STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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4 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

The Whisky Vault Is a Bulletproof Safe for Your Prized Hooch

It’s nearly impossible to get your hands on a bottle of one of the World’s Best Whiskies at retail. But if you manage the herculean feat of picking up a Ballantine’s 17, Pappy, Hibiki, or (insert your coveted bottle of choice here) you’re going to need a way to keep it safe. If you’re anything like us, you’re far less concerned about ne’er-do-wells and intruders than you are about your own drunk self and your friends. Consider protecting your prized collection of bottles with the Whisky Vault, a bulletproof, armored and almost impenetrable safe that will keep your bottles cozy while also allowing you to show them off. The “ultimate in whiskey protection” is exactly as advertised—a side-loading, solid steel plate construction safe with multiple vault door locking bolts, a tri-spoke handle and a bullet proof window that allows you to protect your impressive collection. The Whisky Vault is supposedly launching an Indiegogo campaign in December. If you don’t want to wait that long—and who does?—you can apparently order the bomb-proof booze safe starting at $6,000

I bet my teenage children could figure a way in

[MIKA27]

Scientists Discover A Weird Noise Coming From Antarctic Ice Shelf

The Antarctic is no stranger to weird sounds, from ancient trapped air bubbles popping to entire ice sheets disintegrating. Now we can add another freaky track to the ouevre of icy masterpieces.

Scientists monitoring the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica captured the acoustic oddity. Using a series of ultra sensitive seismic sensors, they produced a soundscape that would fit in perfectly at a Halloween haunted house or as the soundtrack to a 1950s B-movie about aliens arriving on Earth. But beyond being spooky, the sounds reveal how numerous processes from winds to warming are changing Antarctica’s ice.

Julien Chaput, an ambient noise monitoring expert at Colorado State University and new faculty at University of Texas, El Paso told Earther the records were a “happy accident.” In 2014 researchers were deploying seismic equipment on the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest hunk of floating ice in Antarctica, to study the crust and mantle underneath it. Chaput hopped on board hoping to tease out seasonal changes to the ice shelf’s mass, “and instead found strange spectral anomalies that escaped easy explanations, suggesting high frequency trapped seismic waves in the top couple of meters of snow.”

In essence, disturbances on the surface get trapped as seismic waves that ripple through the ice shelf. The team documented those wild waves in a Geophysical Research Letters paper released on Tuesday. They also released some of the sounds they captured over the course of more than two years of continuous recording (sped up below for your convenience).

Those top couple meters of loose snow and ice are called firn, and they’re very vulnerable to what’s going on above the surface, from changes in wind to changes in temperature. And with the sensitive seismic equipment buried below the surface, Chaput was able to intimately document much more than just seasonal shifts.

The frequency of the tune changed after storms blew through, which in itself is interesting. But what really stood out is a January 2016 warm spell when temperatures cracked freezing. The pitch of the tune dropped during that stretch, indicating that the snow and bits of ice melted, slowing down the propagation of seismic waves through the firn. More importantly, the pitch drop didn’t reverse itself after temperatures cooled back down, indicating permanent or semi-permanent changes in the firn layer.

“Melting of the firn is broadly considered one of the most important factors in the destabilization of an ice shelf, which then accelerates the streaming of ice into the ocean from abutting ice sheets,” Chaput said.

The Ross Ice Shelf is located in West Antarctica, parts of which could face an unstoppable meltdown owing to the shape of the bedrock beneath the ice that allows warm ocean currents to undercut the floating ice shelves. The melting of this unstable region could raise sea levels by roughly 3.05m. Surface warming could add another layer of stress that scientists will need to monitor closely.

Chaput pointed to seismic monitoring as a way to keep tabs on one of the most remote locales in the world and also help researcher answer questions about how resilient firn could be to rising temperatures. And of course this type of monitoring could provide more horror movie soundtrack fodder, though if we’re being real, what’s happening in Antarctica is frightening enough on its own.

[MIKA27]

Tacs Nato Lens watch

The Japanese brand TACS offers vintage lens-inspired watches for photography lovers. The Tacs Nato Lens watch incorporates the look and feel of a vintage camera with the sleekness and sophistication of a Japanese design. The dial of the watch resembles a focus ring and surrounds the watch glass which is convex like a fisheye lens. Powered by a reliable Miyota 2039 Japanese Movement, the timepiece takes inspiration from camera straps and camera lenses, features a sporty look with its leather nylon strap, and provides great comfort when being worn.

[MIKA27]

Big Beer’s Bet on Bourbon Barrels

Formerly niche, whiskey-finished beers are now going big time.

The Budweiser name is one of the crown jewels of branding, known around the world. Likewise, Jim Beam is an iconic label, the world’s best-selling bourbon. But Bud and Beam are more than just brand names and have huge cultural significance.

So when you see both of these brands on a single label, you can be sure that what is inside, by merely existing, is big news. Meet Budweiser Reserve Copper Lager, a new beer brewed from 2-row barley and aged on actual Jim Beam White Label bourbon barrel staves.

However, this isn’t exactly a bottled beer and a shot. “There is not actual Jim Beam in the beer,” says Ricardo Marques, vice-president of marketing for Budweiser. “Rather the recipe was inspired by the flavors of the bourbon. The barrel staves are sterilized and added to the lager tank prior to filling with [the] beer.” (That’s a process the brewers are familiar with; it’s exactly how the famed “beechwood aging” of classic Budweiser is done.)

If this concoction takes off, it’s a huge boom for bourbon barrel-aged beers. These hugely flavorful brews, with boozy overtones of vanilla and spicy oak, are usually based on heavy-framed imperial stouts or tripels. For decades, they have been a favorite of the craft beer crowd, but have been somewhat intimidating for the regular beer drinkers who generally want…well…an easy drinking Bud.

The first known attempt at a bourbon barrel finished beer was made 26 years ago, and, to be honest, didn’t sell all that well. “The first few days it was on tap, no one drank it,” admits Greg Hall, who brewed that first batch of Bourbon County Stout at Goose Island Beer Company in Chicago. “They had no idea what it was!”

What’s fascinating is that the very first batch wouldn’t have happened without Jim Beam’s grandson and legendary Beam master distiller, Booker Noe. He hosted a beer, bourbon, and cigar dinner in South Bend, Indiana, in 1992, and Hall was there. In the afterglow of the dinner, the idea of aging Hall’s beer in Noe’s barrels was born.

Noe sent six freshly-emptied barrels to Chicago, and Hall filled them with a big, rich imperial stout. As he said, it got off to a slow start, but once a few adventurous drinkers tried it, word spread quickly.

However, when Hall took the beer to the Great American Beer Festival, there wasn’t even an award category for him to enter it in. The judges punted, and awarded the beer one of the festival’s few honorable mentions, acknowledging a great but unclassifiable beer. There are now multiple medal categories for barrel-aged beers at the event and even an annual Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers in Chicago.

Bourbon County Stout (almost universally called simply BCS) has become a phenomenon. It was one of the reasons that the company was purchased a few years ago by Budweiser’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev. I visited the BCS warehouse in Chicago recently as a guest of the brand, and was left slack-jawed at the size of the place. The warehouse has room for up to 10,000 barrels, and held about 6,500 when I was there. The brand was gearing up for its annual one-day release of BCS, appropriately enough on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. For a beer geek, the BCS release is every bit as frenzied and grabby as a midnight holiday doorbuster sale (especially for the Chicago-only release of the limited Proprietor’s bottling, which changes every year).

Every drop of BCS (the classic stout, as well as variants like barleywine and this year’s wheatwine, which, wow, I’m going to be looking hard for) is brewed at Goose Island’s smaller Fulton Street Taproom facility and then is tankered to the warehouse, where it is poured into freshly-emptied bourbon barrels. These are now largely from Heaven Hill, mostly former Evan Williams and Elijah Craig barrels, but about 25-percent are sourced through brokers.

The beers are either simply aged in the barrels (for a minimum of eight months; the average is eleven), or infused with flavors. The flavors are natural—coffee beans (from Intelligentsia roasters, literally next door to the Fulton Street facility), vanilla beans, cocoa nibs, fruit puree—and spun directly into the beer in small vessels referred to affectionately as Dorothy tanks, a hat tip to the tornado barrels in the 1996 movie Twister.

