Chasing Sunset

Flash picture zooms eternally.

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Shweee! Lots of blood.

Move the blocky rag doll around with your mouse for some gruesome fun :-D

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1. Garbage (32) 
2. Lily Allen (32) 
3. Within Temptation (31) 
4. Paramore (12) 
5. The Flying Change (10) 

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

An ex-Jack Sparrow spills on life at the Magic Kingdom

Like everyone, I grew up going to Disneyland. Even as an adult I loved it there and went at least once a month. I was an annual pass holder, though not like the freaky ones you may have heard of. I’d see the park’s characters and think, “It’d be so cool to work here.” But there was never a character I really wanted to play. I had a role on the television show Veronica Mars and was working at Coco’s when a friend told me Disneyland was casting a Jack Sparrow character. I had already played Jack as a hobby at San Diego’s Comic-Con and the Renaissance Faire.
Thirty-seven actors showed up that day, four of us in costume. Only eight were chosen for the next round. We were told we would be auditioning the next day at Disneyland. When I showed up, there were now 23 guys - 15 that had been pulled from in-house auditions. There was this assistant who would come in and pull people one by one - “Steve, can you come with me?” Then you’d never see Steve again. Finally I was sitting all alone in the room. After 15 minutes they pulled me into another room where two other guys were sitting. They told us we were going to be Disneyland’s first Jack Sparrows.

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1. Avril Lavigne (41) 
2. Paramore (30) 
3. Lily Allen (26) 
4. Evanescence (26) 
5. The Veronicas (14) 

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Have you ever really wanted to do something, but you just weren’t motivated enough to do it?

This is always my number one reason for not taking action, as I’m sure it’s probably yours too. If you’re not motivated, you just don’t have the energy or the drive to do what you need to do, right? Simple enough.

But here’s three of the biggest problems with relying on being highly motivated all the time:

1. Maybe you don’t really care about what you’re doing. Maybe it doesn’t really matter and you’re trying to force yourself to do something you don’t want to do. In this case, your lack of motivation is your subconscious telling you “this is not important” or “this does not align with my values.”
2. Energy comes in waves. And just as each wave has a crest, it also has a trough. Sometimes your level of motivation will be like a rushing tsunami. At other times, it will be a steady flow. These are natural rhythms and following these rhythms are important, because if you don’t, you will burn out.
3. Sometimes you won’t be excited before you take action, but you will feed good after you’re done. Take exercise for example. A lot of people dread or loathe working up a sweat. They are not motivated beforehand, at least not enough for them to break through the mental resistance to the work that will be done. But, they feel awesome when they’ve finished exercising. Therefore, sometimes you can’t rely on being highly motivated before, sometimes you have to rely on being motivated after.

Does that mean that motivation is unimportant? No, it’s still important and it does play a role. But too often, it’s easy to get caught up in relying on being totally psyched about something before you do it.

You will not always be totally psyched.

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We live in an era of recycling, where hippies scream in horror if they spot a soda can in the garbage and go into convulsions at the thought of a landfill full of paper. But if you think glass bottles, milk jugs and CSI are the only things that can be recycled, read on. The next dump you take could be used to build a school in Japan.

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1. Within Temptation (95) 
2. Lily Allen (63) 
3. Howling Bells (36) 
4. Garbage (27) 
5. Alkaline Trio (22) 

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by Brendan Spiegel

If your mother told you never to play with your food, she probably didn’t grow up in any of these towns. Whether the food is being worshipped, chased, sculpted, or thrown, we’ve found 10 spots around the world where picking at your plate isn’t just acceptable, it’s encouraged.

1. Italy’s Orange Battle
2. Cheese Rolling at Cooper’s Hill
3. The Lopburi Monkey Festival
4. Night of the Radishes
5. Turkey’s Greasy Wrestling Competition
6. La Festival Gastronomico del Gato
7. The West Virginia Roadkill Cook-Off
8. Greece’s Clean Monday Flour War
9. The Mame-Maki Ritual
10. Shepherd’s Shemozzle

…more: get the full lowdown on these festivals

About 10 years ago, we didn’t really expect the 1.4mb 3.5 inch floppy to evolve into flash drives 10x smaller with storage capacity as big as 32gb. The interesting thing about technology is it’s just going to get more and more high-end, but the size is just going to get smaller and slimmer.

These concept gadgets have an extremely high chance of getting into production anywhere in the future. For example, Microsoft’s Surface Computing Technology certainly tells us they are for real. Here’s some really cool concept gadgets - just concepts for now but we really hope it’ll be implemented - that inspire.

