Weebles Wobble
Full Fathom Five Fiction Contest
Full Fathom Five Digital Hosts Fiction Writing Contest
By Maryann Yin
Full Fathom Five Digital, an eBook imprint headed by A Million Little Pieces author James Frey, is hosting a fiction contest. One grand prize winner will receive $10,000.
The judges intend to name four finalists; those participants will be offered a guaranteed publishing deal. Depending on the quality of the submissions, the organizers may present a publishing contract to non-finalists as well.
Only manuscripts that contain 50,000 words or more will be accepted; writers can turn in either original unpublished stories or self-published books. A deadline has been set for November 30, 2014. Follow this link to learn about all the rules.
Video Games Are Good
from The San Jose Mercury News
Blasting away enemies in video games boosts brain’s learning
Blowing away enemy soldiers and aliens may be good for the brain, as researchers have found that fast-paced action video games improve a player’s learning ability.
People who play video games such as Activision Blizzard’s “Call of Duty” are better able to multitask, perform cognitive tasks such as rotating objects in their minds and focus and retain information better than non-players, said Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York. They also have better vision. The reason is the games help people learn, even those who aren’t regular players.
“People who play action video games get better much faster,” said Bavelier, who has a joint appointment at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The skills are seemingly unrelated to each other and hard to practice, she said.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains the diverse benefits that stem from faster learning. The insights from the study may be used to improve education or to help people with strokes or other brain injuries.
Players were better able to predict what was coming next, even when they were asked to identify patterns that had nothing to do with the game. Non-gamers also improved after researchers assigned them to play a game like “Call of Duty” for as long as two hours a day, five times a week for two months. The benefits lasted as long as a year.
Insomniac
Pasquale Rotella: “When People Read My Book About SFX It Will Blow Their Minds”
You could say that Pasquale Rotella is America’s answer to ID&T founder Duncan Stutterheim. In 1992, the same year that Duncan threw his first party in Zaandam, Netherlands, Pasquale organized his first illegal rave in Los Angeles. Just like ID&T, Rotella’s Insomniac Events has grown into a dance empire in the last twenty years, organizing events for hundreds of thousands of people.
Yet there’s an important difference between the two: ID&T is now part of SFX, and Insomniac is part of Live Nation – two competing music giants, both intent on world domination in the dance scene. During Amsterdam Dance Event a few weeks ago, we talked to Rotella about his role in LA’s rave scene, his plans to bring Electric Daisy Carnival to Europe, and his book that will come out in May.
THUMP: When did you start organizing events in LA?
Pasquale Rotella: There was already a lively underground warehouse scene in LA in the late 80s. But when the riots happened in 1992, the police started shutting down all the illegal parties. Most of the promoters that remained were really shady. Sometimes they’d print flyers for fake parties, where you had to drive two hours to get there, only to find out that there was no party. The only parties that were still going were a few grisly afterparties where drugs like crystal meth entered the scene.
It had lost its shine. I missed the vibe of the old raves. But then I went to England and got really inspired. When I came back to LA, I threw my very first rave. My second rave, Insomniac, was exactly how I had pictured it. It was an illegal rave in a warehouse on the infamous Crenshaw Blvd. That was known as a really bad neighborhood, but the party was amazing. I decided to turn Insomniac into a weekly event, and after that it really took off. At first we’d have about 300 people there, but that quickly grew to 12,000 every week.
Sam Jaeger To Lumen
Sam Jaeger To Star In TNT Pilot ‘Lumen’
As Parenthood is wrapping its six-season run on NBC, original cast member Sam Jaeger is segueing to a new drama project. He has been tapped for a lead role in the TNT drama pilot Lumen, written by Chris Black and directed by Joe Johnson.
In Lumen, the famous author of a best-selling series of fantasy books suddenly disappears, and a family of four finds themselves transported to the mystical alternate world that inspired her work. Jaeger will play Michael Hartman, the stepfather of 16-year-old Charlie whose obsession with finding the author thrusts his family into the surreal world of Lumen.
Lumen hails from TNT Original Productions, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, Full Fathom Five and ABC Signature Studios, with Johnson, Black, Amblin’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey as well as Full Fathom Five’s James Frey and Todd Cohen exec producing. Filming begins January 12 in New Zealand.
