As a musician, I entered the world of jazz kind of sideways. I use the term “musician” a little loosely here; I’m more of a songwriter, and consider my level of musicianship merely “functional”. I also use the phrase “entered the world of” fairly loosely; although I have a definite gift for listenable improvisation, I’m hardly what I’d call a “jazz musician”. Here’s an example of an actual jazz musician:

My first foray into the world of “jazz” was a result of listening to the artists on the ECM label as a teen, while maybe occasionally smoking marijuana and jamming to the LP’s on my guitar. While many of the label’s artists were competent “classic jazz” musicians, a fair number of them were doing stuff that probably qualifies more as experimental music than jazz. Part of what jazz is supposed to be all about is not knowing exactly what’s going to happen, and this is nowhere more likely to happen than when you, for instance, put a Norwegian soprano sax player on a beach with a windharp. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s dabblings were some of my favorites, and were amongst a number of influences (like listening to Brian Eno and Brand X) that shaped my approach to music.

Some Examples of “Jazz” that Influenced Me:

All of which helped me become something of a dope when it comes to my knowledge of “traditional jazz”. I have friends who are terrible musicians – and maybe even have what I consider to be terrible taste in music – who have a much more encyclopedic knowledge of who played what with whom and what the lineage of it all is. Probably my main connection with a jazz great is that when I play golf (which is never) I use the words “Dexter Gordon” to pace my swing.

Behind the Scenes of “Well I should have…”

Which is why I immediately fell in love with the idea behind Jon Benjamin’s  new album Well, I Should Have…*. If you know who Benjamin is at all, you probably know him as the voice of Archer, or might at least recognize his voice from other animated shows like Bob’s Burgers or Dr. Katz. I say “fell in love with the idea behind”, because, well, the album is actually pretty terrible. But the dry ironic humor at work here is brilliant, and let’s face it: to an inexperienced ear, this may actually sound like visionary jazz piano work. We’ll let you decide. The limited edition vinyl version sold out pretty quickly, but you can still get the album on Amazon.

NPR also did a fun segment about the release.

The post Jon Benjamin (Voice of Sterling Archer) Did a Jazz Album. Here’s Why I Love It. appeared first on Innoculous.com.

No more sleepless nights agonizing over how many eggs are in the fridge, with the Quirky Egg Minder Wink App Enabled Smart Egg Tray

The idea of technology overtaking your life and destroying it has been the dystopian theme of science fiction stories since before the genre really existed, beginning with stories like the 1909 novel The Machine Stops, and carving out its place as a near-cliché in films like Logan’s Run, THX 1138, Blade Runner, and Brazil. I’ve always felt Brazil covered the topic best, with its failing toasters, anachronistic technology, labyrinthine plumbing, and its eerie prediction of terrorist bombings as a daily occurrence met with nonchalance.

Well, the future is here, as they say. People are already (perhaps reasonably) freaking out about the possibilitities of self-driving-cars-gone-wrong. But interestingly, the least of your worries is the car-run-amok-in-traffic scenario that most folks envision. No, according to the experts, what you should be worried about is driverless car bombs and getaway cars. Like most things though, the terrifying realities of the future tend to play out in much more mundane, insidious ways. You know, like texting. So let’s take a look at a few ways the internet is invading your life, in ways you never expected. And in many cases, don’t need or want it to.

PLACES YOU DON’T NEED THE INTERNET

Your Butt

For most people, the internet hasn’t even entered their homes, but here it is already trying to make its way into your butt! To be fair, the description for the Kinsa Smart Thermometer says it’s for oral, rectal, or underarm use. Why is it that when we see a thermometer, we immediately think of butts? On a side note, this one of course immediately made me think of Eddie Murphy’s Boogie In Your Butt.

Your Vagina

The weirdest thing about this internet invasion is that for some reason the BABYPOD  is hardwired. So why do you need a BABYPOD? According to the producer of the product, it’s all about “the difference between music via the vagina and via the abdomen”. We’ll spare you all the cheap shots about including songs like Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver on your playlist, because pictures speak a thousand words, and this video says the rest.

