Kristen Stewart and Oscar Isaac are teaming up to star in the next wild-sounding project from Panos Cosmatos, best known for soaking Nicolas Cage in blood and vodka for his trippy action-horror “Mandy.”

“Flesh of the Gods,” launching in Cannes with WME Independent, CAA Media Finance and XYZ Films, packs some considerable pedigree behind the camera, having been written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Se7en,” “The Killer”) from a story he devised with Cosmatos, and produced by Adam McKay and Betsy Koch of Hyperobject Industries. Isaac and Gena Konstantinakos also produce for Mad Gene Media, the production company Isaac set up with his wife Elvira Lind.

“Flesh of the Gods” is set in “glittering ’80s L.A.,” where married couple Raoul (Isaac) and Alex (Stewart) each evening descend from their luxury skyscraper condo and head into the city’s electric nighttime realm. When they cross paths with a mysterious and enigmatic figure known as Nameless and her hard-partying cabal, the pair are seduced into a glamorous, surrealistic world of hedonism, thrills and violence.

“Like Los Angeles itself, ‘Flesh of the Gods’ inhabits the liminal realm between fantasy and nightmare,” Cosmatos said. “Both propulsive and hypnotic, ‘Flesh’ will take you on a hot rod joy ride deep into the glittering heart of hell.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15254151

It's 11am in Dublin and about 30 people on North Earl Street are vigorously waving at a man on an escooter in New York, who stares back at them with a look on his face that suggests he’s not entirely sure what’s going on.

The two cities have just been linked up via a 24-hour live stream as part of the Portals art project. The large circular screen in the middle of the north Dublin street provides a window to the Flatiron South Public Plaza at Broadway (and vice versa) and will remain in place until the autumn.

...

The Irish Times watched for about an hour on Thursday and in that time, viewers on the Dublin side waved at the New Yorkers, blew them kisses and tried to entice them into dance-offs. The New Yorkers repeated the gestures back; one guy in a blue baseball cap also rolled up his sleeve and flexed his bicep for the camera, another man performed cartwheels.

It took at least half an hour before a guy in a flannel top on the New York side gave the middle finger to the Dubliners, who repeated the gesture back at him enthusiastically.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15181516

Is the Mongolian Death Worm Real?

Some say the true death worm has already been found—slithering beneath the sands of the Gobi.

 It’s a particularly implausible cryptid, supposedly growing up to six feet long, spitting acid poison that rapidly corrodes anything and kills on contact, and possibly shooting electricity. And yet, the worm has never left any physical evidence. The mystery of its existence was also seemingly solved in 1983 when a Soviet scientist demonstrated that the “worm” likely evolved from legends around a harmless local snake, the Tartar sand boa.

The worm was sausage-like, mostly subterranean but would surface for food or following rains, and incredibly deadly. If you saw it, you kept your distance or ran.

In some stories, the worm is only about a foot long. In others, it’s man-sized. It sweeps across the sands like a snake, inches like a caterpillar, or (in one tale) sprouts wings from its butt and flies. It’s white-gray, turning red when perturbed. Or scaly and brown. Or fleshy and blood-red.

The effort monster hunters pour into searching for a seemingly debunked beast may baffle outsiders. But it reflects two simple truths: (1) A good cryptid is more than a creature, so you can never catch or debunk it. (2) The hunt is often less about finding a monster, and more about the thrill of nature and exploring the unknown.

It is possibly the most famous foot in modern screen history as it stamps down twice during the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Now it has been revealed that its inspiration is a 16th century painting in the National Gallery.

“In the late Sixties I would come to the gallery to steal ideas - some from paintings and through buying posters and souvenirs of characters I liked,” says Python member Terry Gilliam. “I then went home to create wonderfully silly animations.”

In a documentary film to celebrate the gallery’s 200th anniversary, which falls this weekend, Gilliam tells how Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus, Cupid and Folly led to his creation of the descending bare foot. Gilliam, who later directed films including Brazil and 12 Monkeys, had noticed Cupid and a dove in a bottom corner of the painting.

“It seemed like his foot was about to crush the unsuspecting bird. I thought it would make a lovely punctuation - a sudden halt to what was going on. Cupid’s foot made it even better because what better than to be crushed by love,” he told The Telegraph.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/11755652

If The Dark Knight felt like a relentless crime thriller inspired by the cinema of Michael Mann, The Dark Knight Rises explored the spiritual and emotional journey of Christian Bale’s version of Bruce Wayne. By connecting to the storyline involving the League of Shadows first introduced in Batman Begins, Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan were able to bring their interpretation of the caped crusader to a satisfying conclusion. Although the film satisfied story beats that they had established at the beginning of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises drew inspiration from Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities.

...

Dickens’ novel examined how it could be possible for one city to have two classes of citizens with completely different experiences. A Tale of Two Cities focuses on the experiences of both a wealthy family and an English barrister in the years leading up to the Reign of Terror, in which revolutionaries stormed Paris and executed members of the upper class. Jonathan Nolan cited the sociopolitical themes of A Tale of Two Cities as a primary influence on The Dark Knight Rises. He stated that when looking for “good literature for inspiration,” he found that A Tale of Two Cities was a "harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors." Similar to the French revolutionaries who were infuriated by the wealth gap, the prisoners Bane frees in The Dark Knight Rises have a justified reason for their anger; it is revealed to them that Dent’s crimes were covered up, and that his entire legacy is itself a lie.