BCS is entering the mainstream through sheer force of will, but, like the Budweiser Copper Reserve, other beers are joining up with established bourbon brands to attract the wider beer and bourbon markets and not just craft beer nerds.

One of the first was Anderson Valley, a pioneering brewery from northern California. They teamed up with Wild Turkey and I was lucky enough to be at the launch of Wild Turkey Bourbon Barrel Stout back in 2012. I was handed my first glass by Wild Turkey’s legendary distiller Jimmy Russell.

This product was different from BCS in a number of ways. For one, it was made with Anderson Valley’s oatmeal stout at a significantly lower alcohol level. This presaged the current crop of bourbon barrel beers, which are more drinkable that the original behemoths.

Still, as Anderson Valley head brewer Fal Allen (a craft brewing icon in his own right) noted, these beers often pick up some power from the still-wet barrels. “It starts out about 5.8-percent ABV (alcohol by volume). We put it in Wild Turkey barrels for about three months, and it comes up a little, to about 6.9-percent.” (Marques noted that the Budweiser Reserve Copper Lager picks up no additional alcohol from the wood; presumably because of the sterilization process.)

New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado, has also teamed up with Beam bourbon brand Knob Creek to make Oakspire Bourbon Barrel Ale using a new process altogether. Oakspire is produced with a combination of intricately-cut spirals of oak soaked in Knob Creek Bourbon and Knob Creek barrel char. The barrel char—the charred inner layer, rich in caramelized wood sugars and natural vanillin—is “harvested” at the distillery from freshly-dumped barrels. A blend of the char and the soaked oak spirals is added to what is essentially a steel tea bag, fitted with openings to allow an exchange of liquid, which is put in the tank with the maturing beer, a high-rye 9-percent bruiser of an ale.

If you’re a long-time craft beer drinker, or a bourbon-barrel beer aficionado, this will be old hat to you. But if you’re new to the idea, the lure of two familiar names—Wild Turkey, Budweiser, Jim Beam, Anderson Valley, Elijah Craig, New Belgium, Knob Creek—might be enough to tempt you to sample one of these brews. And if you do, you’ll discover a beautiful blend of two great flavors.

[MIKA27]

The Biggest Organism On Earth Is Dying, And It's Our Fault

The heaviest organism on Earth isn’t a whale or an elephant. It’s a tree — or rather, a system of over 40,000 clonal trees, all connected by their roots. Pando, a six million kg organism in central Utah, is believed to have sprouted toward the end of the last Ice Age.

But after thousands of years of thriving, Pando has run into trouble. A study published in PLOS One this week features the first comprehensive examination of the entire 106 acres of clonal aspen forest, and it concludes that Pando isn’t growing. In fact, the forest has been failing to self-reproduce since at least 30 to 40 years ago.

“People are at the centre of that failure,” said co-author Paul Rogers, the director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University, who authored a similar study last year on a smaller portion of the Pando.

People have allowed the local deer and cattle population to thrive, Rogers said. Their voracious grazing has resulted in fewer saplings and a whole lot of old, dying trees. During its analysis, the team couldn’t find any sapling-size trees that didn’t have the tops eaten off.

Apex predators such as bears, wolves and mountain lions once kept the mule deer’s population in check, but those are barely around any more because of hunting. Then, there are ranchers who don’t stop their cattle from grazing on the trees.

State and federal officials are the ones who can help remedy this issue, so Rogers blames humans, not animals.

“Humans decide on how many animals are there and how they move around,” Rogers told us. “Because there are people there recreating and having homes in the area and roads in the area, you’re not allowed to hunt. Because of human presence, deer are more safe, which causes a localised overabundance of the animals.”

This, my friend, is the incredible Pando aspen clone of central Utah.

A survey took place in June 2016 and 2017 where the researchers measured the size, age and health of the trees all across the grove. And they looked at the amount of scat: “We count shit to see what animals are there and what their relative visitation rates are,” Rogers said.

The researchers also looked at two areas of the forest where the trees were protected by fencing and found fences weren’t always all that effective in keeping out wildlife.

What the tree system needs is time free of grazers in order to regrow. The Pando is not like other trees, Roger explained.

“They don’t live as long [as other trees], and they regrow,” he told us. “They send a hormonal signal whenever one of them dies to spread from the roots, not from seed. That’s its survival mechanism. When trees are dying and you don’t see any regrowth, that’s a red flag.”

A 72-year aerial photo sequence shows forest cover within the Pando aspen clone in Utah. The yellow outlines the boundary of the clone.

The Pando’s lack of regrowth became even more evident when the authors’ analysed aerial photos dating back to 1939. Here, other human impacts became obvious, including clear-cutting for homes or campgrounds.

“Nothing ever grew back [in those areas] because of the combination of [people] cutting, and then the deer and cattle browsing,” Rogers said.

While this study tells an important story, there’s more work to be done. There are open questions about how climate change might further impact the Pando. The study also doesn’t get into other clonal aspen ecosystems, such as those in Europe. More research could also be done using cameras or GPS collars to track animals that interact with the Pando.

But for now, the goal is to sound the alarm on this unique organism. What the Pando needs is coordinated action to protect it at the state and federal level. There’s still so much to learn about this forest, but the trees need to be alive in order for those discoveries to happen.

[MIKA27]

Go Behind The Scenes Of The Original Planet Of The Apes In This Glorious New Book

The recent Planet of the Apes prequel trilogy boasted some seriously sophisticated special effects. But as a new book marking the 50th anniversary of the original film reminds us, special effects have always been an important part of what makes Planet of the Apes such a compelling saga.

J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Planet of the Apes, due out October 23, is packed full of concept art, photos, and other behind-the-scenes documents that have never been published before. It also features a foreword by Fraser Clarke Heston, son of Charlton Heston, who played stranded astronaut George Taylor in the 1968 film. Obviously, long before the advent of CGI and the motion-capture technology used in War for the Planet of the Apes and the other prequels, things like set design, prosthetic make-up, and practical special effects were a huge part of bringing the original sci-fi tale to life.

Here’s a peek inside the new book, starting with a highly detailed concept drawing that shows a very human-like ape chilling out in his front yard, smoking a pipe.

Mentor Heubner’s sketch #12 depicts a pipe-smoking ape standing on a flagstone patio in front of his house. 

More concept art, this time depicting the astronauts’ arrival on the titular planet, as well as a trio of ominous “scarecrows” dotting the landscape.

Top: An illustration by Don Peters and a detail from it (right): The astronauts use their jetpacks to explore a lusher environment. Below: The explorers encounter ominous scarecrows, meant to keep intruders out, an idea conceptualized for the first time by artist Peters. The scarecrows are simian in appearance. 

No CGI here, obviously; Apetown was a detailed, fully-constructed set.

A good view of Apetown. The two-thousand-acre ranch was convenient to Fox headquarters and provided many locales for Apes, as it had for dozens of studio productions since 1939. 

More views of Apetown.

Left Top: The finished gazebo on the lake walkway. Left Right: A good look at the Apetown “units,” including two smaller ones built on the hill using forced perspective, and farther up what looks to be a painted façade. A double for Heston as Taylor runs across an elevated walkway. 

The iconic final moments of Planet of the Apes, with the big reveal of the Statue of Liberty, took careful planning, camerawork, and prop-making.

Clockwise from top left: Two sketches illustrate how (director Franklin J. Schaffner) intended to shoot down on (characters) Taylor and Nova as they arrive at the foot of the statue: First, he would “zoom back to include torch” using the foreground “miniature”—a scaled, aged replica of the real torch. As they rode on Schaffner would film with a Panavision 50mm-to-500mm lens to “zoom through spikes” through the second foreground “miniature.” Later in the day, Schaffner filmed (Charlton) Heston and (Linda) Harrison standing next to their horse as the astronaut gazes in horror at Liberty’s crown. Last, a photograph taken from the platform as Heston and Harrison ride by the torch. 

