It may have taken longer than expected, but a replacement for the Kindle 2 has arrived. The addition of Wi-Fi and an aggressive $139 starting price make the new eReader a formidable upgrade. More »
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Thinner and Lighter Kindle Comes with Wi-Fi and Starts at $139 [Kindle]
July 28 2010, 4:50pm | Comments »
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72 Ravishing Refractions [Photography]
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/OAK3dtmudps/72-ravishing-refractions
Refraction is a mind-bending idea. Light passes through a clear object, and it comes out the other side, inverted. The Shooting Challenge results that follow are must-sees, the winner is astounding and...well...we busted a cheater, too. More »
July 27 2010, 11:00am | Comments »
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"Thor" mixes science with magic, but science wins [First Look]
http://io9.com/5595715/thor-mixes-science-with-magic-but-science-wins
Though Thor is the story of a god who crushes his enemies with a magical hammer, Kenneth Branagh's Thor movie is set in a scientific universe. Or so it seemed from footage we saw this weekend, especially of Destroyer. Branagh, whose previous films include Frankenstein and Dead Again, is known for over-the-top theatricality and an emphasis on acting in his films. The 3D Thor is no exception, especially since the director says he loved Thor growing up and has even worked to include different versions of the first Avenger in his film. Though the hero's iconic hammer is pure Jack Kirby, Branagh assured the audience that "there are some Donald Blake touches" too. Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, a minor character in the comics who has a very large role in the movie. She called her character a rare "real, frazzled, grounded female scientist - not the low-cut lab coat and sexy glasses kind of thing." She added that she was happy to get back in front of a green screen with an actor-oriented director like Branagh, because "working with green screens is a skill - it should be something you learn in acting school." Chris Hemsworth is the perfect physical type to play the god of thunder, and when we saw the sizzle reel from the film, I was immediately sold on Hemsworth as much more than just a pretty boy who looks good shirtless. We saw him in both action scenes and in tense, intimate moments - and he burned up the screen. Especially when he finds the hammer hidden at the heart of a secret New Mexico military installation and lets out a mega-shout to heaven. His damaged younger brother Loki is played by Tom Hiddleston, the god of mischief who turns into a major badass who wears black fetishwear and big horns on his head. Hiddleston says Loki's main issue is that "he was the guy who was almost the guy, but wasn't." Before we get into the footage, let me say that the 3D was good. It didn't feel intrusive, but at the same time we got a lot of fun squirts of fire aimed out into the audience - plus, of course, some hammer throwing. And the 3D made the sets really pop, giving the whole flick some texture. I'm usually the first to grouse about the overuse of 3D but I think Thor earned it. So what was so sciencey about the footage we saw? First of all, the emphasis was on the secret industrial-science facility where Thor is being held by clueless fed types for part of the movie. Plus, when Thor is hurled to Earth by Odin, who casts the young god out for his arrogance and penchant for war, we see a shot that looks remarkably like something out of a scifi movie. We zoom toward the galaxy from a great height, as if Thor's home Asgard is in another galaxy rather than being some kind of god dimension. Also, Asgard itself looks more like one of those really gorgeous Alderaan-style planets from Star Wars rather than heaven. Jane is the person who finds Thor when he crashes to Earth, so Thor is immediately treated like a scientifically-discoverable thing rather than a mystical presence. (There's also a nice moment of quippery where Jane tells her sidekick that "for a homeless guy, he's pretty cut.") And we hear him explaining to Jane that he comes from a place where "magic" and "science" are indistinguishable. This does nothing to quench our feeling that this is a scientific universe - it's just that the Asgardians have science that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. So I know what you want to know: What about the hammer fighting? Was it awesome? Hell yes. Like I said earlier, there's a great moment when Thor finds the hammer Mjolnir, pulls it from a pile of muddy rock, and lets out a cosmic yelp. Then we see him fighting a variety of enemies, including brother Loki and his fetishwear-clad Asgardian corps, who have taken over Asgard after the death of Odin. He does a good hammer throw, and the hammer manages to look both cartoonish and kickass at the same time. We also got a glimpse of Hemsworth doing the steely eye when he's being interrogated by a fed at the secret facility, who accuses him of being a highly-trained mercenary. I like the look of our mercenaryesque god in that scene: Human, but with a glint of godhood in his eyes. The other ultra-awesome part of the sizzle reel was meeting Destroyer, who looked like a medieval version of Gort from the original Day The Earth Stood Still. He stands a few heads taller than a human, and when he arrives the Feds mistake him for "unauthorized military technology" and ask him to stand down in bored tones. Then he opens all the layered vents on his suit and his face plates open to reveal - emptiness, shortly filled with a surge of fire. Again, it feels Gort-like, but also terrifically old school, as if he has a dragon breath weapon. I was left feeling like this film would be a pleasure to watch, full of awe-inspiring visual flourishes, great acting, mega-battles, and funny, tight dialogue. A perfect superhero treat.
July 25 2010, 3:11pm | Comments »
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"Thor" mixes science with magic, but science wins [First Look]
http://io9.com/5595715/thor-mixes-science-with-magic-but-science-wins
Though Thor is the story of a god who crushes his enemies with a magical hammer, Kenneth Branagh's Thor movie is set in a scientific universe. Or so it seemed from footage we saw this weekend, especially of Destroyer. Branagh, whose previous films include Frankenstein and Dead Again, is known for over-the-top theatricality and an emphasis on acting in his films. The 3D Thor is no exception, especially since the director says he loved Thor growing up and has even worked to include different versions of the first Avenger in his film. Though the hero's iconic hammer is pure Jack Kirby, Branagh assured the audience that "there are some Donald Blake touches" too. Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, a minor character in the comics who has a very large role in the movie. She called her character a rare "real, frazzled, grounded female scientist - not the low-cut lab coat and sexy glasses kind of thing." She added that she was happy to get back in front of a green screen with an actor-oriented director like Branagh, because "working with green screens is a skill - it should be something you learn in acting school." Chris Hemsworth is the perfect physical type to play the god of thunder, and when we saw the sizzle reel from the film, I was immediately sold on Hemsworth as much more than just a pretty boy who looks good shirtless. We saw him in both action scenes and in tense, intimate moments - and he burned up the screen. Especially when he finds the hammer hidden at the heart of a secret New Mexico military installation and lets out a mega-shout to heaven. His damaged younger brother Loki is played by Tom Hiddleston, the god of mischief who turns into a major badass who wears black fetishwear and big horns on his head. Hiddleston says Loki's main issue is that "he was the guy who was almost the guy, but wasn't." Before we get into the footage, let me say that the 3D was good. It didn't feel intrusive, but at the same time we got a lot of fun squirts of fire aimed out into the audience - plus, of course, some hammer throwing. And the 3D made the sets really pop, giving the whole flick some texture. I'm usually the first to grouse about the overuse of 3D but I think Thor earned it. So what was so sciencey about the footage we saw? First of all, the emphasis was on the secret industrial-science facility where Thor is being held by clueless fed types for part of the movie. Plus, when Thor is hurled to Earth by Odin, who casts the young god out for his arrogance and penchant for war, we see a shot that looks remarkably like something out of a scifi movie. We zoom toward the galaxy from a great height, as if Thor's home Asgard is in another galaxy rather than being some kind of god dimension. Also, Asgard itself looks more like one of those really gorgeous Alderaan-style planets from Star Wars rather than heaven. Jane is the person who finds Thor when he crashes to Earth, so Thor is immediately treated like a scientifically-discoverable thing rather than a mystical presence. (There's also a nice moment of quippery where Jane tells her sidekick that "for a homeless guy, he's pretty cut.") And we hear him explaining to Jane that he comes from a place where "magic" and "science" are indistinguishable. This does nothing to quench our feeling that this is a scientific universe - it's just that the Asgardians have science that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. So I know what you want to know: What about the hammer fighting? Was it awesome? Hell yes. Like I said earlier, there's a great moment when Thor finds the hammer Mjolnir, pulls it from a pile of muddy rock, and lets out a cosmic yelp. Then we see him fighting a variety of enemies, including brother Loki and his fetishwear-clad Asgardian corps, who have taken over Asgard after the death of Odin. He does a good hammer throw, and the hammer manages to look both cartoonish and kickass at the same time. We also got a glimpse of Hemsworth doing the steely eye when he's being interrogated by a fed at the secret facility, who accuses him of being a highly-trained mercenary. I like the look of our mercenaryesque god in that scene: Human, but with a glint of godhood in his eyes. The other ultra-awesome part of the sizzle reel was meeting Destroyer, who looked like a medieval version of Gort from the original Day The Earth Stood Still. He stands a few heads taller than a human, and when he arrives the Feds mistake him for "unauthorized military technology" and ask him to stand down in bored tones. Then he opens all the layered vents on his suit and his face plates open to reveal - emptiness, shortly filled with a surge of fire. Again, it feels Gort-like, but also terrifically old school, as if he has a dragon breath weapon. I was left feeling like this film would be a pleasure to watch, full of awe-inspiring visual flourishes, great acting, mega-battles, and funny, tight dialogue. A perfect superhero treat.
