Dino D-day

The Nazis have dinosaurs fighting on their side, and the Allies need not only contend with the regular German forces at the Normandy landing: that's the premise of Dino D-day, a Half-Life 2 mod. ..looks like good fun right down my alley.

The Allied Forces Battle Nazi T-Rex on Dino D-Day - Dino D-Day - io9

Assassin's Creed 2

Nice coincidence: returning from my first session of Assassin's Creed with my buddies just to learn that the sequel has been released today. There's a comprehensive review to be found at the Gametrailers web site below.

Assassin's Creed II Video Game, Review HD | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com

Golden record

I give you my new obsession: the Voyager 1 space probe. This exceptional spacecraft was launched in 1977 and toured nearly the whole solar system, exploring Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and its moons, and has become the farthest man-made object, reaching a distance of nearly 17 billion kilometers (or 15 light hours) from Earth, traveling at a speed of around 45 km per second.

This space probe is still functioning and receiving commands from Earth, and will probably be functional until 2025, when its power source will run out.

Included with the spacecraft is the so-called Golden Record: a phonograph record that includes instructions on how to play the content, which is made up from music and sounds and images from Earth. I found the NASA page that has many of the images available, which is pretty freaky if you take a look at them (see top of post)-- these are the images which are supposed to help an alien civilization understand about mankind. Makes you wonder who selected these pics and how..

Voyager - Scenes From Earth

A much better insight about humankind can be gathered in the comments of the NASA blog though: in the poll "What would you put on a new Golden Record?", there's the usual cornucopia of dumb, asinine, funny, creepy, and stupid comments of any page or poll on the Internet, ..pretty funny.

342: send a rubix cube, that will confuse the little critters.

338: If you have oil we may be able to come to some sort of arrangement.
Best Regards
Earth

328: I would add the book Battlefield Earth, with the comment, we do not want things to go this way.

274: voyager space is very nice probe.. because this probe, explore the solar system...

What Would You Put on a New Golden Record

Morpho towers

Crazy, astonishing, stupefying, mind-and-sense-robbing: The Morpho Towers by Sachiko Kodama and Yasushi Miyajima.. the trick is ferrofluids, but don't ask me about the makings behind this.

Sachiko Kodama

100 The Wire quotes

100 quotes from The Wire.. no more explanation needed. (I wouldn't call it the Top 100 though, there were many more of my favorites that were left out.)

The Daily What: Early Bird Special: The top 100 quotes from HBO’s The Wire

3D Mandelbrot

Well, these are pretty amazing. By taking the mathematical approach used to create the classic Mandelbrot images and applying them to a three-dimensional sphere, Daniel White made some astounding 3D images. (They can explain the procedure much better than me, on their page.)

Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal

Anatomy of a disaster movie

Popular Mechanics takes a look at the making of a specific scene of Roland Emmerich's movie 2012. The process of creating those hybrid real-life / CGI scenes is quite interesting, and the scene in question really leaves you breathless (even though it is not in the Youtube clip above -- that one's bit cut down).

Popular Mechanics: The Anatomy of a Disaster Scene in the Movie 2012

The Road new clips

Two more short clips from The Road. C'mon, stupid movie, be out now, dammit! The Road will be in cinemas on November 25.

See What Life Was Like Before Viggo Hit "The Road" - The Road - io9

Pigeon Impossible

Animated short movie by Lucas Martell. A rogue pigeon messes with the top-secret nuclear briefcase of a secret agent, pandemonium ensues.

The Presurfer: Pigeon: Impossible

Real-life star gate

What looks like a real-life star gate here is actually a tunnel-boring device, used at the Yucca mountain in Nevada.

BLDGBLOG: One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik

Looking down

Looking down from 820 meters high Dubai Tower. Note how small the 70-story Address Hotel next to the lake appears from up there.

The Daily What: Top Of The World, Looking Down On Creation of the Day

Alternate universe Beatles history

This is an extremely well written of an alternate universe Beatles history up to the present day. In this universe, the Beatles reunite after an appearance at Saturday Night Live, whose host Lorne Michaels mockingly offered 3000$ for a reunion concert. The Beatles continue to put out a couple of albums, John Lennon isn't shot in 1980, and Ringo Starr turns out to be a time traveller whose mission is to warn the "other" Ringo about the tragic events in "our" universe. Amazing!