We’re not sure what’s happening in this image, but we suspect they’ve lost contact and are trying to locate the speaker:

Your Crockpot

It’s 10:10am. Your stew is slowly cooking. It’s 10:15am. Your stew is slowly cooking. It’s 10:20am “THE FEATURE YOU ARE TRYING TO USE IS ON A NETWORK RESOURCE THAT IS UNAVAILABLE”. It kind of ruins the whole idea of slow-cooking if you watch over the crockpot like a new parent holding a mirror to their baby’s mouth to make sure they’re breathing. We also wonder if the bizarre quantum “watched pot never boils” phenomena also happens over wifi, or if this somehow nullifies it. Find out yourself with a Crock-Pot Smart Wifi-Enabled WeMo 6-Quart Slow Cooker

Your Eggs

Bags under your eyes from the stress of worrying all day and waking thrice nightly to check on how many eggs are in your fridge? The Quirky Egg Minder Wink App Enabled Smart Egg Tray might just change your life. But don’t take it from us, here’s an actual user review:

Your Diaper

Have you heard of Amazon Dash? Having a handy pushbutton mounted on your washing machine that lets you order more Tide automatically is actually a pretty darn clever idea. But we don’t know if it makes as much sense for say, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and if you’re wearing your last pair of Depends when you say to yourself “Oh crap, I better order some Depends”, it may be a little too late.

Your Bathroom Scale

As of this writing, there are over 2,600 positive reviews for the Fitbit Aria WiFi Smart Scale, but as far as we can tell, its real usefulness lies in the fact that it’s an easy way to watch your cats‘ weight (all three of them), and without them knowing:

Your Baby Monitor

Oops. Looks like we’re too late. The soul-less consciousness of the internet seems to have already taken control of this child. Don’t let the same thing happen to your kid, harden those security settings before you get hacked like these folks.

Under Your Desk

Probably only second to chewed gum, the internet is near the top of the list of things you don’t want to find under your desk. Just ask the staff at Daily Telegraph who did, and immediately demanded its removal. The paper claimed it was only trying to improve energy efficiency, but OccupEye bills itself as a way to condense workspaces to save money, with little mention of eco-concerns.

Your Clothes

Looking for all the world like a Health Goth version of the sex suits in Zero Theorem, the TeslaSuit is still just a KickStarter pitch for a gaming suit. But imagine the possibilities for hackers once they have access to actually controlling your bodily sensations.

_{If you want to keep up on the latest in what you don’t need internet in, you might want to follow @internetofshit on Twitter}

The post Places You May Not Need (Or Want) The Internet appeared first on Innoculous.com.

If you’re into loop-and-sample based music in the vein of say, Deep Forest or Kutiman, and you haven’t checked out Pogo, you’re in for a treat. Pogo is the stage name of Australian mashup/music artist Nick Bertke, who brilliantly slices up familiar films ranging from Disney classics & Pixar blockbusters like Snow White and Up, to classics and cult faves like The Apartment and Pulp Fiction, and then reassembles the pieces into evocative, catchy, surprisingly melodic tunes, many of which clock in at around two minutes.

Much of Pogo’s work owes its musicality and atmosphere to the fact that rather than relying on a lot of pitch-shifting and time compression to create a composition, he takes a lot of care to select pieces of dialog or even foley sounds that have a more inherent musicality, and typically builds the work around those pieces, rather than banging them into place to suit a preconceived idea. The resulting tunes often have a very evocative and genuinely musical quality that most mashup artists and their loop-based songs fail too achieve.

Below are our picks from Pogo’s catalog, which is rather extensive. Many of the pieces are on YouTube, as you see below, but one test for us as we assembled these selections was “is it listenable without the video or sentiments about the source?” We think most of these tracks are, and most of them are available on Amazon.

Forget

Female dialog samples from films as disparate as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mary Poppins, and Jungle Book, woven into a surprisingly musical and haunting melody. GET THE SONG

J’adore Juin

I may be a little biased, since The Apartment is one of my favorite films, but this is genius. It captures an odd retro-future vibe of the sixties, and is surprisingly melodic, given the dry delivery of much of the dialog in the source film. GET THE SONG

Nicey Nicey

It’s almost like the British series The Mighty Boosh  was created merely so Pogo would have a video to make. The droning tenor of the creepy moon lends a perfect anchor to some very melodic “Nicey Nicey Zoo Zoo” GET THE SONG

Wishery

If you sent a robot from the 22nd century back to the 1930’s, this is the message it might return. The plaintive “talkie” vocalising of Snow White is somehow all at once eerie and uplifting. GET THE SONG

