Today is Election Day in the US and even President Obama is saying these elections "might be the most important of our lifetimes". Everyone is a liiiittle on edge. Instead of exhorting you to go vote, I dug through the kottke.org archives for some videos to watch if you need a calm moment or hour or entire afternoon and deep into the evening's election returns.
From the BBC Earth team, long videos of relaxing sounds and scenes from their groundbreaking documentaries like Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II (more here):
This is one of my personal favorites, a Norwegian icebreaker idling in the frozen Arctic — "natural white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful icebreaker idling engines":
A 30-day time lapse of a container ship traveling from the Red Sea to Hong Kong:
Daniel Jovanov does fantastic impressions of cars. In the video above, he imitates them so well that a trio of actual race car drivers are able to pick out exactly which ones he's doing. I think he's gotten better since his appearance on Australia's Got Talent several years ago:
What does it sound like when a woman in red high heels walks across a dining room table? What does it sound like when a big guy gets slapped on the nape? What does it sound like when a forest watches itself? "Unnecessary Sounds" reveals all.
"Madeline the Robot Tamer" is a really lovely video about Madeline Gannon, a woman who dances, so to speak, with robots. As a resident at Pier 9, she developed Quipt, "a gesture-based control software that gives industrial robots basic spatial behaviors for interacting closely with people." It's a wonderful demonstration of robots and humans learning to work together.
Whether or not you're a writer or even care about words, this video starring George Saunders talking about how to tell a story that matters is phenomenal. It was created by Redglass Pictures. (P.S. There's swearing in it.)
Clayton Cubitt has a new installment of his "Hysterical Literature" series, and this one's in French. As Jason described previously, in each video, "a female participant is filmed from the waist up reading a story of her choosing while she is stimulated to orgasm with a vibrator by Cubitt's partner, Katie James." (There's no nudity in the video, but you may find the audio NSFW.)
This time, the woman is Fette, the reading is in French with English subtitles, and the text is Thomas Bernhard's The Loser.
You can see the entire Hysterical Literature project here, you can read author Toni Bentley's Vanity Fair account of being a Hysterical Literature star here, and Cubitt's Instagram is here.
You may have seen artist Clayton Cubitt's NSFW Hysterical Literature project. On YouTube, the videos have been viewed nearly 50 million times. The recipe is simple: a woman, a book, and a Hitachi Magic Wand. In the latest installment, Janet, who's in her early sixties, reads Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's a lovely meditation on women, sexuality, and age. The project is also on view at MASS MoCA's Bibliothecaphilia show.
I really love this video featuring the opening and closing shots of fifty-five movies presented side-by-side, "First and Final Frames." Created by Jacob T. Swinney.
My favorites: "Tree of Life," "Raging Bull," "Melancholia."
Update: Swinney has released a second installment of First and Final Frames.
The "Mad Max: Fury Road" international trailer features fire and blood, colorful explosions, and Charlize Theron screaming. What a lovely day, indeed. BRB, I gotta go get in line.
A week ago, Paul Kalanithi, who was 37, died from lung cancer. He had recently finished his neurosurgery residency at Stanford and was a father to an infant daughter.
In this video, he talks about how time changes as you face your mortality. "Clocks are now kind of irrelevant to me," he says. "Time, where it used to have kind of a linear progression feel to it, now feels more like a space."
Holy crap! Bjork's released something she's calling a "moving album cover," although it appears it's basically the video for the song "Family" on her Vulnicura album. It's about the darkest, strangest, most beautiful thing I've seen on the internet in a while. The video is a collaboration between Bjork and Andrew Thomas Huang.
Snoop Dogg's next album, BUSH, doesn't drop until May 12, but until then, we've got a very cool lyric video for the first single, "Peaches N Cream," featuring Charlie Wilson and directed by Wolf & Crow.
I finally got a chance to watch "Fury" last weekend, and the part of the movie that was the most compelling to me was the end title sequence. The sequence terrifyingly captures the slamming chaos of war. (Contains graphic imagery.)
The main title sequence and the end title sequence were created by Greenhaus GFX.
Here's slow motion video from Smarter Every Day of what it looks like when an AK47 is shot underwater. Not only is the slow motion footage beautiful (best shots at 2:40, 4:30, 7:20), the science behind why the bubbles do what they do is explained. Science! Previously.
Normally the 'danger in the water' beat focuses on sharks, but here's a video of two divers almost getting eaten by two humpback whales. The impatient among you may skip ahead to about :30. The whales would have you believe this was accidental. Youtube commenter tom bill said this was his "number 1 fear," and I have to say, I spend more than my share of time thinking about things going wrong in the ocean. However, the idea I might be accidentally eaten by whales never even occurred to me, which means I've got some more thinking to do.
You remember the BigDog robotic prototype constructed by Boston Dynamics? Now they have a human robot that can run, do push-ups, and just generally acts pretty human.
Also worth watching is the Tarantino Mixtape, which hovers somewhere between an analysis of the themes in QuentinTarantino's films and a toe-tapping remix of all the great music, visuals, and sounds he uses in them. (via @brainpicker)
The worm is consumed by the snail, and begins its development in the snail digestive tract. Once it grows and matures, it moves into the snail's optical tentacles, where it will pulsate and writhe as an example of aggressive mimicry, turning the tentacle into a dead-ringer for a caterpillar larvae, and making the snail a visible snack to a passing bird. The worm's dance is also deadly because it renders the snail insensitive to light, making it incapable of shielding itself from predators. After the bird eats the infected snail, the worm matures fully inside the bird's digestive tract, there it reproduces and lays eggs. Once the bird excretes the Leucochloridium larva, it is consumed by snails, thus continuing its life cycle.
A video clip of what fashion designers in the 1930s predicted that people would be wearing in the year 2000. While the predictions for the women only accurately depict Lady GaGa's wardrobe, the designers of the past were slightly closer to the mark when it came to men's fashion:
"He'll be fitted with a radio, telephone, and containers for coins, keys, and candy for cuties."
By which they must have meant credit cards.
Update: FASHION magazine responded to this video. It turns out that it was eerily accurate, with designs like Alexander Wang and Marc Jacobs parading futuristic wares that are perfectly current.
8-Bit Trip is the result of two brothers spending 1,500 hours moving LEGO bricks and taking pictures. An homage to 1980s video-games, it's considered by many to be the greatest among the micro-genre of LEGO music videos, sometimes known as brickfilms. Originally made famous by director Michel Gondry for his work with the White Stripes, these block-by-block masterpieces are now being put to more use than just trippy visuals for killer beats, recently there was a LEGO PSA for bicyclists, warning against the dangers of running red lights.
Jason is gainfully employed again. After 4 months of contracting and sitting around on my ass, I finally found a full-time job. I'm going to be a Web designer at a small ad firm in Mpls. called Kuester Partners. I'm pretty excited...it should be fun and challenging and all that good stuff. Wish me luck.
