Tag: culture

Roof Shark

Sometimes art can be subtle and other times it is expressive. Then there are the statement pieces that become icons. One such art installation is over in Oxford in the UK where a house has a shark crashing through a roof. Yes, you read that right: a shark crashing through a roof. Prolific YouTuber Tom Scott takes us to this block where a piece of art was installed without permission, the decades of fighting to get it removed, and the eventual acceptance of the piece. I just have one question: what happens when it rains??

California Platin’

It only took fifteen years for e-ink to find another use besides the driving technology behind the Kindle and other eBook readers. A bill was signed into law recently in California allowing this tech to do something that will make life easier for everyone: be a license plate. Jonathan Gitlin at Ars Technica has more. Currently, there’s just a single approved digital license plate manufacturer, Reviver. The company’s product, called the RPlate, uses a monochromatic e-ink screen protected by a lens or cover that Reviver says is “six times stronger than glass.” The plate also includes Bluetooth low energy and…

Good Sport Stallone

There are few movie stars that have endured and worked as hard as Sylvester Stallone. The man we all know as Rocky and Rambo has never left the business of entertaining us. It also seems the man who seems like a tough-guy action star has a great sense of humor. This clip from the Jonathan Ross show where they interview Sly shows his good-natured way of handling show business. It’s a short clip, but a fun one to have a few laughs.

Notepad of Doom

Doom is one of the most well-known and earliest entries into successful PC gaming. Id practically invented the FPS (First Person Shooter) genre with Wolfenstein and then Doom. For years, the joke is asking if a piece of technology runs Doom. Now, we get the ultimate Doom: running in Notepad. Chris Kerr at Game Developer has more of this incredible feat. In a video uploaded to YouTube and shared on social media, creator Samperson showcased just under one minute of footage that feels like a flickering, greyscale fever dream.  Although they didn’t break down their process, Samperson explained the footage isn’t sped…

Twit Show

In the words of Ian Malcolm: Well, there it is. The long-running saga of if shitposter extraordinaire Elon Musk would own Twitter is now over. It comes as no surprise that a man who impulsively signed a purchase agreement could not get out of it, no matter how much he tried. As of last Friday, the company is his. The immediate changes were swift with him cleaning out the executive suite. Again, no surprise. In leaked chats, he showed no affinity toward Parag Agrawal, the now-former CEO. The Twitter.com homepage was redirected to the service’s Explore section, which surfaces everything…

Tipping Overload

It is everywhere. You buy a sandwich, you’re asked to tip. Grabbing a t-shirt at a concert’s merch booth? You’re asked to tip. Picking up an online order you needed to pay for at the counter? Tip. Stop the insanity! Tipping is uniquely American and we have created a society where employees are severely underpaid (legally) because they can earn tips. That system alone is awful because people should earn a living wage regardless of tips. However, tipping has permeated into situations where the employee is doing their job or minimal work. Sara Morrison at Vice has more about how…

The House From…

Interesting documentaries can always be a fun time. I’ve seen numerous movies about cool subjects, such as Class Action Park and Off The Rails. Now a new one is getting funded on Kickstarter that’s all about famous houses from movies and TV shows. Germain Lussier at Gizmodo has more on this cool idea. The film is called The House From and it takes fans not just to the outside of famous houses from movies and TV shows like Full House, Golden Girls, Friday, Twilight, and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, but beyond. More than just a tour, it’s an exploration of the people who live or have…

Talk Dirty to Boo

Sometimes you find an interesting story that catches your attention. That’s this haunted house in Gainesville, Texas where you can try your luck at having an encounter with the spirit world. However, there’s more to this than meets the eye: the ghosts in Linda Hill’s home are all perverts. More from Sean Giggy at WFAA: Rumor has it, the house, built in the 1840s, used to be a bordello. That’s why Hill said many of the ghosts here tend to reveal themselves in a particular nature. “Sexual,” she said. “There’s no other way to put it.”Hill said several people have…

Sleepy Busses

With travel back to pre-COVID numbers, there are a ton of people who are on the move. This is also a return to the issue of people who must go somewhere but can’t or don’t want to fly. Enter NapAway: an overnight bus service that fits the bill for this situation. Sounds crazy, right? Well, Natalie Compton at the Washington Post gave it a try. Instead of sucking up half your day getting to and from airports, you could travel overnight and wake up in downtown Nashville. It’s like taking a redeye, but with the ability to have a full…

NJ Slows Car Subscription Ambitions

A subscription for features in your car is one of the worst “you don’t really own it” ideas of the modern subscription-heavy world we live in. I’ve previously written about how horrible of an idea this is. Now, New Jersey is doing something about it. Jonathan Gitlin at Ars Technica has more. In late September, Assemblymen Paul Moriarty and Joe Danielsen introduced a bill that would prohibit car makers or dealers from offering subscriptions in New Jersey for any feature that uses hardware already installed on the vehicle at the time of purchase unless that feature would represent an ongoing…

