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In 1980, civil rights hero Rosa Parks appeared on To Tell the Truth, a long-running game show. Parks appeared alongside two other women claiming to be Parks and a celebrity panel tried to guess the identity of the true Parks. See also the appearance of a Lincoln assassination witness on a 50s game show. (via @ptak)
If you ever need a good definition for “differently abled” (as opposed to “disabled”), these two videos should suffice.
Apparently they set off fireworks everywhere in Lima, Peru when the New Year hits. And Jeff Cremer was there with his drone to capture the craziness. Wow. (via colossal)
From Tony Zhou comes another episode of Every Frame a Painting. In it, he uses Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder to explore ensemble staging, how movies can direct an audience’s onscreen attention when many people are on the screen at the same time, and why a director would want to do that.
Jordan Hanzon made an edit of Inside Out showing only the “outside” parts of the film…so, none of the stuff with Joy, Sadness, Anger, etc. I bet Pixar had an internal cut like this just to make sure the outside stuff hung together independent of the inside. (via devour1)
I love Devour. They find great videos and curate their selection well. But they never credit their sources. More than a dozen times in recent months, I’ll post a video to kottke.org and it’ll show up on Devour within 30 minutes or so. (How do I know they’re taking from me and not the place I originally found them? Because I often don’t post stuff right away because of my scheduling, pacing, etc.) Anyway, it’s not just me…they take stuff from Colossal and other places as well. It sucks. I’ve complained to them on Twitter and nothing changed. For the past few months, I’ve been using a tit-for-tat approach and not crediting Devour for finding a video on their site. Since it’s the new year, I’m giving them another chance. Come on, Devour, stop being a leech and credit your sources!↩
With just a few modifications, Samuel Bernier and Andreas Bhends made a working bicycle out of a pair of Ikea FROSTA stools.
(via @kellianderson)
Of Oz the Wizard is the entire Wizard of Oz movie presented in alphabetical order by dialogue. So it starts with all the scenes where Dorothy and the gang say “a”, “aaiee”, “along”, and proceeds through “you’re” and “zipper”. Even the words on each of the title cards are sorted alphabetically.
(I feel like I’ve posted this before — or something like it — but I can’t find it in the archives. Anyone?)
Update: Ah yes, I was thinking of this alphabetized version of Star Wars (which I’ve seen before but somehow never posted):
Another example is Thomson & Craighead’s The Time Machine. Matt Bucy, the creator of Of Oz the Wizard, seems to have pioneered this technique (the Vimeo page indicates it was completed in April 2004) but didn’t post the video online until a few days ago. (via @Mister_Milligan, @sannahahn)
What does it sound like when a woman in red high heels walks across a dining room table? What does it sound like when a big guy gets slapped on the nape? What does it sound like when a forest watches itself? “Unnecessary Sounds” reveals all.
“Madeline the Robot Tamer” is a really lovely video about Madeline Gannon, a woman who dances, so to speak, with robots. As a resident at Pier 9, she developed Quipt, “a gesture-based control software that gives industrial robots basic spatial behaviors for interacting closely with people.” It’s a wonderful demonstration of robots and humans learning to work together.
(via Laughing Squid)
Whether or not you’re a writer or even care about words, this video starring George Saunders talking about how to tell a story that matters is phenomenal. It was created by Redglass Pictures. (P.S. There’s swearing in it.)
(via Harry Allen)
Clayton Cubitt has a new installment of his “Hysterical Literature” series, and this one’s in French. As Jason described previously, in each video, “a female participant is filmed from the waist up reading a story of her choosing while she is stimulated to orgasm with a vibrator by Cubitt’s partner, Katie James.” (There’s no nudity in the video, but you may find the audio NSFW.)
This time, the woman is Fette, the reading is in French with English subtitles, and the text is Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser.
You can see the entire Hysterical Literature project here, you can read author Toni Bentley’s Vanity Fair account of being a Hysterical Literature star here, and Cubitt’s Instagram is here.
Things don’t work out so well for Santa and his reindeer in “Happy Holidays,” a video by Eoin Duffy. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
Surfer Kelly Slater has built what I can only guess is the world’s largest wave pool that pumps out perfectly surfable waves. It looks a bit boring actually, faultless waves every time. Like playing against the computer in NHL ‘94. (via @mathowie)
The “hidden” mathematics and order behind everyday objects & phenomenon like spinning tops, dice, magnifying glasses, and airplanes. (via @stevenstrogatz)
YouTube user darman212 used iOS coding app Hopscotch and Final Cut Pro X to make a version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer entirely out of emoji. BB-8 is a soccer ball with a bowl of ramen on his head!
(via @marcprecipice)
One of the most persistent “facts” used by 9/11 truthers is that burning jet fuel can’t generate the temperatures necessary to melt steel beams, therefore something other than airplanes crashing into the WTC towers brought them down, therefore the US government or the Jews or, I don’t know, the buildings’ owners did it to collect the insurance payment.
In his workshop, blacksmith Trenton Tye easily demonstrates that although it’s true jet fuel can’t burn hot enough to melt steel beams, it can definitely soften the steel past the ability to bear any sort of load.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is out today, at least in NYC theaters.1 To celebrate, I watched the classic clip of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog interviewing people standing in line for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
You look like some kind of super-nerd. It looks like you were built in a laboratory out of parts from lesser nerds.
