Luca's meaningless thoughts

You might already know about the new Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs.

Even when is a good album, I think is by far the less interesting / innovative / emotional from the band (at least from the musical point of view, I didn't payed much attention to the lyrics yet), but I still love their live performance, and I've came across the Unstaged series at the Madison Square Garden and directed by Terry Gilliam. The videos are available in YouTube in HD (many thanks to youtube-dl [*] that let me see the concert without suffering the f*cking Flash Player).

Here is Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), my favourite song from the new album:

for i in h0DpBOYzXcQ 5pp3olGyku0 TtbrY6QrgPw 7vS5crSXJ6k GGdyG_83nX4 \
      DSykB-j_2UQ Q2T-ZAharmY 0L6ZFhZVOx0 CLjrQ3cwzJ4 RdYyYFymH-Y \
      sVW9usMRgNE bjhAP3V1o0w Q7fRvPjKDLs N9WR_eK0Rac bhwdd_01Ots \
      0ozdCLrTrtA diK1tZOXgDk 0ozdCLrTrtA aXuymDSGCko MQvZ4N1RfS8 \
      siFsdInZqC0 MXJi5_yThNY
do
   youtube-dl -f 37 -t "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$i"
done

A través de esteifri llegué a estos de videos del muchacho Newton Faulkner en los que realmente muestra una habilidad sorprendente (me hicieron acordar a Mister Orkester pero solo con una guitarra).

Cover de Teardrop:

Cover de Bohemian Rhapsody:

Cover de Here Comes the Sun:

Si se quedaron con ganas hay una playlist con más videos (pero por lo que vi, estos son los mejores lejos).

The attack of the killer app (6ACV03) is one of the best and geekest episodes of Futurama I've ever seen.

Making fun of iPhone and Twitter is really easy, and done everywhere now days, but Futurama does it in another level, in a level only geeks can enjoy that much. One clear example (leaving aside the title of the episode) is this little jewel:

Fry: Since when is the Internet about robbing people of their privacy?

Bender: August 6th, 1991.

Referencing the announcement of the creation of the WorldWideWeb.

I spent hours laughing at this Zuiikin' English videos.

Empezamos así:

Y terminamos así:

Que se le va a hacer... A chuparla, a seguiarla mamando hasta el 2014.

Youtube agregó un botón a los videos que es una pelotita de fútbol que todo lo que hace es agregarle ruido de cornetas (¿¡ma qué vuvuzela ni vuvuzela!?) de fondo al video.

Genial! Para cagarlos a trompadas...

The CocoRosie sisters are back with a new album, Grey Oceans. After seeing their new video, I guess nobody would wonder why their music is labeled as freak folk.

Weird stuff! =P

It's been some time since I was surprised by a video. It reminds me of videos like Closer, almost any video from Tool, Teardrop, Black Hole Sun and the later Peacebone. One wonders where these people get their imagination (besides hard drugs, of course).

La dama y la muerte

Tales of Mere Existence is a nice series of comics and videos by Lev Yilmaz.

Here is the last animation, which is very close to how I feel about God:

No es un tema nuevo, pero merece toda la difusión posible. Cito una nota del Página 12:

Los veintiséis pesados de Macri

Se especializan en desalojar a indigentes de espacios públicos y de edificios. Su característica es “tener calle”, su legalidad es tenue, sus uniformes son oscuros y sus acciones ya terminaron en la Justicia por varias denuncias.

Habla de la UCEP, o Unidad de Control del Espacio Público, algo así como un grupo de tareas encargado de limpiar a la gente en situación de calle.

Acá les dejo un video tristísimo pero muy claro:

Y acá les dejo otro que se toma las cosas con un poco más de humor pero que no es menos aterrador:

If you are Argentine and like comics and science fiction, you read El Eternauta, but if you are not around here, it's most likely that you didn't (specially because, sadly, I couldn't find any English translation of the comic).