July 25 2010, 12:11pm | Comments »
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Top 10 DIY Food Geek Projects [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5595336/top-10-diy-food-geek-projects
The best-tasting food is the kind that comes from your own efforts, because victory tastes oh-so-sweet. Conquer KFC-style fried chicken, smoky barbecue, wood-fired pizza, five-minute bread, and other DIY delicacies with these great food-focused projects.Photo from The Pizza Hacker. We've previously tackled 10 clever kitchen repurposing tricks and food and drink hacks, but this here is a compendium of more involved, fare more awesome projects that actually create food and drinks you can brag about. 10. Put Your Chicken on a "Throne" for Crispy Skin and Moist Meat It's a pretty light project, but you certainly get your hands dirty. Cooking chicken so that it's standing up, with a can of liquid inside its carcass, ensures that the skin gets the perfect kind of crisp you're looking for, but the inner meat stays juicy, thanks to the steam coming from the can. You can watch Christopher Walken—yep, that Christopher Walken—demonstrate a fancier indoor method in the video, or read up on how to make it on the grill. 9. Make Crispy Wings at Home in the Oven Chicken wings you get at the bar are crispy, but their sauce sticks right to them. Wings you make at home in the oven are slick, and you're lucky if half the sauce stays on. The solution? Baking powder, along with some overnight, open-air refrigeration before cooking. You get healthier wings you can cook at home, and a great feeling of having somehow beaten the takeout economy. (Original post) 8. Brew Your Own Beer and Soda You'd think homebrew beer or soda would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. Starting out with either project is nothing more than a weekend afternoon spent with some beginner's materials. Guided tours and cost analyses of DIY brew are provided by the Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar, while a great video on making your own 2-liter soda experiments is offered at Howcast. (Original posts: beer, soda). 7. Fry Some KFC-Style Chicken at Home The Colonel's seven secret herbs and spices do a good enough job when you want the bucket, but if you want the good stuff at home—or you're not a huge fan of MSG—you can pick up the mix provided by the Guardian UK's Word of Mouth blog. Many testers claim it to provide the same kind of mouth-filling feeling as the KFC's version, though if you disagree, the theoretically secret recipe is offered at the post, too, coming from Ron Douglas' America's Most Wanted Recipes. (Original post) 6. Make Fresh Bread Without a Bread Maker First their came the no-knead bread, and it was declared good. Then there came faster and whole wheat remixes, and it couldn't seem to get better. But then came another no-bread-machine-needed recipe, a mix-once, break-off-and-bake dough recipe that our own Jason tested and loved, and then a recipe that rises while you're at work for about a minute of prep time. There is nothing quite like fresh-baked bread, and that's all we have to say on that. (Original posts: no-knead, faster and whole wheat, five minutes, one-minute). 5. Use Sous-Vide Techniques for Perfect Done-Ness You have to do it right, and you have to do it safe. Once you commit to sous-vide cooking and try a slice of steak, though, you'll want to make the commitment. The Serious Eats blog detailed a very do-able cooler technique, along with instructions on making the best prime steaks in that cooler. Savvy Housekeeping has also explained DIY sous-vide, for comparison's sake, and reader Jeff showed us how to take your DIY to drastically cool levels with an arduino-powered, self-monitoring sous-vide cooler. Soon enough, you'll be making dinners you want to invite guests over for, and you'll be free to actually talk to them while it's cooking. (Original posts: cooler sous-vide, steaks, sous-vide retake, electronic cooler). 4. Grind Your Own Meat to Replicate Great Burgers Most of the burger places you hear people preach and brag about grind their own meat. It's safer than relying on mass-produced, clumped-together stuff, and you get total quality and taste control. Mix together some chuck, sirloin, and maybe even brisket, and you get great burgers that taste like the steak they might have also become. KitchenAid machines have good attachments for meat grinding, but you can also use a standard food processor. Once you're comfortable cutting up your own burger meat, you can step up to the plate and make something like at-home Shake Shack burgers. Photo by VirtualErn. (Original posts: grinding, Shake Shack). 3. Smoke Food Without Building a Shed Most of us lack a converted oil pipe, a tin roof shack, or the other elements of authentic smoked barbecue, to say nothing of the space, money, and time commitments. Without serious masonry skills, you can still get the deep, grin-inducing flavor of smoked meats and other 'cue favorites. There is Alton Brown's original terra cotta pot smoker and a flower pot variation, and then there's a conversion process for your standard, trusty Weber charcoal grill. For those trapped indoors by apartment leases or inclement weather, a wok can step in as a smoker, too. (Original posts: flower pot, charcoal grill, wok). 2. Quickly Create Ice Cream and Other Frozen Desserts Like pizza ovens, Lifehacker's obsession with instant ice cream recipes and techniques started off as a kind of "ooh, neat" post. Then, suddenly, there were links and clever photo illustrations everywhere. Adam rounded up a bunch of our favorites, but we've also since discovered our love for two-ingredient ice cream and the beauty of frozen bananas blended to a creamy pulp. (Original posts: two ingredients, banana ice cream). 1. Cook Your Pizza in a Homemade Pizza Oven The place around the corner with the great pies can get their oven really hot, much hotter than the conventional kind. That's why pizza snobs are so enthused about building their own pizza ovens, to cook their dough, sauce, and cheese combinations just so. We've featured wood-fired, cement-placed pompeii ovens, a more stand-alone brick oven, a standard oven filled with bricks and aluminum foil, a temporary model, and conversions and make-do models done with Weber grills (now sold as DIY PizzaForge kits and cast iron skillets. If one of them fires your imagination, just remember to save a slice now and then for someone else.
What's the neatest, most simple, or most amazingly detailed and complex DIY food project you've seen on Lifehacker or elsewhere? Lay down the links and reviews in the comments.
