Category Archives: Blog

*** Spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched season 4 of Silicon Valley ***

How great is it when life imitates art?

Much of season four of Silicon Valley so far has circled around the boorish charm of entrepreneur Erlich Bachman and his attempt to make something of the young developer Jian-Yang’s octopus recipes app. 

Bachman hastily invested in the app, thinking it had to do with Oculus — not octopus.  

With venture capitalists confused as to why anyone would want an app with eight octopus recipes in it, Bachman seized on Jian-Yang’s lack of English by explaining its not a seafood app, but rather you can “see food,” pivoting the app to become the “Shazam of food” to secure funding. Read more…

More about Apps, Hot Dog, Silicon Valley Season 4, and Watercooler

The dude who crashed the Eurovision stage — who everyone thought was Australian because he was wearing the country’s flag as a cape, but isn’t — appears to be in a lot of trouble.

Ukrainian prankster Vitalii Sediuk mooned the crowd and millions of television viewers on stage during the performance of reigning winner Jamala at the final in Kiev on Saturday night.

Here’s the moment again, if you missed it.  

Sediuk was removed from the stage, and no references were made to the incident by the show’s presenters. Australian fans were reportedly furious following the incident, with concerns that the country would not be invited to compete in Eurovision again. Read more…

More about Watercooler, Australia, Ukraine, Eurovision, and Watercooler

This video is giving us some serious “Do it for the Vine” flashbacks.

Twitter user @TommyFrmBroward uploaded a video of his friend doing an extremely risky stunt for a video and… let’s just say it almost ended very, very badly.

The reckless dude climbed onto the back of a car parked on an obvious slope to show off his video-worthy backflip next to an active road. We’re no physicists, but the flip’s momentum in combination with the slope were clearly too much for the guy, who narrowly avoided falling directly into oncoming traffic.

Watch him unwittingly test his luck right next to fast-moving cars here: Read more…

More about Watercooler, Twitter, Cars, Traffic, and Backflip

NBCUniversal is getting into arts and crafts.

The media conglomerate said this week that it’s buying Craftsy, a DIY tutorial and art supply site, in what Recode reported to be a $230 million deal.

The Denver-based startup merges media and e-commerce with paywalled courses on everything from watercolor painting to “mastering the art of the pizza,” as well as a catalog of crafting kits.

NBC plans to tap Craftsy’s contributing instructors to appear on various shows across the company’s cable and broadcast channels like Bravo’s Top Chef and SyFy’s Face Off. The startup will also use its own production studio to create content for the network. Read more…

More about Nbcuniversal, Craftsy, and Business

Ah, Mother’s Day. It’s a time when our feeds are clogged with people pouring their hearts out for their loved ones, but director Darren Aronofsky couldn’t resist a grotesque tie-in for his upcoming film Mother!

The first cinematic poster for the film, posted on Twitter by Aronofsky on Sunday, features a sullen-looking Jennifer Lawrence with her hands drenched in blood. 

Lawrence also happens to be holding her heart in her hands, seemingly freshly taken out of a gap in her chest. We know Mother! is meant to be a psychological horror film, but just, wow. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Film, Movies, Jennifer Lawrence, and Javier Bardem

The ride-hailing app wars just took another dramatic turn with the announcement that Google’s Waymo self-driving car team will be teaming up with Lyft, Uber’s chief rival. 

This could change everything. 

In a deal that was confirmed by both Waymo and Lyft in a report from The New York Times, the two companies will work together on autonomous vehicle “pilot projects and product development efforts.”

“Waymo holds today’s best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the world’s best transportation,” a Lyft spokeswoman told the Times in a statement on Sunday.   Read more…

More about Google, Uber, Autonomous Cars, Lyft, and Autonomous Vehicles

Fidget spinners are a fun, relaxing fount of mindless entertainment. But are they really more than a cheap toy?

Some experts say no. Despite marketing claims, there’s no research that shows the wildly popular spinners are therapeutic tools for people with anxiety, autism, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 

“I know there’s lots of similar toys … and there’s basically no scientific evidence that those things work across the board,” Scott Kollins, a clinical psychologist and professor at Duke University, told NPR on Sunday.

More about Science, Toys, Teachers, Students, and Psychology

The augmented reality game of whack-a-mole in the popular Black Mirror episode “Playtest” may have seemed like a fascinating look at the future but now it’s real. 

David Robustelli, a virtual reality and augmented reality developer at Amsterdam-based Capitola VR, posted video of a prototype of an AR whack-a-mole game using the Microsoft Hololens.  

In a post on UploadVR, Robustelli explains how the prototype app simulates hitting the moles as they pop up and disappear.

And while this app isn’t coming to most users anytime soon, it’s yet another example of just how hard it’s getting to come up with sci-fi scenarios that aren’t just previews of things we already have in development. Let’s just hope that most of Black Mirror‘s often dystopian tech visions don’t come true. Read more…

More about Microsoft, Virtual Reality, Vr, Sci Fi, and Science Fiction

Reactions to pain medication have a special place on the internet. Eight years and 135 million views later, David After the Dentist is a YouTube classic.

Recently, the BBC was doing a profile on Scotland’s super hospital when they filmed a man being sedated with a powerful drug called ketamine. Some people love to use the term k-hole to describe a disassociated state, but here’s what one actually looks like.

At least this poor fella didn’t have to live through the pain of having his broken ankle reset. Read more…

More about Watercooler, Funny, Bbc, Viral Videos, and Watercooler

Of the myriad ways planet miners and space soldiers have tried to defeat the xenomorphs from Alien a new method from none other than Rick and Morty may hold the key. 

In a new video from Adult Swim, the animated dimension traveling duo encounter a deadly facehugger, the parasite that plants alien eggs in humans. But when the nearly undefeated facehugger locks onto Rick, it’s forced to let go after encountering “all the drugs and alcohol swirling around” in his body. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t a preview from a new episode of Rick and Morty, it’s just a promo for Alien: Covenant, but we’ll take any mashup of the two sci-fi favorites we can get.  Read more…

More about Animation, Rick And Morty, Adult Swim, Alien, and Alien Covenant