manual for your time machine?

I will consider it but I do not expect they are worth anything to most people except as a curiosity.

 

Uhh...OK???


...If you met yourself on another worldline, what would happen?

It has always surprised me why this concept is so hard for people to imagine and accept.

Nothing would happen.

The universe would not end and there are no paradox problems that threaten existence.

 But, surely the implications of meeting
your own self could be disastrous? 


You are saying the things you do in the past have no bearing on the future?

Temporal space-time is made up of every possible quantum state. The Everett-Wheeler model is correct.

I have met and/or seen myself twice on different worldlines.

The first was a training mission and the second is now.

 

You have met your own self ?!?
What on earth did you say to each other?

I was born in 1998 so the other "me" is two years old on this worldline.

There is a saying where I come from, "Every possible thing that can happen or will happen has already happened somewhere".

- - - -
 

Stay Tuned for Part 3 coming soon! 

For the full transcript of John Titor's postings, head over to johntitor.com.

Wksc.

You got Brendan Fraser'd

Copyright Tim Apgar 2008




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WEAKSAUCE: Best April Fools Day ever?

WEAKSAUCE: Best April Fools Day ever?: "When April 1st, 1974 rolled around, Sitka, AK resident 'Porky' Bickar decided to go big or go home. He looked towards majestic Mount Edgecu..."

WEAKSAUCE: MJ at his best

WEAKSAUCE: MJ at his best: "I recently unearthed this old snapshot of a page from the Guinness Book of World Records. I believe it is the 1992 hardcover edition that b..."

WEAKSAUCE: Interview with John Titor (Part 1)

WEAKSAUCE: Interview with John Titor (Part 1): "The following webcomic is based on John Titor's actual web forum postings on timetravelinstitute.com from November, 2000 to March, 2001. ..."

Best April Fools Day ever?

When April 1st, 1974 rolled around, Sitka, AK resident 'Porky' Bickar decided to go big or go home. He looked towards majestic Mount Edgecumbe, sleepily sitting 14 miles away, and was hit with arguably the best April Fools idea ever:

After being turned down (or laughed off) by several other charter companies, Mr. Bickar called a mutual friend at Temsco Helicopters, Inc. Once he convinced the clerk to book a flight up to the mountain, Bickar raced home to fashion two makeshift rope slings out of manila and strung them each through a stack of 100 old car tires.

Porky and his new friend Earl from Temsco then hooked their chopper onto the sling of tires and proceeded to the waiting summit of the mountain. Earl found a suitable spot to touch down, Porky hopped out, disconnected the cable and then tossed the rest of his fuel on the pile; a bunch of oily rags, a gallon of sterno, a jug of diesel oil, and a dozen smoke bombs.

He lit a match, and presto! Scare the shit out of the entire town!

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MJ at his best

I recently unearthed this old snapshot of a page from the Guinness Book of World Records. I believe it is the 1992 hardcover edition that belongs to Al and Dug Main.

The photo, obviously, speaks for itself.




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