Culture Burst

I love culture and the art, design, and technology that it influences. When I find great stuff I also like to share it. This is my internet. Welcome.

May29

This is the Isle of Man TT Motorcycle race and it’s hell on wheels.

May17

Marco Tempest on magic and deception delightfully discussed while using an iPod as a backdrop.

Apr30

Read this to restore faith in humanity→

Two minutes before, a 21-year-old stand-up comic named Woody Roseland had just made it home from the greatest doctor’s appointment in his life. After spending more than two and a half years of his life in chemotherapy for five cancer relapses — knee, lungs and calf — the nurse said, “You’re good. We don’t need to see you anymore.”

Woody practically floated home to his Denver apartment, fixed himself a sandwich and flipped open his laptop to his Twitter feed, with Guthrie’s offer on top. Which is when this happened…

This is a great story and another example of the doors that social media can open that were closed prior to its existence.

Apr24

Apr23

Crazy before and after shots of models who’ve been enhanced in software.  Click through for an assortment of photos.

Crazy before and after shots of models who’ve been enhanced in software.  Click through for an assortment of photos.

Apr19

Apr18

Studio's forcing the change to digital from 35 mm; down goes Arthouse theatres→

Hadrian Belove wanted to show Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Valentine’s Day. As executive director of the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre in West Hollywood, he’s used to working with studios to borrow prints of rare or classic films.

But this year it proved trickier. Studios are pushing a new format. And Belove’s cinema — a nonprofit collective of cinephiles dedicated to presenting “weird and wonderful” movies — hasn’t made the upgrade.

It’s sad to see such a gold standard medium go away.  Especially considering the challenges of storing digital copies:

Even worse, it’s extremely easy to lose data. “If I spend,” Horak says, “as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money’s gone.”

Think it doesn’t happen?

It does.

Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?

Not really.

Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody’s hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.

Imagine the horror: 20 people’s work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar’s visual arts director had just had a baby, and she’d brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.

Apr11