If The Dark Knight felt like a relentless crime thriller inspired by the cinema of Michael Mann, The Dark Knight Rises explored the spiritual and emotional journey of Christian Bale’s version of Bruce Wayne. By connecting to the storyline involving the League of Shadows first introduced in Batman Begins, Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan were able to bring their interpretation of the caped crusader to a satisfying conclusion. Although the film satisfied story beats that they had established at the beginning of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises drew inspiration from Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities.

...

Dickens’ novel examined how it could be possible for one city to have two classes of citizens with completely different experiences. A Tale of Two Cities focuses on the experiences of both a wealthy family and an English barrister in the years leading up to the Reign of Terror, in which revolutionaries stormed Paris and executed members of the upper class. Jonathan Nolan cited the sociopolitical themes of A Tale of Two Cities as a primary influence on The Dark Knight Rises. He stated that when looking for “good literature for inspiration,” he found that A Tale of Two Cities was a "harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors." Similar to the French revolutionaries who were infuriated by the wealth gap, the prisoners Bane frees in The Dark Knight Rises have a justified reason for their anger; it is revealed to them that Dent’s crimes were covered up, and that his entire legacy is itself a lie.

Roger Corman, the writer and director who helped turn out such low-budget classics as Little Shop of Horrors and gave many of Hollywood’s most famous actors and directors early breaks, has died aged 98.

Corman died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, his daughter Catherine Corman said on Saturday in a statement.

“He was generous, open-hearted and kind to all those who knew him,” the statement said. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a film-maker, just that.’”

Across a career spanning more than 60 years, Corman developed a cheap and cheerful style that led some to refer to him as the “king of the B-movies”. His films were notable for their low-budget special effects and attention-grabbing titles such as She Gods of Shark Reef (1958) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Yet he also played a significant role in developing the talents of a number of acclaimed directors, including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, and launching the careers of actors such as Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro and Sandra Bullock.

Rolling hot off the heels of World Password Day (groan), every May 2 we hacks generally receive hundreds of emails from PR companies repping their respective infosec pros, all espousing their expert opinions on how to create an "iron-clad" or "military-grade" password, or something equally cringey.

We didn't write anything about it because, quite frankly, it's all a bit dull. We know what is and isn't a good password – national security agencies tend to all agree with one another to a certain extent and anyone with an iota of cyber literacy knows the good from the bad and the downright terrible. There's no "password123" nonsense here at Vulture Central.

However, according to a Xeet from the UK Daily Mail's political editor, Jason Groves, journalists attending the headquarters of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on Thursday were told some information that appeared to fly in the face of conventional password hygiene.

The NCSC still stands by its password guidance of creating a string out of three random words, an idea it may or may not have swiped from our readers, but it doesn't appear to have been in use when reporters attended the NCSC where foreign secretary David Cameron was delivering an address.

Groves said reporters were told the security code for the doors at the UK's cybersecurity agency was – drum roll please – 1234.

Sounding way too funny to be true, we caught up with Groves who confirmed to us that the Xeet wasn't a joke as it initially seemed at first glance. Reporters were told the code on arrival and then the head of events blasted it out loud from a stage later on.

Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them. Astronomers say this could be evidence for alien civilisations harnessing energy from their stars by using a vast construction known as a Dyson sphere – although they can’t fully rule out more mundane explanations.

To search for potential Dyson spheres, two teams of astronomers, one led by Matías Suazo at Uppsala University in Sweden and the other by Gaby Contardo at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, combined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite – which is mapping the position and motion of billions of stars in our galaxy – with infrared survey results from ground and space telescopes.

Each team analysed the same 5 million stars from the combined datasets, and both turned up signs of excess infrared heat that couldn’t be explained by known natural processes. “The most fascinating explanation could be actual Dyson spheres,” says Suazo.

His team spotted strange signals at seven red dwarfs within 900 light-years of Earth. These stars are smaller and dimmer than our sun, but appeared up to 60 times brighter in infrared than expected. This excess would have been caused by something with a temperature of up to 400°C, consistent with what we might expect for a Dyson sphere. Up to 16 per cent of each star would have to be obscured to account for the signal, meaning it would more likely be a variant of the idea called a Dyson swarm – a collection of large satellites orbiting a star to collect energy – if the cause is truly of artificial origin. “This isn’t like a single solid shell around the star,” says team member Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University.

Contardo’s results are broader, with 53 candidates found among larger stars, including some sun-like stars, at distances of up to 6500 light years from Earth. “Both sets of candidates are interesting,” she says, though inconclusive. “You need follow-up observations to confirm anything.”

One natural explanation that could mimic the properties of a Dyson sphere is that the stars are surrounded by hot, planet-forming debris disks, but most of the stars found by both teams appear to be too old for this. Another possibility is that each star could coincidentally be positioned in front of a distant galaxy giving off an infrared glow.

The infrared signals could also result from some unknown natural process. “It might be something that happens very rarely, like if two planets collide and produce an enormous amount of material,” says David Hogg at New York University, who worked with Contardo. “I think it’s most likely to be a natural phenomenon.”

Archive

A type of shrimp that died out hundreds of millions of years ago has been declared a new species and a Glaswegian.

The shrimp is believed to have swam in the Carboniferous seas surrounding Glasgow around 333 million years ago. Its fossil was found at the same world-famous locality where the Bearsden Shark was excavated in the early 1980s.

The shrimp has been given the name Tealliocaris weegie after a scientific paper identified it as a Glaswegian crustacean. Its authors thought that it would be appropriate to name the new species in honour of the people of Glasgow and the local dialect.

The paper was recently published in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions.