xhacker02 If you ask 10 different people, "What is art?", chances are you'll get 10 different answers. To 17 bidders on eBay, the answer this week would be a screenshot of a 4chan post. Opening at a minimum bid of $500 and finishing just four days later on 1 August at $90,900, the screenshot --…

It was only a matter of time before some enterprising young thinker took a look at the growing world of smartwatches, fitness trackers , and other such digital bands and thought, "Hey, I bet I know where we could put one of these!" Enter the "SexFit." It's a device for men designed with the same…

Some achievements are too easy, at times only requiring players to do mundane things like pressing start. Some achievements pose an actual challenge to players, requiring people to earn their digital trophies. And some achievements? Some achievements just aren't possible, no matter what a game might…

Last week, Universal and Focus Features released the first trailer for director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel’s adaptation of E.L. James’ bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey , which generated a lot of comment from readers, mostly having to do with the crumminess of…

David Pierce’s “I torrented ‘The Expendables 3’ and I’m still going to see it in theaters,” , is labeled an editorial, but it’s more like a cross between a breathless fanboy review and a starry-eyed techno-Utopian fantasy. Pierce doesn’t quite come out and say that he torrented a leaked copy of the…

I t was just after she’d had her first child that Janet Bloomfield realized she didn’t want to go back to work and pay some nanny to raise her kids. She had gone to college to study film theory and assumed, like practically every American woman does, that she would start a career before marrying and…

Sexuality and Sex Comedy Tasha: On the most recent episode of The Dissolve Podcast , we used Sex Tape as a springboard for a conversation about sex comedies, and why so many of the ones aimed at adults fail. One of the conclusions we reached: Teen sex comedies are often about failure and…

Lucy by Vadim Rizov in Filmmaking on Jul 28, 2014 In a statement published in the Nov. 24, 1962 Film Culture , Pier Paolo Pasolini thought about how a simple metaphor can be conveyed onscreen, starting from one solution he rejected as overall unsound: “Let us consider the following written or spoken…

When I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, I was so excited about computer vision that I chose to implement a cutting-edge paper on recognizing machine parts as my final-year project. Even though those parts were simple silhouettes of basic shapes like triangles and cogs, my project barely worked at…

It's Never Summer Long Notes Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Kitchen Sink" The Bechers are Hilarious Candida Höfer, On Kawara, Date Paintings Carl Van Vechten's backgrounds in Kodachrome MFA Books & Interview Music Atget, Kertész and Google photograph one street in Paris Rauschenberg's contact sheet of Cy…

from the i-don't-think-so... dept A year and a half ago, we wrote about a movie that was entirely filmed by chimpanzees , and wondered about who held the copyright on it. Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to…

from the is-this-some-new-copyright-theory? dept It appears this monkey business isn't over just yet. As you probably know already, we had a discussion recently about some monkey self-portraits , in which some monkeys in Indonesia happened upon a camera left by photographer David Slater. In the…

I reckon I spent five hours at most in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s close company, six at a pinch. Otherwise it was standing around with other people on the set of “ A Most Wanted Man ,” watching him on the monitor and afterward telling him he was great, or deciding better to keep your thoughts to…

If you like weird stories like this, check out our new book! → Hipster Business Models In late 2000, the producers and crew for action flick Rush Hour 2 gathered at the now-defunct Desert Inn in Las Vegas and prepared to blow up a casino. The scene, which pitted policemen and Secret Service agents…

Less than a year after quitting his job at Digg, Jake Levine turned an idea for a high-definition screen to display digital art into a prototype that landed him $1.7 million in funding, and $750,000 more in Kickstarter dollars. The product is a darling among the tech elite and earned a glowing…

Earlier this year, a headline in The Guardian declared that “you are the future of photography.” You’ll remember “you,” of course – Time ’s person of the year in 2006 , the tech-empowered “you” has been the future of everything for at least half a decade now: journalism, design, etc. So it’s hardly…

“It’s not just about picking up chicks and sticking your cock in. It’s about finding out what you can be in this world.” —Frank “T.J.” Mackey S hooting Eyes Wide Shut in England, Tom Cruise had time to kill. One evening, he and Nicole [Kidman] watched Boogie Nights (1997), the second feature from…