The Million-Dollar Sinking Home

If you’re going to build an experimental house on the water, it has to do one thing: float. Unfortunately, that’s what a home unveiled in Panama didn’t do. Emily Brown at Unilad has more from the “You Had One Job” department. Unfortunately, the ‘floating’ part of the house didn’t quite go to plan when it was unveiled in a ceremony which included Panama’s president, Laurentino Cortizo, last month. Footage from the event shows the structure leaning at a dramatic angle, with some people actually on the home slowly trying to make their way back to safety as part of it…

Yell Poop, Make Money

Leave it to kids and a weird set of circumstances to become an income stream for musicians out there. A fascinating story from Katie Notopoulos at Buzz Feed wherein people who make silly songs are earning streaming income by kids yelling “Poop” at Alexa. With the proliferation of Echo devices putting Alexa in many homes, kids will yell silly things at it. Of course, kids think this stuff is funny, but when they issue this command, Alexa translates it into a request to play a song. With Amazon Music set as the default music service, it serves up songs like…

Hobbyist Weather Project

The Weather Channel has been around since the beginning of cable television. One popular portion of their offerings has been Weatherscan channel. It’s a 24/7 feed of local weather without any anchors, meteorologists, or interruptions. It’s just weather set to jazz music. And now weather lovers are saving it before the official shutdown. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica has more. The Weather Channel amassed a large fan following over the decades, and that community maintains a wiki filled with intricate details about beloved on-air talent, discontinued programs, and the back-end tech that pulls it all together. It’s that deep lore that inspires hobbyists like Bates to…

A Lawsuit to Fix Hot Sauce

If there is one thing Americans love to do, it’s file lawsuits. Our legal system is gunked up again by a man in California who felt the best way to use his time and resources was to file a lawsuit. About hot sauce. Because it’s not made in Texas. If you’re saying “really??” then let Ariana Garcia at Chron tell you more. A Los Angeles man has filed a class action lawsuit accusing Winston-Salem-based T.W. Garner Food Co. of false advertising after learning that its Texas Pete hot sauce is made in North Carolina—not the Lone Star State.  As reported…

Fine-Dining Restaurant… For Dogs

Another story from the “I can’t believe this is a real thing” department. This time the reporting from Elena Kadvany at the SF Chronicle details a high-end restaurant for dogs complete with a $75 tasting menu. Dogue opened last week at 988 Valencia St. with pastries and “dogguccinos” served during the day and a $75, three-course tasting menu on Sundays. Passersby could easily confuse this for San Francisco’s hottest new all-day cafe. A glass case is filled with elegant pastries, like a rose-shaped cake filled with wild venison heart and a doggy petit gâteau modeled after the creations of acclaimed French pastry…

Serial Justice

The Serial podcast was one of the first truly breakout shows. Podcasting had been fairly niche until they hit on this engrossing formula: true crime told from a journalistic and narriative point of view. Their subject, Adnan Syed, was convicted of a murder he claims he didn’t do. The evidence seemed flimsy. The more Serial dug, the more doubt many people had about the crime’s investigation. For years Syed was helped by the attention to get the case reviewed by the courts. Now, hot off the presses, the prosecutors in Baltimore have announced they are dropping all charges. Jacob Knutson…

Patagonia Now Belongs to Planet Earth

When you have more money than you ever need in your lifetime, what do you do? Well, instead of trying to buy / not-buy / be forced to buy Twitter, or go to space, Yvon Chouinard has taken his company Patagonia and given it away. Valued at three billion dollars, the clothing company that has been a mainstay for decades will be transferred to a non-profit. Meera Navlakha at Mashable has more about how this was done. The Chouinards donated 2 percent of their voting stock to the specially created Patagonia Purpose Trust, which the Times reports will be overseen by family…

The Happy Meal for Adults

McDonald’s is doing what a lot of other companies love to do: cash in on nostalgia. Many things from the ’80s and ’90s are back these days. Now “Mickey D’s” has done something pretty cool: an adult happy meal. It’s a collaboration with a secretive streetwear brand called Cactus Plant Flea Market. Even better, it still comes with a toy. Nicholas Vega at CNBC gives us the details. The Cactus Plant Flea Market Box is a collaboration between McDonald’s and the famous streetwear brand, and will roll out to participating stores starting on Oct. 3. Unlike the smaller menu items…

Every State’s Favorite Ice Cream

Ice cream is one of the best desserts out there. There are enough flavors being made all over that there is truly something for everyone’s tastes. But, like most food, cultural and geographic differences can change what is popular. We can now see, thanks to the Top agency, how each state in the US stacks up against the others. Top Data team analyzed digital commerce trends in 2022 to determine the most searched ice cream flavors in America. Looking through Top’s analysis of search data, we get some interesting results. Rocky Road is quite popular, along with Strawberry. One I…

Minecraft Rule Change Collapses NFT Community

Minecraft, one of the most popular and longest-lasting games out there, made an interesting rule change earlier this year: no integrations with NFTs would be allowed anymore. To many (or even most) players of Minecraft, this would likely be no big deal. But to a few who parlayed their servers into a play-to-earn model, the results would be disastrous. That is how I came across this fascinating story by Neirin Gray Desai at Rest of World. Desai recounts the story of how one savvy player established his own server, used NFTs to create an in-world currency, and make money doing…