- Tags:
- Feature
- Top
- Cooking
- Food
- DIY
- Clips
- Lifehacker Top 10
- Food Hacks
- Kitchen
- Project
- Weekend project
July 24 2010, 9:00am | Comments »
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Top 10 DIY Food Geek Projects [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5595336/top-10-diy-food-geek-projects
The best-tasting food is the kind that comes from your own efforts, because victory tastes oh-so-sweet. Conquer KFC-style fried chicken, smoky barbecue, wood-fired pizza, five-minute bread, and other DIY delicacies with these great food-focused projects.Photo from The Pizza Hacker. We've previously tackled 10 clever kitchen repurposing tricks and food and drink hacks, but this here is a compendium of more involved, fare more awesome projects that actually create food and drinks you can brag about. 10. Put Your Chicken on a "Throne" for Crispy Skin and Moist Meat It's a pretty light project, but you certainly get your hands dirty. Cooking chicken so that it's standing up, with a can of liquid inside its carcass, ensures that the skin gets the perfect kind of crisp you're looking for, but the inner meat stays juicy, thanks to the steam coming from the can. You can watch Christopher Walken—yep, that Christopher Walken—demonstrate a fancier indoor method in the video, or read up on how to make it on the grill. 9. Make Crispy Wings at Home in the Oven Chicken wings you get at the bar are crispy, but their sauce sticks right to them. Wings you make at home in the oven are slick, and you're lucky if half the sauce stays on. The solution? Baking powder, along with some overnight, open-air refrigeration before cooking. You get healthier wings you can cook at home, and a great feeling of having somehow beaten the takeout economy. (Original post) 8. Brew Your Own Beer and Soda You'd think homebrew beer or soda would be a pretty huge undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. Starting out with either project is nothing more than a weekend afternoon spent with some beginner's materials. Guided tours and cost analyses of DIY brew are provided by the Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar, while a great video on making your own 2-liter soda experiments is offered at Howcast. (Original posts: beer, soda). 7. Fry Some KFC-Style Chicken at Home The Colonel's seven secret herbs and spices do a good enough job when you want the bucket, but if you want the good stuff at home—or you're not a huge fan of MSG—you can pick up the mix provided by the Guardian UK's Word of Mouth blog. Many testers claim it to provide the same kind of mouth-filling feeling as the KFC's version, though if you disagree, the theoretically secret recipe is offered at the post, too, coming from Ron Douglas' America's Most Wanted Recipes. (Original post) 6. Make Fresh Bread Without a Bread Maker First their came the no-knead bread, and it was declared good. Then there came faster and whole wheat remixes, and it couldn't seem to get better. But then came another no-bread-machine-needed recipe, a mix-once, break-off-and-bake dough recipe that our own Jason tested and loved, and then a recipe that rises while you're at work for about a minute of prep time. There is nothing quite like fresh-baked bread, and that's all we have to say on that. (Original posts: no-knead, faster and whole wheat, five minutes, one-minute). 5. Use Sous-Vide Techniques for Perfect Done-Ness You have to do it right, and you have to do it safe. Once you commit to sous-vide cooking and try a slice of steak, though, you'll want to make the commitment. The Serious Eats blog detailed a very do-able cooler technique, along with instructions on making the best prime steaks in that cooler. Savvy Housekeeping has also explained DIY sous-vide, for comparison's sake, and reader Jeff showed us how to take your DIY to drastically cool levels with an arduino-powered, self-monitoring sous-vide cooler. Soon enough, you'll be making dinners you want to invite guests over for, and you'll be free to actually talk to them while it's cooking. (Original posts: cooler sous-vide, steaks, sous-vide retake, electronic cooler). 4. Grind Your Own Meat to Replicate Great Burgers Most of the burger places you hear people preach and brag about grind their own meat. It's safer than relying on mass-produced, clumped-together stuff, and you get total quality and taste control. Mix together some chuck, sirloin, and maybe even brisket, and you get great burgers that taste like the steak they might have also become. KitchenAid machines have good attachments for meat grinding, but you can also use a standard food processor. Once you're comfortable cutting up your own burger meat, you can step up to the plate and make something like at-home Shake Shack burgers. Photo by VirtualErn. (Original posts: grinding, Shake Shack). 3. Smoke Food Without Building a Shed Most of us lack a converted oil pipe, a tin roof shack, or the other elements of authentic smoked barbecue, to say nothing of the space, money, and time commitments. Without serious masonry skills, you can still get the deep, grin-inducing flavor of smoked meats and other 'cue favorites. There is Alton Brown's original terra cotta pot smoker and a flower pot variation, and then there's a conversion process for your standard, trusty Weber charcoal grill. For those trapped indoors by apartment leases or inclement weather, a wok can step in as a smoker, too. (Original posts: flower pot, charcoal grill, wok). 2. Quickly Create Ice Cream and Other Frozen Desserts Like pizza ovens, Lifehacker's obsession with instant ice cream recipes and techniques started off as a kind of "ooh, neat" post. Then, suddenly, there were links and clever photo illustrations everywhere. Adam rounded up a bunch of our favorites, but we've also since discovered our love for two-ingredient ice cream and the beauty of frozen bananas blended to a creamy pulp. (Original posts: two ingredients, banana ice cream). 1. Cook Your Pizza in a Homemade Pizza Oven The place around the corner with the great pies can get their oven really hot, much hotter than the conventional kind. That's why pizza snobs are so enthused about building their own pizza ovens, to cook their dough, sauce, and cheese combinations just so. We've featured wood-fired, cement-placed pompeii ovens, a more stand-alone brick oven, a standard oven filled with bricks and aluminum foil, a temporary model, and conversions and make-do models done with Weber grills (now sold as DIY PizzaForge kits and cast iron skillets. If one of them fires your imagination, just remember to save a slice now and then for someone else.
What's the neatest, most simple, or most amazingly detailed and complex DIY food project you've seen on Lifehacker or elsewhere? Lay down the links and reviews in the comments.
- Tags:
- Feature
- Top
- Cooking
- Food
- DIY
- Clips
- Lifehacker Top 10
- Food Hacks
- Kitchen
- Project
- Weekend project
July 24 2010, 6:00am | Comments »
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Is "avoiding tropes" the same thing as telling fresh stories? [Rant]
http://io9.com/5586431/is-avoiding-tropes-the-same-thing-as-telling-fresh-stories
Often, it seems the highest praise you can give a story is to say it avoids a common trope. And thanks to the Internet, everyone, including creators, is hyper-aware of this. But do we cherish trope-avoidance, instead of fresh storytelling? I was thinking about this the other day, when I was writing a recap of a TV episode, and found myself mentioning a trope that the episode had managed to avoid. There was a certain amount of pleasure involved in this moment, I realized — first of all, I felt all clever for realizing that there was a trope the episode had sidestepped. And then, acknowledging this fact made me appreciate the episode in a new light. And finally, there was the realization that, most likely, the people making the episode had also been aware of the trope in question, and had consciously avoided it. I also thought about it a bit after posting a link to the hilarious "World War II assessed as if it were a fictional TV show" rant, which pointed out all the tropes that World War II was guilty of. Which, as Bones creator Hart Hanson pointed out, really was what a lot of fan criticism sounds like. It's like judging a sporting event — you see the trope in the path of the narrative, and you sit on the edge of your seat. The trope is a sand pit, and you wait to see if the trope manages to vault over it safely. Then you award points for form. (Really, I should say "I," rather than "you," since I do this all the time.) It's part of what I love about the Internet, and about the pervasiveness of media-geekery. We're all insanely aware of the places that our stories tend to go, including some fairly obscure stuff that nobody would have thought of as "tropes" years ago. I mean, people always obsessed about clichés in storytelling, but not at the level that people have reached with sites like TVTropes. We've managed to broaden and deepen the scope of human knowledge regarding clichés. Truly, this is the golden age of modern metafictional geekery. How did we manage to be alive in such a time of plenty? There's just one thing more exciting, to the devoted story nerd, than a story that consciously avoids a trope — the story that subverts a trope. That's like, the story runs up to the sand pit, and instead of vaulting over, it, it blasts the sand with a LASER until it's turned to glass, and then rollerskates across. Early Buffy The Vampire Slayer is full of Olympics-level trope subversion — there's a possessed dummy, but it's actually a good guy! Good misdirection is always a pleasure of storytelling, but misdirection that plays with the expectations that past helpings of pop culture have created — that's the ultimate.
(And I think it's important to talk about pleasure here. Because part of what goes along with this consciousness about "tropes" on the part of both audiences and creators is a recognition that part of the pleasure of consuming a narrative comes from engaging with it actively. We get pleasure from recognizing that something has been done well, just as we get pleasure from tearing apart something that's been done badly. As with the active engagement that comes from spoilers and rumors, the internet has helped us all to enjoy being active. And in turn, a lot of creators seem to cooperate with fans in helping to dissect their own work, because they know we enjoy it. Oh, and one more thing — there's no wrong way to take pleasure from a story, unless you're a serial killer or something. If you're enjoying yourself by being either infinitely nitpicky or not nitpicky at all, don't let anybody tell you that you're doing it wrong.)
Or more recently, the episode of Supernatural that introduced a third Winchester brother displayed an Impala-sized awareness of our nerdspectations. Not only was the episode called "Jump The Shark," but they met the third brother in a café named after Cousin Oliver, the Brady Bunch relative introduced late in the show's run. And yet — wait for it — the show totally subverted the "long lost relative appears out of nowhere" trope. So yay, we're all metafictional now. But what I was wondering is: is avoiding or subverting a trope the same thing as fresh, original storytelling? And do we all place so much emphasis on how a story navigates the minefield that we lose sight of the most important thing, whether the story has power or not? Of course, the two things aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And part of the hope of being super-conscious of the sand pit is that you hope that we'll go someplace beautiful instead of getting stuck there. But on the other hand, sometimes you can just watch a story avoid a trope — and then have noplace else to go. I guess it's like vaulting over the sand pit and then not nailing the landing. But even beyond the fact that "absence of cliché" doesn't equate to "presence of inventive storytelling," there's also the question of whether we're looking at the wrong thing. In true nerd fashion, maybe we're overly focused on the details. Maybe we tend — and by "we," I definitely mean "me," among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. (I'm not saying give a free pass to lazy writing, natch. But lazy writing isn't the same as falling into one of the thousand "been there done that" boxes.) Really, what storytellers should aspire to, and what us audience-members should look for, is truthfulness. Characters who feel real, and who breathe. Stories that have a momentum that comes from people's emotions as well as the progression of ideas. Because stories that feel like they're being honest and letting their characters be real people will also feel fresh. It's the characters and the ideas, and how truthfully the story plays them out, that make it fresh. Like Basia says, "It's really me and you/We're watching on the tube." (Yes, I was listening to Basia while I was writing this. You got a problem with that?) An idea you've seen a million times can take a whole new life if you feel like you've never seen this character in that situation, and you care enough and relate enough to see how that plays out. Likewise, a story can avoid falling into the trap of repeating older stories, in a clever way that feels totally mechanical. Of course, the "freshness" or "truthfulness" of a story is a lot harder to talk about than whether it zigged or zagged, and whether we saw that zag coming. But you know, us nerds love a challenge, right?
