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Category Archives: Futurism

Astronaut Creates Timelapse Video Of Earth As Seen From The ISS

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(Credit: ESA/Alexander Gerst)

ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst spent his time from May to November of 2014 on the International Space Station. One of the projects he worked on while he was up there was taking thousands of photos of the Earths surface using ultra-high definition cameras.

After coming back to Earth, Gerst then took 12,500 of those photos and created a stunning timelapse video of the Earth and other interesting objects as seen from the International Space Station.

In addition to the Earths surface, there are also some incredible shots of the space station in action, including the solar panels in action, the stations robotic arm manipulating a SpaceX Dragon capsule, and an Orbital Sciences Cygnus capsule departing from the station.

And just after the three minute mark, you can also see stunning photos of the Milky Way from the station. To my mind, thats the highlight of the video.

You can check out the timelapse video in full below:

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Astronaut Creates Timelapse Video Of Earth As Seen From The ISS

Up fantasy creek, without a paddle: what 2014's box office tells us

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Biggest film of the year: Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Monkeys, raccoons and lizards clobbered the planet in 2014, helped by aliens, robots and fairies. It was not quite a terrible year for great films, but they just didn't stand a chance against the killer critters coming out of Hollywood or, to be accurate, out of large warehouses full of computers in Bangalore, Bristol, South Korea, Spain, China, Denmark or wherever the major special-effects houses set up their production facilities.

At least in that sense, the work gets shared around: thousands of worker bees around the world are now employed in the business of turning bad scripts into good money.

Cheerful: Australians' favourite film this year was The Lego Movie. Photo: AP

I have just spent an hour perusing the box office figures for 2014 and it is a depressing experience, from any angle. Not one of the top-10 movies at the box office, either worldwide or United States domestic, was a real-world story, in the sense of something that reflects the world we actually live in. Every film, on both indices, was a work of fantasy, if we define it widely.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, an adventure-comedy about space pirates fighting alien criminals, was the top film at the US box office, but only second on the international list. This was the film with the talking raccoon, and that might be why. What do the rest of us know about raccoons?

Worldwide, the biggest film of the year was Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in a brain-melting series directed by Michael Bay, who brought us Bad Boys, Armageddon and Pain & Gain. What he doesn't know about dumbing down hasn't yet been discovered. Guardians was $US315 million ($387 million) behind, not even close. I realise a lot of children had Transformers toys as kids, but come on you're making us all suffer.

Real world: Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl.

The next seven films in worldwide box office were Maleficent (with Angelina Jolie as the wicked witch from Cinderella), X-Men: Days of Future Past (a lot of good actors in silly costumes), Captain America: The Winter Soldier(ditto), The Amazing Spiderman 2 (rebooted, recast and regurgitated), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (rebooted and re-energised, with a talking monkey), Interstellar (space explorers, but a good movie), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (funny animation) and The Hunger Games: MockingjayPart 1 (dystopian futurism).

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Up fantasy creek, without a paddle: what 2014's box office tells us

MUSE – Futurism PRO SHOT live @Tokyo Zepp (Christmas present 2014) – Video

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MUSE - Futurism PRO SHOT live @Tokyo Zepp (Christmas present 2014)
Fuck yeah MUSE! Now THAT #39;S a christmas present! Footage of Futurism from the legendary Tokyo Zepp show! I claim no rights to this song whatsoever! All rights belong to their respectful owners.

By: jajajeomaiskaal

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MUSE - Futurism PRO SHOT live @Tokyo Zepp (Christmas present 2014) - Video

80 Days is the perfect mobile game for holiday downtime

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No matter what your plans are for the next two weeks, chances are that you will have a lot of downtime that needs to be killed. You might be on a plane towards a tropical island, on the bus to go see your brother,heading into the city to shop, or taking a short break from your family party, but there will be some time when its just you and your phone. 80 Days, from Inkle Studios, seems to have been specifically and perfectly engineered for end of the year downtime.

In case you didnt catch the Jules Vernereference, 80 Days is game about traveling around the world as quickly as possible. The catch is that its 1872 so you are without the aid of modern airplanes and high-speed trains. The other catch is that in this Jules Verne-inspired world you might not have jets, but you have undersea ships, rocket-planes, and dirigibles to get you from England and back in just a few short weeks.

The nineteenth century futurism extends past transportation and into the world through its text adventure gameplay. As you travel you talk to people to discover new routes between cities, but past that useful knowledge you can dive deep into the world, learning about automaton soldiers, the Artificers Guild, and all manner of sub-narratives. The decisions you make in the text adventures impact your trip one option may earn you some a few pounds (as in English money) while another might get you locked up for two much-needed days. Reading carefully and understanding the world will help, but there is a lot of luck involved as well.

With 148 cities, there are an endless number of ways for you to make your way around the globe. Picking the right route is important, but you cant justzip from east to west because you might not discover the correct route in time, the boat you want might not leave for three days, or there couldbe a crew mutiny as you cross the Pacific causing your route to be changed. 80 Days has a delightfulmixture of planning and surprise, so that you always feel like you are master of your fate, but never to the point where you are bored.

The game is interesting, challenging, and replayable, but it does all the other stuff a great mobile game should. It has excellentvisuals and sound, and, most importantly, it handles save states perfectly. If you are playing and then have to take a call or reply to a text (or go to Google Maps to check out where your next stop should be) the game is always exactly where it should be when you open it back up. This sort of reliability is absolutely critical to mobile strategy games. If Im playing an action game I understand that I mightlose 30 seconds of play time if I close the app, but a game like this, that takes well over an hour to beat and involves significant planning, has to perfect when it comes to saving the state of my game no matter what happens with my phone or tablet. 80 Days does just that.

