Nerdcore

Music

Last Mash-Up Your Bootz Party for 2007 in Berlin!
This weekend it’s the last Mash-Up Your Bootz Party in Berlin for 2007. So all bootleggas & fellas come over and party with us, the last time so young! As Special Guest DJ this month I’m happy to announce that Mister Sushi is playing a special Bootie/Mash-Up Set.

Wired: Warner’s Entire Digital Music Catalog For Sale on Amazon as MP3s
Today, Warner Music Group began selling music on Amazon in the MP3 format without the digital rights management that hampers many of the files sold in iTunes and other online music stores.

Ars Technica: 3 down, 1 to go: Warner Music Group drops DRM
Warner Music has bent beneath the force of the anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe. The label will now offer its complete catalog, DRM-free, through Amazon’s new MP3 store.

BoingBoing: Warner to sell no-DRM MP3s on Amazon
Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out — and that’s the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

The Death of High Fidelity – In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he’s not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Movies

Science Fiction Film Babes Through Time
Sure there are a ton of lists of beautiful women out there, but as a site dedicated to movies, we really felt like we had to have our own. What’s so special about our list? Two things (no, not THOSE two things). One; we are spanning approximately five decades of Science-Fiction babes. Two; for this list, we are sticking only to Sci-Fi Babes from movies.

The Best 19 Movies You Didn’t See in 2007
No one really has enough time (or money) to see every movie released every year, but shamefully too many great films are left in the dust. Sure, maybe you’ll see a couple of those indies that are making the rounds on the year-end top ten lists, but even those critics missed a few good ones. This is about those movies that were phenomenal yet hardly anyone saw, so now we’re giving them one final moment in the spotlight.

Best Horror Movies of all Time
Furchtbar inkompetente Liste. Ich mach’ eine eigene.

The Most Controversial Films of All-Time
The following illustrated list in the next few web pages, in unranked alphabetical order, presents a solid collection of the most controversial films in cinematic history. Entertainment Weekly’s June 16, 2006 issue contained a listing of their top 25 “Most Controversial Movies of All-Time” – included here and indicated with the # numbers after the film title, in this more comprehensive list.

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Design

Innesmouth Beach
The Dread Cthulhu Tries to Relax

Isometrie Honkong

150 years of advertising in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the history of modern mass advertising dates from around 1850. But advertising did not really get off the ground until 1869, when the stamp duty on newspapers and magazines was abolished. From then on, more and more posters and hoardings, advertising such products as Sunlight soap, Van Houten chocolate, Singer sewing machines, Philips light bulbs, Verkade biscuits and Delft salad oil, were to be seen on the streets in ever-growing numbers. Most of these brands still exist and have an advertising history going back over 100 years.

Logo Trends 2007
At LogoLounge.com we look at A LOT of logos and see plenty of trends: Some are aesthetic, some conceptual, and some cultural. As the internet’s largest database of logos – over 50,000 to date – you can’t help notice the evolution of design – and trends.
For instance, we have seen many more 3-D logos that are designed to be in motion, never still or flat. These designs have completely shaken the earthly bonds of CMYK and exist only in ethereal RGB: The old logo design rules just don’t apply to them.

Europe’s Manga Mania
While Western comics such as Donald Duck, Tintin, and Asterix long dominated the European market, young readers like Malis are looking eastward. The Japan External Trade Organization says German and French sales of manga totaled $212.6 million last year, making Europe the largest consumer of manga outside Japan.

The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available
Now that blogs are being used by groups of people (be it businesses, organizations, even schools) just as much as they are individuals, WordPress theme designers have felt that need and have created a number of quality magazine–style themes in response. Some of them are good, some are better, and some are simple outstanding. What follows is a look at them, free or otherwise, and what you need to know before grabbing them.

Und so.

A Brief History of The Home Video Game Consoles
In 1973, after the success of the original PONG coin-op, an Atari engineer by the name of Harold Lee came up with the idea of a home PONG unit. Since the PONG coin-op that Alan Alcorn designed was nothing more than the game board connected to an actual television set, he thought it would be possible to scale it down a bit and modify it for use at home.

Portal in LEGO

Neo-Ruins: Lithographs of post-apocalyptic Tokyo
Hisaharu Motoda’s “Neo-Ruins” series of lithographs depict the cityscape of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar streets lie deserted, the buildings are crumbling and weeds grow from the broken pavement.

Top of the Swaps: P2P’s Most-Traded Movies, TV and Songs of 2007
If you want a true snapshot of what people are watching and whom they’re listening to online, look no further than the file-sharing underground. With Hollywood sweating over piracy and record labels crying over losses, activity on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has emerged as the most reliable barometer for determining what’s hot and what’s not among the most tech-savvy media consumers.

Arresting images of Benazir Bhutto’s last moments, including some shots of the suicide bomb going off nearby shortly after she was shot.

Some People Can Hear A Color Or Smell A Sound
Surprising as it may seem, there are people who can smell sounds, see smells or hear colors. Actually, all of as, at some point in our lives, have had this skill (some authors affirm that it is common in newborns). This phenomenon, called “synaesthesia” – from the Greek “syn” (with) and “aisthesis” (sensation) – consists of the pairing of two bodily senses by which the perception of a determined stimulus activates a different subjective perception with no external stimulus (in science, the evoker stimulus is called inducer and the additional experience concurrent).

Planetary Imagery: 30 Years From Voyager Spacecraft
Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977 atop a Titan rocket with a Centaur-6 upper stage. Still operational for 30 years, Voyager 1 is more than 103.2 astronomical units away from the Sun. Astronomers believe it has now entered the solar system’s heliosheath — the termination shock region between the sun’s solar wind and interstellar space. Signals from Voyager 1 take 13 hours to reach Earth, traveling at the speed of light.

The Future: A Retrospective
In May 2007 I found a book in a used bookstore called Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams and Harriet Bernstein. It was published in 1989, and it described about 250 consumer products that should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000. It was based on interviews with the people who were working on these products. It made concrete predictions, with dates and estimated prices. The predictions were more or less wrong.

Erster Schritt auf dem Weg zur Simulation des menschlichen Gehirns
Das Blue Brain-Projekt, das unter der Leitung von Henry Markram an der École Polytechnique in Lausanne mit Unterstützung von IBM 2005 gestartet wurde, hat sein erstes Ziel erreicht.