- Tags:
- Top
- books
- Movies
- Television
- Writing
- Rant
- buffy
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
- Joss Whedon
- Supernatural
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- Hart hanson
- Metafiction
- Nerdery
- Nerds
July 16 2010, 11:55am | Comments »
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Is "avoiding tropes" the same thing as telling fresh stories? [Rant]
http://io9.com/5586431/is-avoiding-tropes-the-same-thing-as-telling-fresh-stories
Often, it seems the highest praise you can give a story is to say it avoids a common trope. And thanks to the Internet, everyone, including creators, is hyper-aware of this. But do we cherish trope-avoidance, instead of fresh storytelling? I was thinking about this the other day, when I was writing a recap of a TV episode, and found myself mentioning a trope that the episode had managed to avoid. There was a certain amount of pleasure involved in this moment, I realized — first of all, I felt all clever for realizing that there was a trope the episode had sidestepped. And then, acknowledging this fact made me appreciate the episode in a new light. And finally, there was the realization that, most likely, the people making the episode had also been aware of the trope in question, and had consciously avoided it. I also thought about it a bit after posting a link to the hilarious "World War II assessed as if it were a fictional TV show" rant, which pointed out all the tropes that World War II was guilty of. Which, as Bones creator Hart Hanson pointed out, really was what a lot of fan criticism sounds like. It's like judging a sporting event — you see the trope in the path of the narrative, and you sit on the edge of your seat. The trope is a sand pit, and you wait to see if the trope manages to vault over it safely. Then you award points for form. (Really, I should say "I," rather than "you," since I do this all the time.) It's part of what I love about the Internet, and about the pervasiveness of media-geekery. We're all insanely aware of the places that our stories tend to go, including some fairly obscure stuff that nobody would have thought of as "tropes" years ago. I mean, people always obsessed about clichés in storytelling, but not at the level that people have reached with sites like TVTropes. We've managed to broaden and deepen the scope of human knowledge regarding clichés. Truly, this is the golden age of modern metafictional geekery. How did we manage to be alive in such a time of plenty? There's just one thing more exciting, to the devoted story nerd, than a story that consciously avoids a trope — the story that subverts a trope. That's like, the story runs up to the sand pit, and instead of vaulting over, it, it blasts the sand with a LASER until it's turned to glass, and then rollerskates across. Early Buffy The Vampire Slayer is full of Olympics-level trope subversion — there's a possessed dummy, but it's actually a good guy! Good misdirection is always a pleasure of storytelling, but misdirection that plays with the expectations that past helpings of pop culture have created — that's the ultimate.
(And I think it's important to talk about pleasure here. Because part of what goes along with this consciousness about "tropes" on the part of both audiences and creators is a recognition that part of the pleasure of consuming a narrative comes from engaging with it actively. We get pleasure from recognizing that something has been done well, just as we get pleasure from tearing apart something that's been done badly. As with the active engagement that comes from spoilers and rumors, the internet has helped us all to enjoy being active. And in turn, a lot of creators seem to cooperate with fans in helping to dissect their own work, because they know we enjoy it. Oh, and one more thing — there's no wrong way to take pleasure from a story, unless you're a serial killer or something. If you're enjoying yourself by being either infinitely nitpicky or not nitpicky at all, don't let anybody tell you that you're doing it wrong.)
Or more recently, the episode of Supernatural that introduced a third Winchester brother displayed an Impala-sized awareness of our nerdspectations. Not only was the episode called "Jump The Shark," but they met the third brother in a café named after Cousin Oliver, the Brady Bunch relative introduced late in the show's run. And yet — wait for it — the show totally subverted the "long lost relative appears out of nowhere" trope. So yay, we're all metafictional now. But what I was wondering is: is avoiding or subverting a trope the same thing as fresh, original storytelling? And do we all place so much emphasis on how a story navigates the minefield that we lose sight of the most important thing, whether the story has power or not? Of course, the two things aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And part of the hope of being super-conscious of the sand pit is that you hope that we'll go someplace beautiful instead of getting stuck there. But on the other hand, sometimes you can just watch a story avoid a trope — and then have noplace else to go. I guess it's like vaulting over the sand pit and then not nailing the landing. But even beyond the fact that "absence of cliché" doesn't equate to "presence of inventive storytelling," there's also the question of whether we're looking at the wrong thing. In true nerd fashion, maybe we're overly focused on the details. Maybe we tend — and by "we," I definitely mean "me," among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. (I'm not saying give a free pass to lazy writing, natch. But lazy writing isn't the same as falling into one of the thousand "been there done that" boxes.) Really, what storytellers should aspire to, and what us audience-members should look for, is truthfulness. Characters who feel real, and who breathe. Stories that have a momentum that comes from people's emotions as well as the progression of ideas. Because stories that feel like they're being honest and letting their characters be real people will also feel fresh. It's the characters and the ideas, and how truthfully the story plays them out, that make it fresh. Like Basia says, "It's really me and you/We're watching on the tube." (Yes, I was listening to Basia while I was writing this. You got a problem with that?) An idea you've seen a million times can take a whole new life if you feel like you've never seen this character in that situation, and you care enough and relate enough to see how that plays out. Likewise, a story can avoid falling into the trap of repeating older stories, in a clever way that feels totally mechanical. Of course, the "freshness" or "truthfulness" of a story is a lot harder to talk about than whether it zigged or zagged, and whether we saw that zag coming. But you know, us nerds love a challenge, right?
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July 16 2010, 8:55am | Comments »
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Common Cooking Myths You Can Easily Dispel [Science]
http://lifehacker.com/5583068/kitchen-myths-you-can-safely-leave-behind
Kitchen "tips" and habits made up a big percentage of things we discovered we were doing wrong. Searing meat to seal in juices? Baking soda absorbing fridge odors? Alcohol that "cooks off" instantly? This great debunking page dispels such common kitchen myths.Photo by pixietart. Peter Aitken put together a great page with a number of common kitchen myths and the reasons why they're misunderstood. Some of them you may already have cast aside, but many are hard-and-fast laws, passed down through generations, that refuse to stand up to science. Including the ever-popular orange box:
A box of baking soda in the fridge or freezer absorbs odors This is a very clever and successful marketing ploy by the baking soda people, but the fact is that baking soda is very poor at absorbing odors. It seems to make sense, however, so lots of people have spent untold billions of dollars to put boxes of baking soda in their fridge or freezer to no effect. Activated charcoal would work much better but is expensive. Better to wrap your food and clean the fridge once in a while. Source: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem00/chem00388.htm
One more myth that I must apologize to all my dinner guests over the years for: believing that any alcohol you add to a recipe just "cooks off" when it's been in the pan for a bit. Aitken offers up a chart of alcohol retention dependent on cooking methods:
So much for bananas foster being a non-alcoholic dessert. Hit the page for more great reads on modern cooking myths, and share any pseudo-science you've cast aside in your own kitchen in the comments. Kitchen Myths [Peter Aitken's Pages via brainpicker]
July 9 2010, 7:00am | Comments »
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Common Cooking Myths You Can Easily Dispel [Science]
http://lifehacker.com/5583068/kitchen-myths-you-can-safely-leave-behind
Kitchen "tips" and habits made up a big percentage of things we discovered we were doing wrong. Searing meat to seal in juices? Baking soda absorbing fridge odors? Alcohol that "cooks off" instantly? This great debunking page dispels such common kitchen myths.Photo by pixietart. Peter Aitken put together a great page with a number of common kitchen myths and the reasons why they're misunderstood. Some of them you may already have cast aside, but many are hard-and-fast laws, passed down through generations, that refuse to stand up to science. Including the ever-popular orange box:
A box of baking soda in the fridge or freezer absorbs odors This is a very clever and successful marketing ploy by the baking soda people, but the fact is that baking soda is very poor at absorbing odors. It seems to make sense, however, so lots of people have spent untold billions of dollars to put boxes of baking soda in their fridge or freezer to no effect. Activated charcoal would work much better but is expensive. Better to wrap your food and clean the fridge once in a while. Source: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem00/chem00388.htm
One more myth that I must apologize to all my dinner guests over the years for: believing that any alcohol you add to a recipe just "cooks off" when it's been in the pan for a bit. Aitken offers up a chart of alcohol retention dependent on cooking methods:
So much for bananas foster being a non-alcoholic dessert. Hit the page for more great reads on modern cooking myths, and share any pseudo-science you've cast aside in your own kitchen in the comments. Kitchen Myths [Peter Aitken's Pages via brainpicker]
July 9 2010, 4:00am | Comments »
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Some overused Doctor Who plot devices we'd like a moratorium on [Rant]
http://io9.com/5576090/10-overused-doctor-who-plot-devices-wed-like-a-moratorium-on