American Gothic
CBS is developing a family sudser with Amblin TV and former “Good Wife” scribe Corinne Brinkerhoff.
Brinkerhoff is set to write the script and exec produce, as part of her overall deal with CBS Television Studios. Amblin TV’s Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank and Full Fathom Five’s James Frey and Todd Cohen are set as exec producers.
Not to be confused with the Eye’s 1995 series of the same name, “American Gothic” follows a prominent Boston family, struggling to redefine itself after a chilling discovery implicates their recently deceased patriarch in a series of murders spanning decades, all while under the mounting suspicion that one of them may have been his accomplice.
I Spy With My Default Eye
A Creepy Website Is Streaming From 73,000 Private Security Cameras
by
It shouldn’t be so easy to peer into a stranger’s bedroom, much less hundreds of strangers’ bedrooms. But a website has collected the streaming footage from over 73,000 IP cameras whose owners haven’t changed their default passwords. Is this about highlighting an important security problem, or profiting off creepy voyeurism—or both?
Insecam claims to feature feeds from IP cameras all over the world, including 11,000 in the U.S. alone. A quick browse will pull up parking lots and stores but also living rooms and bedrooms. “This site has been designed in order to show the importance of the security settings,” the site’s about page says. But it’s also clearly running and profiting off ads.
Susan Sollins (Art21) Gone
Susan Sollins, a Creator of PBS’s ‘Art21’ Series, Dies at 75
Susan Sollins, an art curator who took avant-garde exhibitions to small communities across the country and produced an award-winning PBS television series aimed at demystifying and popularizing contemporary art, died on Oct. 13 at her home in Rye, N.Y. She was 75.
Ms. Sollins first came to public attention in the 1970s as a founder of Independent Curators Incorporated, a small nonprofit organization that produced traveling art exhibitions — “a museum without walls,” as she called it — featuring both renowned and emerging contemporary artists.
She and her co-founder, Nina Castelli Sundell, who died in August, curated or coordinated hundreds of exhibitions over the next two decades, introducing new ideas and revisiting old ones — Pop Art, Conceptualism, Deconstructivism — for audiences in small cities and university towns throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe.
The project for which Ms. Sollins is best known is “Art21,” or “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” a four-part series about contemporary art and artists that PBS generally broadcasts every two years. Now in its seventh season, “Art21” presents artists discussing themselves and their work in an unmediated way. Ms. Sollins conducted the interviews from behind the camera but was never heard in the finished documentaries.
She and a partner, Susan Dowling-Griffiths, began working on the project in 1997. It was first broadcast in September 2001.
Is it real pork?
This Is How McDonald’s Actually Makes Its Infamous McRib Sandwiches
If there is one thing we know about people who eat fast food, it’s that they like to know exactly how that pile of delicious hot garbage is made.
Actually, no. That’s not correct. We do not want to see how Taco Bell puts Flamin’ Hot Fritos into their burritos; all we care about is the fact that they are there at all.
But McDonald’s has this whole new video series that teaches its customers all about how the food is made. Mostly it’s just a big initiative to prove NO PINK SLIME HERE. The company recently showed the step-by-step process that goes into making a hamburger patty, but the newest video is truly something special.
It’s the origin story of the McRib sandwich. It’s like Batman Begins, but starring the fast food item that sort of looks like a rack of ribs in BBQ sauce but tastes like pudding?
Why CFC Aerosols Were Banned
Robot Robot
City Worker Gets 20-Day Suspension for Using Robot Voice to Answer Phone
Thinkstock
NEW YORK CITY — A longtime city Health Department worker was suspended 20 days without pay for answering customer-service calls in a robot voice.
Ronald Dillon, a computer specialist for the agency’s IT help desk who assists co-workers and the public with tech-related problems, repeatedly channeled his inner Siri by talking in a “deliberately robotic fashion” when he fielded calls — despite his boss telling him to stop, according to an Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings decision.
Representatives for the Health Department said during a disciplinary hearing before Administrative Law Judge Kara Miller that Dillon talked in the phony voice on at least five occasions between February and April 2013.
Miller’s decision says that during the hearing the Health Department played a recording of Dillon speaking to a customer in a “slow, monotone and over-enunciated manner” and saying, “You have reached the Help Desk. This is Mr. Dillon. How may I help you?”