Lastly, here’s a look at the full book cover:

Planet of the Apes TM & © 1968, 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from the book The Making of Planet of the Apes by J.W. Rinzler. Copyright © 2018 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Published on October 23, 2018 by Harper Design, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

The Making of Planet of the Apes by J. W. Rinzler is out October 23.

[MIKA27]

Someone Used A Deep Learning AI To Perfectly Insert Harrison Ford Into Solo: A Star Wars Story

Casting anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo just feels like sacrilege, but since Ford is now 76 years old, playing a younger version of himself would be all but impossible. Or at least impossible if you rely on the standard Hollywood de-ageing tricks like makeup and CG. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, does a pretty amazing job at putting Ford back into the role of Solo.

The YouTube channel “derpfakes” has been posting videos that demonstrate the impressive, and at times frightening, capabilities of image processing using artificial intelligence. Using a process called deep learning, an AI analyses a large collection of photos of a given person, creating a comprehensive database of them in any almost any position and pose. It then uses that database to intelligently perform an automatic face replacement on a source clip, in this case replacing actor Alden Ehrenreich’s face with Harrison Ford’s.

[MIKA27]

Sean Bean's Penchant For Dying On Film Has Him Starring As Hitman 2's First Elusive Target

Sean Bean is known for many things, thanks to his long career in film and TV — but mostly from that, he’s known for his characters often getting bumped off in dramatic fashion. So much, in fact, that the next Hitman game has hired him to be Agent 47's next big target, in a very silly manner.

Announced this morning, Bean is lending his talents and likeness to the first Elusive Target of Hitman 2 — limited time event missions returning from 2016's Hitman, where players have to track down and assassinate a particularly challenging target added to one of the game’s maps, and where failure means you can’t try again.

As you can see in the cute live-action teaser above, Bean isn’t playing himself as an actor who’s “died” endlessly onscreen for our amusement. Instead, he’s an ex-MI5 agent turned contract killer named Mark Faba, colloquially known as “The Undying” for repeatedly faking his death on missions in increasingly elaborate manners. Like, say... dying in a fiery explosion.

You see what they did there. I wonder if he got his head lopped off at one point?

Hitman 2 players will have the chance to contribute to Bean’s ever-growing death count from November 20 — a week after the game itself comes out on November 13 — and will have 10 days to do so.

[MIKA27]

Ancient Viking Ship Found Buried Next To Busy Norwegian Freeway

Using ground-penetrating radar, archaeologists in Norway have discovered an ancient Viking ship buried just 50cm beneath the surface of a farmer’s field. The 20m-long ship, deliberately buried during a funeral ritual, appears surprisingly intact — and it could contain the skeletal remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior.

It’s called the Jellstad Ship, and it was discovered on farmland in Østfold county in southeast Norway. The site, known as Viksletta, is near the the large and fully intact Jelle burial mound, which can be seen from the busy Norwegian Rv41 118 freeway.

Archaeologists with the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), with the help of radar specialists from Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI ArchPro), detected the vessel using mobile ground-penetrating radar.

The discovery is significant in that it’s only the fourth Viking ship burial ever discovered, according to Knut Paasche, head of the Department of Digital Archaeology at NIKU.

The Viksletta site: Red circles show locations of the burial mounds, orange rectangles the longhouses, and the green eye-shaped object the ancient boat.

“There are only a small number of ship burials known from Scandinavia so far and only three of them (Gokstad, Oseberg and Tune ships) are actually well preserved,” Erich Nau, an archaeologist with NIKU, told Gizmodo.

“The last one of these — Oseberg — was found and excavated in 1904, when archaeological methods were far less advanced than they are today. This new finding offers the possibility for modern, state-of-the-art research. Both further non-invasive methods and modern excavation and documentation methodology can now be applied and will probably lead to a much deeper understanding of the phenomenon of ship-burials.”

In addition to the ship, the scans revealed eight previously undiscovered burial mounds and several longhouses. All eight of the mounds had been plowed over by farmers, but enough evidence remained beneath the surface for the researchers to identify them as such.

In a statement, Morten Hanisch, the county conservator in Østfold, said the archaeologists “are certain that there is a ship there, but how much is preserved is hard to say before further investigation”.

The researchers haven’t dug into the topsoil yet, as they’re hoping to perform as much non-invasive work as possible using “all modern means of archaeology,” said Paasche. Indeed, the ship’s timbers, once exposed to the elements, will start to degrade immediately. What’s more, radar scans show the ship in its undisturbed condition.

The researchers are planning to perform more scans of the area, but they haven’t ruled out an excavation of the ship at some point in the future.

The ship is resting just 50cm below the topsoil, and it’s around 20m long. Preliminary scans suggest the ship’s keel and floor timbers are still intact. While the researchers have not yet dated this site, similar sites in Norway date to around 800 AD.

The researchers say the ship was deliberately buried in a burial mound, which is not as extraordinary as it might sound. Boats and ships were an indelible aspect of Viking culture, used for transportation, trade and conquest in northern Europe until about 1000 years ago. Ships were precious and considered symbols of wealth and status.

Archaeologists have found buried ships before, some even containing bodies. In 2011, for example, archaeologists in Scotland discovered a 5m-long boat with a warrior inside, along with his shield, sword, spear and other grave goods.

“Ship burials are a tradition that only exist in Scandinavia and adjoining areas during the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia — from the 6th to the 11th century — and the majority of the already excavated examples can be dated to the 9th and 10th century which is also called the Viking Age,” said Nau.

“Therefore we can assume that the new one is also from this period and thus between 1000 and 1200 years old. However, we cannot date the new findings with certainty yet — this will probably be possible only within the framework of an excavation.”

This newly discovered ship may have been part of a cemetery, which was “clearly designed to display power and influence,” archaeologist and project leader Lars Gustavsen said in a statement. There’s a very real possibility that the Jellstad Ship contains the remains of a high-ranking Viking, but that still needs to be proven.

It isn’t immediately clear if ground-penetrating radar could pick up traces of a body, or bodies; for that, ground excavations may be necessary.

Five longhouses, or halls, were also discovered by the researchers, some of which were quite large. The scientists said the site is reminiscent of another Viking site: The Borre site in Vestfold County, on the opposite side of the Oslofjord.

These findings are all very preliminary, and the researchers are preparing for the next stage of the project, which will involve more thorough scans of the Viksletta site using additional non-invasive geophysical methods. The discovery of this ancient ship is very exciting, but the best may be yet to come.

[MIKA27]

THE JAPANESE HAVE INVENTED A CRUEL DEVICE TO MAKE YOU WORK LONGER & HARDER

Goodbye Susan from accounts; hello future. Panasonic’s design studio, Future Life Factory, has just found a way to silence your irritating co-workers forever. The price? $258, plus your dignity.

If you are willing to give up any aspirations you may have as a living, breathing individual, and wrap a physical manifestation of your “desk jockey” status around your head, the Wear Space headset—essentially a one-piece set of human blinders—is the place to start.

Remember when your dog would start a personal vendetta against one of its paws and you would have to put a lampshade on it? Well Wear Space is the lampshade, you’re the dog, and the itchy paw is your annoying co-workers.

The Wear Space headset promises to, “Aid concentration by limiting your senses of sight and hearing, via noise-cancelling technology and a partition that controls your field of view,” (Panasonic). This comes in response to the rise of open office spaces and digital nomadism—work-styles which make it difficult for employees to focus. According to the product description, Wear Space instantly creates “personal space” for you, no matter where you are.

According to them, “It’s as simple as putting on an article of clothing.” The device can be adjusted based on the level of concentration you desire. So, just as you would wear an overcoat in freezing cold weather and a light jacket in a cool breeze, Wear Space has different settings for different environments.

Panasonic debuted the Wear Space, at a conference earlier this year. However, as reported by Mashable, “Sensing it had a hit on its hands, the ‘Panasonic group’ Shiftall Co. (recently) launched a crowdfunding campaign to move this idea from the realm of complacent nightmare to defeated reality.”

And we’d have to agree: although it was created in partnership with Kunihiko Morinaga, a fashion designer, we also find the idea of wearing human blinders (no matter how sleek you dress it), a bit demeaning.