There was no new episode of time-traveling action-comedy Doctor Who on BBC America this weekend, but that's okay. In lieu of another recap, we've got something to get off our chests. With vague spoilers for the end of season five. Doctor Who's new season has been a lot of fun to watch, in general — Matt Smith is the most Doctor-ish of the recent Doctors, and his performance just bursts with acting tics and neat ideas. Karen Gillan is a totally thrilling companion. The season-long arc was pretty thrilling, and kept us guessing. The whole thing has been cute, sparky, moving and extraordinarily watchable. There's just one thing that's been bugging me quite a bit — and that's the extent to which Steven Moffat's Who is already feeling like a one-trick pony. Or maybe, more accurately, a three- or four-trick pony. It may seem like a pusillanimous complaint — every era of Doctor Who has had its repeated motifs and go-to ideas, after all. And surely, what matters is how you use these repeated ideas, right? And most of all, when you complain about reusing plot devices you risk elevating plot about characters, or story, or the little moments that make Moffat's Who such a joy to watch. But still, to me, a big part of the thrill of Doctor Who is wondering what happens next. And when I heard Moffat was taking over as the show's new head writer, the first thing that jumped to mind was, "I can't wait to see what clever stuff he comes up with this time." And to a large extent, this year, it's felt like Moffat's clever ideas are the same ones he's had in years past. There are a couple ideas that he's reused over and over, and some that he's reused once or twice. In either case, I wouldn't mind seeing these plot devices take a vacation for 2011:
The Doctor tells scary aliens to go away. Especially if he tells them to look him up in a directory, or read up on him somewhere. Or if he encourages them to think about all the times he's defeated them before. I loved the "It is defended" speech in "The Christmas Invasion," and I quite liked the "look me up" speech in "Forest Of The Dead." But enough, already. The Doctor is getting blustery and self-promoting here. He's starting to remind us of those Internet hipsters who've somehow managed to convince angel investors that their totally impractical business plan will rock the cybersphere, and can't stop talking about it loudly in cafes. Remember when the Eccleston Doctor gave Mickey a disk that would erase all references to him from the internet, because he wanted to remain a secret? We want that Doctor back. Someone stops a deadly machine by admitting to their true feelings. This one first cropped up in "The Doctor Dances," to some extent — Nancy saves everybody from being turned into gasmask zombies by admitting that she's Jamie's mother. And it's turned up a few times since then — in the Dalek story, the android Professor Bracewell is able to keep himself from self-destructing by thinking about a girl he's had a crush on. In "The Lodger," an explosion is similarly averted by having two characters confess their love for each other. And in "Amy's Choice," Amy can only escape from the dream world after admitting, at last, that she really loves Rory. And then there's a bit of this in the finale as well. It's easy to see why this trope persists — after all, it allows you to have character resolution and plot resolution neatly in one go. But if it rears its head too often, it starts to feel a bit too neat and tidy. In the real world, coping with our feelings often gets in the way of coping with the big explodey machines, and vice versa — part of how we prove our worth as people is the way we balance those two challenges. Deadly and unknowable aliens use a dead humans's lingering remains to communicate. This has really only popped up twice — the Vashta Nerada use the last recorded thoughts of the humans in "Silence In The Library" to communicate with the Doctor. And then the Weeping Angels use the corpse of Sacred Bob to fashion themselves a ready-made sock-puppet with which they can speak into Sacred Bob's walkie-talkie, to taunt the Doctor. But if we see this one again next year, it'll start to seem distinctly tropey.
A little girl is trapped in an unreal world where she's the only one who can touch reality. This was the setup for "Silence In The Library" — the little girl is stuck in a virtual paradise, but Doctor Moon tells her it's not real, and only the Library, where the Doctor and his friends are trapped, is real. This motif crops up very strongly once again in "The Big Bang," where there's another little girl who's stuck in a world that's "wrong" in a very basic way, but she remembers the "real" world. A little girl meets the Doctor, and then she sees him again as an adult, but it's only been a few minutes for him. This is the plot of Moffat's acclaimed season-two story "The Girl In The Fireplace," and he cannibalizes it pretty heavily for the season five opener, "The Eleventh Hour." The overall effect of this trope is to make the Doctor a central figure in the female character's life, while to him she's just someone he's bumped into during his travels.
Timey-wimey cheating that actually affects the plot. We all know that Moffat loves to play with the sheer perverseness of time travel — he wrote a whole Doctor Who spoof, "The Curse Of The Fatal Death," in which the Doctor and the Master keep traveling back in time to outsmart each other, in sillier and sillier ways. And when it works, it's really brilliant — I'm completely enthralled with the Doctor's relationship with River Song, in which they "keep meeting in the wrong order." But it's a different matter when the Doctor faces an insoluble dilemma — until his future self steps in and helps him out, by tossing him the solution. If you follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion, the Doctor can never face a no-win situation, because he can always travel back in time from a future in which he's already solved the problem, and give himself the solution. At that point, the tension and drama go right out of the series, forever. This has been turned up in a lot of Moffat's scripts — in the otherwise perfect "Blink," the Doctor knows what Sally Sparrow is going to say to his DVD easter egg, years in the future, because her future self gave his past self a transcript. In "Forest Of The Dead," the future Doctor remembers that River Song is going to die in the library, so he gives his past self a way to save her. And then — spoiler alert — this device appears again in the season five finale, "The Big Bang." This one is the one I'm grumpiest about — partly because it gives the Doctor an easy "out" in any sticky situation, but also because it makes time travel into the Doctor's superpower, rather than just the way he arrives at his latest adventure. Moffat is still one of the most clever writers ever to have handled Doctor Who. And with the creation of Amy Pond, he's finessed the biggest problem of them all: How to create a version of the companion-centric story arc that doesn't feel like a repeat of Rose, Ace, Martha or Donna. So maybe it's excessively nit-picky to point out that he seems to reuse motifs and plot ideas an awful lot. Mostly, we know that his enormous brain still has some new twists and surprises stuffed into its root cellar, though, and we're dying for him to trot them out for Matt Smith's second season. Here's hoping it happens!
July 5 2010, 10:00am | Comments »
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Some overused Doctor Who plot devices we'd like a moratorium on [Rant]
http://io9.com/5576090/10-overused-doctor-who-plot-devices-wed-like-a-moratorium-on
There was no new episode of time-traveling action-comedy Doctor Who on BBC America this weekend, but that's okay. In lieu of another recap, we've got something to get off our chests. With vague spoilers for the end of season five. Doctor Who's new season has been a lot of fun to watch, in general — Matt Smith is the most Doctor-ish of the recent Doctors, and his performance just bursts with acting tics and neat ideas. Karen Gillan is a totally thrilling companion. The season-long arc was pretty thrilling, and kept us guessing. The whole thing has been cute, sparky, moving and extraordinarily watchable. There's just one thing that's been bugging me quite a bit — and that's the extent to which Steven Moffat's Who is already feeling like a one-trick pony. Or maybe, more accurately, a three- or four-trick pony. It may seem like a pusillanimous complaint — every era of Doctor Who has had its repeated motifs and go-to ideas, after all. And surely, what matters is how you use these repeated ideas, right? And most of all, when you complain about reusing plot devices you risk elevating plot about characters, or story, or the little moments that make Moffat's Who such a joy to watch. But still, to me, a big part of the thrill of Doctor Who is wondering what happens next. And when I heard Moffat was taking over as the show's new head writer, the first thing that jumped to mind was, "I can't wait to see what clever stuff he comes up with this time." And to a large extent, this year, it's felt like Moffat's clever ideas are the same ones he's had in years past. There are a couple ideas that he's reused over and over, and some that he's reused once or twice. In either case, I wouldn't mind seeing these plot devices take a vacation for 2011:
The Doctor tells scary aliens to go away. Especially if he tells them to look him up in a directory, or read up on him somewhere. Or if he encourages them to think about all the times he's defeated them before. I loved the "It is defended" speech in "The Christmas Invasion," and I quite liked the "look me up" speech in "Forest Of The Dead." But enough, already. The Doctor is getting blustery and self-promoting here. He's starting to remind us of those Internet hipsters who've somehow managed to convince angel investors that their totally impractical business plan will rock the cybersphere, and can't stop talking about it loudly in cafes. Remember when the Eccleston Doctor gave Mickey a disk that would erase all references to him from the internet, because he wanted to remain a secret? We want that Doctor back. Someone stops a deadly machine by admitting to their true feelings. This one first cropped up in "The Doctor Dances," to some extent — Nancy saves everybody from being turned into gasmask zombies by admitting that she's Jamie's mother. And it's turned up a few times since then — in the Dalek story, the android Professor Bracewell is able to keep himself from self-destructing by thinking about a girl he's had a crush on. In "The Lodger," an explosion is similarly averted by having two characters confess their love for each other. And in "Amy's Choice," Amy can only escape from the dream world after admitting, at last, that she really loves Rory. And then there's a bit of this in the finale as well. It's easy to see why this trope persists — after all, it allows you to have character resolution and plot resolution neatly in one go. But if it rears its head too often, it starts to feel a bit too neat and tidy. In the real world, coping with our feelings often gets in the way of coping with the big explodey machines, and vice versa — part of how we prove our worth as people is the way we balance those two challenges. Deadly and unknowable aliens use a dead humans's lingering remains to communicate. This has really only popped up twice — the Vashta Nerada use the last recorded thoughts of the humans in "Silence In The Library" to communicate with the Doctor. And then the Weeping Angels use the corpse of Sacred Bob to fashion themselves a ready-made sock-puppet with which they can speak into Sacred Bob's walkie-talkie, to taunt the Doctor. But if we see this one again next year, it'll start to seem distinctly tropey.
