Allthyngs

The hardest thing about working out is obviously being motivated enough to get to the gym. Once your there, fear of looking silly in front of 25 people who could kick your ass without even noticing takes over and you make yourself have a good workout, but when you’re in your room looking at your gym clothes and your bed and deciding which one looks more comfortable, making yourself have a good workout is much harder. For mornings like those, this article by Henry Rollins is a pretty solid source of inspiration.

Check it out on nerdfitness.com

I’ve been through two Mardi Grases now, so I like to think of myself as pretty expert in the field of absolutely out of control city wide parties, but apparently I still have much to learn. Fallas, a month-long festival in Valencia, Spain, comes to an end with a ceremony called “La Crema,” where huge crowds of people stand around massive paper machè structures and watch as they’re burned to the ground. New Orleans could learn a thing or two from these guys.

Check out pictures of the insanity at Holavalencia.com.

More from Daytrotter! Frightened Rabbit is one of those bands that I don’t like all that much generally but has come out with a few songs that I adore. Download this version of Good Arms vs. Bad Arms now! Scott’s accent, crooning, and unaccompanied guitar make you want to feel as sorry for him as he is feeling for himself. I think this version is a huge step up from the one on the album.

Check it out on daytrotter.

It’s really hard to keep up with news, because there’s so much of it that just keeping up takes hours a day. Fortunately, The New York Times has started putting up a quick, 5-10 minute video every day around 1pm where they analyze everything that’s going on in the world that day and why it matters. It’s one of those things that’s so good it makes you realize everyone else sucks at their jobs.

Check it out onNYTimes.com

Edgar Wright, the director behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is at it again. Recently, the teaser trailer for his third film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, hit the internet, and although it lacks a certain lovable British duo, it looks awesome. If you’re not already excited for this movie, you should be. Early reviews have been almost unanimously positive, praising the film’s genuine originality. Hell, Keven Smith even went as far as to call it “spellbinding,” among other things. Hopefully this summer will have plenty of good movies like this to make up for my Transformers 2 lobotomy.

I’ve had a lot of dreams in life, but seeing these pictures made me realize that all of them are stupid. Who cares about being a famous comedian or president or one of John and Kate’s kids when there’s someone out there with the power to create a situation like the one in these pictures. What good is ruling the free world if you can’t use it to do stuff like that? On a side-note, I’ll be on spring break all this week, so things might be a little quirky, but theoretically I’ve set it up so that posts will keep showing up while I’m away. Maybe I’ll run into a scene like this while I’m gone. Spring Break, WOOOOOO!!!!

Check out the pictures on Egotastic.

Let’s say you’re the first (sane) human being to make contact with an intelligent alien race. What do you do once aboard that shiny metal ship? Try to communicate? Show them that thing you can do with your elbows? Kill them all and triumphantly return to earth in a state-of-the-art floating death machine? Fortunately for you, you’ll have memorized these step-by-step instructions for exactly what to do in this scenario (unless they’ve already shoved their cold metal instruments up your colon and dropped you off in Montana).

My god is this website creepy. The user written stories are best described as adventure-horror. Each one leads you into a crazy situation with one of the “holders” who possess certain “objects”, which could seriously fuck things up if they come together. I know at this point it sounds kinda ridiculous, so I’ll just post the introductory story and let you decide if you want to spend the next three hours of your life reading through every other story on the site. Check it out after the jump (click “read more”). Also, I’ve found this particularly helpful in that it has given me a list of lines that I will never in my life say in any situation, the most important being, “I seek the one who calls himself the Holder of the End.”

Check it out at TheHolders.org

Jamie Oliver’s new show premiers Friday night at 8pm EST on ABC, but instead of watching that you should watch his TED talk, which is much better. The first half of the premier is up on Hulu already (and it’s embedded after the jump, as is the TED talk), and it’s way too reality-showy to be any good. Jamie’s TED talk on the other hand, is brilliant. He lays out pretty solidly all the problems with food in America, and even manages to give me some hope that we can fix them. Check it out after the jump (click “read more”). You can download the TED talk at Ted.com

In the world of Atheism there are weak Atheists, who don’t believe in God, strong Atheists, who believe there is no God, and Sam Harris, who believes even if there were a God but he’d be retarded and not worth worshiping. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens make some pretty strong arguments for why Atheism is the only reasonable theism, but only Sam Harris has the balls to flat out call religious people wrong and stupid. In this TED talk, he argues that not only can science answer moral questions, it’s the only thing that should. Maybe I’m biased, but I think he’s dead-on. Check it out for yourself after the jump (click “read more”).

