Apparently it’s YouTube Day for Ms. Nickels. Anyway, remember little Charlie and the finger biting incident? People LOVE that Charlie! What an effortless lil comedian! He’s got 20something MILLION EFFING VIEWS and has our Video Matt steaming from jealousy.

And here’s the semi-decent Charlie Bit Me song that the talented Ainslie Henderson wrote just for him. It has almost 40,000 views. See, kids, putting effort into shit makes it not as funny.

Hi Anonymous,

I know this won’t be quite as much fun as your ongoing war with the Scientologists, but some hacker tapped into the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site and put up a whole bunch of flashing shit, which sent people into seizures. STOP LAUGHING. Yeah, it seems kinda funny for a second, but once the giggles clear up you might realize how completely fucked up and evil that shit is. That’s on some malignant shit right there. It’s like picking on a kitten.

From Wired News:

…In a rare example of an attack apparently motivated by malice rather than money, hackers recently bombarded the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site with hundreds of pictures and links to pages with rapidly flashing images.
The breach triggered severe migraines and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed the images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get seizures when they’re exposed to flickering images, a response also caused by some video games and cartoons.
The attack happened when hackers exploited a security hole in the foundation’s publishing software that allowed them to quickly make numerous posts and overwhelm the site’s support forums.
Within the hackers’ posts were small flashing pictures and links - masquerading as helpful - to pages that exploded with kaleidoscopic images pulsating with different colors.
“They were out to create seizures,” said Ken Lowenberg, senior director of Web and print publishing for the foundation.

Can someone find out who did this and ruin them, please? thanx

Here’s the new Interpol music video for “Rest My Chemistry”. It’s on some other shit. Just watching it made me high.

If you totally tripped out on it and want to read more about the concept so that perhaps you, too, can someday make someone high off your art, please do so after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fermi Paradox is defined as the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. In other words, in a universe as big, and as old as ours seems to be, the fact that we have yet to be contacted by a civilization advanced enough to reach us seems pretty improbable. It has been speculated previously that there must be some sort of Great Filter which prevents such life from arising, or reaching the technological level necessary to achieve interstellar communications. A recent article by Nick Bostrom in the Technology Review explores the possibility that this Great Filter is technology itself: that all civilizations eventually seal their own doom by way of technology, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or the Unabomber’s favorite, Gray Goo. To this list, Tim O’Reilly (aka the guy who coined the term Web 2.0) has added a far more tangible possibility: Peak Oil:

I’ve been thinking of Fermi’s Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail. What if the answer to Fermi’s paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource — and one that won’t last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie’s contentions are correct, we’re truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

Those longing desperately to find prove of ancient civilizations on planets like Mars might want to think twice, since, as O’Reilly puts it “once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we’ve narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come.” FUCKKKKKKKK

No, I didn’t actually see At The Drive In live when I had the chance. All my friends raved about them, but I was too busy being a hippy to take much notice. Hell, I was still figuring out the Dismemberment Plan, and all ATDI’s wiry guitars confused and scared me just a little bit. My brain wasn’t ready for their epic assault until a month before they broke up and splintered into Sparta (yay!) and Mars Volta (blech). Then did I actually sit down and check out what all the fuss was about. Man, I must have missed some great 60-person crowd shows. Any case, all the Mars Volta fans who aren’t hip to At The Drive In better be prepared to get their faces ripped off by ATDI with the release of Guitar Hero IV.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 8, 2008 — Huntington Beach, CA

Pick up your guitar and shred along to “One Armed Scissor” by At the Drive-In this summer on Guitar Hero IV. The game will be released this June on all major platforms including Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, PC, Mac and Nintendo DS. At The Drive-In will have their track included along with rock giants such as Aerosmith and Def Leppard.

The track “One Armed Scissor” originally released on Relationship and Command still continues to stand the test of time. It has been recognized by Spin Magazine as one of the “Top 100 albums between 1985 and 2005″ and by Time Magazine as an album that, “deftly combines punk ferocity with artful though sometimes inscrutable lyrics.”

Who needs a costly film cam when you got a digi, photoshop, some skills and a groove that just won’t stop? Check Time Machine’s video for “The Groove Won’t Stop” from their upcoming 2nd release, Life is Expensive, out 5/20.

Lead single to Time Machines upcoming album, LIFE IS EXPENSIVE. Directed by JetSetJay, Jerome D and Evan Guidera. Starring Randi Astrid and Shelly Nicole.
www.myspace.com/timemachine
www.glowlikethis.com

From Score Press’ Release:

TIME MACHINE is making a name for themselves these days… one party at a time. The trio of emcees Biscuit and Jet Set Jay, and DJ / Producer Mekalek is playing all the hot weeklies from Dim Mak Tuesdays and PYT in LA, to Roxy Cottontail’s Heartbeat in NY, and winning over fans with their seamless set of high-energy party rapping and tongue-in-cheek synchronized dance routines.

However, the east-coast bred, LA-based squad knows that every night has its last call, and that much of life is what happens before doors open the next evening. And so, on their new album, LIFE IS EXPENSIVE, the crew balances the rolling good times with a shrewd awareness of the cost of living… both literal and figurative.