Link Dump

A busy weekend and the Flyers storming back in the Stanley Cup finals means less time than usual, so here’s a few links that I’ve found interesting lately:

• Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese: Remember when I posted this comic a while back? It’s apparently from 2007, and according to what appears to be an internal weekly newsletter, Subway will begin tessellating cheese on its sandwiches. A consumer triumph.
• Trailers From Hell: This has been around for a while, but it’s well worth checking out for movie fans (it tends to lean towards horror, but it’s not exclusively that genre). Basically, it consists of a bunch of famous directors doing a commentary on the trailers of their favorite films. While some well-known movies are featured, there are tons of obscure films as well. The people doing the commentary tend to be horror director mainstays, including Joe Dante, Kaedrin favorite Don Coscarelli, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, John Landis, and a bunch of others.
• Johanna Blakely: Lessons from fashion’s free culture: Shamus posts this excellent 15 minute TED talk about how the fashion industry doesn’t use copyright, and various implications to other areas of IP. Interesting stuff about a subject I’m always fascinated by…
• Heist!: An intriguing bank robbery in Buenos Aires that Hollywood should be paying attention to…
  

  On the afternoon of (Friday!) January 13, four gunmen walked into the Banco Rio in Acassuso (part of greater Buenos Aires) and took the staff and customers hostage. There was a tense six hour long siege by the police, expertly handled by the robbers – they let each hostage call home, so that family members showed up at the scene; the calculation was that the police would be more reluctant to storm the building immediately if hostages’ relatives were watching. They made sure to release three hostages right away as a gesture of goodwill, but of course the three released included the security guard and police officer already in the building. While one of the robbers stayed on the phone, negotiating with police, the remaining ones got busy cracking open safe deposit boxes. Towards four in the afternoon, the police delivered six pizzas and some bottles of soda, the fruit of all those hours of negotiation, which the robbers passed along to the hostages. And then they went silent.

  After about an hour of no contact and no news, an elite police bank-storming squad stormed the bank, only to find a group of bewildered hostages sitting scared in the smoke. There was no trace of the gunmen.

  I love the cat-and-mouse games robbers play with the police in situations like this, and this one has a few exchanges of that going on…

• Pulsate: This thing had me transfixed for much longer than it should have. My favorite thing to do was to position my mouse in the center of the space and click several times in succession, creating a series of concentric rings. Then I’d move the mouse to one of the corners (quickly, as you have to do it before the original set of rings makes it there) and do another series of rings. Do it for a couple other corners and presto! You’ve got an Aphex Twin song.
• Soviet Space Center: A photo tour of a decommissioned Soviet Space Center. The post isn’t in English, but the photos are great.
• Nothing New to Report: At first, I thought this was the same newspaper, over and over again, but there are probably tons of copies of the same one in use in Hollywood. I can almost guarantee it’s due to the fact that someone had to clear all the stories in the newspaper once, and never wants to pay for the rights again. Understandable for what should be a throwaway prop.
• Duck Hunt Behind-the-Scenes: Pretty sure that’s what happens.

That’s all for now. Possibly something more substantial next week!