Best of Kickstarter, 10/31
We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.
Grilled Cheesus: We could all use a few more miracles, right? Thankfully there’s “Grilled Cheesus,” a new sandwich press from Rob Corso and Meg Sheehan that brings the Lord to your lunch hour with a grill plate made to look like Jesus’ smiling visage. Now all we need is some Christ’s Ketchup and we’ll be set.
Almost-Instant Weather Prediction: I get pretty grumpy when I responsibly check the weather report in the morning only to be caught in an unforeseen downpour later in the day (and inevitably shell out $12 for a cheap umbrella that lasts two avenues). But a nifty new app called “Dark Sky,” could make this sad, soggy scenario a thing of the past – at least for iPad owners – by making super accurate, short-term weather predictions using GPS…
Read More »Around (part of) the world in 7 days: Sundance films go cross-contintental this week
Because it’s on a Monday this year, which means you’ve been dressing up in costume every night since Friday, this might just be the longest Halloween weekend ever. It’s not over yet, but if you’re partied out, or just out of fake blood, stay in and cozy up to the Halloween episode of my “My So Called Life.” Angela falls for the Jordan Catalano of the 50s, who’s ghost still haunts the school gym, and (spoiler) her parents get so turned on by their costumes (he’s a pirate, she’s Rapunzel) that they decide to stay in and role play instead of going to the neighbor’s party.
Once the clock strikes November, though, we ditch all things Halloween with EVERLASTING MOMENTS (2008), by Swedish director Jan Troell, who worked with Nordic heavy-hitters like Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, who he directed in some of her finest films, including THE EMIGRANTS (1971) and THE NEW LAND (1972). Then we venture south to France with Claude Chabrol’s A GIRL CUT IN TWO (2007). Chabrol, who died just last year, is credited with starting the nouvelle vague. He was a critic at the famed Cahiers du Cinema in the 50s and directed…
Read More »Working Nikon camera aka best Halloween costume ever
Making of the Camera Costume from Tyler Card on Vimeo.
Michigan-based photographer Tyler Card took his craft to the next (and very literal) level with a Halloween costume that should be submitted to Make’s Halloween costume contest. With the help of Adam Barr, Tyler built this life-size costume of a Nikon D3 DSLR camera, which is impressive in and of itself, but what makes it mind-blowing is that it’s a fully functional, working camera with a “LCD display, built-in flash, and shutter-release button.”
Read More »Happy Gay Christmas: Your First Look at GWLBWLB Season 2
Put down that Pumpkin Spice Latte and step away from the glitter shadow, because the new season of GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS is coming out! Get a first look at the Nashville cast as they prepare to unleash their unique brand of southern-fried FIERCE on Sundance Channel.
Read More »Breakfast from fifty countries
Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. Correction: Breakfast food is my favorite, but I don’t typically do breakfast in the morning. In fact, I’m notorious for not being a “morning person.” This compilation of breakfasts from fifty countries by Design You Trust combines my love for eggs at any time of day with something else I’m a fan of: world travel…
Read More »Movie trailer roundup: Out of control super teens & a scare from the Sundance fest
Okay, it may not be the most original approach, but this week I rounded up a bunch of scary movie trailers because hey, it’s Halloween and everyone’s talking about it. Too much, in fact. None of my friends have kids yet – the only excusable reason for an adult to get amped up it – and yet many are inexplicably entranced by the holiday. Luckily, no one’s asked me what I’m going as, maybe because my friends all know by now that I don’t care. I like candy and I like drinking on a Monday night as much as the next person, but not with a bunch of women who’ve picked the first snow weekend of the year to go out dressed like whores. On purpose – not by accident. A good friend of mine, who’s also a snappy and sometimes theatrical dresser, someone I would normally think would go all out for the opportunity for outlandish dressing that Halloween affords, surprised me by confiding that she doesn’t dress for Halloween because she takes so much time in thinking of what she’ll wear on all the other 364 days of the year that it’s simply too exhausting. This weekend, I join her in taking a stand against all your avid Halloweeners out there, and yeah you can boo me as much as you want. And oh yeah, this is supposed to be about movies:
Read More »What makes NOSFERATU scary?