A little girl is trapped in an unreal world where she's the only one who can touch reality. This was the setup for "Silence In The Library" — the little girl is stuck in a virtual paradise, but Doctor Moon tells her it's not real, and only the Library, where the Doctor and his friends are trapped, is real. This motif crops up very strongly once again in "The Big Bang," where there's another little girl who's stuck in a world that's "wrong" in a very basic way, but she remembers the "real" world. A little girl meets the Doctor, and then she sees him again as an adult, but it's only been a few minutes for him. This is the plot of Moffat's acclaimed season-two story "The Girl In The Fireplace," and he cannibalizes it pretty heavily for the season five opener, "The Eleventh Hour." The overall effect of this trope is to make the Doctor a central figure in the female character's life, while to him she's just someone he's bumped into during his travels.
Timey-wimey cheating that actually affects the plot. We all know that Moffat loves to play with the sheer perverseness of time travel — he wrote a whole Doctor Who spoof, "The Curse Of The Fatal Death," in which the Doctor and the Master keep traveling back in time to outsmart each other, in sillier and sillier ways. And when it works, it's really brilliant — I'm completely enthralled with the Doctor's relationship with River Song, in which they "keep meeting in the wrong order." But it's a different matter when the Doctor faces an insoluble dilemma — until his future self steps in and helps him out, by tossing him the solution. If you follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion, the Doctor can never face a no-win situation, because he can always travel back in time from a future in which he's already solved the problem, and give himself the solution. At that point, the tension and drama go right out of the series, forever. This has been turned up in a lot of Moffat's scripts — in the otherwise perfect "Blink," the Doctor knows what Sally Sparrow is going to say to his DVD easter egg, years in the future, because her future self gave his past self a transcript. In "Forest Of The Dead," the future Doctor remembers that River Song is going to die in the library, so he gives his past self a way to save her. And then — spoiler alert — this device appears again in the season five finale, "The Big Bang." This one is the one I'm grumpiest about — partly because it gives the Doctor an easy "out" in any sticky situation, but also because it makes time travel into the Doctor's superpower, rather than just the way he arrives at his latest adventure. Moffat is still one of the most clever writers ever to have handled Doctor Who. And with the creation of Amy Pond, he's finessed the biggest problem of them all: How to create a version of the companion-centric story arc that doesn't feel like a repeat of Rose, Ace, Martha or Donna. So maybe it's excessively nit-picky to point out that he seems to reuse motifs and plot ideas an awful lot. Mostly, we know that his enormous brain still has some new twists and surprises stuffed into its root cellar, though, and we're dying for him to trot them out for Matt Smith's second season. Here's hoping it happens!
July 5 2010, 7:00am | Comments »
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Top 10 Hulu Hacks and Power User Tips [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5577647/top-10-hulu-hacks-and-power-user-tips
Hulu has made your computer into a viable TV viewing alternative, and Hulu Plus might make it a real replacement. In celebration of all-things streaming and (mostly) free, here are our best Hulu hacks—downloading, watching anywhere, and advanced searching included.10. Upgrade to Flash 10.1 for Better Performance Some of the smarter browsers out there should take care of this for you, but if you haven't upgraded your Flash plug-in to 10.1, and you're a Hulu fan, you're missing out. Flash 10.1 includes support for hardware acceleration on certain graphics cards on the PC, and most modern Macs. That means your video card can help out with the video processing duties, and your CPU won't run as hot as a toaster oven element when you're 10 minutes into It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Not sure if you need the upgrade? Head to Firefox's kindly Plugin Check page, which works on most browsers, or right-click on a video, choose "About Adobe Flash Player," and see what Adobe has to say. 9. Learn to Use Hulu's Advance Search Tools—They're Much, Much Better To be honest, using Hulu's general search tool, especially before they offered an Advanced Search option, was kind of painful. The results arrived in a pretty big pile, and the false positives could be overwhelming. You can head to Hulu's own advanced search page and fill out all those boxes of specifics, but you should only need to do so once: you can pick up its specific search operators and use them in the main search box. Next time you're at Hulu, try show:glee season:1 episode:3, rather than try and remember if that was the one with the "Acafellas" (hint: it was). (Original post) 8. Watch Hulu on Android with Skyfire It's spotty, and the experience isn't exactly A-number-one, but if you wanted to watch a Hulu clip, or had the battery/power-cord mojo to do so, you can watch Hulu through Skyfire, the alternative Android browser we've previously covered. Hulu blocks official Flash on Android, but Skyfire's "Video" button sends the Flash to its servers, then streams it back to the phone. It's not perfect, and Hulu has figured out ways of blocking it before, but it's there for you in a pinch. 7. Catch New Shows When They Go Up—And When They Almost Expire Hulu is fairly predictable as to when it posts episodes and pulls them down—but not always. To make sure you know when you can catch up on this week's show, or catch it right before it gets pulled down weeks later, use Hulu's email alerts. As explained in our guide to never missing important stuff:
Head to Hulu's Coming Soon section, click the envelope/email icon next to that episode, and you'll get a ping when it's available on Hulu. If there's a show you're always watching on your computer or TV-connected system, "subscribe" to it (the envelope icon with a plus sign in it), log into Hulu, click on "Queue" in the upper-right corner of the site, and enable "Subscription updates" and "Expiration alerts" in the Email alerts section, and you'll get updates when episodes go up, or down, on anything you watch.
Keep Videos Full-Screen on a Second Monitor By default, Flash videos, like those put up by Hulu, won't stay in full-screen mode if you click anywhere on any screen. Why hasn't Adobe changed this? We have no idea. In the meantime, there's this slightly geeky hack that sets up your Flash plug-in to respect your dual-monitor needs. Use Bing to Preview Hulu Clips To see what kind of clip you're looking at in Hulu, you have to open it, and sometimes wait for a 30-second ad to finish before you can even start scanning around. One of the best uses of Bing, however, is to search through videos and see live-playing previews of their contents. You can do that with Hulu, either by searching for your clips in general, or using the site:hulu restriction. Download Hulu Clips for Must-Have Offline Viewing If you like what Hulu does, watch it online. Watch the shorter-than-TV ad breaks. Tell your friends. But if you've got a show you can't find on iTunes, or just can't find anywhere else, StreamTransport is there for your offline Hulu needs. It's not the most elegant software, and you might have to download multiple files, but you'll have your FLV files—which you can then convert however you'd like. (Original post) Run Hulu from Windows Media Center Hulu's own Hulu Desktop app is the best way to watch Hulu on an HDTV—it uses Flash hardware acceleration, if possible, and offers a remote-friendly interface. But you probably want to do more than just watch Hulu in a media center, right? That's where Hulu Desktop Integration comes in. It adds an entry to your Windows Media Center menu for Hulu, then closes down WMC, launches Hulu, and then re-launches WMC when you're done with Hulu. It's part of what this editor termed a media center that non-geeks can actually use. (Original post) Find an Episode From a Single Line (or a Single Line in an Episode) "I'm gonna need a leather jacket when I'm on my hog and need to go into a controlled slide." Which Arrested Development episode was that in? Pull up a show or episode page on Hulu, click on the Captions tab, and search out your term. You'll get not only the episode by searching through the closed captioning for the show, but the exact moment in the episode when a character says the line. It's either great for settling debates, or a gateway to procrastination, but either way, it's a helpful search tool. (Original post) Access Hulu Outside the U.S. Hulu's supported by advertising, so you'd think it would be willing to let in anyone willing to sit through the ads. You would be wrong, but it's largely due to Hulu's "content partners." Until the networks get a bit more multinational with their business plans, you can try using Firefox or Chrome to access blocked streaming video via proxies, or consider a technique using IP Hider.What's your own favorite, indispensable Hulu upgrade or work-around? What features are you surprised more people don't know about? Spread the free TV love in the comments.