Jaaam

Probably more Will Smith than most people can handle in three minutes, and yet still pretty charming. Who would think “Arnold Schwarzenegger” could make for such a catchy component of a refrain? With a bonus Hawaiian slide break. GET THE SONG

Joberg Jam

A sort of one-note acoustic-afro-boogie comprised of material from footage for the “World Remix” project. GET THE SONG

Kenya Chords

A charming and upbeat riff created with Good Makers Films, as part of the Good Makers initiative to spread joy and creativity throughout Kenyan communities. GET THE SONG

Just Blue Fairy

You don’t have to have an appreciation for Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence to enjoy the bittersweet cheerfulness of this tune. It’s probably suitable that the video literally shows the actual digital source of the sound. GET THE SONG

Upular

This one has that irresistible perkiness that infects so many of the Pogo mashups, and at its current 10 million+ views, is one of the most popular, due certainly in part to the popularity of Up, the movie.

Lead Breakfast

A fuckin’ good milk-shake! Samuel Jackson, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Pulp Fiction. Need we say more? Warning: after watching this, the phrases “god damn”, “fuck me”, and “you’ll be a woman soon” will be running through your head for the rest of the day. GET THE SONG

Behind the Scenes, & In Front of the Camera

With some artists who establish their reputation via the web, you may go years without learning much about them. Pogo stepped in front of the camera and was on social media a bit in 2013, but mostly has since mostly retreated to his digital domain, expressing that he felt the engagement was having a negative effect on his creations.

Snow White remixed live

Aside from the brilliantly selected and edited fairy voices that make this tune bubble, one of my favorite things about this clip is that I’m pretty sure that I (and I bet you) occasionally find myself dancing this clownishly in the privacy of home. Bravo, Pogo, for letting it all hang out.

Wizard Of Meh

Here’s another of Pogo’s rare on-screen appearances, demonstrating an impressive willingness to ham it up. If you don’t like the visuals, look away, it’s actually amongst the better mashups, if a bit too short. GET THE SONG

How He Does It

Pogo is surprisingly open about his process, even going so far as to create step-by-step how to’s that get as detailed as setting up the sound card on your Mac! The clip below is one of many that NoFilmSchool has rounded up here.

The post The Best of Mashup Genius Pogo appeared first on Innoculous.com.

Don’t Fly TOO Far – You only have 23 minutes of battery!

If – like many of us – you’ve been finding the idea of self-driving cars taking over the world a bit horrifying, you’ll be delighted to learn that there’s a company that envisions doing the same thing in the sky. Apparently cluttering the heavens with thousands of unmanned drones (they make the Ghost Drone) isn’t enough for the makers of the EHANG 184, they want to do it with manned drones too. If EHANG pulls it off, they’ll be like the “Uber of lift”. Or is that the “Lyft of Jetpacks”? We discussed being the “Uber of X” not long ago, and if you could create a self-piloted, self-navigating personal quadrocopter at a reasonable price, you’d definitely be the Uber of something. And that seems to be EHANG’s plan. A slightly strange plan, if you walk it through, but hey. We’re not here to stifle innovation. Bring on the Blade Runner flying cars! More below.

If you’re not familiar with the company, EHANG is an IndieGogo-funded startup that created the Ghost Drone, which is pitched as an easy-to-fly, app-controlled “drone for everyone”. The fact that this self-piloted personal transport is the company’s next major pursuit could be a good thing or a bad thing; while they clearly did a bang up job on the fundraising and marketing for the Ghost Drone, it’s not without its critics when it comes to the device’s functionality, engineering, and customer support. There are plenty of positive reviews out there too, but with the pervasiveness of “native advertising” and the likely bias of a reviewer who just got a free drone, well – you decide.

So what’s the basic plan for the vehicle?

Point to point flight…

…by tapping a tablet:

We’re withholding judgment until something more tangible is revealed. So far all the company is sharing is a presence at CES 2016, and a slightly buggy website with a lot of typos and some decent 3D renderings to accompany the text descriptions of the concept. So has anyone actually flown in it? None of the press we’ve seen even asks, but according to this Business Insider piece, there have been a 100 test flights. However, everyone seems to conveniently skirt the actual phrase “manned test flight”, and there are no videos or images available of anyone in the cockpit of an airborne prototype.