Tonight I was at a screening that proved how F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Dracula film, NOSFERATU, stands the test of time. You can watch it online via YouTube, but if you can this Halloween weekend, get yourself to a screening with live music. The extra oomph a live organ provides transforms the film from a historical, over-the-top expression-fest to a truly terrifying event. Don’t believe me? My seven-year-old kid could barely sit through the first ten minutes he was so utterly terrified.
So once you add a score – and a really good one at that – it’s easy to look beyond the elements that seem dated now, namely the acting. Acting styles have changed so radically in the past eighty years that we can barely recognize what now seems like camera-mugging as the same craft. But beyond that, not much else seems dated. In fact, the shot construction and framing feel very sophisticated. When Ellen (Greta Schroder), our sweetheart of a protagonist, is discovered sleepwalking just as the dreaded vampire is attacking his first victim miles away, we see her eerily tip toe through the frame far in the distance, the shot size diminishing her presence but emphasizing her fleeting, gorgeously scary physicality as she inches along a high terrace wall…
Read More »Get your doodle on with a scrapbooking iPad app
I have a thing for notebooks. But after years of notebook accumulation, no real pattern or trend has emerged. I collect them indiscriminately—a pink Moleskine here, a cool, cloth-wrapped volume there, some funky vintage find from a flea market. Sadly, most of them sit blank and dusty on a bookshelf in my office, silently pleading for a simple doodle or To-Do list. Alas, my fascination with notebooks doesn’t seem to have come with any real dedication to journaling.
But the creative minds behind new iPad app, Clibe, have come up with a space-saving digital solution for notebook nerds…
Read More »Halloween costume wtf’s, emotional vampires & spectrophilia, oh my!
In honor of Halloween, here’s a round up of some fun love & sex stuff from the (spider) web:
Sundance Channel’s THE MORTIFIED SESSIONS Premieres December 5th at 8p
AWKWARD CHILDHOOD PHOTOS, PROFANE DIARY ENTRIES AND EMBARRASSING POETRY TAKE CENTER STAGE IN SUNDANCE CHANNEL’S THE MORTIFIED SESSIONS AS CELEBRITIES SHARE THEIR PERSONAL ARTIFACTS AND ANECDOTES OF THEIR YOUTH
Ed Helms, Eric Stonestreet, Mo’Nique, Will Forte, Cheryl Hines, Alanis Morrisette, Megan Mullally and more reveal seminal moments and little known secrets to host David Nadelberg in this Original ten-part Series
Facebook and Twitter have made keeping your past in the past a thing of the past. Keeping secrets has truly become a lost art, so one might ask why the display of a celebrity’s diary entry or unsent love letter can carry so much weight? Sundance Channel’s new interview series, THE MORTIFIED SESSIONS, premiering Monday, December 5th at 8:00pm ET/PT, provides a fun look at these artifacts and demonstrates that our adult personality began taking shape in our early years – and that even the coolest celebrity was once a geeky adolescent. The series offers a first person account of these life-changing moments from the past and showcases a new and irreverent side to some of Hollywood’s favorite personalities.
Read More »Visit random corners of the Earth via Globe Genie
MIT grad student Joe McMichael created Globe Genie, a fun chat roulette-like experience, but instead of randomly connecting you with a stranger (or, as if often the case, their penis), it instantly transports you to a random corner of the world (or at least the random corners that have been visited by the Google Maps Street View camera). As The New York Times writes, with a press of the “teleport” button “this could be a stretch of highway in rural Denmark, a corner in downtown Denver or the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro” (and no surprise penises!). I think the usage of the word teleport is fitting…
Read More »Best of the Web: Williamsburg is always ready for Halloween & Spike Jonze tries stop-motion
Halloween or Williamsburg: Anyone that’s ever set foot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn can attest that outfits seen on the sidewalk can be startlingly strange. One minute, you’re looking at a modern Jimi Hendrix and the next, an NYU student’s take on Annie Hall. If you didn’t live here, you might think these people were en route to a costume party or similarly themed event. A brilliant new blog, “Halloween or Williamsburg,” documents some of the neighborhood’s goofiest get-ups…
Read More »The sexy librarian is a man, baby
We’re not sure which is the most pervasive stereotype about librarians – that she wears her hair in a bun, wears glasses and likes to shush people, or that she’s secretly a sex fiend who likes to shake out her bun and whip off her glasses. Either way, male librarians are decidedly absent. And not just male librarians, but young male librarians. Young, male librarians who are not opposed to showing a little skin. This oversight bothered Megan Perez – a young, male former librarian who is not opposed to showing a little skin (see below).
