[insert witty title]

I just saw this video and my mind was completely blown, the only description on the video’s page is this:

Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.

This really doesn’t do it justice, just check this out:

I think I could probably have followed along up to the point where he WAS WALKING ON RUSTY PIPES THOUSANDS OF FEET ABOVE SOME ROCKS.

Balls of steel.

late edit: I just realized that this is exactly like a level out of Half Life

I think I have a new favourite person in the world. He goes by the name of StSanders on YouTube and makes a very specialised type of video. StSanders takes videos of famous rockstars playing live and overdubs them with some absolutely atrocious (and very well synched) music tracks. These videos are then uploaded to Youtube with the title “[guitar player] shreds”, and the video comments explode as most people find it very funny, but a particularly stupid minority think it’s real and start defending their favourite musicians against all of the unfair attacks.

I know a lot of people will not ‘get’ this, and indeed the first time I watched them I was pretty nonplussed for the first minute or so, but they really do grow on you! With no further ado:

Carlos Santana

(highlights: the guy on the keyboards playing Europe’s Final Countdown, and the guy going mental on the snare drum)

Eric Clapton

(highlights: SAXOPHONE! (1:30 onwards))

Here is StSanders’ user page with loads more videos.

edit: Hahaha the Jake E. Sanders one is awesome. Ozzy Osbourne really makes it

I woke up this morning to a rather wonderful ready made blog post in my inbox, here it is (courtesy of a friend, who will probably wish to remain anonymous):

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I came across this as I was browsing the other night,

I hope you find it interesting.
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This did indeed sound really interesting but sadly there was no movie attached, when I queried this I received the following response:

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http://emol.org/movies/greattrainrobbery/movie256kb.html

I’m not feeling too good.
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Fantastic! Thank you, anonymous friend. Your sacrifice in the name of finding interesting stuff on the internet is much appreciated and I hope your office chair made for a comfortable bed.

A century of so from now when I’m watching hyper-realistic 3d holo-immersion-scenarios I will indeed spare a thought for the chumps living in the early 21st century watching shoddily shot ‘movies’ on ‘flat screen tele-visions’

…so that I can become an international man of mystery

I also think it would be possible to build one of these using two webcams and a creatively placed laptop/cardboard screen system:

If I had somebody around to help with this I’d definitely do it. (full New Scientist article here)

OK I’m a bit late on the scene with this one, but it’s awesome enough that it deserves its own post. It’s well worth watching the whole eight minutes

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

(thanks to JPS and JEG)

late edit: I am getting bored of crimson and annoyed that pictures in blog posts can only be 420 pixels wide so I have changed themes for a while

I really love ridiculously high fps videos of everyday objects and actions. I’m sure you will too. Here are some really nice ones:

A water balloon not exploding
A water balloon exploding
Billiards in slow motion (the thermal camera bits are fantastic)
A paintball shot by a ball bearing
Pouring a beer
Lighting a match
A single red drop of water (awesome)
Another drop of water
Dropping an icecube
Making breakfast

Recently, via an online newspaper column I stumbled over a fantastic argument and associated video. I’m going to quote very heavily from the aforementioned article because it’s written much more eloquently than I can manage. The video is a sort of mini-documentary in which:

The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”

What an excellent question! It had seriously never occured to me, what do you do with women who have illegal abortions, as one campaigner is quoted as saying:

“How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?”

The US states that are drafting legislation to ban abortion (in the case that Roe vs. Wade is overturned) are mostly planning to punish the doctor and not the woman who set the so-called crime in motion:

Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into “victims” of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.

This is really some condescending shit and it makes it all the sweeter to:

Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?

Unfortuntely embedding of this video has been disabled, but you can:

It’s only five minutes long, but in summary:

there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.

I found this video really enjoyable:

“A typical day in the life of a brummie is going to work, getting laid off by a car manufacturer, getting home, having a nice cup of tea and sticking the box on”

This is probably my favourite piece of sensationalised television trash journalism, ever:

This report is every bit as stupid as something off the Onion News Network.

My summary: Anonymous people from an internet message board (420chan, I believe, although in the report it is described as something like a “top secret internet-terrorist bunker”) enjoy pulling really sociopathic stunts, including things so shocking as animating a gif of hitler so it looks like he is dancing, making prank phone calls, trying to spoil the harry potter book, and hassling people over MySpace.

Fox News Summary: DIE. ATTACK. DESTROY. INTERNET HACKER GANGS WILL BLOW UP YELLOW VANS IN THE STREETS. INTERNET HATE MACHINE. INTERNET.

p.s. Sorry the blog has barely been updated for the past few days, I have been spending my time writing the word association game, which is taking much longer than I originally estimated and seems to be sucking up all of my spare thinking time.

