This was a Fun movie, and a very funny one, too. Until the end, I wasn't sure if it was a good one. Hell, it is good. The first was well-made and profoundly clever in its use of nostalgia as part of its storytelling soul rather than just appearances, but the sequel has a more perfect magic: emotional honesty.
It's about a team of famous yet bickering mercenaries and their unseemly associates, all outmaneuvering enemies and gravitating toward epic destinies that turn out to be mirages obscuring the smaller truths of family. I suspect this will make older viewers like it more, but younger ones like it less, because they don't sleep with the sort of well-settled emotional tangles that the movie vicariously unravels.
I don't really feel like more should be said, frankly, than that. It's a light show, lacking any suggestion of physical threat or danger, yet it wields its human weaponry so well.
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The Neptune Convertible Art Lens System is designed to recreate a vintage look without being completely terrible wide-open like the old C-mount trash glass you keep buying on eBay.
The Neptune Convertible Art Lens System consists of a lens base that’s mounted to your camera and several convertible lens components. By interchanging the front components, you can shoot photos or videos at three different fixed focal lengths — 35mm, 50mm and 80mm. An Art Lens System unlike any other; it offers you all the freedom of a zoom lens without compromising on prime lens quality, and it’s the only convertible Art Lens out there to work with a range of modern-day analogue and digital cameras. Each component is assembled by using the finest multi-coated glass and crafted to produce exceptionally sharp focus and strong, saturated colors for stunning high-definition images — even when you’re shooting close-ups at 0.25m/9.8” with Thalassa (35mm), 0.4/15.7” with Despina (50mm) or 0.8m/31.5” with Proteus (80mm). This is an Art Lens System that lets you take beautifully intimate shots, allowing you to get near enough to capture every last detail of your subject. And because it’s so small and lightweight design, you can take it with you everywhere.
That's $600 for a 35mm f/3.5, 50mm f/2.8 and 80mm f/4 set of very compact full-frame manual primes with drop-in aperture plates, natively mounted in Canon EF or Nikon F, with a custom adapter for whatever mount you got. "Compact" and "consistent" are the watchwords: on the photography sites, the old men of the mountain are all angrily pointing out that you can get the same results by attaching some ancient thriftstore artillery piece. Read the rest
Martin Shkreli was suspended from Twitter in January after harassing reporter Lauren Duca there, and reported being permanently banned Thursday. He boasted about setting up a new Twitter account to circumvent the ban, but @TrashyTheCat has now been banned too.
Shkreli is most famous for hiking the cost of the HIV drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill, but he’s also well known for being incredibly obnoxious. After he paid $2 million for the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin he set up a YouTube live stream of him sitting, doing nothing, and teasing that he would play the album. He did not play it at that time, but later streamed clips of it to celebrate Donald Trump being elected as president.
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Oskar Stalberg (previously) made Brick Block, a fun online 3D toy that lets you design surreal blocky houses. You can spin the scene to any degree and have it generate random houses. It's like the level editor for a Victorian-themed version of the classic cyberpunk game Syndicate.
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Meet
the 19 Republicans who flipped their votes in favor of the ACHA, the bill that effectively repeals Obamacare and allows insurance companies to hike premiums and refuse to sell insurance to people on the basis of "pre-existing conditions" such as being the victim of domestic violence. There's something odd about them. Can't quite put my finger on it.
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In a 217-213 vote in the House of Representatives, every Democrat and 20 Republicans
were not enough to prevent the passage of Paul Ryan's Obamacare repeal bill. The American Health Care Act (ACHA) will reportedly allow insurers to raise premiums and deny healthcare coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions (including being the victim of domestic abuse or sexual assault, or giving birth by c-section) and amounts to an
$880-billion slashing of healthcare services in the form of a tax cut returning mostly to the rich.
The Senate, however, will not need any Democrats to pass it because they are using a procedural mechanism that allows the bill to pass the Senate to pass with just 51 votes instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate.
The House measure came to the floor without an updated accounting of how much the bill will cost or its impact. The last assessment, which was done before the bill was altered, said that 24 million people would lose insurance, it would save $300 million and premiums would go down ten percent after ten years.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Georgia, said that having no updated CBO score is slightly concerning.
"It is a concern, but at this point we have to move forward. The American people are clear they want this done, so I think we have to strike when the iron's hot," he said.
The bill must still be voted on in the Senate. Then, assuming it passes, it will be signed into law by President Trump, who had promised before the election to provide healthcare coverage for all Americans. Read the rest
@Smutclyde Google Translated sequences of unicode characters and short pairings, at varying lengths, to see what the neural networks would interpret each as. The results are remarkable. Lovecraftian wailings, for example, become homoerotic death metal lyrics.