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July 3 2010, 9:00am | Comments »
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Top 10 Hulu Hacks and Power User Tips [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5577647/top-10-hulu-hacks-and-power-user-tips
Hulu has made your computer into a viable TV viewing alternative, and Hulu Plus might make it a real replacement. In celebration of all-things streaming and (mostly) free, here are our best Hulu hacks—downloading, watching anywhere, and advanced searching included.10. Upgrade to Flash 10.1 for Better Performance Some of the smarter browsers out there should take care of this for you, but if you haven't upgraded your Flash plug-in to 10.1, and you're a Hulu fan, you're missing out. Flash 10.1 includes support for hardware acceleration on certain graphics cards on the PC, and most modern Macs. That means your video card can help out with the video processing duties, and your CPU won't run as hot as a toaster oven element when you're 10 minutes into It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Not sure if you need the upgrade? Head to Firefox's kindly Plugin Check page, which works on most browsers, or right-click on a video, choose "About Adobe Flash Player," and see what Adobe has to say. 9. Learn to Use Hulu's Advance Search Tools—They're Much, Much Better To be honest, using Hulu's general search tool, especially before they offered an Advanced Search option, was kind of painful. The results arrived in a pretty big pile, and the false positives could be overwhelming. You can head to Hulu's own advanced search page and fill out all those boxes of specifics, but you should only need to do so once: you can pick up its specific search operators and use them in the main search box. Next time you're at Hulu, try show:glee season:1 episode:3, rather than try and remember if that was the one with the "Acafellas" (hint: it was). (Original post) 8. Watch Hulu on Android with Skyfire It's spotty, and the experience isn't exactly A-number-one, but if you wanted to watch a Hulu clip, or had the battery/power-cord mojo to do so, you can watch Hulu through Skyfire, the alternative Android browser we've previously covered. Hulu blocks official Flash on Android, but Skyfire's "Video" button sends the Flash to its servers, then streams it back to the phone. It's not perfect, and Hulu has figured out ways of blocking it before, but it's there for you in a pinch. 7. Catch New Shows When They Go Up—And When They Almost Expire Hulu is fairly predictable as to when it posts episodes and pulls them down—but not always. To make sure you know when you can catch up on this week's show, or catch it right before it gets pulled down weeks later, use Hulu's email alerts. As explained in our guide to never missing important stuff:
Head to Hulu's Coming Soon section, click the envelope/email icon next to that episode, and you'll get a ping when it's available on Hulu. If there's a show you're always watching on your computer or TV-connected system, "subscribe" to it (the envelope icon with a plus sign in it), log into Hulu, click on "Queue" in the upper-right corner of the site, and enable "Subscription updates" and "Expiration alerts" in the Email alerts section, and you'll get updates when episodes go up, or down, on anything you watch.
Keep Videos Full-Screen on a Second Monitor By default, Flash videos, like those put up by Hulu, won't stay in full-screen mode if you click anywhere on any screen. Why hasn't Adobe changed this? We have no idea. In the meantime, there's this slightly geeky hack that sets up your Flash plug-in to respect your dual-monitor needs. Use Bing to Preview Hulu Clips To see what kind of clip you're looking at in Hulu, you have to open it, and sometimes wait for a 30-second ad to finish before you can even start scanning around. One of the best uses of Bing, however, is to search through videos and see live-playing previews of their contents. You can do that with Hulu, either by searching for your clips in general, or using the site:hulu restriction. Download Hulu Clips for Must-Have Offline Viewing If you like what Hulu does, watch it online. Watch the shorter-than-TV ad breaks. Tell your friends. But if you've got a show you can't find on iTunes, or just can't find anywhere else, StreamTransport is there for your offline Hulu needs. It's not the most elegant software, and you might have to download multiple files, but you'll have your FLV files—which you can then convert however you'd like. (Original post) Run Hulu from Windows Media Center Hulu's own Hulu Desktop app is the best way to watch Hulu on an HDTV—it uses Flash hardware acceleration, if possible, and offers a remote-friendly interface. But you probably want to do more than just watch Hulu in a media center, right? That's where Hulu Desktop Integration comes in. It adds an entry to your Windows Media Center menu for Hulu, then closes down WMC, launches Hulu, and then re-launches WMC when you're done with Hulu. It's part of what this editor termed a media center that non-geeks can actually use. (Original post) Find an Episode From a Single Line (or a Single Line in an Episode) "I'm gonna need a leather jacket when I'm on my hog and need to go into a controlled slide." Which Arrested Development episode was that in? Pull up a show or episode page on Hulu, click on the Captions tab, and search out your term. You'll get not only the episode by searching through the closed captioning for the show, but the exact moment in the episode when a character says the line. It's either great for settling debates, or a gateway to procrastination, but either way, it's a helpful search tool. (Original post) Access Hulu Outside the U.S. Hulu's supported by advertising, so you'd think it would be willing to let in anyone willing to sit through the ads. You would be wrong, but it's largely due to Hulu's "content partners." Until the networks get a bit more multinational with their business plans, you can try using Firefox or Chrome to access blocked streaming video via proxies, or consider a technique using IP Hider.What's your own favorite, indispensable Hulu upgrade or work-around? What features are you surprised more people don't know about? Spread the free TV love in the comments.
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- Lifehacker Top 10
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July 3 2010, 6:00am | Comments »
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Top 10 Photo Fixing and Image Editing Tricks [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5555512/top-10-photo-fixing-and-image-editing-tricks
You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.Photo by Jase The Bass. 10. Create Your Own Bokeh Bokeh is a cute name for something you've noticed before, but probably never really pinned down—the gauzy, creamy light points that appear behind the subject that's in drastic focus in a picture. Photo site DIY Photography explains how to harness and control bokeh effects, using a photo lens like a 50mm F/1.8 and creating a small lens cover with just the right kind of hole cut out. Lacking for the right kind of digital lens? The Photojojo blog details an analog-to-digital lens adaptation, perfect for garage sale and eBay finds. (Original posts: Bokeh, DSLR lenses). 9. Make Pop Art from Your Photos Some shots have great subjects, angles, or scenes, but just can't be saved from bad lighting or other mistakes. When that's the case, your saving grace can be Photoshop guru Melissa Clifton's pop-art-style fixes. She's shown us how to Andy-Warhol-Up photos, as well as make zoomed-in-comic-style, Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired pop art from photos both good and bad. If you're not a Photoshop lover, or even owner, you can arrive at a similar bad-shot-as-art result by using Rollip to Polaroid-ize your photo, or use the Poladroid desktop software. (Original posts: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rollip, Poladroid). 8. Convert to Black and White the Right Way It's easy to turn a color image into black and white on a computer, and sometimes that's enough to rescue high-grain, fuzzy shots, like concert photos. Before you hit the switch, though, take Helen Bradley's advice on black-and-white conversion, which can make your shot actually suit the specific strengths of grayscale coloring. Got a specific subject to highlight? Try adding a dash of color to give your shot unique appeal. (Original posts: concerts, conversions, color in b&w). 7. De-Pixelize Graphics and Small Photos Resizing images is grunt work enough—having to deal with pixelated results is just torture. Free webapp VectorMagic can make your graphic-style images into vector art that scales clean and smooth as it's sized up and down. It works better with clean line drawings and small, icon-like photos than full-size shots, but if you can tolerate some loss of detail, it's a lifesaver. (Original post). 6. Make Photos Look Like Miniatures with Tilt-Shift Tools With tilt-shift photography, you can put being 50 rows back from the action to your advantage. A professional lens can run upwards of $1,200 for a very single-use tool, so try some DIY solutions. MAKE shows us a DIY lens that looks like it's made from, of all things, a plunger. There are also two web-based software tilt-shift solutions: Tiltshift Maker and TiltShift—we prefer the latter for its options and control, but the mostly automated Tiltshift Maker also gets the job done in simple fashion. (Original posts: DIY lens, TiltShiftMaker, TiltShift) 5. Use Textures to Liven Up Flat Images For whatever reason, perfectly fine photos can lack definition. Sometimes it's tricks of light and lens, and sometimes it's because Cousin Jeff wore a sweater that just turns out like a blob. Try adding textures to a photo with layering techniques. A scanned sheet of white paper, for example, saved an otherwise washed-out photo in Digital Photography School's example. It's not a save-all, and definitely has potential for abuse, but it's a nice saving grace to have in your mental back pocket. (Original post). 