The video further below shows a man getting into the prototype’s cockpit but…

…the only in-flight shot with a passenger appears to be a mannequin, in a different version of the craft:

Here’s the company’s full spiel:

The post The EHANG 184: The Uber of Air Travel? Or Just Good Hype? appeared first on Innoculous.com.

CB2 seems resigned to his terrible robot fate.

We recently said we’d be revisiting the Uncanny Valley, and there’s probably nothing Uncanny Valley-er than a robotic baby. Fortunately for CB2, the robot baby below, the organization that created it appears to be defunct; its short life seemed to consist mainly of taunting it by tugging its arms and dangling objects above it as it lay on its back like a beetle, unable to escape. The only words it seemed able to utter were “eh” and “eh”, otherwise it probably would have shrieked “LET ME GO, I DON’T WANT TO STAND UP RIGHT NOW” as the researcher tugged it into a precarious upright position:

The Still Suffering

CB2’s misery may have ended, but sadly, the torture continues for iCub, the open source robot. Take the video titles below with a grain of salt; iCub has a long way to go before it’s autonomously following you around the house asking you to read The Robot and the Bluebird to it.

iCub Learns Names of Shapes & Colours

If by “learning names of shapes and colors” you mean saying “muh serm gree durh sowm green faww” no matter what you show it.

iCub Learns to Play Piano

Well, to be fair, it might be more accurate to say “stares at keyboard playing terrible MIDI rendition of Christmas song, then hits a few keys”.

iCub Pours Cereal in a Cup

Although iCub struggles here too, it highlights something interesting: it’s fairly likely that there will be preferred “movement models” when this technology brings us full blown life-like robotics. iCub replicates the gestural training perfectly.

Advanced Cereal Pouring

Maybe the iCub development community should contact Simone Giertz; she’s already made significant inroads with this cereal pouring thing (we previously touched on this here).

Why Make Baby Robots At All?

This was a perfectly reasonable question asked in Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence (see clip further below), and presumably the answer is for “training”. Training humans, that is. Although I understand perfectly well the reasoning behind it, I personally find the idea that people who are incapable of caring for a baby are trained using “life like” dolls a bit creepy. But if you know some befuddled teen or drug addict and want them raising babies, help is available. On Amazon!

Ready-or-Not Tot Enhanced White Male or Female

We’re not sure what “enhanced” means, and we’re also not sure exactly what that title on the instruction manual means either.

Nasco Nita Newborn Infant Access Simulator

This little baby is all business. The product description mentions all sorts of terms we’ve never heard, like vascular accessing, venipuncture, and the median basilic, saphenous, and popliteal veins. ONLY $1,212.99!*

*At the time of this writing

No Functionality, Just Pure Terror

Okay, we of course have been joking about the robotic babies; there’s a lot of incredible technology going into the development of these things. But while rabbit wholing on Amazon, we ran across a lot of products like the two below, which seem to serve no purpose other than to terrify any sane person as they shop for dolls for their real live children. A few of the questions asked on the Amazon pages probably give some insight into who is seriously pondering a purchase; one potential buyer asked “can she take a pasafire? does see come with thangs?” Because, you know, who wants a creepy doll baby if it doesn’t “come with thangs”?

Clementine Baby Monkey Doll

Because who doesn’t need a terrifying and macabre baby monkey doll that looks like a prop from Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, right?

Boy Baby Doll 10 Inch

The machine-translated description on Amazon says it all: “hand can knead move; doll limbs can activity, can sit and lie, can shower with baby together, eyes, eyes can’t closed”. Which is probably how you’ll end up talking after this Stepford Baby from the Beyond has stared you down for a while.

Why Make a Child Robot At All?

A perfectly reasonable question. And sadly, Artificial Intelligence may have it right, with the answer “So you can set it on fire, and shoot it from a catapult, of course!”

The post Children of the Uncanny Valley appeared first on Innoculous.com.

