Arts Featured Gaming Music Show video 

Dancing Assassins – a random moment from Fan Expo

Some of the best things to happen at conventions are totally random, and you don’t expect to have your camera running at the time. At Fan Expo this year, we all happened to be in the right place at the right time. The above video is the result of a bunch of random cosplay Ezios and Altairs milling around the Ubisoft booth when they’re starting a Just Dance 3 contest.

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Arts Featured 

Putting It Together: Modelling Modern Memes

Words fail me. Yes, it’s that good. Brought to you by Tamiya: The “Put It Together” famous conspiracies model series: the Roswell Saucer Crash, the JFK assassination with lone gunman on grassy knoll, Marilyn Monroe’s “suicide”, Elvis’ faked death and the studio-filmed Apollo “moon landing”. Apparently these models don’t exist but then where did the pictures come from? Check out the full set at GeekoSystem.

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Animation Arts Comics Featured Film Gaming TV Zombies 

Fan Expo 2011 details

It’s that time of year again, when nerds and geeks of all stripes descend on Toronto and congregate at the shrine of pop culture known as Fan Expo. To alleviate the major congestion problems of last year, the expo is returning to the larger South Building of the Metro Convention Centre, and has added a fourth day to the event.

Fan Expo 2011 runs from August 25th to 28th, and you can catch all the details in the press release below…

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Arts Featured Film 

Attack the Block: The Street Finds Its Own…

William Gibson said  that when he reads a science fiction story by Alfred Bester he doesn’t get any ideas about the future but he does get a feeling for what it was like to be an adult living in New York in the Fifties. Science fiction stories are always set in the present. Science fiction movies are lucky if they even come close to the present. By the time a movie gets made it’s often referring to something that’s had it’s day. Film is at best a souvenir. Viewing Attack…

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Arts Computing Featured Film 

Docs and Taxes

To the filmmakers in our readership- this might be of some interest to you come next year at “income tax time”. Yes, it is from an American perspective but  a) some of our readers are U.S. citizens and b) Canadians shouldn’t feel too smug: our current government is unlikely to go after large corporations and it is very ambivalent about the arts and non-mainstream journalism. If Revenue Canada is trying to make itself look busy they might just decide to try some of the tactics that the IRS is presently…

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Arts Film Hardware Photography Show video 

Filmmaking on a Lo-Fi Budget: The $4 Focus Lever

I first saw this while looking for some kitchen utensils at a home/kitchen store. It is a silicon jar opener. Composed of a rubbery silicon material with a hard plastic tightening collar, it is made to open the toughest of jars.

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Computing Featured Internet 

Collusion: Do you know where you are?

The image and text above tells you just about everything you need to know. It’s from the Collusion project at http://collusion.toolness.org/ . It’s a Mozilla Firefox plug-in that allows you to visualise, either on the site or in a separate tab, a history of your web surfing for that session with lines showing which websites are sharing information about your movements with other websites ( the grey dots) or with dedicated trackers (the red dots). When you first visit the site it will demonstrate this using a pre-set series of…

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Arts Featured Gaming 

They Bleed Pixels gets an official trailer, summer release date

Sppoky Squid has released the debut trailer for the upcoming They Bleed Pixels, a game I’ve personally been waiting for to make its appearance on Xbox Live Indie Games since before I first got a chance to play a beta version at TCAF this year. The “fast-paced, gothic lo-fi, platforming beat’em up” is due to appear on the Xbox sometime this summer.

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