[MIKA27]

‘Monster Party’ Trailer Promises a Deadly Dinner Party You Can’t Escape

Dinner parties can be a real drag, especially if you get busted trying to crash. Part The Purge, part The Invitation and part Don’t Breathe, the new horror thriller Monster Party sets the table for a dinner party from hell where the guests (invited or otherwise) find themselves caught in a fight for their lives. The film follows three young thieves who pose as waiters and make their way into a fancy Malibu mansion in the hopes of pulling of a heist that will solve their debt problems for good. But when the plan goes wrong, they realize the dinner guests are more dangerous than they thought and the fight is on to make it out alive.

Written and directed by Chris von Hoffmann (Drifter), Monster Party stars Julian McMahon (Nip/Tuck), Robin Tunney (The Mentalist), Sam Strike (Nightflyers), Erin Moriarty (Blood Father), Lance Reddick (John Wick), Brandon Micheal Hall (Search Party), Virginia Gardner (Halloween), and Diego Boneta (Scream Queens) . RLJE Films will release the film in theaters, on VOD and Digital HD on Nov. 2, 2018. 

[MIKA27]

BUGATTI CHIRON OFF-ROAD EDITION

Automotive digital artist Rain Prisk is no stranger to insane concepts. In fact, the Estonian designer has envisioned some of the wildest repurposed vehicles we’ve ever seen. But this one, a Bugatti Chiron 4×4, might just be his most over-the-top concept car yet.

We’re pretty sure the designers at Bugatti never intended for the Chiron to go off-road — evidenced by its super-low ground clearance and monstrous track-friendly 1,500-horsepower rating. But that didn’t stop Prisk from giving it a beefed-up off-road suspension, massive all-terrain tires, and a roof rack to boot. The imaginary build also appears to have a whole complement of undercarriage armor and a front-end winch (to get the driver out of any sticky situations). This might be the most absurd and opulent overlander ever imagined, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to get behind the wheel and take her to task.

[MIKA27]

THE MAKING OF ‘THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK’ DOCUMENTARY

Star Wars may very well be the greatest science fiction film franchise of all time. And The Empire Strikes Back is inarguably the best of the bunch. And that’s not just because of the story and themes, but also because of its groundbreaking production and special effects. If you’ve ever wanted to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to create this movie masterpiece, you’re in luck — as a long-lost documentary, called The Making of “The Empire Strikes Back,” has just resurfaced.

Created by Michel Parbot, this hour-long look at the second Star Wars film was thought to have disappeared — lost to history and the speculation of fanboys everywhere. Mysteriously, however, it has popped back up in full on YouTube, completely free for everyone to enjoy. From cast interviews, development of the costumes, and the construction of some of the most impressive set pieces (like the ice planet, Hoth), this is a marvelous in-depth glimpse at one of the greatest films to ever grace the silver screen.

[MIKA27]

The Haunting Mystery of 'Edwin Drood' That Charles Dickens Left Behind

When Charles Dickens died, he left behind an unfinished book containing unresolved mysteries. In 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' who killed Drood and is Drood, in fact, dead?

On June 8, 1870, Charles Dickens spent most of the day working on his latest novel. Normally Dickens would confine his writing to the morning hours, but on this day he met his close friend John Forster for lunch and then returned to his novel in the afternoon.

At 6:10 p.m., shortly after he had joined his family at the dinner table, he had a stroke. Twenty-four hours later, the most celebrated author in Victorian England was dead.

“The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except Abraham Lincoln alone, has carried mourning into so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the ranks of society,” Horace Greeley, the founder of the New-York Tribune, said.

In a letter to Forster, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “The terrible news from England fills us all with inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are sorrowing for him.”

Even Queen Victoria weighed in, sending “her deepest regret at the sad news of Charles Dickens’s death” via telegraph from Balmoral Castle.

But beyond the initial shock of sadness, what avid Dickens fans were really wondering—were really praying for—was the answer to one question: did Dickens finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood before he kicked it?

Towards the end of his life, Dickens was beginning to suffer from ill health. An avid walker, he was beset by increasing leg pain in addition to a variety of other ailments that he was treating with self-prescribed laudanum. But poor health didn’t slow him down one bit.

The fall before his untimely demise, he had not only begun a new novel, he had also launched a new speaking tour, commitments he normally did not take on simultaneously.

On Aug. 6, 1869, Dickens wrote to Forster that he had “a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.”

The novel was titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood and it was going to be Dickens’s version of a dark whodunnit set in his hometown of Rochester. The story centered around a choirmaster with a hidden wicked side who covets his nephew’s fiancée. When the nephew, one Edwin Drood, suddenly disappears, a murder mystery ensues.

“I hope his book is finished. It is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all,” Longfellow wrote in his condolence letter. “It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand, and left it incomplete.”

Alas, the pen had fallen from Dickens’s hand when the tale was only halfway done. The contract for the novel specified it would be published in 12 installments; Dickens completed six, with the last of the chapters left two pages short.

And so was born the mystery within the mystery that has plagued Dickens obsessives for over a century with no resolution in sight: how did Dickens intend to resolve the main questions at the heart of the book — who killed Edwin Drood and is Drood, in fact, dead?

In a move that was a departure from his previous writing process, Dickens did not leave any notes on the plot of his last novel or what he intended to do with the second half. But there are some hints that he knew exactly how he planned to solve the puzzling twists and turns.

Queen Victoria was a big fan of Dickens (she called Oliver Twist “excessively interesting”), and their reigns had largely coincided — hers on the throne and his as the country’s premier novelist. She had tried to meet him on several occasions, but he had politely, and against royal protocol, declined each attempt.

Finally, on March 7, 1870, only a few months before his death, the long-awaited meeting took place. Both parties stood throughout the visit, according to Claire Tomalin in her biography of the author, Charles Dickens: A Life, and they covered topics ranging from the popularity of the royal family in America to rising food costs and the Queen’s difficulty finding good servants.

Dickens, who Tomalin says had a “lack of enthusiasm for royalty” managed to graciously grin and bear it when Victoria presented him with a copy of a book she had written, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. (When it was published two years earlier, Dickens had written to a friend that it was “preposterous” and that he wouldn’t have joined “the Shameful lick-spittle chorus” and published a glowing review of it “for any money,” unlike the friend to whom his letter was addressed.)

At one point, Victoria not-so-subtly hinted that she regretted never having been able to attend one of Dickens’s readings. The author told her in no uncertain terms that he did not give private performances but, the story goes, he did offer to reveal to her the ending of Drood.

To the horror of those who have been haunted ever since by the unsolved crime, Victoria allegedly declined his offer. (Maybe she was staunchly anti-spoiler, or maybe she was paying him back for refusing her so many times.)

Forster, for his part, claimed that he knew exactly what Dickens intended, despite Dickens writing in that early letter that the plot of his latest novel was “not a communicable idea.”

Dickens would speak often to his dear friend about his work and even visited the Forster family to read each completed chapter aloud before it was published (take that, Queen Victoria).

In The Life of Charles Dickens, Forster’s posthumous biography of his friend, he lays out what Dickens had intended to happen at the end of Drood. (Semi-spoiler alert: he said the uncle did it, disposed of the body by dissolving it in lime, and his crime was revealed with the discovery of his nephew’s lime-resistant gold ring.)

But despite Forster’s certainty, many critics have maintained that the matter is not settled, and debate continues to this day as to the ending Dickens intended. The result has been an almost endless supply of takes and adaptations and attempts to complete the original text.

Writers ranging from Charley Dickens (Charles’s son) and the American novelist Robert Henry Newell to the American publisher Thomas James (who claimed to have channeled the spirit of Dickens through a medium) and more recently Leon Garfield have all attempted to finish what Dickens started.

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“What's less well known is that Dickens died on purpose—to avoid having to finish it. Or that's what I came to believe, after months of wrestling in darkened rooms with the questions he ran out of time to answer”

There have been film and TV adaptations, including a 2012 version for the BBC produced by mystery writer Gwyneth Hughes who, in a story for The Guardian on her experience, wrote that, “What’s less well known is that Dickens died on purpose—to avoid having to finish it. Or that’s what I came to believe, after months of wrestling in darkened rooms with the questions he ran out of time to answer.”