Hey, remember the 2008 Financial Crisis? When all those bankers ripped you off to the tune of a trillion dollars and then got bonuses for doing it? Of course you don’t. You’re too interested in this week’s mass shooter count, and that shitshow we call the 2016 election. Well, let us help remind you. If you haven’t yet, get off your duff and go see “The Big Short” (or pre-order it for later). It’s one of the first films about douchebags on Wall Street that will neither bore you to tears, nor make you feel warm and fuzzy about what clever guys they are and how you wish you were one of them. It not only features A-List actors turning in A-List performances, it propels the story along with a black humor and fourth-wall-breaking explanations from celebrities like Selena Gomez and chef Anthony Bourdain, which help you swallow the unbelievable pile of plundering that bankers pulled off in the rollup to the crisis. The storytelling also gets a little boost from the soundtrack, which (as well as a bunch of heavy metal) ranges from tunes like When the Levee Breaks to Ludacris’ Money Maker, the Gorillaz’ Feel Good Inc., and The Polyphonic Spree’s hilarious cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium” (see highlights further below). But we’re not here to review the soundtrack, we’re here to help you rediscover your righteous indignation. Check out the trailer, then go see the damn movie:

But I’m Broke As Hell & Homeless

Can’t afford to go see The Big Short, in this post-crisis economy where only billionaires are doing well and you’re too broke from carrying that student loan or maybe homeless after a mortgage default? No worries. One of the other best films about the financial crisis is viewable for FREE. 2010’s Inside Job won an academy award for Best Documentary Feature, but no-one noticed, because we were too busy debating the meaning of Inception and cooing about Toy Story 3. If you don’t mind watching a low-res copy with Spanish subs, it’s available on Vimeo, or you can get the whole thing in higher resolution on Archive.org. But frankly, we recommend an actual HD copy, it was rather stunningly filmed and edited, and has an excellent soundtrack and sound mixing.

But I Want To Be A Douchebag Myself!

If your dream has always been to be a Wall Street douchebag, stepping on the necks of anyone in your way as you amass billions of dollars, you’ll love The Wolf of Wall Street. But if you’re NOT some kind of money-mongering sociopath, it should propel you into an altogether different kind of rage, the kind you might experience when a director you used to admire makes the 21st century version of 1987’s Wall Street, the flick that glorified the roots of all this money madness in the first place, with its “Greed is Good” message. Way to go Mr. Scorsese, you make this rape of the American economy and pickpocketing the public look FUN. Much like the bonuses bankers got during the bailout, Scorcese’s film helped Jordan Belfort hustle another hundred million in 2014.

_{Not pissed off yet? We’ll be back soon with another roundup. In the meantime we’ll be laughing all the way to the bank, thanks to the revenue from these product plugs that feed right back into the system we’re critiquing}

The post The Big Short: Where’s Your Righteous Indignation? appeared first on Innoculous.com.

You’ve probably heard of Uber, and probably – like most of us – think of it as that clever, industry-disrupting cab service that outsources both the driving and the ownership of taxis, making more money with lower rates, by paying drivers poorly, and avoiding the cost of cab ownership. We generally assume this to be part of their over-arching strategy to become the driving dominant force in the taxi service business. Their goal, simply put, is to get you in their cars when you’re not using yours.

This all mostly true for now – they have been accused of paying drivers poorly to gain a perhaps unfair edge in the taxi business, and they do want to dominate the taxi business overall. But in the long run, one of the last things Uber wants to be doing is hiring drivers, or even paying them. They also don’t want you just using their service when you’re not using your own car.

Their long-term goal is much more sinister.

Uber Wants to Take Your Car Away Forever

Maybe that sounds a bit melodramatic. But if you think Uber is just a clever internet-and-app-enabled taxi service, you’ll be surprised to learn that their long-term goal is to evolve the basic taxi services they currently provide into driverless taxi service, making even more money. And in today’s tech-industry-based, long-game thinking, their ultimate goal isn’t just to own all the taxis, it’s to own all the cars.

How Would This Even Be Possible?

Obviously, in a country full of gun-toting second-amendment crazies “ascared that the gubmint gonna take away they guns“, the idea that a company will somehow take away people’s CARS is preposterous, right? Well, obviously there would be a huge change in perception of ownership necessary, but consider a few factors. First of all, most people already don’t own their cars, they lease them or finance them. Second, many Americans work two-and-a-half hours of every eight to own a vehicle that sits idle 95% percent of the time.

But perhaps more importantly, ponder the words of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:

“…the reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car, you’re paying for the other dude in the car…when there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. Even if you want to go on a road trip, it would just be cheaper. The magic there is that you bring the cost down below the cost of ownership, for everybody, and then car ownership goes away…”

So A Tech Industry “Unicorn” CEO is Cocky. What Else Is New?

