Halloween is over, but the scares we endured linger. A "scare specialist" explains why some people are thrilled by horror movies and haunted houses while others prefer to hide under the covers.
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In an "utterly extraordinary" coincidence, one of J.K. Rowling's most curiously named characters turns out to have been real after all.
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The long-awaited day has come: most airlines are making moves to
allow passengers to keep their phones, e-readers, tablets, and other
electronics on during take-off and landing.
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Sure, that Thomas Kinkade painting at your doctor’s office probably looks fine as is, but it could use more Stormtroopers.
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Cool is an elusive enough concept, but what does it mean to be “cool” in India? China? Estonia?
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Can babies dream? Queenie Liao wasn’t sure, but created a photo series exploring what might be going through her infant son’s head that will make a very cute baby photo album someday.
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How many of the 22 most clichéd tourist photos have you taken? I’m guilty of five.
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It’s okay: the sriracha crisishas been averted. Return to your normal hot sauce habits.
Before
vigilante hackers like Anonymous tamed the Internet, two brothers
started their own fight against software piracy. Their weapon: the first
PC virus.
In 1986, students at the University of Delaware began experiencing
strange symptoms: temporary memory loss, a lethargic drive, and fits of
rage. This wasn’t just any old flu—it was the world’s first personal
computer virus. Known as Brain, the bug destroyed memory, slowed the
hard drive, and hid a short copyright message in the boot sector,
introducing the world to two soon-to-be hacker celebrities.
At the time, coders Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi were just 17 and 24,
respectively, running a computer store in Lahore, Pakistan. When they
discovered that customers were circulating illegal copies of software
they’d written, the brothers decided to retaliate. Brain was their
attempt to scare pirates straight, but, as the creators tell it, the
virus was never intended to be malicious. In a 2011 interview with
F-Secure, a Finnish anti-virus company, the brothers called the bug a
“friendly virus,” one that “was not made to destroy any data.” Why else
would they have stamped the virus code with their names, their phone
numbers, and the address of their shop?
“The idea was that only if the program was illegally copied would the
virus load,” Amjad said in a Pakistani TV interview a few years ago.
The Alvis also had an ingenious method for keeping track of how far the
virus had spread. “[We] had a ‘counter’ in the program, which could keep
track of all copies made and when they were made.”
Outbreak
The brothers claim they never knew that Brain would grow into a monster beyond their control. But a 1988 TIME
magazine article reveals a more complicated truth: As concerned as they
were with piracy of their own software, that didn’t stop them from
making and selling bootleg copies of other expensive programs, such as
Lotus 1-2-3. In fact, the ethics of their computer vigilantism are a
little murky. Computer software isn’t copyright protected in Pakistan,
Basit has argued in interviews, so therefore it’s not piracy for people
to trade bootleg disks.
Under that rationale, the brothers sold clean bootleg copies to
Pakistanis—and virus-infected versions to American students and
backpackers. When Americans flew home and attempted to copy the
programs, they ended up infecting every floppy disc subsequently
inserted into their computers, even discs that had nothing to do with
the original program.
Shortly after the University of Delaware outbreak, Brain began popping up at other universities, and then at newspapers. The New York Times reported that a “rogue computer program” had hit the Providence Journal-Bulletin, though the “damage was limited to one reporter losing several months of work contained on a floppy disk.”
While there was never any legal action, the media response was
explosive. Basit and Amjad began receiving calls from all over the
world. They were as surprised as anyone that their little experiment had
traveled so far. After all, unlike today’s computer viruses, which
spread at lightning speed, Brain had to transmit itself the
old-fashioned way—through human carriers toting around 5.25-inch floppy
discs.
But the binary genie was out of the bottle. Today, there are more
than a million viruses vying to infect your computer; it’s estimated
that half of all PCs are or have been infected. Consumers shell out more
than $4 billion per year for software to fight these digital dragons.
As for the brothers, the virus hasn’t been bad for business. Their
company, Brain Net, is now the largest Internet service provider in
Pakistan. While they maintain that they never meant to hurt anyone, they
have nevertheless embraced Brain as a device that exposed the global
nature of piracy. “The virus could not have spread unless people were
copying the software illegally,” Amjad said during his Pakistani TV
interview.