And is this not as disturbing as it is funny? Especially when you consider that
the machine minds are learning their way beyond our comprehension. Read the rest
Luis Padron, 25, has spent huge sums of money on cosmetic surgery in order to resemble an elf.
He has almost spent more than £25,000 on surgery including liposuction on his jaw, a nose job, full body hair removal and operations to change his eye colour. ... He is planning surgery to make his ears pointed, hair implants for a heart-shaped hairline and a limb lengthening operation to make him 6ft 5in tall.
Mr Padron fell in love with the fantasy genre during his early teenage years, while struggling with bullies who mocked him because he dyed his hair and had different dress sense.
But by the end of high school, he claimed his quirkiness led to him being admired, which further fuelled his desire to be different.
He added: 'I was bullied as a child and as an escape I would submerge myself in fantasy movies like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story, as well as other fantasy tales.
'Over time things changed, older teens liked me because I was unique and that's what encouraged me to start turning what I felt on the inside into a reality.
From an aesthetic perspective, I think he's executing his goals unusually well, which is largely due to broadened horizons among competent surgeons. There will be more of this in future from the rich (and those willing to tolerate a lifetime of debt). But I must say his is a rather sickly and emo-looking sort of elf. It's like he set out to turn his body into an illustration rather than an embodied creature; the details require "a £4,000-a-month ritual applying creams, dyes and treatment," according to the Daily Mail. Read the rest
Trish Vickers of Dorset, England, decided to write a novel. Though blind, she preferred to work the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, with her son dropping in weekly to type up the results. On one visit, though, she learned to her horror that her pen had ran out of ink fully 26 pages ago. But all was not lost!
Not knowing what else to do, she and Simon called the police. To the Vickers’s surprise, officers at Dorset HQ volunteered to work during their breaks and free time, hoping to use their forensic tools to help. And, five months later, the police reported back with success: they recovered the never-written words. Vickers told a local newspaper that the pen she used to write the pages — even though there was no ink left in it — left behind a series of indentations: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen.”
Vickers finished the book, Grannifer's Legacy, and died the day it was published. [via MeFi] Read the rest
Ascii Cinema is a purely text-based way to record and view, well, text. Whether it's terminal sessions or gorgeous ASCII animations such as those created by MapSCII, this means you get crisp, copy/pastable 1:1 representations of the input and output in a form as easily embedded as a YouTube video.
Simple recording
Record right where you work - in a terminal. To start just run asciinema rec, to finish hit Ctrl-D or type exit.
Copy & paste
Any time you see a command you'd like to try in your own terminal just pause the player and copy-paste the content you want. It's just a text after all!
Embedding
Easily embed an asciicast player in your blog post, project documentation page or in your conference talk slides.
Here are a few pretty examples: Read the rest
MapSCII turns vectors into text-mode maps using the Braille ASCII character set. You can check out examples at ASCII Cinema, which provides animated embeds comprising of actual text!
Examples follow:
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Ultrasonic beacons (previously, previously) let advertisers build an idea of when and where you use your devices: the sound plays in an ad on one device, and is heard by other devices. This way, they can associate two gadgets with a single user, precisely geolocate devices without aGPS, or even build graphs of real-world social networks. The threat was considered more academic than some, but more than 200 Android apps were found in the wild using the technique.
In research sponsored by the German government [PDF], a team of researchers conducted extensive tests across the EU to better understand how widespread this practice is in the real world.
Their results revealed Shopkick ultrasonic beacons at 4 of 35 stores in two European cities. The situation isn't that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.
In the real world, this isn't an issue, as store owners, advertisers, or product manufactures could incentivize users to open various apps as a way to get discounts.
From the paper:
While in April 2015 only six instances were known,
we have been able to identify 39 further instances in a dataset
of about 1,3 million applications in December 2015, and until
now, a total of 234 samples containing SilverPush has been
discovered. We conclude that even if the tracking through TV
content is not actively used yet, the monitoring functionality
is already deployed in mobile applications and might become
a serious privacy threat in the near future
Apparently it's not very effective—consumer speakers and mics aren't designed with ultrasonic use in mind and the authors say noise, audio compression and other factors "significantly affects the feasibility" of the technology—but the intent is clearly there on the part of advertisers and appmakers to make a stab at it. Read the rest
Subject-28 presentes sketches, cels and animation tests from Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 masterpiece, Akira. A huge and beautifully-presented selection. [
via]
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Mauri Helme (previously) created a 16-bit tribute to King-Size Homer, one of The Simpsons' more surreal turns: "It's a pixel art animation as if there were a 16-bit game starring Homer and his muumuu." (Compare to the "real" 16-bit Simpsons game, which was comparatively sane stuff) Read the rest
@mattatomic on Twitter not only had a brilliant idea, but
executed it with such perfection I'm not sure I'll ever be able to eat carbs again without wondering at its moral and ethical placement.
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