His droid imitation was apparently good enough to fool callers.
One confused customer who spoke to Dillon later called back and told another Health Department worker that she thought “there was a new automated answering system and had hung up when she heard ‘the robot’ answer the phone because she needed to speak to a human about her issues,” the decision says.
Endgame Straits
End game in mind
The latest book from James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton will keep readers busy deciphering the codes within, writes Stuart Danker
ENDGAME: The Calling is the latest novel by authors James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. The duo have numerous bestselling titles between them, namely A Million Little Pieces and I Am Number Four (Frey), and the Full Fathom Five series (Johnson-Shelton).
I recently had the opportunity to interview Frey in conjunction with the launch of his book. “Yeah, there are writers who tend to procrastinate. I do it sometimes. But to get going again, I just keep reminding myself that writing is also a job, and I have to work like everyone else,” he tells me.
He works on the premise that a few pages a day is all he needs to be happy with, and it is a pretty effective method, seeing as how he’s just put another book on the shelves.
For someone whose works have been adapted to visual media, Frey confides that he doesn’t always write with the intention of having his books translated for the silver screen. “The book is always the most important thing. I’ll never know if something will get made, so you have to assume the book will live only as a book.”
Endgame: The Calling takes readers on a journey through myriad cultures and places. Suffice to say, it would have entailed a huge amount of research to get things right. Frey credits the web as his source of research, saying that writing this book would not have been possible without the use of the Internet. As someone who combines more modern forms of media and marketing with traditional print, Frey definitely knows how to utilise the Internet to its maximum potential.
Happy Halloween
Good clown, real clown, funny clown
Clowns are not scary
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NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) – Fox 5 continues to receive reports of scary clowns popping up all over New York City: in movies and television shows and at Halloween parties near you. Now, the World Clown Association wants you to know who the real clowns are.
“How we doing? How we doing?” a clown wearing a red hat, baggy yellow paints and a matching vest covered in stars and drama masks said in greeting as we approached his home.
Good clown, real clown, funny clown, call College Point’s Cido the Clown what you like. But when you see his red nose, painted cheeks and over-sized shoes pedaling right for you on a tiny bicycle (which he demonstrated for us), he asks you not run away in terror.
“I can’t possibly be an evil clown!” Cido said, screwing up his face into a grimace. “I try to make my face angry and you’ll still laugh.”
The World Clown Association, for which Cido serves as Mid-Atlantic director, wants the rest of us to distinguish between real clowns like Cido who try to make us laugh and horror clowns like Pennywise from Stephen King’s “It” who try to make their creators some money.
“You walk in a room and people say: ‘It! Here comes It!'” Cido said. “Well, you know what? There are clowns out there that make me scared. I look at them and I’m like: ‘Wow.'”
Endgame Gold Reveal @ Caesar’s Palace
Woo-hoo!! Orgy-Chat Is Back!
The dream of the ’90s is alive in Facebook Rooms
Ah, the 1990s: The grunge music, the overabundance of flannel, the anonymous chat rooms you explored on your 28.8 dial-up modem. Facebook is reviving at least one of those blasts from the past with its new standalone chat app, Rooms.
The app, released Thursday and currently only available for iPhones, lets users create private chat rooms to post text — just like the good ol’ days — along with photos and videos, in a nod to the Instagram generation.
Rooms was developed by Facebook Creative Labs, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s a Facebook product just by looking at it — you don’t need a Facebook account to log in, just an anonymous user name and an optional email address.
Users are able to create a room based on the topic of their choosing (but come on, we all know it’ll be used mostly for sex chats); choose a theme, colors and presentation; invite guests; and moderate content.
BT TORONTO – James Frey on Endgame: The Calling
U.S. Government Prepares for “Endgame”
U.S. Gov Prepares For “Endgame” Nightmare Scenario?
By Susan Duclos / Allnewspipeline.com
We have all seen headline after headline about a variety of current events which make it seem like the MSM is reporting what is occurring, but these events are being reported separately without any attempt whatsoever to connect the dots of what we are seeing. The previous reports include the US government purchasing 160,000 specially made Ebola HAZMAT suits; Small towns receiving orders for body bags and HAZMAT suits; and Barack Obama’s presidential executive orders, specifically ones dealing with “quarantines.”