B-membrane Laptop/Desktop: Concept computer designed by Korean designer Won-Seok Lee. No bulky monitors, just a UFO shape system that displays screen like a projector. [via yankodesign]

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All day yesterday, Twitter was flooded with folks tweeting each other “geek pick-up lines.” The microblogging service’s 140-character limit actually makes it a good format to exchange such information, as any pick-up line over 140 characters would qualify as more of an awkward monologue.

Using a rough formula of quality and times tweeted and re-tweeted, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 geek pick-up lines from the discussion. Since not everybody speaks geek, we’ve also deciphered some of the more technical lingo.

10. I wish I was your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves. (In calculus, a derivative is tangent — meaning it brushes up against — a curve.)

9. Mind if I put a Trojan on your hard drive? (A Trojan is malware that appears to form a legitimate function on your computer, but actually facilitates unauthorized access to your system. You would mind.)

8. You had me at Halo. (Halo is popular video game with those who don’t have a traditional set of social skills.)

7. Is it ok if I ascii you out? (ASCII is a coding standard which allows computers to talk to each other.)

6. By looking at you I can tell you’re 36-25-36, which by the way are all perfect squares. (Fourth-grade math joke)

5. I wish I was DNA Helicase so I can unzip ur genes, (Helicase is the enzyme responsible for unzipping the double-helix structure of the DNA that makes up your genes.)

4. Baby, I love you so much that if Joss Whedon were writing our romance one of us would be dead by now. (Joss Whedon is a writer/director who has a history of killing off love interests in his sci-fi/fantasy-based TV dramas like “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.”)

3. If I FlickR your YOUTUBE, will you Twitter my Yahoo? (Geeks also like crude puns.)

2. Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, All my base are belong to you. (#FF000 and #0000FF are the HTML codes for red and blue respectively. The rest is from an Internet meme involving Japanese Engrish.)

1. My name’s Vista. Can I crash at your place tonight? (Microsoft’s operating system has a reputation for being unstable.)

(Read the full article on Asylum.com)

Geeks, as a general rule, are pretty easy-going. We like to think things through, so passionate confrontations aren’t commonplace for us. When we get well and properly provoked, though, watch out! We won’t stop talking until every last point that we can think of has been made at least twice. So, what do you say to provoke a geek? Glad you asked!

10. “No real programmer would ever use PHP.” - This won’t work for every geek, of course, but for those it works on, it should work really well.

9. “Comic books are just for kids!” - I’m sure you’ve heard this one before — I know I certainly heard it often enough in high school, and even though it’s even less true now than it was then, I’m sure comic book afficionados still hear it today.

8. “Role-playing games are just for people who can’t deal with real life.” - There are, sadly, still a lot of people who think anyone who plays D&D must live in his parents’ basement and bathe once a month. Such people must be put straight, and immediately!

7. “The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are so realistic!” - I doubt many people actually believe this, but there are an awful lot of misconceptions about pirates out there, so you never know.

6. “Yeah, I got an Xbox 360 so my daughter could play Hello Kitty games. Is it really good for anything else?” - We’ve hit the ones that are hard for me even to type, now…

5. “Mac, Windows, or Linux? Does it really make a difference?” - An argument so old its original form was probably first written down in hieroglyphs, I know, but I don’t know a single geek it wouldn’t work on—myself included.

4. “The Ewoks were the best thing about the original Star Wars trilogy.” / “Greedo shot first!” - I couldn’t decide between the two. If one doesn’t work, I’ll bet the other one would.

3. “Tolkien? Ehhh, I prefer Terry Brooks!” - I almost feel like I should argue with myself just for writing that. I’m going to let the top two stand for themselves.

2. “Joss Whedon is a hack!”

1. “I don’t see what’s so bad about DRM!”

(Read the full article on GeekDad)

Whether or not humans are the smartest species on the planet really depends on which animals and which humans you base it on. After all, sometimes when people match wits with members of the animal kingdom, it doesn’t turn out well for the humans.

Read the full article

Meet Kelly, a dolphin who lived at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies. Her trainers, perhaps out of laziness, decided to teach her how to pick up litter from her own tank.

This was encouraged by presenting Kelly and her chums with a nice fishy meal whenever they retrieved trash from their pool and brought it to their trainer. Life was sweet for the keepers, the pool was kept clean with fuck all effort on their behalf and the dolphins were happy enough with their little game. But Kelly, like all great entrepreneurs, wondered whether there was a way of making a profit from it.

And so one day, when someone dropped a piece of paper into the pool, rather than playing along with the game, Kelly picked up the litter and swam to the bottom of the pool, wedging it in place under a rock. The next time a trainer passed, she popped on down to the rock, tore off a tiny strip of paper and took it to the keeper. Bingo—she got a fish.

Holy shit! It worked! She had found a way to multiply her fishy return many times over.

When the paper ran out, Kelly decided it was time to expand her business. In order to yield more impressive profits, she needed something more impressive than a piece of paper.

Gulls are lots bigger than paper and they like to eat dolphin food, so they could be found hanging around the tank. Kelly tested her theory by catching an unsuspecting fish-stealing gull and holding it in her mouth until a trainer arrived, her little fins twitching in anticipation. Bingo—once again she hit the mark. She got a shit-ton of fish in return.

So now it was just a matter of attracting more gulls. The next time she was fed, Kelly stored a few fish under her rock hiding place. Once the keepers had left, she brought up a fish to use as bait. She caught another gull, waited for a trainer to come back, and proudly swam over to find herself once again rewarded with another shit ton of fish.

She then taught her kids to do it, turning “gulls for fish” it into a family business.

You have to impressed; not only was Kelly turning a profit here, she had done it by adapting her behavior to elicit the desired response from her keepers. She could get them to give her fish on demand.

That’s right; Kelly the dolphin trained her trainers.

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A US-based language monitoring group crowned Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language, although other linguists slammed it as nonsense and a stunt.

The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, said Web 2.0 appeared over 25 000 times in searches and was widely accepted, making it the legitimate, one millionth word.

It said Web 2.0 started out as a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services but had crossed into far wider circulation in the last six months.

Other linguists, however, denounced the list as pure publicity and unscientific, saying it was impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.

There are no set rules for such a count as there is no certified arbiter of what constitutes a legitimate English word and classifying the language is complicated by the number of compound words, verbs and obsolete terms.

“I think it’s pure fraud … It’s not bad science. It’s nonsense,” Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.

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1. Avril Lavigne (83) 
2. The Like (24) 
3. Howling Bells (18) 
4. Enaid (10) 
5. Centerpointe (4) 

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

After wasting an afternoon taking pictures of a broken tricycle, moss on trees, and the shadow of a wrought-iron fence, Churchill Alternative High School senior Jessica Ivers falsely informed family and friends Saturday that she was getting into photography. “I love the way real film looks,” said Ivers, who has owned the old single-lens reflex 35 millimeter camera for exactly one week, and named as her favorite photographers “probably Diane Arbus” and the French guy who took the picture of the boy with the wine bottle. “I’m really fascinated by textures, and I think I’ll be able to get some good shots of my grandma’s hands this weekend.” Sources close to Ivers expect the camera to join her clarinet and yoga mat under her bed once she pays $14.85 to develop the roll of clumsy, overexposed images.

(from the ONION)

A few weeks ago, a guy moved into the apartment across from me. I know little about him apart from the fact that he owns cane furniture as I saw the delivery guys carry it up. I bumped into him on the stairs once and he said hello but I cannot be friends with someone that owns cane furniture so I pretended I had a turtle to feed or something.

Last week when I checked my mailbox, I found that my new neighbour had left me a note stating that he was having a party and to let him know if the noise was too loud.

The problem I have with the note is not that he was having a party and didn’t invite me, it was that he selected a vibrant background of balloons, effectively stating that his party was going to be vibrant and possibly have balloons and that I couldn’t come.

If I was writing a note to my neighbours saying that I was going to have a party but none of them could come, I would not add photos of ecstasy tablets, beer and gratuitous shots of Lucius going down on men to show them what they are missing out on, I would make it clean and simple, possibly even sombre, so they didn’t think ‘you prick’.

At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, people stood in line for hours to look at a strange sight.

They wanted to see the “Futurama,” a miniaturized replica of a typical 21st century American city that featured moving sidewalks, computer-guided cars zipping along congestion-free highways and resort hotels beneath the sea.

Forty years later, we’re still waiting for those congestion-free highways — along with the jet pack, the paperless office and all those “Star Trek”-like gadgets that were supposed to make 21st-century life so easy.

Daniel Wilson has been waiting as well. He’s looked at the future we imagined for ourselves in pulp comic books, old science magazines and cheesy sci-fi movies from the 1950s, and came up with one question.

Why isn’t the future what it used to be?

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