80 Days is available for iOS and Android for $5. I highly recommend you pick it up before you start your holiday traveling this year.

Now read:Sauron mockingly glares at your holiday creations from Gingerbread Barad-Dr

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80 Days is the perfect mobile game for holiday downtime

Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 review

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'. Photograph: Rex Features

In 1933 Joseph Goebbels quarrelled with the mother of Horst Wessel. SA-Sturmfhrer Wessel, murdered three years previously, was the hero of a Nazi cult. His mother wanted a place in the ceremonies commemorating his martyrdom. Goebbels found her arrogance intolerable. Our dead belong to the nation, he wrote.

So, supposedly, did the living. Theonly people who still have aprivate life in Germany are those whoare asleep, boasted a Nazi official. As Paul Ginsborg points out in this original and illuminating book, this was wrong on two counts: for one thing, even while sleeping, people went on dreaming about the regime; for another, private life, the life of the family, was never entirely extinguished.

The government could suck children out of their homes, recruiting them forthe Hitlerjugend or the League of German Girls. It could redefine the marriage bed as a breeding ground for German soldiers. It could stir up sons against their fathers. (Hitler said: When an opponent tells me I will not come over to your side, I calmly reply, Your child belongs to me already.) But families, as each of the six dictatorships covered in this book would discover, are protean and ultimately indispensable entities. Their relationships with the state, under the revolutionary or dictatorial regimes here examined, were troubled in diverse and often lethal ways, but even in the Soviet Gulag, as Ginsborg reminds us, people found partners and had children. True, those children who survived weresent to state orphanages at the age of two, but their mothers fought bitterly to keep them. Even when the establishment of a family was cruelly prohibited, the yearning for one wasineradicable.

This would have surprised Alexandra Kollontai. Ginsborg, adept at bringing the general to life by zooming in on the particular, chooses a prominent but sidelined individual (Marinetti, the frontman of Futurism, for fascist Italy; female journalists Halide Edib for Kemalist Turkey, the nation created byMustafa Kemal; and Margarita Nelken for civil war Spain) as a way into writing about his chosen countries in crisis. Kollontai, the only woman onLenins Council of Commissars, comes first.

For Kollontai, bourgeois marriage was an oppressive institution and romantic love dangerous and devouring. In 1893, at the age of 21, she rebelled against her family of origin, marrying against her parents wishes. Five years later she abandoned her new family. Visiting a textile factory, she had seen that for its 12,000 workershome life meant a squalid existence, without comfort or privacy, in vast, foul-smelling dormitories. Thenceforward, she declared, she would dedicate herself to the working class and to womens rights. To that end she left her husband (permanently) and her little son, Misha (for more than a year).

By 1917, in common with many of her fellow Bolsheviks, Kollontai looked forward to a time when the family would wither into obsolescence, and communal living would become the norm. Cooking, mending and laundry would be collectivised. Monogamous marriage would be replaced by the rule of winged Eros, under whose aegis awoman holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of loves joy ... When the cup is empty she throws it away without regret and bitterness. And again to work. Sexual and familial ties would be secondary: everyones first loyalty would be to the collective. Even parental love would become communal. The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine ... there are only our children, the children of Russias communist workers.

The vision was never realised. Certainly, in the years following the revolution, Russian families were destroyed by war, famine and terror but the consequences were not emancipating, but terrible. Ginsborg quotes the recollections of an official who heard, on a railway station at night, during the famine of 1921, a thin, weak, remote wailing emanating froma great mass of grey rags. He realised that he was looking at some 3,000 children, homeless and starving, too weak to move. The promised free childcare and education, the welfare for those unable to work, were neverforthcoming.

Under the Bolsheviks, what Ginsborg calls the hyperactive public sphere encroached brutally on what had once been the private realm, but families stubbornly, in defiance of dogma continued to exist.

Ginsborg, a subtle thinker alive to nuance, declares himself suspicious ofthe term totalitarianism, which suggestsevery tyranny resembles every other one. Eschewing Eurocentrism, he takes as one of his case studies Kemalist Turkey. There, in contrast to Russian collectivism, the nuclear family was protected and praised as the site of modernity and emancipation. For women whose mothers had been obliged to tolerate their husbands polygamy, to submit patiently to orders from their mothers-in-law, and to leave the patriarchal home only seldom, and veiled, the nuclear bourgeois family of which the Young Turks approved seemed exhilaratingly liberated. They bared their heads, if shyly.

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Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 review

Muse unveil live video of Futurism as gift for fans

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PanARMENIAN.Net - As a Christmas gift to their fans, Muse have unveiled a live video of 'Futurism', filmed at Tokyo's Zepp back in summer 2013, Gigwise reports.

The song was a bonus track from the classic Origin Of Symmetry, and as such has become a cult favourite among fans. The performance in Toyko was the first time they'd aired it live in 10 years.

The video was sent out as a gift to Muse fans and can be downloaded here or watched below. The gig in question was packed with obscurities and rarities, and was dubbed by the band as 'their most amazing yet'. They later revealed that the show was filmed and it will be released in the future. Taking to Twitter prior to the gig, the band's long-time friend, collaborator and video director Tom Kirk promised that the gig at The Zepp would have a few surprises in store .

Meanwhile, the band have also been working on their 'heavier' seventh album with AC/DC producer 'Mutt' Lange - due for release in Summer 2015.

Muse are currently confirmed to headline many festivals across Europe in 2015 - including Download Festival.

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Muse unveil live video of Futurism as gift for fans


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