It is all sorts of inappropriate, but also one of my favorite comedy bits of all time. (via @fromedome)
Update: One of the people from the video wrote an article about the experience last month.
Another thing that’s lost on some people is that everyone there was in on it. After all, we were nerds camping on a sidewalk to see a Star Wars movie. We were very much aware of who Conan O’Brien was, and what Triumph was all about. Everyone there was a fan and if you watch the video, people are hunched over laughing in the background in basically every shot. We were glad to let him mock us. In fact, we helped.
(via @CastIrony)
So, did they add these Thursday showings after the initial announcement of tickets going on sale back in October? When I bought my tickets that day, I got them for the first available showing (11am on Fri), or so I remember. Did Disney add these earlier shows at a later point to sucker fans into having to buy tickets twice in order to see it as soon as possible? (I did not do this. But I definitely thought about doing it.) ↩
Star Wars Minus Star Wars is a video essay on the original film that doesn’t use a single shot, sound, or snippet of music from the original movie. Instead, it strings together scenes and sounds from movies that influenced George Lucas in making the film and also from movies that have been influenced by Star Wars.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Star Wars. Its arrival in theaters on May 25th 1977 marked the end of one chapter in film history and the beginning of another. It’s a hinge on which film history swings. Upon its release, critic Pauline Kael derided the film as “an assemblage of spare parts-it has no emotional grip… an epic without a dream” Twenty years after its release critic Roger Ebert remarked that the film “colonized our imaginations, and it is hard to stand back and see it simply as a motion picture, because it has so completely become part of our memories.”
They’re both right. Star Wars succeeded because of its roots in film history and mythology, and its influence over generations of filmmakers can be felt in countless works that came after it. For better or worse, Star Wars engulfs the past and future of moviemaking.
That was super-fun to watch. See also Where did Star Wars come from? and Paul’s Boutique Minus Paul’s Boutique. (via @tonyszhou, who calls it “the best Star Wars video essay ever”)
Update: This might be even more impressive. John D’Amico made a full-length shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars using material that influenced (or may have influenced) Lucas in making the film. Very cool.
(thx, jim)
Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show deftly skewers that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” nonsense.
Kurzgesagt makes some of the most entertaining science explainers around. Check out their most recent video on black holes.
The forecast high temperature for Christmas Eve in New York City is 66°F. What the hell is going on? Climate change? Yes, but mostly the balmy East Coast temps are due to a super-strong El Niño.1 In the video above, Vox explains what El Niño is and how the Pacific weather pattern affects weather around the globe (including the East Coast of the US).
El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs irregularly in the eastern tropical Pacific every two to seven years. When the trade winds that usually blow from east to west weaken, sea surface temperatures start rising, setting off a chain of atmospheric impacts.
El Niños can be strong or weak. Strong events can temporarily disrupt weather patterns around the world, typically making certain regions wetter (Peru or California, say) and others drier (Southeast Asia). Some countries suffer major damage as a result.
Although the severity of this and future El Niños may be due to greenhouse warming. Complex systems, yo!↩
The most teasing of teaser trailers is out for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter prequel that everyone insists isn’t a prequel. Out November 2016. (via trailer town)
Update: Toooootally a prequel…Dumbledore gets name-dropped in this one:
Update: The full trailer has been released:
The winner of the 2015 Small World in Motion competition is Wim van Egmond’s video of a single-celled organism consuming a smaller single-celled organism. The winners of the photomicrography contest are worth a look as well.
As of last month, 685 multi-planet solar systems (with 1705 planets) have been discovered outside our own. This video shows the relative sizes of those systems compared to ours. Please note:
The size of the orbits are all to scale, but the size of the planets are not. For example, Jupiter is actually 11x larger than Earth, but that scale makes Earth-size planets almost invisible (or Jupiters annoyingly large).
(via @daveg)
Steven Avery spent 12 years in prison for rape before being exonerated by DNA evidence. After his release, he was charged with murder. Making a Murderer, a new 10-show Netflix series premiering on December 18, will examine Avery’s crimes, a la Serial and The Jinx.
One of my video game triumphs as a kid was playing all the way through The Legend of Zelda using only the wooden sword.1 It was difficult. The person in the video above beat Zelda with only three hearts and without using a sword (until right at the end…you need a sword to kill Gannon). Hardcore. Makes me want to fire up the Wii and see what I can do.
A close runner-up was beating Zelda without dying.↩
A collection of old film footage of NYC, taken between 1896 and 1905, along with maps and descriptions of the locations.
This video is 20 minutes of the best YouTube footage from 2015 of extreme sports, marriage proposals, cute kids, funny animals, fast cars, groovy dancing, dronies, and more slow-motion GoPro footage than you could ever want to see in one lifetime. I’ve linked to a few of these videos, but generally my list of cool videos of the year would be a bit less X-TREEM. If you want to watch all 506 videos in the compilation, check out this playlist.
Joshua Foer, winner of the 2006 USA Memory Championship and author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, shows us how to memorize anything using a “memory palace” technique with the first 100 digits of pi as an example.
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