The brothers, who told reporters that they stopped selling
contaminated software sometime in 1987, are still based at the same
address in Lahore—the one stamped into Brain’s code.
Books are beautiful in their own right, but these artists have managed to improve on perfection.
1. Books to infinity
This crazy miracle in a library in Prague was designed by Slovakian
artist Matej Kren. There’s a mirror inside so the tunnel of books looks
endless when you lean into it.
2. Books as landscapes
Guy Laramee
Montreal-based artist Guy Laramee uses the texture of the pages
to give the feeling of earth and rocks in his landscape sculptures.
3. Film Star
Flickr
This piece by John Latham was part of a special exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2005-2006.
The story of a Texas electrician who deals experimental
AIDs drugs only took twenty years to make it to Hollywood. And it all
started as a simple act of journalism.
Today Dallas Buyers Club
is a major Hollywood motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey as a
Texas electrician and rodeo habitué who transforms himself into an
importer and distributer of experimental AIDS medications after
contracting HIV.
But it started life as a simple act of journalism.
Focus Features
In the summer of 1992, Bill Minutaglio, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News,
stumbled upon an article about AIDS patients in cities across the
country who were pooling their resources and paying local entrepreneurs
to supply them with drugs not yet approved by the FDA. Minutaglio
eventually tracked down Ron Woodroof, the wiry, mustachioed,
foul-mouthed head of Dallas’s homegrown buyers club, and convinced
Woodroof to tell him all about his exploits.
There was, for example, the time Woodroof installed special air shocks
on the rear end of his Lincoln Continental to support the weight of the
thousands of pills he intended to sneak across the Mexico border only to
have the shocks collapse while he was being interrogated at the
checkpoint. Or the time he bribed a Japanese biochemical worker with
$500 and a few rounds of drinks in exchange for the name of a fiscally
troubled physician who might supply him with a few dozen vials of
interferon. Or the time he smuggled the interferon through customs in a
smoking briefcase full of dry ice.
All of which eventually made it into Minutaglio’s feature for the Morning News’ Sunday magazine. It was called “Buying Time,” and it was the first real profile of Ron Woodroof anyone had ever done.
Shortly
after Minutaglio’s story appeared, screenwriter Craig Borten drove to
Dallas and spent three days talking to Woodroof. From their
conversations he fashioned a screenplay that eventually became, as The Los Angeles Times recently put it, “the stuff of legend”—a
20-year tale of “the doomed commitment of superstars like Brad Pitt and
Ryan Gosling, the dissipated interest of filmmakers as diverse as Marc
Forster and Dennis Hopper, numerous shaky financial arrangements, two
studios with cold feet, a writer so tortured by rejection that he
spiraled into addiction, a bailout by men in the decidedly unglamorous
business of Texas fertilizer, and the film's eventual salvation by an
actor who for many years had best been known for semi-naked bongo
drumming.”
Meanwhile, Minutaglio got on with his career, writing books about George W. Bush and the JFK assassination while teaching journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.
That’s where The Daily Beast found him last week when we called to
talk about the true story behind the movie—the real Ron Woodruff.
“I’m glad they made the movie,” Minutaglio told us. “I admired Ron.
I’m not afraid to say it now. He just wanted to live a little longer,
and he wanted the same for other people, too. Out of that, he created a
business. It kept him going for a while. It kept him energized. He was a
fascinating figure in American history.”
Excerpts from our conversation:
THE DAILY BEAST: How did you find out about Ron Woodroof? BILL MINUTAGLIO: There had been one mention of Ron in my old newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, but really the thing that sparked my interest was reading in the Village Voice
or some other alternative weekly about Buyers Clubs. The article
mentioned that the group in Dallas had a national reputation: they were
known for being more risk-taking and aggressive. I was always looking
for stories in Dallas that had some sort of national or even
international significance, and I thought this could be one of them. So I
clipped the story out and began making some calls.
And it was really easy to find Ron Woodroof. He was not in hiding. He
was not underground. People in the AIDs community just simply said,
“Oh, the Dallas Buyers Club—here’s how you reach them.”
I called him, got in touch with him, and he invited me over to his
office. Which was kind of surprising to me. I didn’t know what to
expect. I thought it would be hidden, out in the woods, or some kind of
backroom deal.
This is a guy who is smuggling drugs across the border.
