Somali pirate interview

Wired brings us a matter-of-factly interview with a Somali pirate about their work of hijacking ships and killing people. He also gives a pretty thorough rundown on how to run a successful pirating mission, so if you're ever forced to board a ship for ransom, his advice sounds like a good starting point.

Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or … then it’s like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

Exclusive Interview: Pirate on When to Negotiate, Kill Hostages | Danger Room | Wired.com

Tron Legacy trailer

Promising footage for the sequel to the classic Tron movie, Tron Legacy, which will be released some time around 2011. Critics have been skeptical about the Walt Disney Pictures-produced project, ridiculing the title choice of Tron 2.0 or TR2N. However, the film has since been renamed, and at San Diego Comic Con this and the previous year the above movie segment wowed the audience. Also, The NME reported that Daft Punk have been hired to do the original soundtrack score for the movie, which is also a pretty amazing.

UPDATE: Here's also an cool gallery with concept design from the movie.

Daft Punk set for Disney 'Tron 2.0' score | News | NME.COM

The Book of Eli trailer

First offical trailer for the post-apocalyptic movie "The Book of Eli", starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, set for release in January 2010.

The Book Of Eli's Pages Are Stuck Together With Awesome Blood, Judging From The Trailer - The Book Of Eli - io9

The Wire illustrations

Wire Illustrations on the Behance Network

Experimental astronaut suits

Here's a glimpse of how much different our mind image of the moon landing could be if the astronaut suits were of another design. Check out these prototypes and experimental astronaut suits in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Quite certainly the suit in the third picture is more befitting of the steampunk science-fiction world of Bioshock with its metal plated look.

Also noteworthy on the web page of the National Air and Space Museum is a display of 100 objects from the Apollo mission.

The Suits That Carried Our Heroes To The Moon - Space - io9

'Tetris' movie

Honestly there is not much I can think of right now that's more awesome than this mock-up trailer for the movie adaptation of Tetris.

Topless Robot - Make Your Own Videogame Movie: And the Winner Is... - Page 1

The Manhattan Project remnants

Martin Miller has created an interesting photo essay of the remnants of the Manhattan Project. These are mostly pictures from the Oak Ridge facility where the plutonium for the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atom bombs was produced. It's quite fascinating that so much of the facilities is still standing in their original state, and Fallout 3 players should feel right at home with these World War II-era military installations.

One cannot see the nuclear-explosives production facilities built during the Manhattan Project without experiencing a sense of awe at what was accomplished. The scientific, engineering, managerial, labor, and logistical challenges that were met and overcome are separately impressive but, taken together, simply astonishing. It is all the more incredible that this was done in the context of a desperate and bitter war that had already strained the nation's manpower and resources as never before. Yet appreciation of the monumental achievements of the Manhattan Project cannot be considered without a pang of regret at what it unleashed into the world.

Slouching towards Bethlehem ... :: Photography Served

Mechwarrior trailer

Being big fans of the old MechWarrior PC games from back in the day, this footage from the new MechWarrior game certainly looks exciting!

MechWarrior Video Game, Debut Trailer | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com

Dynamars Corporation updates

The Dynamars Corporation Updates were started on Something Awful in 2004 as a tongue-in-cheek parody of games and movies like Doom and Event Horizon. As can be learned from the updates, the Mars settlers are busy fighting trans-dimensional doorways to Hell, out-of-control fast food restaurants, animals appearing out of nowhere, and also extremely strict company policy. Below is a list of all articles, starting with the first one.

Surviving residents are advised to ignore the ominous transmissions coming from Ares Station. In all likelihood, Resident #010 mistakenly activated a damaged subsystem, causing the station to automatically transmit dire predictions of death. DynaMars Corporation wishes to remind all residents that these predictions are the beliefs of a damaged Ares Station subsystem, and not those of the DynaMars Corporation itself.

• 06-05-2293 - 11-02-2293
  
  
• 03-12-2295 - 09-20-2295
  
  
• 05-15-2301 - 07-14-2301
  
  
• 07-15-2301 - 08-07-2301
  
  
• 03-01-2304 - 03-11-2304 [Complaint Queue Logs]
  
  
• 04-02-2304 - 04-04-2304 [Command Queue Logs]
  
  
• 04-07-2304 - 04-21-2304
  
  
• 06-23-2305 - 07-10-2305
  
  
• 08-16-2305 - 08-26-2305

District 9 new trailer

Awesome new trailer for District 9, the Peter Jackson-produced movie where aliens have landed on Earth but are kept segregated from the general population in concentration camps. Only one month till it's opening in theaters on August 14th.

YouTube - 'District 9' Trailer 2 HD

Dollhouse Epitaph One clip

Here's a very short clip from the 13th "lost" episode of Dollhouse titled Epitaph One. It's supposedly set in a post-apocalyptic world of 2019, and will be available on the Dollhouse DVD and Blu-Ray out later this month.

The creator of the series Joss Whedon says about the episode:

"It has a very different structure and feel from what we do on Dollhouse, so it would have been ridiculously startling to have aired it the week after the season finale as just this insane coda," he says. "And it is a little bit insane, except that we sort of follow everything through to its logical conclusion. As always, it's logical to conclude that people are terrible and will try to destroy each other."