Mightygodking.com » Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer

50 worst one-liners from video games

50 terribly hilarious examples of bad voice acting in video games. Example? #11 (Disaster Report): A: "I have to stay alive and write this article before I die!" B: "Okay."

The Daily What: This Is Hilarious, You Should Listen To It of the Day

Russian roulette gone wrong

Russian flying fortress fighting off a Nazi UFO

Exactly what the title says: a depiction of the fictional Russian super bomber K-7 attacking what is clearly a U.F.O. of Nazi Germany allegiance.

English Russia » Russian Flying Fortresses

Alternate history TV series

More greatness by The Onion:

NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War, premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to our own.

The much-anticipated television event is said to be the most ambitious ever produced by the science-fiction-themed network, which is a subsidiary of the Aryan Broadcasting Company. According to the early response, audiences in the alternate realm have been riveted by the show's vision of an inverted existence wherein a defeated Germany has been completely neutered by the Allied powers.

"Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler's glorious master plan had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow emerged the victors," the show's creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said during an appearance on Entertainment Heute Nacht. "It would be as if everything we know to be true—the fall of Russia, the invasion and surrender of the American continents, Heinrich Braun-Hitler's consolidation of the various conquered states in 1973—had never even happened."

Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

World's highest base-jump

More about Burj Dubai: While looking for the video about a Petronas Towers base jump i remembered from a few years back and which i can't find for the life of me, I came across this documentary of a base jump from the Dubai Tower, which took place in 2008.

World Record BASE Jump // Current

Making of a soldier

In a very interesting photo documentary, The Denver Post accompanies 17-year-old Ian Fisher from his Army recruitment all through his 6 month posting in Iraq and his return.

Captured Photo Collection » Ian Fisher : American Soldier Photos

Tightrope walking across the Twin Towers

Obsessed with tall buildings as I currently am, I found this old story quite interesting:

In 1974, French Philippe Petit did a tightrope walk across the 43m gap between the Twin Towers of the then recently opened World Trade Center in New York. To accomplish this "artistic crime of the century", he spent 6 years researching the towers, including several incognito visits to the roof and aerial reconnaissance while the buildings were still under construction.

On the night of August 6, 1974, Petit and his team snuck on the roof and managed to attach the tightrope by means of shooting a fishing line from one tower to the other with a bow, then passing larger and larger ropes until they could fasten the 220 kg tightrope. In the morning of August 7, Petit spent nearly one hour walking, dancing and prancing on the tightrope, to the clear amazement of a crowd on the ground and the policemen that were sent to arrest him.

Even though he was arrested on the spot, Petit was credited as having brought much-needed publicity to the rather unpopular World Trade Center, and all formal charges against him were dropped. A documentary on Petit titled Man on Wire won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2008.

Philippe Petit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dune soundtrack

We're back from our little excursion to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman and you will see some reports from those crazy countries soon!

Meanwhile, before the trip I was digging around for Dune stuff and found this collections of soundtrack bits from the original Dune video game, released in 1992. The score by Stéphane Picq is atmospheric and dense, and listening to it now it brought back some fond memories of how much fun it was playing this game back in the day, even though it was somewhat limited compared to its successor Dune II, one of the first real-time strategy games.

The soundtrack was released as "EXXOS, DUNE, Spice opéra" by Virgin Records but the CD is no longer available. Composer Stéphane Picq said on his very old-school web page (from 1998) about re-releasing this album:

I received many mails asking me about a new release of "DUNE Spice Opera".

Unfortunately, the owners of the rights, EMI publishing, does not want to give me back the rights, even if they don't intend to reprint it in the future! :(

Be patient, dudes, because I've signd with those bastards for 30 years!! Well, I should have read better my contracts (written in english) when I signed with CRYO and VIRGIN (now EMI).

BUT... My crystal ball said to me that a MP3 copy of the whole thing is going to be available somewhere on the net... but shhhht! I did not told you... and I have nothing to do with it, cos' it's a pirate who did it. Anyway, nobody will be able to find any proof it could come from me ;^)

Stephane Picq's musical ship