Frankly, yeah. He was a smuggler. There’s no other word for it. I
thought he was going to be an outlaw bandit kind of guy where we would
have to have secret codes and handshakes before we could meet.
But in fact the office of the Dallas Buyers Club was right outside
downtown Dallas, about a quarter-mile from the skyscrapers. It was on
Swiss, which is one of the finest, oldest, premium blocks in the city.
If he was hiding, he was in plain sight. And that’s where I met Ron.
What was your first impression of him?
I probably came armed with the thing you’re not supposed to as a
reporter: preconceptions. I thought he was going to be mysterious. That
he was going to look like a motorcycle gang member. A smuggler. Whatever
a smuggler looks like.
But I met a man in a suit. That was the first thing that threw me
off. He had a nice white shirt on, and a tie. He might have even had
cufflinks. He was carefully groomed. He had a thick, healthy mustache. I
remember thinking that it looked like a holdover from the disco days.
In short, he wasn’t the outlaw gangster pirate person I thought I would see—furtive and frankly scary.
Were you disappointed by that, as a journalist? That he didn’t seem more colorful.
No, no. I actually began to see the possibilities in the story. It
was counterintuitive. He wasn’t the stereotype. People were telling me
that the Dallas Buyers Club really was aggressive and that they really
were involved in smuggling drugs, and yet here’s a guy who looks like a
CPA. And that makes it more interesting. I remember thinking, “This is
just the kind of story I like, because it’s so unlikely. It’s your
average man next door, but he’s really going all the way. An ordinary
person caught up in something extraordinary.”
Very early on, Ron told me that he was doing this to stay alive. And
like many people, that’s a story I love: someone rising to the occasion
and behaving really differently because they’re faced with some
unbelievable thunderclap in their lives.
The
good news was that Ron didn’t turn out to be too ordinary, which comes
across in your story as well as the new movie. He was an incredibly
vibrant character.
[Laughs] When he opened his mouth and began talking, he cursed like
four sailors instead of one. Very blue. Very salty. I remember he would
bound up from his chair and march around the room and slap his hand on
the table. I thought he was really unfiltered.
But what he was yelling and cursing about was the government, and
the pace of approval, and how the FDA didn’t realize how desperate
people like him were. It was only later that I realized he was dying. I
was with a man who would be dead in a few weeks. My story came out in
August 1992. Ron died in either late September or early October.
He had a thick, healthy mustache. I remember thinking that it looked like a holdover from the disco days.
Did he let on that he was that close to the end?
No, he was very vibrant, and very intense, and very coiled. But
really, really angry. It was palpable. Almost demanding answers right
there. There’s the kind of cursing that is like barroom banter, but with
Ron it would escalate. He wasn’t being blustery for the sake of “see my
personality, I’m a tough-talking guy.” He was just really frustrated—at
the world, at the government that was firewalling his access to the
medicines that he thought could keep him alive. He was desperate—perhaps
because he knew the clock was ticking.
Ron had told me he had been a commercial electrician in Dallas. In
the early 1980s, Dallas was just rocketing. The joke was that the
national bird of Dallas was the crane, with all the buildings going up
everywhere. People were moving in from all over the country,
corporations were relocating there, huge development. And here’s Ron. He
told me he felt he was being overlapped by all these circumstances in
Dallas—that it was a go-go city, but he was left out. And then he had
this discovery that he had AIDs, and he made the fateful decision to go
get these drugs.
What was your next step?
To try to verify some of his tales because they were so
extraordinary. I went out to look out his car because he was talking
about going to Mexico a lot. Smuggling was a lot easier back then. This
was long before 9/11.
Ron was wary of me initially. But he quickly became completely
unfiltered. Thinking back, I’m like, “Was that just the way he was? Why
was he so open?”
As I read your story I was thinking the same thing. Ron was committing crimes—and then telling a reporter all about them.
I think it was that he was dying. Someone who is going to be that
self-medicating, who’s going to be mixing potions and chemicals to stay
alive, is going to be very on top of his medical condition. He might
have known that he was near the end.
So he was open with you because he was looking out for his legacy?