Okay, so the stereotype – the first one at least – does have some truth to it: Currently, the American library workforce is approximately 80% White and 72% female. And tens of thousands of librarians are expected to reach age 65 over the next five years. But all the more reason to expand people’s notions of what a librarian is…
Read More »Josh Marston’s THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD
I’ve been on the festival circuit recently (with my co-directed project SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS) and was lucky enough to see the Berlin world premiere and Chicago winner THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD. It recently made headlines when it was yanked it from Foreign Oscar competition for not being Albanian enough (read Anthony Kaufman’s story here), though the film itself is about a distinctly Albanian issue: the clash of modernity and time-worn cultural customs, this one being medieval blood feuds – rifts between families that can lead to the permanent threat of violence for men, prompting a form of vigilante house arrest that leaves the women and girls to become surrogate bread winners.
Marston, originally from Southern California, initially became intrigued when he read a news article about the phenomenon and began to do his research, boots on the ground. Unafraid of placing himself in cultures different from his own (see his debut feature, MARIA FULL OF GRACE), Marston boldly crafted a story with co-writer Andamion Murataj that dramatizes the futility of a feud from a teenager’s perspective – protagonist Nik (Tristan Halilaj), who just wants to be with his friends at school. Instead, he’s forced to grow up pretty quickly as the tension increases between his family and the neighbors, who his father and uncle attacked, claiming self-defense.
Read More »Sundance is gonna scare the sh*t outta you this week
Halloween is just around the corner, and if you don’t have your costume ready yet let us inspire you with a line up of seriously scary movies. Seriously. I mean it. Like if you really wanted to dress up as some of the characters in these movies you could probably just pour of bucket of fake blood over your head and call it a night. Or, if you’re like me and prefer to leave the gore onscreen, there’s no better way to drown out the sound of your doorbell ringing and scare away the trick-or-treaters on the other side by tuning into Sundance Channel and turning the volume wayyyy up.
Don’t know what to watch first? Allow me to break it down quick and dirty:
POSSESSION OF DAVID O’REILLY: Scary-as-hell supernatural demons in a ”shockumentary” that will haunt your dreams.
COFFIN ROCK: Go ahead, sleep with your stalker, psychopathic neighbor. What’s the worse that could happen?…
Read More »IMDB’s Captcha is less annoying and actually kind of cool
Little Big Details is a slightly esoteric website but one I think would be very interesting and useful for my designer friends and really anyone who lives and breathes in the digital space. It posts user submitted examples of how the tiniest detail in a website, software or user flow can have a disproportionately huge impact on the user experience. A lot of the submissions are from the Apple ecosystem and can be traced back to Steve Jobs, whose obsession over the smallest details resulted in a superior overall user experience…
Read More »Design Dish: Performance architecture & design solutions for the 99%
Alex Schweder’s “Performance” Architecture: Architect Alex Schweder is credited with the invention of “performance architecture,” which broadly refers to small, occupied spaces that challenge our preconceived notions of shelter. Many of Schweder’s works are built within existing spaces, appealing to my childhood obsession with forts. Among my favorites are the inflatable plastic creations, including “sac of rooms all day long,” which looks like a big, warped playhouse.