More recent reports include, but are not limited to; The creation of Ebola SWAT teams; The US military begins its Ebola “rapid-response teams; The Veterans Administration setting up Ebola wards in Puerto Rico expecting an influx of Ebola patients, Tampa Bay area VA hospitals training for Ebola cases; Mandatory quarantine measures in New York and New Jersey for high risk travelers from Ebola infected zones; and Chris Christie hinting that mandatory quarantines will soon be nationwide.
Zaouli de Manfla, centre-ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire
It Is A Great Day For America
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Canceled by TLC
Joey Skladany/TLC
Here Comes cancellation for Honey Boo Boo. E! News can confirm TLC has pulled the plug on the reality series following former kid pageant star Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson and her family. The news comes after reports that Mama June (June Shannon) was dating a convicted child molester.
“TLC has cancelled the series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and ended all activities around the series, effective immediately,” the network said in a statement. “Supporting the health and welfare of these remarkable children is our only priority. TLC is faithfully committed to the children’s ongoing comfort and well-being.”
MORE: Mama June speaks out about alleged relationship
Mama June posted the above video on Facebook confirming TLC will not produce any more episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and thanking fans for their support. She also reiterates claims that she is not dating Mark McDaniel.
Summoning The Demon
Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
Musk was so caught up on artificial intelligence that he missed the audience’s next question. “Sorry can you repeat the question, I was just sort of thinking about the AI thing for a second,” he said.
Original Liberace Korla Pandit
Before there was Liberace, there was Korla Pandit (literally). Korla Pandit had a daily afternoon music TV show in LA back in the 1950s where he played his unique percussive style of Hammond organ while mystical cloud projections passed in the background and the camera focused in on his dreamy hypnotic eyes.
So dreamy & hypnotic, in fact, that wealthy women started sending him really expensive gifts, like grand pianos. Rumors began to circulate that Pandit was actually hypnotizing women thru the TV & the concern got so great that the station cancelled him & he was replaced by an up & coming pianist – Liberace.
Taking The Tri-State Down The Rabbit Hole
Author James Frey Talks About His Latest Project
ENDGAME is the interactive project led by international bestselling author James Frey who is the creator of the ENDGAME novels. Together with Google’s Niantic Labs and Twentieth Century Fox, ENDGAME will be a real-world mobile adventure game, creating a unified, immersive world that moves seamlessly from books to games to movies, with an accompanying real-world, multimillion-dollar treasure hunt to bring people in even closer. In the ENDGAME book is an interactive puzzle comprised of clues that will lead to the location of a hidden key. The first eligible reader to solve the puzzle for the first book and find the key will win $500,000 dollars’ worth of gold.
Aluminum Crotch Cool
Men’s boxers promise to block ‘harmful’ cellphone rays
Manhattan-based Belly Armor is selling RadiaShield boxer briefs designed to shield against the radiation emitted by cellphones and other mobile devices. Photo: Belly Armor
You wanna know what comes between you and your Calvins? Radiation!
Belly Armor — which claims its products protect pregnant women from harmful rays emitted by laptops and other gadgets — is pitching a product to men concerned about the effects of cellphone radiation on their fertility.
The Manhattan company branched into the menswear department this month with RadiaShield boxer briefs, which promise “to protect men’s reproductive organs and maintain fertility health.”
The high-tech skivvies, which go on sale Thursday, come with a thin layer of aluminum-like silver in the crotch area to shield little swimmers, the company claims on its site.
Bath
Girl With A Pearl Banksy
Banksy Parodies Girl With a Pearl Earring in New Painting
Recent reports of the artist’s arrest are a hoax
The famous and elusive street artist Banksy has parodied Johannes Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring in a new painting in the English city of Bristol. The artist posted a picture of the work, reportedly titled Girl with a Pierced Eardrum, to his website.
The painting, photographed from different angles on the site, features an outdoor alarm box as the woman’s earring, the BBC reports. Banksy previously graced Bristol with the painting Mobile Lovers earlier this year.
Support PAINTED NAILS
Help Save These Dogs, Please.
from Adrienne S.