And there was a 1985 Broadway adaptation that did away with the hair-wringing job of deciding what Dickens intended by allowing the audience to vote on their ending of choice. The result was a tale whose ending “as often as not” was chosen “not according to logic or the likelihood of guilt but out of affection for one or another member of the cast,” wrote Charles McGrath in The New York Times.

Given how many scholars have been driven to the brink of madness parsing out Dickens’s every word and crumb of a clue, this may have been the best Drood decision ever made.

Not all critics agree on the literary merit of this last novel, but what is thoroughly decided is that, to the very end, Dickens never stopped being the Great Novelist Charles Dickens.

Tomalin is one of the critics of this last novel, writing that “the mystery is a slight one, the villain less interesting than he promises to be at first, the comedy only moderately funny, the charm a little forced, and the language reads at times like a parody of earlier work.”

But, in the end, she writes that The Mystery of Edwin Drood can be seen “as the achievement of a man who is dying and refusing to die, who would not allow illness and failing powers to keep him from exerting his imagination, or to prevent him from writing: and as such it is an astonishing and heroic enterprise.”

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JACK DANIEL’S TENNESSEE TASTERS’ SELECTION SERIES WHISKEY

Known for its signature whiskey that’s half of a one-two punch cocktail, Jack Daniel’s is always a reliable spirit for happy hour. The American whiskey brand typically doesn’t stray too far away from its tried-and-true formula. However, they are exercising their creativity with variants called the Tennessee Tasters’ Selection series.

This limited release of experimental whiskeys has been selected by the distillery’s expert tasting team to bring us more varied flavor profiles. Each of the variants will be sold exclusively at the Jack Daniel’s distillery and in select Tennessee liquor stores. There will be around 24,000 bottles for each new flavor followed by limited offerings every few months. Details for three of the offerings are available. The High Angel’s Share Barrels offer a distinct and deep concentration of flavors at 107-proof. The Smoked Hickory Finish bottle — an absolutely perfect campfire whiskey — is a matured whiskey finished with charred hickory staves at 100-proof. And, the Reunion Barrel is a 90-proof whiskey finished in wine barrels. High Angel’s Share Barrels and Smoked Hickory Finish will be available in October and Reunion Barrel will hit select shelves in 2019.

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Anicorn Made a Special Watch to Honor the 60th Anniversary of NASA

Anicorn Watches has always impressed us with their unique, wearable timepieces. In honor of the 60th Anniversary of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration–more affectionately and simply referred to as NASA–Anicorn is releasing a special edition watch that puts the Series 000 watches and the Series K452 watches to shame. This limited release watch combines NASA-style white, blue and red accents with Anicorn styling to create a truly unique timepiece filled with the features you want in a watch. Mechanical timepiece with Cerakote ceramic coatings, white textile strap (with NASA logo and the GPS coordinates of the Kennedy Space Center), NASA embroidered patch, metal warranty plate and a limited edition number on each watch movement. We know it’s the 60th Anniversary of NASA. We know Anicorn is only releasing 60 watches. We know they’re being released at 12pm EST on October 18th. We don’t know how much they’re going to cost. Stay tuned to the Anicorn website below to make sure you get one of what is sure to be a collector’s edition watch.

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How The Universe Ends

Somewhere between a second and a millennium from now, you will die. Your body and all of its parts will cease functioning and rejoin the Earth as regular, lifeless stuff. The Earth, too, will die, engulfed by an expanding, ageing Sun. The Sun will burn off all of its fuel and end up a white dwarf, then burn out and die. The Milky Way will collide with nearby Andromeda, and form a large, elliptical galaxy, which will die by losing all of its stars to intergalactic space. The corpses of those remaining stars will die, decaying into their constituent parts. The universe will age onward, until all matter is either stored in black holes or floating as free elementary particles. Those black holes will evaporate, and then universe will die. All that was will be an icy cold nothing, forever.

This is one of the happier possible endings—this “heat death,” as in, the death of heat, at least leaves us time to say goodbye. The truth is, the universe far predates humans, it will far outlast humans, and contemplating its death is a depressing effort that highlights our incredible insignificance. At least studying the physics of it all serves as a nice pastime while we wait to dissolve into nothingness.

“We can try to understand it, but there’s nothing we can do to affect it in any way,” Katie Mack, North Carolina State University assistant professor currently writing a book on the end of the universe, told Gizmodo. “We have no legacy in the cosmos, eventually. That’s an interesting concept.”

Heat death, or the “big freeze,” is generally considered the most likely future, based on how things are looking today. The universe is expanding, and will continue expanding. As things move farther apart, stars will form less frequently from the sparser dust and gas. The last black holes will have slowly evaporated into energy through the theoretical process proposed by Stephen Hawking, perhaps in a googol (that’s 10100) years. And maybe some time afterward, the remaining particles will decay, and the entire universe will assume an average temperature of nearly, but not exactly, absolute zero. Basically, the universe will be so big and sparse that the odds of finding anything at all will be effectively absolute zero.

None of this will happen any time soon. Provided humans survive our own self-destructive tendencies, the Earth’s atmosphere could have another billion years, and the Sun maybe 7 billion to 10 billion years before it grows into a red giant, ejects its outer layers, and remains just a glowing core around the same size as the Earth but packing far more mass, called a white dwarf, according to John Baez, a physicist at University of California, Riverside. Smaller red stars will stick around for perhaps a hundred trillion years—maybe humans can settle on a planet orbiting a nice red dwarf like Proxima Centauri to live out our days. These are timescales far beyond human comprehension—think of the amount of time it would take to walk across the universe at its present size, if you had to stop and count every atom in the universe after each step.

“I guess everyone tends to feel depressed about it,” Baez told Gizmodo. “People are future-thinking animals, and we always like to think about life in terms of a story, and hope it has a happy ending. It goes against our brain to imagine development other than things getting more interesting, but there’s no reason to think that this will last forever.”

Some more eventful theorised fates could arrive sooner, like the Big Rip. You might be aware that in 1998, scientists discovered the universe wasn’t just expanding, but that the expansion rate was increasing. They theorise that some energy seemingly innate to the vacuum of the universe, called dark energy, powers the accelerated expansion. There’s a possibility that in over 100 billion years, the dark energy will cause the universe to expand so quickly that it tears apart galaxies, solar systems, planets, and atoms before they can run out of energy on their own. The space between every individual point would grow infinitely large. Physics theory seems stacked in favour of heat death over the Big Rip, but who knows—observations don’t forbid it.

Then, there’s the chance that the very vacuum of space itself could change. Maybe the “Higgs field,” a field the permeates the universe that determines the mass of subatomic particles, isn’t in the lowest energy configuriation. Maybe it is actually “metastable” and there’s a lower-energy ground state it could decay to. Imagine spending your whole life living on a platform, thinking it was the solid ground—this platform is the metastable state. Maybe one day, the platform will collapse and reveal a true floor a hundred feet below. The laws of physics as you know them would no longer work, and you would fall and die. This is essentially what would happen if the universe snapped from a metastable state to a more stable state, if we were living on the platform all along. This would end the universe as we know it, since this new, lower-energy universe would not support the existence of the present-day Standard Model that governs the identities and interactions of particles that make up matter. It’s unlikely such an event would occur before the heat death does. But it would be a spectacular death.

“At some spot in the universe you’d create a bubble of true vacuum that expands at the speed of light and envelopes the universe, destroying everything,” said Mack. Its light speed means you wouldn’t see it coming—the death would arrive simultaneously with the warning that death was coming.

But not every possible cosmic conclusion is one of utter desolation and emptiness. Maybe in some distant, post-heat-death future, the energy in the universe’s vacuum could spontaneously jump back upward at a point, initiating inflation at that point in space from which entirely new universes form, Alan Guth, MIT physicist who invented the theory of cosmic inflation, told Gizmodo. Perhaps that’s how our universe formed, and perhaps there are an infinite number of universes forming in the same way, decaying out of an infinitely inflating grander universe. Maybe there are places beyond the reach of our own universe that won’t be impacted by the demise of our own.