4. Create Stunning and Realistic HDR Photos High dynamic range photos are a world unto themselves, and difficult to pin down in a few sentences. A noble attempt: they make your brights brighter and darks darker, and give a more realistic look to photos. We've previously pointed to a few good guides to shooting and editing in HDR fashion: the Backing Winds' beginner's Photoshop tutorial, Gizmodo's guide to realistic HDR, and a Flickr set by Leviathor that shows how unrealistic HDR can look, if you're not careful with how you combine images. (Original posts: Photoshop, Gizmodo guide, surreal vs. real sets). 3. Sharpen Images the Smart Way As we learned the hard way, giving your images a crisper look requires more than just leaning on the "Unsharp Mask" crutch every time. It does have its uses, though, especially if done the right way. But there's also a more fine-tuned way to sharpen your images, as Cameron Moll explains in a blog post. (Original posts: Unsharp mask, Smart Sharpen). 2. Remove People from Otherwise Perfect Shots Stupid vacationers! Always standing and gawking at the same thing you're trying to capture just perfectly! There are ways around the herd's tendency to wander into your shots. For one, take a whole bunch of images from the same position, with the same settings, and use Photoshop's statistics and stacks tools to remove the people, almost entirely, from your shot. Online tool Tourist Remover does a similar task after you upload multiple photos. No luck with automated filtering? Try removing the background entirely and grabbing what you can from your perfect shot. (Original posts: people-free, Tourist Remover, backgrounds). 1. Craft Panoramas from Regular Shots There's nothing wrong with your run-of-the-mill digicam, but when you want to capture the sweep and scope of a big scene, its small lens can't quite tackle the job. Don't give up, though—switch to manual settings, take a series of shots, and stitch together a panorama with free software. Our own guide relies on the very adaptable and customizable Hugin software, but we've previously pointed at a few good packages for different levels of automation and customization: AutoStitch for the click-and-go method, You Suck at Photoshop's PhotoMerge tutorial for the PS-loving set, and Microsoft's powerful Image Composite Editor for another alternative. (Original posts: AutoStitch, Photomerge, Composite Editor)
What image edits or Photoshop tricks are a regular part of your photo-fixing repertoire? What editing techniques would you like to see covered or explained in the future? We're all ears in the comments.
- Tags:
- Feature
- Top
- Photography
- Photos
- Art
- Digital Photography
- Digital Photos
- Photoshop
- Images
- Lifehacker Top 10
- Image Editing
- Photoshop Tip
June 5 2010, 9:00am | Comments »
-
Top 10 Photo Fixing and Image Editing Tricks [Lifehacker Top 10]
http://lifehacker.com/5555512/top-10-photo-fixing-and-image-editing-tricks
You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.Photo by Jase The Bass. 10. Create Your Own Bokeh Bokeh is a cute name for something you've noticed before, but probably never really pinned down—the gauzy, creamy light points that appear behind the subject that's in drastic focus in a picture. Photo site DIY Photography explains how to harness and control bokeh effects, using a photo lens like a 50mm F/1.8 and creating a small lens cover with just the right kind of hole cut out. Lacking for the right kind of digital lens? The Photojojo blog details an analog-to-digital lens adaptation, perfect for garage sale and eBay finds. (Original posts: Bokeh, DSLR lenses). 9. Make Pop Art from Your Photos Some shots have great subjects, angles, or scenes, but just can't be saved from bad lighting or other mistakes. When that's the case, your saving grace can be Photoshop guru Melissa Clifton's pop-art-style fixes. She's shown us how to Andy-Warhol-Up photos, as well as make zoomed-in-comic-style, Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired pop art from photos both good and bad. If you're not a Photoshop lover, or even owner, you can arrive at a similar bad-shot-as-art result by using Rollip to Polaroid-ize your photo, or use the Poladroid desktop software. (Original posts: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rollip, Poladroid). 8. Convert to Black and White the Right Way It's easy to turn a color image into black and white on a computer, and sometimes that's enough to rescue high-grain, fuzzy shots, like concert photos. Before you hit the switch, though, take Helen Bradley's advice on black-and-white conversion, which can make your shot actually suit the specific strengths of grayscale coloring. Got a specific subject to highlight? Try adding a dash of color to give your shot unique appeal. (Original posts: concerts, conversions, color in b&w). 7. De-Pixelize Graphics and Small Photos Resizing images is grunt work enough—having to deal with pixelated results is just torture. Free webapp VectorMagic can make your graphic-style images into vector art that scales clean and smooth as it's sized up and down. It works better with clean line drawings and small, icon-like photos than full-size shots, but if you can tolerate some loss of detail, it's a lifesaver. (Original post). 6. Make Photos Look Like Miniatures with Tilt-Shift Tools With tilt-shift photography, you can put being 50 rows back from the action to your advantage. A professional lens can run upwards of $1,200 for a very single-use tool, so try some DIY solutions. MAKE shows us a DIY lens that looks like it's made from, of all things, a plunger. There are also two web-based software tilt-shift solutions: Tiltshift Maker and TiltShift—we prefer the latter for its options and control, but the mostly automated Tiltshift Maker also gets the job done in simple fashion. (Original posts: DIY lens, TiltShiftMaker, TiltShift) 5. Use Textures to Liven Up Flat Images For whatever reason, perfectly fine photos can lack definition. Sometimes it's tricks of light and lens, and sometimes it's because Cousin Jeff wore a sweater that just turns out like a blob. Try adding textures to a photo with layering techniques. A scanned sheet of white paper, for example, saved an otherwise washed-out photo in Digital Photography School's example. It's not a save-all, and definitely has potential for abuse, but it's a nice saving grace to have in your mental back pocket. (Original post). 4. Create Stunning and Realistic HDR Photos High dynamic range photos are a world unto themselves, and difficult to pin down in a few sentences. A noble attempt: they make your brights brighter and darks darker, and give a more realistic look to photos. We've previously pointed to a few good guides to shooting and editing in HDR fashion: the Backing Winds' beginner's Photoshop tutorial, Gizmodo's guide to realistic HDR, and a Flickr set by Leviathor that shows how unrealistic HDR can look, if you're not careful with how you combine images. (Original posts: Photoshop, Gizmodo guide, surreal vs. real sets). 3. Sharpen Images the Smart Way As we learned the hard way, giving your images a crisper look requires more than just leaning on the "Unsharp Mask" crutch every time. It does have its uses, though, especially if done the right way. But there's also a more fine-tuned way to sharpen your images, as Cameron Moll explains in a blog post. (Original posts: Unsharp mask, Smart Sharpen). 2. Remove People from Otherwise Perfect Shots Stupid vacationers! Always standing and gawking at the same thing you're trying to capture just perfectly! There are ways around the herd's tendency to wander into your shots. For one, take a whole bunch of images from the same position, with the same settings, and use Photoshop's statistics and stacks tools to remove the people, almost entirely, from your shot. Online tool Tourist Remover does a similar task after you upload multiple photos. No luck with automated filtering? Try removing the background entirely and grabbing what you can from your perfect shot. (Original posts: people-free, Tourist Remover, backgrounds). 1. Craft Panoramas from Regular Shots There's nothing wrong with your run-of-the-mill digicam, but when you want to capture the sweep and scope of a big scene, its small lens can't quite tackle the job. Don't give up, though—switch to manual settings, take a series of shots, and stitch together a panorama with free software. Our own guide relies on the very adaptable and customizable Hugin software, but we've previously pointed at a few good packages for different levels of automation and customization: AutoStitch for the click-and-go method, You Suck at Photoshop's PhotoMerge tutorial for the PS-loving set, and Microsoft's powerful Image Composite Editor for another alternative. (Original posts: AutoStitch, Photomerge, Composite Editor)
What image edits or Photoshop tricks are a regular part of your photo-fixing repertoire? What editing techniques would you like to see covered or explained in the future? We're all ears in the comments.
- Tags:
- Feature
- Top
- Photography
- Photos
- Art
- Digital Photography
- Digital Photos
- Photoshop
- Images
- Lifehacker Top 10
- Image Editing
- Photoshop Tip
June 5 2010, 6:00am | Comments »