This Oscar-nominated short film has all of the best parts of those three to five minute sequences that precede every Disney/Pixar movie: really good animations, humor, an original storyline crammed into a very short amount of time, and a warm and fuzzy aftertaste at the end.

Maybe it’s just my Armenian-ness that makes me love Kim Kardashian so freaking much, but I don’t think so, because I love her way more than I love grape leaves, excessive body hair, and not showering. Seriously, just look at this totally average Armenian woman and tell me we don’t belong at the G8 summit.

Check out my favorite pictures after the jump (click “read more”), or the whole set at Egotastic.com

Certain things just don’t get old. MGMT’s catchy electronic hit Kids is one of those things. Chiddy Bang, a spankin’ new rap group out of Philly, exemplfies the immortal quality of Kids by using it as the beat for their beyond catchy breakout single, Opposite of Adults. The music video’s cool to boot, bringing back fond Goldeneye-era memories.

We can’t embed it, but check it out on YouTube Read more

This Ted Talk by Jane McGonigal, who may or may not be a professor at Hogwarts, is yet another really interesting argument that video games aren’t just a waste of time. It makes sense, I mean, nothing people work that hard at could ever be a waste of time. On the other hand, I’d love to play games in her universe, where apparently Halo players form tight-knit communities because they have to trust each other to play by the rules. Although, I don’t play much Halo, so maybe the rules include tea-bagging and being an obnoxious retard on chat? I can’t be sure. Still, check out the video after the jump, and if you want you can download it from Ted.

When one of the first moving pictures (nothing more than a series of everyday occurrences captured on film) was premiered almost a hundred years ago, people ran screaming from the exhibit at the sight of a train barreling towards the camera. Nowadays it’s a little harder to shove movie magic down our cynical throats. Enter the age of special effects. Special effects are like roofies: if you don’t notice them, that means they’re working. With movies like Avatar, it’s easy to forget that there was once a time when movies like Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and even The Wizard of Oz blew people’s minds. Here’s a video to give a little perspective of how far we’ve come, and how much more magical movie magic (holy alliteration Batman!) has grown from its humble black and white beginnings. Music is Rods and Cones by The Blue Man Group.

I frequently walk across campus at Tulane with a smug look on my face, taking everything for granted. What we need here is a sniper, someone to keep us on our toes (FBI people please don’t raid my room I was just kidding). Anyway, in this video a village of seemingly nice people inherit a town sniper who with his friendly eastern European accent and deadly accuracy teaches us all a lesson on how valuable our lives are. Check it out after the jump.

Why do men cheat? It’s an age old question. Among women, at least. Not among men, even those of us who would never cheat on our wives know exactly why men cheat. But few of us can put it as eloquently and as beautifully as Anonymous did in this essay on Esquire.com. He just makes it sound so awesome! But… you know… cheating’s bad, mmmkay?

Read the essay on Esquire.com

Children are our future. Our tiny, gullible, adorably ignorant future. If you asked many of them about the biggest news story of the decade, they would probably mention the extremely controversial decision to kick Pluto out of the solar system club. Like all angry people should, these children took action and wrote furious letters to the heads of our nation. PBS compiled a short hilarious collection of such letters, in which vocal third graders express their concerns about the mindset of the scientific community. Come to think of it, these kids have more initiative than most people I know. Maybe there’s hope for our future yet.

Read the letters at PBS.org

Band of Brothers, for those of you who missed it, was an epic WWII miniseries on HBO that came out a few years ago detailing the immortal bond between soldiers, and the intense Hell of the battlefield. Now HBO is begining to air a follow-up series called The Pacific, taking the Band of Brothers formula and switching the setting from Nazi-occupied Europe to, you guessed it, the Pacific. I think this is an awesome idea because the Pacific side of the war hasn’t seen as much coverage as the Hitlerey part, aside from Clint Eastwood’s also-notable Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers.

For another reminder why our generation is so much worse than the one with the title of “The Greatest,” check out The Pacific on HBO (new episodes air Sunday at 9), or watch episodes online here. (there’s a short registration process, but for those without HBO it’s definitely worth it).

Wade Davis seems to be a little out of breath, uses unnecessarily big words, looks unshakably like Tim Robbins, and is named after a piece of legislation from 1864, but this talk is mindblowing. He paints a picture of the world exactly the way you have to see it. As he puts it, “there’s no pyramid with Victorian England at the top and all the primitive people at the bottom.” The world is the story of a bunch of different threads going in a bunch of different directions, and each one leads to something profound and amazing. Ours is only one of those threads. This is what “open-minded” is supposed to mean.