“This is the most optimistic point of view among theories, because even though our part of the universe will die out, other parts that may be teeming with life would go on forever,” Guth said. Our universe dies, either way.

And maybe dark energy isn’t an innate, constant value to the universe. Maybe, as we previously reported, its strength is decreasing, which might lead to the universe’s expansion eventually slowing. Everything could then turn around under gravity’s force and collapse—that’s the “Big Crunch.”

There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe, so any or none of these ideas could be right. Any new discovery about the nature of dark energy, the Higgs boson, or spacetime itself could reveal a vastly different fate of the universe, where everything wastes away to an infinitely vast nothingness, everything collapses, or new universes spawn from the ashes of the old, or something else entirely happens. Regardless, humanity’s existence and legacy—and everything else, ever—will cease to exist or have meaning.

“Even though we all know that we personally are going to die, it still kinda hurts that so is everything else,” said Mack. “There’s nothing that’s going to live on.”

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See The Glorious Winners Of The 2018 Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Contest

A stunning photograph of Utah’s Badlands—with the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies in the background—captured the top prize of this year’s Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

This annual competition, now in its 10th year, is run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with Insight Investment and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. The 2018 competition received over 4,200 entries from 91 countries, and it includes contributions from both professional and amateur photographers.

The top prize winner, American photographer Brad Goldpaint, received £10,000 ($US13,000 ($18,403)) for his stunning photo, “Transport the Soul.” Winners of the subcategories collected £1,500 ($US1,950 ($2,760)) for their efforts

Take a look at the winning images for yourself, and bask in all their cosmological glory.

Transport the Soul: Brad Goldpaint (USA)

This gorgeous photo by Brad Goldpaint won top prize for the People and Space category and the overall best photo submitted to the competition. Taken in Moab, Utah, the photo shows a lone photographer, the Andromeda Galaxy (top left), the Milky Way galaxy (top right), and the Moon.

Speeding on the Aurora Lane: Nicolas Lefaudeux (France)

Taken from Sirkka, Finland, this otherworldly photo by Nicolas Lefaudeux was chosen as the best in the Aurorae category. If you look carefully, you can see the Big Dipper constellation at the heart of this aurorae, which lasted less than a minute.

NGC 3521, Mysterious Galaxy: Steven Mohr (Australia)

This winning image for the Galaxies category shows spiral galaxy NGC 3521, which is located around 26 million light-years from Earth. The reddish-yellow hues are produced by ancient stars, and the blue-white tones by young, hot stars. This image, taken from Victoria, Australia, comprises around 20.5 hours of exposure time.

Inverted Colours of the boundary between Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquilitatis: Jordi Delpeix Borrell (Spain)

By creating an inverted telescopic image of the lunar landscape, photographer Jordi Delpeix Borrell was able to highlight some of the Moon’s finer details. Taken from a telescope near Barcelona Spain, the photo won top prize in the Our Moon category.

Sun King, Little King, and God of War: Nicolas Lefaudeux (France)

This is definitely one of the coolest shots of the August 2017 eclipse we’ve seen. The winner of the Our Sun category shows the eclipsed moon, Mars (the red dot at far right), and the blue star Regulus (just to the left of the Moon). The total exposure lasted 100 seconds and was recorded in more than 120 individual images. Nicolas Lefaudeux captured this photo from Unity Oregon, a location he chose based on weather forecasts.

The Grace of Venus: Martin Lewis (UK)

This infrared image of Venus was awarded top prize in the Planets, Comets, and Asteroids category. The photo was captured in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, UK.

Circumpolar: Ferenc Szémár (Hungary)

This extra-long exposure taken in Gatyatető, Hungary, took half the winter to create. The circumpolar star Almach, also known as Gamma Andromedae, can be seen streaking above the horizon. This photo won Ferenc Szémár top prize in the Skyscapes category.

Corona Australis Dust Complex: Mario Cogo (Italy)

This stunning photo of nebulas NGC 6726-27-29, dark dust cloud Bernes 157, globular cluster NGC 6723, and other celestial objects, was awarded top prize in the Stars and Nebulae category. This six-hour exposure was taken from a farm in Namibia.

Great Autumn Morning: Fabian Dalpiaz (Italy)

15-year old Fabian Dalpiaz won the Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year award for this moody image. On an early Monday morning (before an exam at school) Dalpiaz decided to go out and take some images. He got lucky and captured this incredible photograph of a meteor passing over the Dolomites.

Galaxy Curtain Call Performance: Tianhong Li (China)

Tianhong Li was awarded the Best Newcomer prize for this photo taken in Ming’antu, China.

Two Comets with the Pleiades: Damian Peach (UK)

The winning image for the Robotic Scope category shows a very rare conjunction of two bright comets passing the famous Pleiades star cluster in Taurus at the same time. Comet C/2017 O1 (ASASSN) can be seen at far left, while C2015 ER61 (PanSTARRS) is in the center. Photographer Damian Peach captured the seen in Mayhill, New Mexico.

 

 

 

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Elon Musk Appears To Be Building Some Sort Of Batcave Underneath Los Angeles

According to new plans filed with city officials, the Boring Company is building a car elevator inside the garage of a nondescript house near Los Angeles. The steel shaft is designed to lower a vehicle down to a test tunnel that snakes beneath the city of Hawthorne. And as some jokesters have pointed out, the whole situation sure does make it seem like Elon Musk is building his own Batcave.

Obviously, the embattled billionaire isn’t really creating a lair where he can hide high-tech weapons and a tactical suit designed for fighting crime. According to the Los Angeles Times, this new car elevator is just the latest in a series of tests for the Boring Company’s mission to create a network of underground roads that will cure Los Angeles of its historically terrible traffic jams. This is perhaps the most whimsical of Musk’s various companies and pursuits, which is why it seems surprising that he’s actually following through with the experiments. It’s equally remarkable that Musk and the Boring Company are hiding this futuristic new infrastructure in plain sight.

Honestly, this house could not be more nondescript. Hawthorne, California is the home of the Boring Company’s headquarters but is otherwise an unremarkable city near LAX airport. The house is on a residential street, W. 119th Place, and is close to the Hawthorne Municipal Airport, where SpaceX is headquartered and Tesla has its design center. But beyond proximity to some of Musk’s other companies, there’s nothing about this particular house that would make it stand out. It actually looks like a bit of a dump. The Boring Company bought it in January for $US485,000 ($686,566) through a shell company called Irma’s Place. That price is pretty low compared to what houses around it are worth.

But Musk and the Boring Company aren’t interested in the house itself. They’re primarily concerned with the garage and the ground beneath it. According to city records, they plan to carve out the elevator shaft in the garage and connect it to a test track 12.19m underground. There are also plans to build another, bigger garage behind the house that will connect to the test track, and the Boring Company bought a nearby industrial building nearby for $US2 ($3) million, where the company plans to transport the cutter head used for digging the test track. Apparently, none of this will cause too much of a ruckus.

“We’ll be completely contained within the garage,” Brett Horton, the senior director of facilities and construction for the Boring Company and SpaceX, told city officials. “You won’t be able to see or hear it.”

The process of building all this has been low-key so far. The company has installed a crapload of security equipment in anticipation for the elevator’s construction and use. Meanwhile, Musk recently announced that a two-mile-long test track underneath Hawthorne called “the Loop” will open to the public on December 11, though he teased the idea of public rides back in May. The Boring Company has released pictures of this tunnel which does indeed look like a tunnel but, at least at the time this photo was taken, does not look like a track that will transport vehicles at a top speed of 249km per hour.

We’ll see if Musk and the Boring Company really do start giving people tunnel rides in six weeks’ time. While the 47-year-old has earned a reputation for harassing rescue workers and attracting SEC investigations, he has not historically followed through on all of his promises. In the past, Musk has said of the Boring Company, “We have no idea what we’re doing.” Which doesn’t mean he’ll fail! At the very least, the Boring Company has released a some very cool and futuristic-looking concept videos. It’s also sold a lot of flamethrowers, for some reason.

