21st Century Macgyver

W H A T

The End, by Alister Lockhart.

Bruh, if you don’t think that having historically significant events well documented from multiple perspectives is a good thing, then idk what the hell u doin.

Besides, like, that is literally a Giant Monster Rampaging Through The Town. What the fuck is the everyday person gonna do other than Tweet/Instagram/Post about it going “It’s the apocalypse you guys! Eyyyy lmao #apocalypse #deathrising #nofilter”?

#like come on your cellphone may not defeat the beast#but it can gain you like 50000 followers before the skies start raining blood so#who’s the REAL winner here? (via @purplebloodedmajesty)

And heck, even if your own death is inevitable getting information out could help save other people, even if it can’t save you. ‘Here are 20 livestreams of the giant tentacle monster including how it moves and attacks, how can we beat it?’ is way more useful than ‘an entire city got wiped off the map and things smell vaguely of calimari idk man’

If people don’t tweet, Instagram and snapchat my beautiful face when I rise from the depths I am going straight back to R'lyeh until the world is ready to give me the internet fame I deserve #ICanFhtagn

he is LITERALLY posing for pics he’s not even causing a ruckus it’s just a signing. god

Why are all those people using their screens as flashlights?

lmao bye

#aesthetic

THAT WAS A PRACTICAL EFFECT. A MOTHERFUCKING PRACTICAL EFFECT. JESUS TAP DANCING HORATIO CHRIST.

“I’m gonna be famous for Star Wars for nothing else but this bread! It was a little gag which was incredibly successful, everybody thought it was CGI. We moulded up an inflatable bread so that it was deflated underneath the liquid and then we slowly inflated it and sucked out the liquid with vacuum pumps at the same time to produce this bread coming up and forming. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to actually perfect that one, that little tiny gag in the film. It started off with the mechanics of getting the bread to rise and the liquid to disappear, but then there was the ongoing problem of what color should the bread be? What consistency should it be? Should it have cracks in it? Should it not have cracks in it? It took about three months.”— CFX & SMUFX Creative Supervisor Neal Scanlan

WHAT I actually think that bread looks tasty because the way it ‘inflates’ from water and powder

“Your Phone Is Ruining You For Us“ - Robert Lanham, The Awl

It is just unbelievable how “old man yells at cloud” neo-luddites come off when they go on rants about how technology is destroying everything interesting about humanity.  I mean, leaving aside the bizarre circlejerk that is the second half of the article, which is its own trek into evidence-free weirdness, it’s just like…how much of a fucking dinosaur do you have to be to write paragraphs like this?  And it’s not just this dude. 

I mean, you can’t throw a rock without you hitting some cranky middle-aged white-dude author who’s been kind of successful (or really successful) for a while now going “Kids these days with their Honeys Boo Boo and their feetball and their Pokemons and their cell phones and their utterly banal and uninteresting alienation that occurs even while they’re simultaneously more connected than ever before.”

You, as a writer, honestly cannot come up with any way to either incorporate phones interestingly or a way to ignore them convincingly?  None?  To the point that you’re “stuck” being unable to set your work past the ’90s?  You do realize that you’re self-identifying as less adaptable and clever than like 80% of sitcom writers in that case, yeah?

I mean, the only way you can come to the conclusion that this is just impossible to do is if you were either tragically unimaginative to begin with or if your refusal to engage with the technology is so complete that you’re left sincerely judging these things by their ad campaigns. 

You don’t want to engage with the technology?  Fine.  Leave it on the cutting-room floor.  Nobody wants to read about somebody playing CandyCrush for half an hour on the subway if that’s the only thing going on.  (Other things nobody wants to read about: A character watching tv for half an hour, a character reading a book for half an hour, a character knitting for half an hour, a character spending half an hour doing nothing but plowing a fucking field, etc.) You can’t come up with a way to make phone-use interesting and plot-advancing?  Sorry, that’s you sucking.

Technology isn’t perfect.  Technology isn’t uniformly accessible.  Technology is subject to user error, and outages, and sabotage, and theft.

Remember this?

[London tube announcement sign reading “For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office.”]

Yeah.  GoogleMaps will quite frequently send you rabbiting through a loop of toll road for no reason, too.  Or confidently insist that your new dentist’s office is in the middle of a highway, or that a patch of territory really belongs to the wrong country.  GPS apps will cheerily direct you to make a left-hand turn where strictly prohibited, or instruct you to drive into the sea. You can absolutely get lost without your phone dying.

Careless accidents or casual misbehavior can take on horror-movie proportions given the right circumstances.  Giving in to the temptation of a quick surreptitious Googling of your date or a new acquaintance while they’re in the bathroom can cast a completely new light on things they’ve said and leave you spending the rest of the evening in a conversational Twilight Zone.  An unlocked phone left unattended presents an opportunity for snooping previously unheard of without having access to someone’s home.  A lost or stolen phone presents the possibility of trouble in a similar proportion, only with added malicious intent and threats of damage.  The immediacy of contact can be used to defuse or accelerate confrontations, or add new layers to previously-established inter-character tension.

As many interesting plot-device limitations as phones (theoretically) destroy, they provide that many more new opportunities.  Or you just come up with new ways to retain the same limitations.  When residential lines became the expectation, films started establishing that service was out, or the line was cut, or that the home didn’t have one in order to explain why characters didn’t just call somebody.  Once candy-bar phones became de rigueur, stories started establishing that nobody had any bars.  Smart phones are now sidelined by apps not working, or batteries being drained, or service being unavailable.  Done and done.  Hell, even in any area with perfect reception and functionality, emergency situations can still involve yelling at a 911 operator that you’re on the side of the fucking road being attacked by a fucking O-T-T-E-R, and no, you don’t have a fucking address to give them.

If you don’t want to bother with that, fine.  If you prefer to write in a time when these things didn’t have to be taken into account, that’s fine, too.  But don’t sit there acting like it can’t be done interestingly or intelligently or to the benefit of the plotline, if you care to take two seconds and consider how all that information, connection, and accessibility grits or greases the gears for your characters and your plots.

(via stuckinabucket)

— Agreed. The only reason to complain about technology ruining storytelling is if you are copying old stories where a simple phone call would fix everything.

Put yourself out on the cutting edge where a simple phone call CAN’T fix everything. Resist the impulse to create a circumstance that eliminates tech (such as, no one’s phone works for X bullshit reason) and step into an undiscovered country of plot points NO ONE HAS THOUGHT OF YET.

(via annerocious)

I know this is a super long post and I hate to add to it but I agree and I also point out that people have been writing science fiction for decades that assume everything or many things that are now true of modern day. Instant communication, instant access to information, etc. And yet, miraculously, those stories managed to be written! Maybe they didn’t predict that we’d like to check neko atsume every half hour given the chance. But they also did include limitations, interruptions, etc. that didn’t happen to come true. Often in ways that are way more inconvenient than ‘ugh why cant I turn off facebook alerts.’ If people could write about basically the internet and cell phones before these things existed or while they were developing technologies, what paralyzes people from writing about them now?

(via betterbemeta)

Larry has one big issue with the government’s desire to access our phones: http://on.cc.com/1Un32uR

I have been waiting all year for this

The “Magic Mirror”

欲しい。商品化しないかな・・・。

This is super cool but it doesn’t include the text instructions! Here’s the original imgur gallery with some comments on each image, and here is a detailed tutorial that the creator made (he also made the code free to use on his github) in case you want to make one yourself!

HOLY SHIT

wtf

you used to call me on my hands-free talking glove

New comic! (link)

This week I am very happy to present a collaboration comic with my friend Chrissie, who has been generous in sharing with me her experiences of gender dynamics in a technical field, and then helping me craft them into a comic narrative.

Whenever I see Chrissie’s work I’m always impressed at the cool, creative things she does. When we were discussing this comic, she told me: “I find men persistently try to direct me lots now too, which is probably the biggest problem I consistently run into”, and my feelings around that fact are a terrible and familiar blend of frustration, sadness, and lack of surprise.

When we talk about the differences in how men and women are treated professionally, especially in technical fields, we are often dismissed with ‘everyone has to deal with that’, or ‘women need to demonstrate more confidence with their skills’, or ‘they’re just trying to be helpful’, or 'it’s all in your head’.

It’s frustrating when we know something like this is happening, but we spend so much of our time actually trying to get people to believe that it’s a real phenomenon. I find narratives like Chrissie’s validating in that she has a comparative set of experiences and is like 'oh yeah, people totally think I’m less competent at my job now. it’s totally a thing’.  So, can guys just believe us already and get on helping it not happen?

people often ask me “well if 50 shades isn’t your favorite erotic trilogy then what is?” now you can stop fucking asking

…why have I not been writing bizarre smut to sell on amazon to make money?

did i actually save or did i imagine it? better save eleven more times

someone: technology is ruining our society and we never talk to people face to face anymore! we’re so antisocial and me: *pulls out my phone because I’m bored*

“One of my favourite Steve Jobs stories was the time the engineers working on the iPod brought their finished prototype to him in his office. He said it was too big, they needed to make it smaller. They said it was as small as they could make it, it couldn’t be made any smaller. So he took the prototype over to his aquarium and dropped it in. The iPod sank to the bottom, and as it did, tiny little bubbles came out. ‘See those bubbles,’ he asked. ‘They’re air inside the iPod. Make it smaller.’

“Another story about Steve Jobs was when they brought the prototype for the iPad 2 to his office. The engineers told him it was faster than the first iPad. He took it over to his aquarium and dropped it in. ‘Look how slowly it sank,’ he told them. ‘Make it faster.’

“One time a newly hired intern had been sent out to get Steve a sandwich. When she brought it to him, he looked at it. ‘I thought I ordered the beef on rye,’ he asked. She told him it was indeed beef on rye. He took it over to his fish tank and dropped it in. ‘Does that look like beef on rye?’

“He was always dropping things in that fish tank. We couldn’t stop him. We told him he had to stop, he wouldn’t listen. It was full of stuff that shouldn’t be in an aquarium.

“The fish had all died years ago. One had been crushed under an early generation iMac. The others were all poisoned. He didn’t care.

“It got to the point where there was no room for anything in the fish tank. When we emptied it after he died, we found a body in there. We never found out who it was.”

i feel like if you showed this to clickhole they would hire you on the spot fuiru