I think Ron was like, “What the hell. I’m not going to hold these
stories in until I die.” I think he just said, “I’m dying. There’s no
reason for me to filter. I don’t give a rat’s ass who knows about these
things.” I don’t know that. He didn’t say. But I could see him thinking
that. “Why do I need to hold these cards close to my vest? There’s no
time for that anymore.”
What happened to the Buyers Club?
I don’t know. You move on. I have to imagine that the air was kind
of let out of it when Ron died. He was such a personality and such a
risk-taker that it’s hard to picture anybody taking his place.
Did you think Ron was a homophobe?
I don’t know. In my discussions with him I don’t remember him
exhibiting anger or expressing pejoratives about gay men and women. He
was a businessman who needed customers—to fund his trips, to buy his
disguises, to pay people off, to keep gas in his Lincoln, and to keep
himself alive. He had ceased being an electrician. There was no money
coming from anywhere else. And I find it hard to imagine that he would
be disparaging of his customers if they happened to be gay.
The movie had a convoluted path through Hollywood. Have you followed the news over the years?
I’d heard rumors about a film, but I was never contacted. And then a few weeks ago I was watching Gravity with my son and suddenly there was the trailer for Dallas Buyers Club. My jaw-dropped. I thought, “Well, I guess those rumors were for real.”
Did Matthew McConaughey remind you of Ron?
I suppose to capture somebody from Texas you’re not going to go
wrong with somebody like Matthew McConaughey. If Tommy Lee Jones isn’t
available, go with McConaughey. [Laughs] McConaughey plays Texans very
well. He’s part of this world.
I didn’t spend 24/7 with Ron, week in and week out. He didn’t
mention that he had befriended a transvestite, or that he was a rodeo
sportsman. He told me that he had a girlfriend, and I repeatedly asked
if I could interview her for the story and learn more about what her
role might be—her fateful journey. But he never steered me to her.
He was a little wary about some things in his personal life, things I
wanted to know more about. If you read my story, there’s not a whole lot
in there about his upbringing or even how he got ill. That’s because he
wouldn’t tell me. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. “How does an
electrician get into this? Where did Ron come from?” He wouldn’t say. I
don’t know why that was.
Just in time for Halloween – a seriously creepy pumpkin lobotomy time-lapse carving by Chris Soria. He spent 15 hours cutting in the ghastly details of this fantastic 360 degree illustration by Jason Smith.
The talented duo teamed up to create a commission for Ford, who created
the GIF. Check out the unexpected ending in the video below.
Happy Halloween everybody!!
It’s been a while since we heard from Nando Costa and his Kickstarter launched project to laser engrave a stop motion film.
After a long two years, and a ton of work on Costa’s part, the project
is finally complete… and it was well worth the wait. The animation
features a series of modernist psychedelic vignettes that flow in
hypnotically smooth motion as changing wood grain flickers across the
rectangular background.
The entire 800+ frame sequence was individually photographed and
assembled into the film you see here – and smartly, Costa sold each of
the unique frames to support the creation and share some seriously
beautiful art. What’s the film all about? He explains:
“The abstract storyline showcased in this piece is a
concoction of a variety of ideas and can perhaps be described as a union
between concepts and experiments born during the Situationist movement
and real life events experienced during the last few years in American
society. Particularly the duality between the economic downturn and the
shift in values and beliefs of many citizens.”
Thats a little different from his original proposition to depict the
rise and fall of a fictitious near-future society – but we’re not
complaining. This is some seriously awesome work. You can buy the few
remaining frames of the film on Etsy, check out the seriously good sounds by World Gang, or see more from Nando Costa here.
via lustik
Sometimes everyday objects can have more than their intended purpose, especially when in the hands of creative artist Javier Pérez. Much like the works of Alex Solis,
Perez layers simple objects with marker drawings to give them new life.
Toothpicks can be miniature drumsticks, orange segments become lungs,
and spaghetti noodles can rain down from the sky. The possibilities are
endless and Perez seems to have no shortage of clever ideas, posting
one of these creations almost every day on Instagram.
Based in Ecuador, Javier Pérez is a Web Designer and Graphic Designer
with a focus on Animation, Art Direction, and Illustration. These
creations are just a fun creative outlet for him, but they are sure to
brighten your Instagram feed with a little clever humor each day. You can check out more work by Pérez on Facebook,Behance, and his website.
Via: au-secours-jai-un-blog.com