If you let your mind wander a bit, though, it doesn’t matter if the Boring Company succeeds at creating a vast network of underground transportation tunnels in cities like Los Angeles. That mission could be abandoned by next year, but Musk would be still be left with at least one sprawling underground lair, concealed from public view by a dilapidated house and accessible by a car-sized elevator in its garage. Just imagine the possibilities.

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Resident Evil: How Sweet Home Inspired the Series and the Survival Horror Genre

Before Resident Evil, there was Sweet Home. This is how a half-forgotten film and game spawned a video game genre...

Ring, Audition, Dark Water, Onibaba, House, Kuroneko... Ask most film fans to name a prominent Japanese horror, and one of those titles would probably come up. Ask most video game fanatics to name a Japanese horror game, and they'd probably reply with Resident Evil, Silent Hill, or, if they're feeling a bit retro, Splatterhouse or Castlevania.

There's one name that almost certainly won't come up in conversations about either category: Sweet Home. Yet this 1989 horror, and the video game of the same name released with it, inadvertently helped define an entire genre - and even spawn the Resident Evil franchise, which is still going 20 years later.

The Sweet Home movie is a curious genre mishmash with an impressive pedigree. It was written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a filmmaker who would earn much wider critical attention for such movies as Pulse (2001) and Tokyo Sonata (2008). Its special makeup effects were created by Dick Smith, who made Linda Blair look possessed in The Exorcist, and famously blew up heads in David Cronenberg's Scanners. Sweet Home's producer was Juzo Itami, in the late-80s well known for his "ramen western" Tampopo and as an actor in such films as Lady Snowblood.

Sweet Home's style, which echoes everything from Italian bloodbath epics of the 1970s and 80s to Robert Wise's The Haunting to Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist, almost borders on pastiche. Its story sees a group of filmmakers - plus the director's teenage daughter, Emi, who's along for the school holidays - enter a deserted mansion to make a film about the work of a famous artist. The artist's mansion is said to contain one of his last frescoes, and the crew are determined to clean the painting up and present it to the Japanese public for the first time. But by poking around the crumbling old building, the filmmakers stir up the ghost of the artist's grief-stricken wife, and her supernatural shadow has a deadly effect on anyone it reaches.

Acted and directed with the tone of a horror-comedy, Sweet Home soon switches gear when the supernatural events kick in: the ghost's shadow is capable of burning and dissolving mortal bodies, with spectacularly gruesome results. In one scene, a cameraman's lower body is reduced to a streak of crimson goo. In another, an old man (played by producer Juzo Itami) is stripped to his bare bones. If the minimal, recognizable style of Kiyoshi Kurosawa seems largely missing, that's apparently because he and Itami fell out while the movie was in production. Itami, a decidedly hands-on producer, had his own ideas as to what the film should look like, and changed Kurosawa's cut considerably before its release.

Kurosawa's fingerprints can still be found in Sweet Home's more vivid moments, however. The sequences where his characters flee from huge, finger-like shadows are wonderfully eerie, and the final third, where TV producer Akiko (Nobuko Miyatomo, the producer's wife) faces the mansion's demonic forces alone are really effective - all Poltergeist-style optical effects and loathsome prosthetics.

Sweet Home could be regarded as a fun yet inconsequential footnote in Japanese cinema - or at any rate a relic from Kurosawa's earlier career that he might prefer to forget - were it not for its innovative ties with the video game company Capcom. Games adapted from movies were common in the 1980s, but Sweet Home was different, in that the game and the film were developed in tandem and released almost at the same time. While Kurosawa and Itami made the film, designer Tokuro Fujiwara worked on the video game - a top-down action RPG set in the very same haunted mansion.

Fujiwara was already an established creative force at Capcom by 1989, having directed or produced classics of the era like Ghosts 'n Goblins (a platformer with a comic-horror theme) and Bionic Commando. Sweet Home, however, was far slower-paced and story driven than most of his earlier titles, and, because it was developed for the Famicom - Japan's version of the Nintendo Entertainment System - it could be given far more depth than the quick-fix arcade games of the era.

Kurosawa and Itami appeared to have a fair bit of input into the video game, since they're credited as the designer and producer respectively. In an interview with Japanese magazine Continue, Fujiawara also recalls that he was allowed to visit the film's studio and "use the movie as reference."

"I got to see the movie and take a tour of the film studio," Fujiwara said, "and use whatever essence I thought would work in the game. I carefully considered how to go about bringing elements from the movie to the game screen." 

While the game departs from the movie in some ways, it's also one of the most cinematic console titles of its era. The characters in the film appear in the game, each with their own specific abilities - the director has a cigarette lighter, the art restorer carries a vacuum cleaner - which come in handy at specific moments of the game. The film's deadly shadows are replaced by randomly-spawning monsters, but an air of horror tension still remains. When a character dies, they're gone for good, and the game's ending changes depending on who makes it out of the mansion alive. Some of the movie's set-pieces remain, too, including the cameraman who's cut in half and the incredible melting old man.

Despite being one of the stronger RPGs available for Nintendo's console, Sweet Home was never released outside of Japan - perhaps because of its pretty extreme moments of gore, which would have had Nintendo of America running for the hills. All of this might mean that, like the film, Sweet Home could have been categorized as a curio from the 8-bit era, were it not for its direct influence on one of the most important horror games of all time.

Four years after he made Sweet Home, Fujiwara and his colleagues at Capcom began to look at Sony's first foray into the console market, the PlayStation, and what they might be able to develop for it.

"Once the PlayStation was released," Fujiwara recalls, "conversation turned towards the idea of launching an original franchise. The basic premise was that I'd be able to do the things that I wasn't able to include in Sweet Home. It was mainly on the graphics front that my frustration had been building up. I was also confident that horror games could become a genre in themselves." 

Shinji Mikami, who would eventually direct under Fujiwara's guidance, recalls that he was less certain that a horror title would be a sales success.

"[Fujiwara] said that he wanted us to make a horror game using systems from Sweet Home, which was a horror game for the Famicom that he had directed," Mikami told Gamespot in 2016. "I was actually a big fan of Sweet Home, and he was someone that I really respected, so I was excited about the project from the beginning. But I was a little worried about how well a horror game would really sell."

Fujiwara's PlayStation horror game was originally planned as a direct remake of Sweet Home, before the decision was made to spin it out into its own separate entity called Biohazard - or Resident Evil, as it would soon become known in the west. While much changed during Resident Evil's development, with a first-person viewpoint explored before a third-person perspective was chosen, much remained from Sweet Home.

The action takes place largely in a mansion, it features multiple endings, and Mikami notes that even some of the item management systems are closely modeled after those in Sweet Home. Resident Evil's designers also toyed with a similar, supernatural threat to Sweet Home in an early build, before adding the now-iconic zombies to the mix as the game developed. Resident Evil launched to huge acclaim in 1996 and, with that, the survival horror genre was born.

While other games had an undoubted influence on Resident Evil - Alone in the Dark gave Mikami and Fujiwara the idea of having a fixed camera, for example - the Capcom classic owes a considerable debt to Sweet Home. Indeed, it's a little sad that both the game and the film are so obscure in the west. The game is generally regarded as an interesting bit of trivia in Resident Evil's early history by gamers, while the film is, in turn, obscured by the game. 

To date, Sweet Home has never had an official DVD release, probably because of the bad blood between its producer and director. Sweet Home can be watched in decidedly unofficial form, either on well-known streaming websites or by ordering a DVD from this site, but the muddy, low-definition transfers are far from ideal. As for Kurosawa's original cut of the film - well, that's probably in an archive somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.

Kurosawa is now one of Japan's most respected directors, and his most recent film, Creepy, is an effective return to the horror genre he lit up so disquietingly with Pulse. Sweet Home might not be a film he's especially proud of - hailing as it does from the stage in his career when Kurosawa was making low-budget erotic and gangster pictures - but it remains a fascinating entry in the Japanese horror genre.

Like the gothic house at its center, Sweet Home has been shunned for nearly three decades, but it remains the dark seed from which the survival horror genre first emerged.