YouTube - Dollhouse Season 1 - Epitaph One Sneak Peek !

Marco Brambilla's 'Civilization'

Most amazing artwork I've seen in a while: Marco Brambilla's video mural commissioned by (and on display in the elevators of) The Standard Hotel, New York. Created out of hundreds of hours of footage, it shows the ascension from Hell to Heaven (or vice versa, depending on the direction of the elevator) created from all kinds of movie clips, video clips and stock footage. The result is a breathtaking experience which warrants multiple rewatchs of the HD clip embedded above.

Marco Brambilla: Civilization | Motionographer | Motion graphics, design, animation, filmmaking and visual effects

A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, published 1960. Considered one of the classics of apocalyptic fiction, it focuses on the abbey of Saint Leibowitz 600 years after the Third World War. The novel continues to two more settings, hundreds of years in the future, but the most compelling part of the book is the first chapter. Picture the monks in the abbey conserving what little remains of pre-war knowledge, copying blueprints, memos, conversation logs and other random data labourously by hand. Essential apocalypse reading.

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.

Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim's advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat. Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch at the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.

Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the Saint's unhappy proteges.

Read the first chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz

Someone tweeted

Funny mock-up World War II Progaganda poster. Check out more of these on artist Brian Lane Winfield Moore's Flickr page.

WWIII Propaganda: Someone Tweeted on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Wikipedia print edition

Artist Rob Matthews has printed and bound all 2500 of Wikipedia's featured articles in one 5000-page volume. Looks rather impractical. However, if you compare it to a multi-volume encyclopedia like Encyclopaedia Britannica, it becomes clear that this Matthew's project is intended only to visualize the size of Wikipedia. The Britannica surpassed this edition already in its 2nd edition in the 1780s century, clocking in at 8595 pages in 10 volumes. Today, Britannica consists of around 30 volumes, each around 1000 pages.

Including only Wikipedia's featured articles means, on the other hand, that only the smallest amount of Wikipedia's actual content is used. Wikipedia has insanely detailed articles about, for instance, celebrities, internet phenomena, and video game characters. One noted example, from a while back, is a feature on Something Awful, ridiculing the Wikipedia page for Knuckles the Echidna (a Sonic The Hedgehog sidekick) for being longer than the pages about the internet, William Shakespeare, the internal combustion engine, and Western civilization.

Wikipedia : Rob Matthews

Moon trailer

Here is the trailer for the long-awaited movie Moon, starring Sam Rockwell and directed by Duncan Jones, opening in theaters in the States this weekend. I'm loving the great production design and reduced tones of the setting. Check out an extensive review over at io9, and go see the movie if you can--no chance for us here on the other side of the pond.

io9 - "Moon" Is the Best Scifi Movie of Summer - Moon

Powers of ten

The classic Charles and Ray Eames short animation film made for IBM in 1977, going to the outer reaches of space and back. Can't believe I haven't posted this before.

http://www.powersof10.com/

Building a 100,000 ton supercarrier

Popular Mechanics has a detailed piece on the building of the new American aircraft carrier Ford class, costing 15 billion dollars each and weighing in at 100,000 tons. The related 5 Ways to Defend a Supercarrier is also quite interesting.

The last time American engineers designed a carrier from scratch, in the 1960s, they drew the ship in ink and built full-scale wooden models to prove their designs. Then, the construction-yard workers had to figure out how to put the ship together. Things work a little differently in 2009. Now, engineers and foremen can wander around a mockup of the ship without wearing helmets or boots. All they have to do is slip on chunky black glasses, stare at a screen and step inside the ship’s CAD plan.

Supercarrier 2015 - How to Build a U.S. Navy Ford-class Warship - Popular Mechanics

City of Ember

Big recommendation for the movie adaptation of City of Ember, a book by Jeanne DuPrau. It seems that the book is targeted at kids around 10-12 years old, and the movie's horrible Harry Potter-lookalike DVD presentation certainly puts the movie in the same brackets -- big mistake. Absolutely stunning production design and great visual effects and ideas make this a thrilling must-see. Both the star cast of Bill Murray and Tim Robbins, as well as the rather less known teen actors in the lead roles, are really doing a great job, so this movie deserves a lot more recognition than it has so far.

Think the underground city setting of Metropolis and Fallout 3 meets the contraptions and riddles of Myst and The Difference Engine, combined with the steampunk retro-aesthetics of Brazil and Bioshock and you get an idea.

Actually even better than the trailer posted above is watching the intro of the movie, located at the io9 link below.

io9 - You Can't Have An Apocalypse Without A Gloomy Voiceover - Movies

District 9

Peter Jackson is producing a new film called District 9. It appears to be a documentary-style feature about an alien race which has to emergency land on Earth, in peace, is "not welcome here" and subsequently confined to concentration camps. Make sure you check out the official site for the movie, which also has an overview over the various mock-up sites created for the movie, including the home page of the evil MNU corporation (which is obviously behind the oppression of the aliens) and an anti-MNU site.

District 9 - Official Site