Design with the Other 99%: Cities: Now on view at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, “Design with the Other 99%” showcases the most promising design and technological innovations coming out of the world’s cities and over-crowded slums…
Read More »Vintage missed connections
I’ve previously mentioned the enjoyment I get from Craigslist’s Missed Connections, the forever alone (meme definition here) corner of the Internet. It seems that New Yorkers’ desire to seek out the stranger who caught their eye is timeless, as evidenced by these missed connections submitted and published back in an 1872 when our existence was a mere glimmer in the eyes of our great, great grandparents (yup, I just put that image in your heads)…
Read More »Halloween, and other things I hate
I hate Halloween. Before you cascade me with weak metaphors and insults that don’t really break the surface, hear me out. Think about all that Halloween represents:
Kids: Your child is neither cute nor charming, and throwing a bed sheet over the poor kid’s head still doesn’t make it cute or charming, it just makes it look like a Klan member.
And hey, parents, great idea to let your kids dress up and ask strangers for a “trick or treat,” (Halloween must be an unthinkably grand holiday for pedophiles) and run through traffic on a corn syrup high (in “fun-sized” portions, of course) on a quest to accumulate enough candy to clinch type 2 diabetes before the age of ten…
Read More »How to defeat zombies using sex toys
One of our favorite sex toy retailers across the pond, Love Honey, really knows how to have fun with holidays. A few Halloweens ago they sent us a bunch of “Death by Orgasm” bullet vibes packaged in cute little coffins that we gave out to our Halloween Haiku contest winners (Lo also awarded one to the best costume winner at her annual Halloween party). This Halloween, they’re doing it again with a video series entitled “How to Defeat Zombies Using Sex Toys.” The production value is almost as good as…
Read More »This Halloween: All guts, no whoring
I’ve never been particularly fond of Halloween. Even as a child, I found the holiday tiresome. I was pained by the process of coming up with a costume cool enough to showcase in my elementary school’s Halloween parade, and would dread the inevitable moment when my classmates would ask me what I was doing that night. My cheeks would turn bubble gum pink as I’d sheepishly admit that I was going trick-or-treating with my mom as opposed to friends, or, ideally, with those large gangs of sugar-crazed kids who’d run from house to house like they were competing to set the record for the fastest trick-or-treaters in the world. I hated those kids, hated the aggressive, greedy spirit they cast into the air. I was perfectly content to spend the evening meandering through the neighborhood with my mom before retiring home to sort my candy by type while my parents watched “The Commish.”
Today, I approach Halloween with similar indifference. I don’t dress up like a prostitute, I don’t seek out the hottest Halloween parties and I don’t binge on fun-size candy bars – or fun-size alcoholic beverages, for that matter. But there is one thing I do: I make pumpkin seeds…
Read More »Art Buzz: Occupy Museums protestors & North Korea’s singing, dancing, human mosaic
North Korean Mosaic: In 2005, German photographer Werner Kranwetvogel attended North Korea’s traditional “mass games” — basically large-scale dance routines with thousands of synchronized participants and singers. Now available in his book, “A Night in the Pongyang,” Kranwetvogel reveals the intricacy of these traditional tableaus which, at the time of his visit, required 30,000 schoolchildren holding as many mosaic tiles to pull off…
Read More »Top Ten cult films: so bad they’re scary
Our resident film critic, Michael Musto, recently wrote about five movies so terrible they’re actually kind of great. The number one film on that list, THE ROOM, also tops another best-of-the-bad rundown, the top ten “Awesomely Bad Films With Cult Followings,” or as I like to call it, ten films that are so bad it’s scary. In fact, many of them fall in the scary movie category, so if a high-budget horror flick isn’t your style, if you like it cheap and dirty, and above all – bad – then these movies are must see, especially as we countdown to the scariest day of the year. You’ve been warned…
Read More »Take This Lollipop: personalized scary movie generated by your Facebook account
Take This Lollipop is an entertaining, interactive viral marketing site for a brilliantly “executed” upcoming horror film that also smartly addresses issues of privacy, or the lack thereof in our modern, digital era where pretty much every new website or app tries to gain access to our personal information stored in Facebook…
Read More »Best of Kickstarter, 10/24
We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.
DESIGN
Imagined Cities: Architecture collective Hither Yon is calling for images of intimate and inspiring spaces (be it the house where you grew up or the church your parents were married in), which they will then manipulate and re-attach to form a “hybrid” city. From these renderings, the collective plans to create a three-dimensional model of the unusual metropolis for display in a Berlin gallery…
Read More »