Moviestore Collection/Rex/REX USA. Successful performers, most frequently comedians, often tell anecdotes of humiliation and failure on the road to fame, and of the stupid/naïve things they themselves did while learning “the ropes.” Rosie O’Donnell, who first achieved recognition as a stand-up…

Like many people this past weekend, I went to see "Guardians of the Galaxy" at a nearby multiplex. I bought some concession snacks, donned a pair of 3-D glasses and sat through the half-hour of previews that preceded the James Gunn romp with a fair bit of anticipation, stoked by my returning to the…

There's only so much you can do with a customer who buys a game. And I mean buying a game in the traditional sense, where you go to a store, pick up a physical product, and can play that product on your hardware forever and ever, amen. Sony has found success with "giving away" games every month for…

The Criterion Collection’s new box set devoted to the films of Jacques Demy earns every bit of the word “essential” in its title. Sets like these are a fruitful reminder of the value of physical media, which can add so much context and depth (not to mention gorgeous transfers) to great works of…

This weekend’s Guardians of the Galaxy is the tenth(!) entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it offers up a whole bunch of things we’ve never seen before in the MCU including a walking tree, a talking raccoon, and a one-sided dance-off. But one thing it still doesn’t offer? A lead female…

Photograph by Larry Busacca/PW/Getty. Beyoncé is redefining the pop star and the meaning of the diva (a pointlessly gendered term, considering that male pop stars often exhibit all the traits of this type of female celebrity). A lot happened when she released a remix of “Flawless,” on Saturday at…

● ● ● If you have cable TV or internet, you’ve probably spent some time waiting for the cable guy. And waiting. And waiting. Comcast, like most cable companies, schedules appointments in time frames instead of set times to allow technicians some flexibility. But Comcast technicians told The Verge…

We’re not sure how the pitch for the original Sharknado went, though something along the lines of “It’s like Twister meets Jaws , minus any Oscar talent” sounds about right. But not even network higher-ups were prepared for the social media storm that would descend when the original Sharknado…

These days, no one has a good excuse for not accepting credit card payments. That includes the smallest of businesses. And it includes, well, you. Way back in 2009, Square torpedoed the idea that taking credit cards had to be cumbersome, esoteric, or exclusive. The company’s free card reader plugged…

Funny voices, kazoos, and polka serve not to entertain us so much as to reassure us. Illustration by Mr. Bingo. Do people enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic because he’s funny or because he’s not that funny? The comedian, who specializes in song parodies, just released his fourteenth studio album, “Mandatory…

T he acting teacher looks up at the stage from his oversize, brown leather chair in this otherwise sparsely furnished auditorium. “You guys saved the night,” he tells a pair of actresses who’ve just run through a one-act play about feuding sisters. “I mean, it was just so bent . But, wait, let me…

It looks like Hollywood's in for some more Kodak moments. Eastman Kodak Co., one of the world's most recognizable film suppliers, is finalizing agreements with industry leaders to keep celluloid in the future of film. Advertisement "After extensive discussions with filmmakers, leading studios and…

Class is in session. Image via Pegas Productions (link NSFW ). Pegas Production, a Quebec-based porn company producing “porn for Quebecers by Quebecers,” was having trouble finding viable actors for their website. The solution: a $149 one-day school to teach men how to bump uglies like their…

Ah, the booth babe. It’s a phenomenon that inspires controversy even down to the name we give it. “It’s a derogatory term,” explains Nina Huntemann, the academic who’s been researching the phenomenon for over a year now. “You could call it ‘booth babe,’ but in terms of what she does: as a product…

Blame it on Afrojack, dance music’s answer to Nickelback. He made it all so easy, and so lucrative for how easy it is – to mask a fundamental lack of skill, knowledge and creativity under a metric fuckton of technology. The simplest way to make a million dollars today is to borrow a million dollars.…

This is a photograph of lightning in Grand Theft Auto 5 . It's one of 16 similar screenshots taken in the game by a player organized by Imgur user AmericanWarfare. The collection has 1019 up-votes on the GTA 5 subreddit , making it the third most popular post of the week. The photographs deserve the…

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