Since I'm lazy, I'll quote Wikipedia to summarize what is it about:

El Eternauta is a science fiction comics series created by Argentine comic strip writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld initially with artwork by Francisco Solano López. It was first published in Hora Cero Semanal from 1957 to 1959.

[...]

The story begins with an extraterrestrial invasion to Earth. A deadly snowfall produced by the invaders covers Buenos Aires wiping out most life in a few hours. Juan Salvo, along with a couple of friends [...] soon find out the true nature of the strange phenomenon and join an improvised resistance army to fight the invaders back. [...]

For us porteños it has a little more magic than other science fiction stories, because we are not used to stories taking place in our city, but I think it's a great story besides that.

Well, the story will hit the big screen soon, so I guess non-Spanish speaking people will be able to see a version of it after all (I'm sure the movie will be subtitled to English). Surprisingly, the director will be Lucrecia Martel, who is characterized by making slow, intensive, dramatic movies, with really dense atmospheres. I think she is an excellent director, with an extremely particular style, which is not usually associated with science fiction movies, which make me even more intrigued about this movie.

Here is an interview with Lucrecia talking about the movie (sorry, Spanish only):

And here is a proof-of-concept of the visual effects (I don't really know if this is really something done for the movie or if it is a fake, so be warned):

The risk is high, I think it could turn up being a complete disaster, or a beauty peace of art. I hope it will turn up to be the latter :)

There is another fan film project on the works theses days called Nevada (in Spanish), which is worth mentioning. You can see a small article about it in English.

El último chiste de XKCD hace referencia a la primera película de Michael Moore (Roger & Me), por lo que me hizo recordarla y pensar: ¿Por qué no recomendarla?

¿Eh? ¿Por qué no? Se las recomiendo.

Luego habrá que ver la nueva, que habla de la crisis financiera de 2007-2009. Si es la mitad de buena que este video ya vale la pena ;)

El viernes 13 de noviembre de 2009, en el Consejo Directivo de la FIUBA (Facultad de Ingeniería de la UBA, por si anda con fiaca de seguir links), un animalito llamado Edgardo Romano, coordinador del Área Inserción Laboral y Pasantías de la SEUBE (Secretaría de Extensión Universitaria y Bienestar Estudiantil) y miembro de la agrupación El Gradiente, golpeó sorpresivamente a un estudiante durante la sesión para elegir Decano. Lamentablemente (para él), quedó grabado en un video.

Una vez el señor Miyagi (que en paz descanse) dijo que si uno puede cazar una mosca con palitos chinos, puede conseguir cualquier cosa. No sé si lo que hizo Emanuel Ginóbili es lo mismo, pero está muy cerca.

Resulta que en medio de un partido apareció un murciélago, y mientras un negro de 2 metros y 100 kilos lo esquivaba como una nena, el hijo de puta del Manu se agazapó y lo cazó de un manotazo. Un gato.

Si no me creen acá tienen el video:

Más allá de que no comparto (la crueldad de matarlo [*] al pedo, pobre murcielaguito, y la crueldad del público de festejar), denota una habilidad inhumana en ese muchacho.

Ahora va a tener que pagar con 8 inyecciones antirabia, así que como dice en su facebook, aprendió la lección y no lo va a hacer más, ya demostró que la habilidad la tiene y que puede conseguir cualquier cosa =)

Here are two very sad videos about wars.

The first is a representation of the battles in the last 1000 years as explosions in a world map. The size of the explosion is proportional to the number of deaths.

I guess it's missing a lot of small battles because you can't see any explosions in very big regions (like Africa, Latin America and India) until some empire tries to conquer them. I'm sorry if I depressed you too much.

The second video at least is cute if you forget what is it really about. Is an animation of food to represent several armed conflicts. Each country is represented by a regional food (you can see the cheat sheet if you get lost).

Found at No Puedo Creer. Lots of interesting stuff there (in Spanish though).

Abro un espacio para la difusión de música experimental, presentado a Ricardo Garmendia, más conocido como El Gaucho Sónico.

8-bit Lego Trip.