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World's Oldest Intact Shipwreck Discovered At Bottom Of Black Sea After 2400 Years

A remarkably intact ancient Greek merchant ship from 2400 years ago has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea.

The sunken vessel was discovered by the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project at a depth of 2000m near the Bulgarian coast, the BBC reports. At this depth, the waters in the Black Sea are anoxic, containing virtually no oxygen. This prevents organic material from degrading, hence the nearly pristine condition of the ship.

Measuring 23m in length, the Greek merchant ship is lying on its side. Its mast, rowing benches and rudders are still intact. Incredibly, coils of rope can still be seen in the stern section. According to AFP, the Black Sea MAP researchers claim it’s the “oldest intact shipwreck known to mankind”.

“A ship, surviving intact, from the Classical world, lying in over two kilometres of water, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Jon Adams from the University of Southampton, the project’s main investigator, AFP reports. “This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world.”

The researchers explored the wreck using a pair of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). According to AFP, a sample of the ship was brought to the surface and carbon dated to 400 BC.

The team also compiled a 3D image of the ancient ship with the ROVs, the BBC reports. The vessel is reminiscent of the ship depicted on the Siren Vase, which is kept at the British Museum. Interestingly, the sunken vessel dates back to the same time period as the vase, which is believed to have been painted around 480 BC.

This Greek merchant ship is likely one of many that ventured back and forth along the Mediterranean, the Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea.

The Siren Vase, featuring a ship similar to the one found at the bottom of the Black Sea.

The Black Sea MAP researchers haven’t had an opportunity to explore the ship’s contents, which could contain some precious and archaeologically significant cargo. Should the team secure additional funding, it would like to return to the site and conduct further investigations.

In addition to exploring the ship’s interior — which they would have to do using ROVs, as it’s way too deep for human divers — the researchers are hoping to learn more about Greek maritime technology, trade, and movements in the area.

The project is being funded by the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust, and is reported to have cost £15 million ($27.5 million) to date.

The discovery of the intact Greek ship is the icing on the cake for the Black Sea MAP, which has been exploring the Black Sea for the past three years. To date, the team has uncovered 67 wrecks, including Roman trading ships and a 17th Century Cossack trading fleet.

[MIKA27]

NASA Releases More Pics Of Freaky Rectangular Iceberg

New photos of a surprisingly rectangular iceberg are offering the full picture of this now-famous Antarctic structure — and it remains weird as hell.

Scientists with NASA’s Operation IceBridge released the original photo last week, but it only showed a portion of the odd iceberg.

The original photo of the geometric iceberg, which triggered a tremendous global response.

With much of the ‘berg out of the frame, it wasn’t clear how geometric the entire structure really was. Now, new photos released by IceBridge scientists reveal the iceberg’s true shape. It isn’t a perfect rectangle, but it’s still a highly angular quadrilateral.

An angled view of the geometric iceberg

These photos were captured by IceBridge senior support scientist Jeremy Harbeck, who spotted the tabular iceberg near the Larsen C ice shelf. Tabular icebergs are the products of calving ice shelves — when large chunks of ice suddenly break loose — and they’re known for their highly angular lines and smooth tops.

A Landsat 8 view of the freakishly geometric iceberg from space (see arrow at center left). The photo was taken on 14 October 2018, just two days before Operation IceBridge captured its now-famous photo of the iceberg.

“I thought it was pretty interesting,” said Harbeck in a NASA statement. “I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I’ve not really seen one before with two corners at such right angles like this one had.”

In July 2017, Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf released the enormous A68 iceberg, which weighs about 1000 billion tonnes and occupies an area roughly the size of the state of Delaware. Harbeck and his colleagues were investigating this massive structure when the geometric shape was spotted.

“I was actually more interested in capturing the A68 iceberg that we were about to fly over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic, so on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” Harbeck said.

Another rectangular iceberg spotted by the IceBridge team. At the far left is the original geometric iceberg, with the massive A68 Iceberg in the background.

Interestingly, Harbeck spotted a second rectangular iceberg during the same 16 October 2018 flyby. In the photo above, you can actually see three icebergs of note: The now-famous freakishly geometric iceberg at far left (slightly obscured by the plane’s engines); the new tabular iceberg; and, off to the horizon, the A68 iceberg.

Yes, it’s that huge — the expanse along the horizon line is a free-floating iceberg measuring about 100km in length and about 30km wide.

Here are some other photos of tabular icebergs, many of which were produced by the Larsen C ice shelf during the A68 calving event.

Tabular icebergs seen in the vicinity of iceberg A68. These objects are remnants of the calving event that produced A68.

NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an ongoing mission to monitor polar regions and track the planet’s global climate system. It’s currently in the midst of a five-week project to chart icebergs in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula, a mission that’s scheduled to conclude on November 18. There’s still plenty of time left in the project, so hopefully the scientists will uncover more Antarctic anomalies.

[MIKA27]

Sandra Bullock's New Horror Movie Looks Like The Quiet Place, Except For Sight Instead Of Sound

Netflix has just shared the first trailer for Bird Box, an unsettling-looking horror thriller from director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) with a screenplay by Arrival’s Eric Heisserer. It stars Sandra Bullock as a mum struggling to protect her kids from chaotic forces that can be avoided by simply not looking at them — which, of course, isn’t so simple to do.

It does look like a twist on The Quiet Place — though it’s worth nothing that Heisserer’s script is adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel, which came out in 2014 — but crashing around the wilderness blindfolded actually seems more perilous than having full control of your senses, but just having to be as silent as possible.

Aside from Bullock, the excellent ensemble cast also includes Sarah Paulson, John Malkovich, Lil Rel Howery and Trevante Rhodes. Bird Box hits Netflix on December 21.

[MIKA27]

The Short Story That Inspired The Thing Is About To Get Longer

When people think of The Thing, usually they first think of the 1982 John Carpenter film.

But that film was based on another film, 1951's The Thing from Another World, which itself was based on a 1930s short story titled “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. And now, the origins of The Thing are about to go one level deeper.

The Verge has uncovered a fascinating Kickstarter campaign for a book called Frozen Hell, which is touted as “The Book That Inspired The Thing”. It, too, was written by John W. Campbell Jr, which seems confusing until you hear the story.

Author Alec Nevala-Lee was researching an upcoming book and found that Campbell Jr had referenced the fact that “Who Goes There?” was a shortened version of a longer novel. No one had ever seen that novel but there was a reference to it being sent to Harvard.

So Nevala-Lee went hunting, and eventually found the unpublished manuscript to Frozen Hell, which is an extended and expanded version of “Who Goes There?”

Long story short, to try and get that book into the hands of fans, it went onto Kickstarter with the modest goal of $US1000 ($1415). Well, that happened and it’s now raised over $US40,000 ($56,436) with almost 40 days to go.

That means there are all kinds of excellent stretch goals to make the release even cooler, and that you will absolutely be able to read it one day.

For more on this story and the book, head over to The Verge or the Kickstarter itself.

[MIKA27]

BREITLING PREMIER CHRONOGRAPH 42 IS A THROWBACK THAT WILL MAKE YOU SWOON

Breitling have unveiled five new models from their Premier collection but only one catches our attention – the Breitling Premier B01 Chronograph 42 you see before you.

The new timepiece marks a special tribute from the Swiss watchmaker as the reintroduction of a name which first debuted in 1940. In its first iteration, the Premier collection was a move which saw the aviation watch name move away from the air and sea to design a collection inspired by the land. As such, it was the first wave of Breitlings to offer style, elegance and performance in a fashion-forward piece.

Today that same name and design code has been resurrected in the Brietling Premier collection.

The Premier B01 Chronograph 42 model comes in two dial colours, silver and blue, and a 42mm stainless steel case with transparent caseback.

The movement inside is the in-house developed Breitling Manufacture Caliber 01 complete with chronometer-certification and a power reserve of over 70 hours.

This movement affords hours, minutes and seconds functions alongside a date window at 6 o’clock, a chronograph minute counter at 3 o’clock and a small second sub-dial at 9 o’clock.

The watch is nicely polished off with a choice of either a black nubuck strap, alligator leather strap or a stainless-steel bracelet.