Well, what else is new is that this particular CEO’s company is currently being valued at over $100 billion dollars. Google and Apple’s combined current valuation is over a TRILLION dollars. And all three of these companies (and others) are investing heavily in fully autonomous vehicles of one kind or another. Do you know how much the big three auto companies are worth, combined? About $130 billion. They quite reasonably are scared, scared enough that they’ve set up offices in Silicon Valley to partner in whatever ways they can.

So Is This a Vision of Heaven, or Hell?

Obviously we are years away from seeing how this all plays out. There’s an incredible amount of investment and development going on, markets can do crazy things (many expect a tech bubble in 2016) and the concept of personal car ownership is almost the very essence of “being American”. But assuming there is a profound evolution in who owns and drives cars, then what? Will the roads be even more cluttered, because of the addition of huge numbers of driverless cars? Or will things go more like Uber’s CEO hopes, and we all share a bunch of driverless cars that no-one owns, reducing the number of cars on the road, and reducing emissions, etc.? Hard to say. But CityLab does a nice job of walking through the possibilities in their piece Will a World of Driverless Cars Be Heaven or Hell?

Personally I suspect it’ll all end up being something like the second “Johnnie Cab” scene in Total Recall:

The post Imperial Uber-Reach: Uber’s Plan To Take Your Car Away appeared first on Innoculous.com.

Our contribution to the #gopdildo meme. See the original Ted Cruz video HERE
The “weapon” he’s holding is the Pipedream Icicles #61. You can get it on Amazon

If you spend any time on the internet at all, there’s a fairly good chance you’ve run across images related to the Twitter hashtag #gopdildo  at some point in the last few days. The meme at first gives off a sort of 4chan/Reddit kind of vibe, with its poorly-Photoshopped images of politicians holding dildos instead of the guns that were in the original photo. But it turns out the source of the meme is in fact Matt Haughey. Unless you’re a total internet noob, the following remix of the original quote should clue you into who Matt Haughey is:

“GOPDildo is one of the strangest sites I’ve seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their dildos wedged into their politicians, or why.”

No, he wasn’t the creator of DildoScan.com (I’m amazed no-one has registered that yet), he was the creator of Metafilter, one of the first “community weblogs” on the web, founded back in 1999, and featuring as one of its first posts the website catscan.com (now defunct). The whole idea of having a place to share links on the web owes a lot to Metafilter.

Back in 1999, this was considered really funny.

Apparently Haughey isn’t overly fond of the death and destruction wrought by guns in America, so earlier this month he decided to do something about it. His idea of “doing something” turned out to be “photoshopping dildos into photos of pro-gun politicians”, and posting them on a tumblr called  #GOPdildo. While you could easily try to argue that this is an odd form of “doing something”, it has in fact worked to some degree, and if you read Haughey’s recent piece on Medium explaining the whole thing, you’ll quickly realize he’s a pretty rational guy who is tired of people getting pointlessly slaughtered, not some raving liberal elitist. His framework for the project is simple; as he puts it: “The subjects are conservatives in power, that work in lawmaking or help support it, and yet do nothing to curtail guns.” The only “call to action” currently is to send him photos of second-amendment types holding guns, so go for it, if you’re so inclined.

On The Other Hand…

It’s not too hard to poke holes in this strategy; one Twitter user pretty quickly used hot dogs and babies as an example:

Dildos And Politics Are Old Bedfellows

The use of dildos as a political statement is nothing new; Jon Stewart famously referred to the GOP reaction to the Affordable Care Act as rolling a dildo in glitter, UT Austin students protested against “Campus Carry” laws by taking dildos to class a few months ago, and this image made the rounds of Anti-Tea Party forums over a year ago:

Owning Six Dildos in Texas A Felony?

On a related note, you may be interested to know that The Obscene Device Law essentially makes it a felony to own a half dozen dildos in the state of Texas. Section 43.21 of the Texas Penal Code prohibits the sale or promotion of “Obscene devices, meaning a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” with section 43.23 stipulating “A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.”

Still no word though on whether the Portland Power Line Dildo Epidemic was politically motivated.

And the winner is….

So far, this is our pick for images submitted and shared via #GOPdildo:

The post Dildos in Politics appeared first on Innoculous.com.

Depending on what year you were born, what social strata you were born into, or what kind of education you received, your introduction to relationships and intimacy may have ranged from an unwelcome grope from Uncle Clem, to a clinical explanation so thorough at the age of five that it made you asexual.