In the process of doing this I was searching for some relatively obscure links between films and found that the IMDB actually indexes everybody that works on a film, down to the tea boy. For example, I’m a big fan of Chris Hoerger, who did fantastic work on The Mothman Prophecies (2002) and 10th & Wolf (2006) as a truck driver. However, his crowning achievement is probably Dogma (1999), where his contribution as the driver of a two room stake bed truck was nothing short of transcendental.

A few months ago I got into a rather heated discussion about the future of entertainment. More specifically what would happen to television in the near-mid future. I argued that as soon as wireless internet connections became just as prevalent as a mobile phone signal it would be natural for televisions to learn to communicate with each other, and with the rest of the world. This would obviously signal a watershed moment in how we think about television. Rather than passively recieving whatever signals a television company chooses to send out, the television could go and find shows you wanted, when you wanted them. The possibilities become almost literally endless.

Well… As of today we have made a first step towards this dream in the form of Miro 0.9.8

Basically, you fire up Miro, select a list of channels from the ‘Miro Guide’ (searchable by category, and for any specific term you want) and then sit back. Miro goes onto Bittorrent and grabs the latest episodes from each channel. It’s as easy to use as a television. Click on an interesting looking episode, then when it’s on the computer a little green button appears, which you can click to play.

The whole process is explained pretty well by a smug sounding American guy in this video

There are over 1,500 channels to choose from, although obviously they vary hugely in quality and I’d say that like most things 90% of it is crap (although the same is also true for broadcast television…), and if you were hoping for this to make your copyright infringement even easier you’re going to be sorely disappointed as it is all free content (however, for free stolen TV go here). Here are a couple of my favourite channels to get you started:

Science Channel Video

Short professionally produced documentaries about science. The “How Bread is Made” documentary is 100% badass

Onion News Network

Brilliant news parody from theonion.com. Probably my favourite episode is “Study: Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys”

Diggnation

Weekly show highlighting the most interesting things to appear on digg.com. One of the hosts is a little bit annoying, so be careful

Newsnight Video Podcast

Daily news segments from BBC’s Newsnight

Terra: The Nature of our World

Documentary series about the world. Sometimes it gets a bit tree-huggy for me, but the documentary on chili peppers was fantastic

NASA’s Spitzer Show

Fantastic stuff from the Spitzer space telescope. DVD quality movies, I really like “Galaxy Explorer: Galactic Centre”

late edit: In other news I just opened the fridge and for some reason we have seven different types of cheese (parmesan, ricotta, halloumi, cheddar, feta, paneer, mozarella)

I don’t even like cheese that much

Looking around youtube today I stumbled over a name I had not seen in a long time: Adam Buxton. Adam, who is probably best known as being half of Adam and Joe now seems to spend his time taping things off telly and narrating over them. He is incredibly amusing, here are two of his best:

A New Pope

Incredible New Nissan Advert

There are a load more linked from his youtube user page. Other highlights include “Songs of Praise (with subtitles)”, “Rememberance on Xantiar” and “Signing for the Deaf (with translations for the dumb)”.

It’s not often I post links to random Youtube videos and say “OMG CHECK TIHS OUT GUYS!!!!1″, but these are seriously two of the funniest videos I have seen in a long while, be sure to watch the top one first, but the second one is way, way better:

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It has always been a dream of mine to be a superhero, sadly I have come to realize over the years that I’m probably going to die as a normal person, just like I was born.

Our only real hope for gaining superpowers is through technology, recently I have seen a couple of videos where people have made outfits that endow them with special abilities. I would love for these guys to band together into some sort of crimefighting (or supercriminal) syndicate. Probably called something like “The Super Team”

Wheelz

Meet Wheelz (the z makes him extra cool):

Wheelz can go at over 60mph, which is just mental. He is like the real life equivalent of Flash Gordon

Hulk

This is Hulk:

He built this suit in order to fight a grizzly bear (well, he claims that he wants to ’study’ the bears, but I can see right through that), but I think it would be just as useful for fighting crime.

I think that in battle Hulk would use Wheelz like a skateboard.

Does anybody else know of any real life superheroes? Or if you could have any power you wanted, what would it be? (I am torn between flight (the coolest power) and invisibility (the perviest power))

A while back I talked about a freaky mechanical walking device, called BigDog. This post is intended to remedy any mental distress I caused with that downright terrifying machine.

Meet the miger:

It’s a cross between a machine and a tiger. Whereas with the last machine everything screamed bad, this one is the exact opposite. It sounds like a monster, looks like the devil in machine form and probably smells of burning oil. This is a machine and I love it

…sure it can’t walk all that well, but who cares?