NASA Stands Up to Asteroid Bullying

Many TV shows and movies have plots involving deadly asteroids plummeting straight for Earth. Us humans here on Earth have been as helpless as the dinosaurs. Now, we’re finally doing something about it and standing up to these Near Earth Objects. Earlier today NASA DART completed a nearly-year-long mission to deliberately slam a satellite into an asteroid. The goal? To see if we can create significant change in the object and protect the planet. Andrew Tarantola at Engadget has more of our planetary defenses. Results and data from the collision are still coming in but NASA ground control confirms that the…

Darth Vader is More Machine Than Man

In all the years of Star Wars movies and television shows, one thing has remained a constant: James Earl Jones. The actor who has appeared in countless movies throughout his career is the defining voice of Darth Vader. At age 91, Jones has agreed to call it quits. It makes sense that would want to hang up his Vader mask. But who will replace him? A computer, of course. [Lucasfilm] has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher’s relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+…

Giving Rogue One Its Due

Star Wars has always been a cash cow. However, in the Disney-ownership era, there’s been hits and misses. An early risk they took with their newly-purchased franchise was Rogue One. This was going to be a non-Skywalker side story. Nobody knew what to expect, but it turned out to be fantastic. On the heels of the Andor TV show releasing on Disney+ tomorrow, Shirley Li at The Atlantic looks back on this odd duck of a Star Wars movie. It primarily follows an ensemble of new characters, none of them named Skywalker, Solo, or Palpatine. The Force is mentioned but…

That S We All Drew in School

If I were to ask you “Remember the ‘S’ from school?” I bet more than a handful would answer “absolutely.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is an angular letter S that is drawn with six vertical lines and then connecting them with some diagonal lines. But where did it come from? Over on YouTube, LEMMiNO has gone down the rabbit hole to find its origins. I loved watching this. The “Universal S” is a really interesting design because anyone can draw it. I, who is not artistically skilled in any way, used to draw it all…

Drought Reveals Ships

While we’re running head-first into a global climate crisis, we might as well unearth some interesting pieces of history. In Europe’s Danube River, the water level is so low, that WWII Nazi warships are resurfacing along with their thousands of onboard explosives. Dipo Faloyin at Vice has more. Twenty explosive-filled German warships have resurfaced after a historic drought pushed the waters of Europe’s second-longest river to its lowest levels in a century.  The sunken World War II warships, part of Nazi Germany’s Black Sea Fleet, were discovered along the Serbian stretch of the Danube River. The ships are believed to…

Jaws Bites the Box Office

You can’t keep a good classic down. Leave it to the Spielberg movie that made everyone afraid of the water to make big bucks in a limited return to theaters. Recently national theater chains held a National Cinema Day event and movie tickets were a cool $3 to see a movie. Jaws ended up being a big draw. David Pierce at The Verge has more. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend. That put it 10th for the weekend. On a per-theater basis, Jaws actually outperformed every other movie in theaters…

A mile and a Half for a Dunkin’

Stow, Massachusettes is in a bit of a crisis. The small town that sits about 30 miles east of Boston has had the most Massachusetts of slights committed against it: the closing of its Dunkin’ Donuts locations. WBZ’s Matt Shearer reports that where there were once two locations in the small town, there are now zero. Shearer interviews various people. One notable local is frustrated he now has to drive a lot further for his Dunkin’ fix: a mile and a half.

Bologna Smugglers

The border of the US and Mexico has a smuggling problem. One that causes hundreds of pounds of meat to illicitly flow into the US. This high-value item is definitely unexpected. It’s bologna. Madeleine Aggeler at Texas Monthly tells us more. The bologna arrives in darkness. Hundreds of pounds cross into the U.S. from Mexico at once. Rolls are stuffed into the backs of SUVs, sewn into car seats, shoved into spare tires, or hidden in suitcases beneath heaps of shirts and socks. Once, in El Paso, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer drilled into a car’s bumper and…

Camera Evolution

On the eve of the iPhone 14 announcement, I thought it would be good to pause and look back on this fantastic comparison the folks at Simple Ghar mocked up. The team over there went through and compared photos from Samsung, Apple, and other smartphones going back to 2000. To compare the capabilities of camera phones over the years, SimpleGhar’s experts gathered data on the tech specs of the best-selling devices and those that made a significant leap in image quality. Then, we created mock-up images of the effect each camera phone would have on a consistent set of sample…

I Want My NFT TV

A new entry from the “we never asked for this” department. LG has announced its Arts Lab with this bonehead feature: you can display, buy, and sell NFTs directly on the television. Emma Roth at The Verge brings us this gem of an idea. For now, only users in the US with an LG TV that runs webOS 5.0 or later can access the app, which is available to download from the TV’s home screen. Through the portal, you can buy and sell digital works made available through LG’s NFT drops. The first one of these drops is set to…