Luckily for the current generation, there are virtually unlimited sources of fact-based, thoughtful information on these topics just a tap away on their mobile phone! Which sadly, they’ll never see, because the internet is ruled by search dominance and shareability, so all they’ll be able to find is viral videos by click-desperate websites like College Humor and BuzzFeed.

Below is a quick roundup of the kinds of clips created to appeal to the viral-content-starved masses, and you know what? They might actually be the best introduction to sex and love a young person could get, and might even open the eyes of deluded “informed adults”. We’ll pretend – for the sake of content flow and keeping the NSFW content “below the fold” – that people actually have sex after getting married, and we’ll start with the love and marriage:

Why Engagement Rings Are a Scam

How we came to believe that if a man didn’t buy a woman a huge ring, he was a “tiny peckered pencil neck”.

How Hollywood Ruins Relationships

Have you heard of that John Gray book called “Men are from Mission to Mars  , and Women are from The Red Planet?

How to Plan a Wedding in 10 Steps

Step #3: Set a budget. Then fuck that budget, ’cause no matter what you do, it’s going to cost more than a Bugatti Veyron.

The Truth About Hymens And Sex

Nope. It’s not a “freshness seal”. As Emily puts it: “If our hymens completely sealed our vaginas, where would our periods go?”

The Real Reason You’re Circumcised

Yup. Better cut ‘im. I reckon it’ll stop him from masturbatin’.

Why Blowjobs Are More Intimate Than Sex

Wherein we learn the difference between a mouth and a vagina, i.e.: “One is a place where I express my ideas and tell my mima I love her the other’s a place I pee near my butthole”

You Probably Have Herpes and That’s Okay

Just ask “Herpy, the Terrifying Genital Herpes Virus”

The post Everything You Need To Know About Sex & Relationships appeared first on Innoculous.com.

David Lynch Chilling to the Mashups

When I ran across the mashup video below, which takes Britney Spears’ Everytime and ingeniously fuses it with the main Twin Peaks Theme, it got me thinking – there must be TONS of clever mashups with Twin Peaks material like this. If ever there was a body of work ripe for mashing up, Twin Peaks would be it. As it turns out though, there are strangely very few variations out there, and most of them are based on the main soundtrack theme. Below I’ve done my best to round up the ones worth listening to or watching. They’re broken down into standard song mashups, dance remixes, and a few video mashups. Enjoy.

Like Agent Cooper says: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen.”

Summertime Peaks (Lana Del Rey vs. Laura Palmer’s Theme)

Mashing Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness with Laura Palmer’s Theme  is a natural fit here; in fact, the synth pads are so similar that the real cleverness of this mashup was all in the drum editing.

Twin Hearts (Kylie Minogue vs Twin Peaks Theme)

Two Hearts by Kylie Minogue is another natural; it’s a little more modal/atonal than the Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey mixes though.

Twin Tissue (Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Angelo Badalamenti)

I have to admit that mashing Scar Tissue by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is the last thing in the universe that would have occurred to me. This is actually pretty good vocal isolation/remixing.

REMIXES

Kayo – Twin Peaks Dubstep (remix)

This one is assembled with HD video, and a lot of dialog samples. “The Man from Another Place” steps in and things get crazy and dubsteppy around two minutes

Basic Dance Remixes

These two are pretty straight-up house-derived dance mixes rife with the familiar “Unts unts unts” beat and “808 snare buildup abuse”. They’d be great for hair show runway music or something though

Agent Vyper – Twin Peaks Theme (Club Vocal Mix)

Dj Dado – Twin Peaks Theme

VIDEO MASHUPS

Fire Walk With Me With Careful What You Wish For

This one is more of a video mashup; it relies on creepy video edits set to Coil’s “Careful What You Wish For” from their album Backwards.

Cup of Joe (Twin Peaks Remix)

Lots of video clips as dialog samples laid over lots of looping delay. All I can say is “Fellas, don’t drink that coffee”.

Drake – Always Music In The Air

This one has Drake dancing in Agent Cooper’s dream, by taking clips from the video for Hotline Bling. It would be brilliant, if the Drake were better synced to the beats.

GOLDEN PEAKS – Stay Golden Mashup#4

This one is from a series of clips for different shows, which all mix Cynthia Fee’s rendition of Andrew Gold’s song Thank You For Being A Friend from the show intro for Golden Girls with the visuals from the selected show. In the case of Twin Peaks, it actually kind of works!

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