San Simon, AZ rescue relief effort
By Nadine | October 11, 2014 | Comments (2)
On 9/28 I visited a man and his wife who have spent the past several years picking up stray dogs and dogs needing homes. This man is a disabled veteran who does not receive enough income to support the situation he has now found himself in. He is unable to afford proper vet care, (spaying/neutering, vaccinations or general medical) or food. Because of this, and despite his efforts to keep them separated by chaining them, they have been breeding and increasing in numbers. After speaking to this man, I’ve come to realize this is a situation of him not being able to turn his back on dogs that have been dumped at the local truck stop or stray. He is more than willing to let the dogs go to a BETTER situation.
He had 51 dogs of which I removed 10 that day and 9 more have since also gone to rescue. Boxer Luv Rescue, Cruz’s Crusaders and AZ Care have taken in dogs but I believe they said there are still 22 outside on chains and most he is willing to part with. There are also 8 (possibly more) inside the house. He has tried to create shaded areas for all of them and they appear to be healthy aside from one with a growth under his left ear who is in need of vet care. I did not enter the home but many of the ones indoors have never been outside or have not been outdoors in many years.
I DESPERATELY need help from rescue groups given the severity of this situation. Please PM me on Facebook “A Voice For Arizona Shelter Dogs” if you are able to help these dogs. Thank you
What do you get when you cross two writers, Google, and three MIT Ph.D graduates?
James Frey’s ‘Endgame: The Calling’ Puzzle And 6 Experimental YA Novels That Twist How We Think of Books
What do you get when you cross two writers, Google, and three MIT Ph.D graduates? A YA book that is about to start a real-life treasure hunt. James Frey, in conjunction with his co-author Nils Johnson-Shelton, created Endgame: The Calling (HarperCollins) as an armchair treasure hunt, a novel that would include secret codes and clues to the location of — wait for it — a key that will unlock a bulletproof glass case filled with $500,000 worth of gold coins.
I’ll pause while you run to go buy the book.
OK, now that your Goonies-style treasure mapping supplies are in stock, there’s more. It’s not going to be easy. Those three MIT Ph.Ds? They are the ones that designed the puzzle and hid the key, so I hope your math skills are top-notch. And Google Niantic built the accompanying mobile game. This is no nonsense.
And, yes, I have read the book, but no, I am not already halfway around the world digging in abandoned wells, because my copy did not have the final puzzle. No hints. No spoilers. It’s up to you.
The story within Endgame: The Calling follows 12 teenagers who are all fighting to save their line of the human race in a game against each other. They’re solving riddles, as well, and the one who finds the key will survive. The other 11 and the rest of their heritage lines will be extinct. So, yes, their stakes are higher than yours are.
The teenagers’ story is a page-turner in itself, so just make sure you don’t pass by those clues too quickly.
Frey isn’t the first writer to test the bounds of what readers consider a novel. In the adult world, we have loads of experimental fiction from people like Shaun Tan, Italo Calvino, Ali Smith, and others. In YA, it may be more rare, but these six authors are stepping up to the plate with some novel (I had to) takes on creating books.
Birdman
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No – it’s a mystery man flying past an Airbus full of passengers as it flew over Macclesfield at 3,500ft
By Thomas Burrows for MailOnline
The man whizzed within 100 metres of the plane over Macclesfield and left pilots baffled (stock image)
Pilots on a holiday jet were left stunned when a ‘flying man’ whizzed past their aircraft at 3,500 feet.
The mystery man flew within 100 metres of the plane and left the pilots baffled as to how he was moving through the air, as neither could see a canopy suspending him.
There was also no sign of him on the radar and further checks failed to reveal any paragliders, parachutists or balloonists in the area at the time.
He appeared from nowhere as the Airbus 320 passed Macclesfield while it was coming in to land at Manchester Airport and has been dubbed the ‘Superman of Macclesfield’.
The Airprox Board, which looks in to near misses, said: ‘They first sighted the object a few hundred metres in the 11 o’clock position 200 to 300ft above.
‘It passed down the left-hand side of the aircraft at 100 to 200m.
‘The crew only saw it fleetingly, there was no time to take avoiding action and they based their assumptions on it being a person under a canopy. But neither can remember seeing a canopy.’