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New Madrid: The Best of What's Next

New Madrid: The Best of What's Next
New Madrid: The Best of What's Next
In 1812, a massive earthquake rocked New Madrid, Missouri. The event was so powerful that reverberations could be felt as far away as Ohio and South Carolina. It made the Mississippi River run backwards. And it has something to do with a modern-day New Madrid, a sort of psych-rock band in Athens, Ga. They’re not sure what. But, asked by a colleague for a “brain dump” of thoughts on their latest, and very good, album Sunswimmer, they opened their musings with this: “New Madrid something about the Mississippi River running backwards sand volcanoes, pretty fire bubbling.” By the end of this article, you likely still won’t know what that means. And that’s okay.
In 1992, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay for the Philadelphia Inquirer that began as a review of tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s memoir, called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” In it, Wallace explores why sports memoirs, or interviews with sports stars, are so often disappointing.
“Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievements we Americans revere—fastest, strongest—and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way,” he writes. “We want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers … We want to get intimate with all that profundity.”
Well, the same is true of us music lovers, and we’re just as prone to be disappointed as any modern tennis fan is with Roger Federer’s flat affect and dully impeccable manners. The truth is, you and me and anyone else who reads this, we folks who listen to music and hear something in it that stirs us, are doing the same thing. We’re trying to get intimate with someone else’s profundity, and brother, that’s a lot to ask an artist to help you do.
New Madrid is a darn good band. The act landed splat in the middle of Athens’ musical consciousness with their 2012 debut, Yardboat, and proceeded to dominate the local music award ceremony that year, which is no small feat in a town where the branches of the music scene are virtually sagging with ripe fruit. Now with New West Records, New Madrid have grown Yardboat’s jammy Southern rock into a psych-tinged sophomore album, Sunswimmer, with the help of producer David Barbe (Deerhunter, Animal Collective) at Chase Park Transduction studios.
There’s something about Sunswimmer that feels instantly comfortable, like a pair of shoes from the thrift store that someone already wore in for you. Opener “All Around the Locust” reveals singer Phil McGill, drawling with a lazy-tongued twang amid washes of reverb and effects-laden guitar, somehow feeling brisk and lackadaisical at the same time. It’s the sound of last year’s cool, wet Georgia July, when everyone was itching to go night swimming in their neighborhood’s apartment complex pool and spent way too much time cooped up inside. And, with the exception of more rock-driven lead single “Manners,” the tone that “Locust” sets permeates the album—somehow full of vigor, yet relaxed, and probably a little stoned.
This brings us to our own “Tracy Austin” moment. Because as good as this record is, as much as it reminds your humble writer of her own cool, wet Georgia July in the very town where this band lives and records, as satisfying as it would be to know some of the specifics of how New Madrid were able to so deftly capture the time and place of Sunswimmer’s conception (recording it live over just under three weeks to analog tape didn’t hurt) the band is remarkably bad at talking about themselves.
“Regional afflictions, superstitions, music has always been an otherworldy thing for New Madrid. The grotesque and mystical nature of the South—it’s history, it all weaves its way into,” says a snippet, truncated mid-sentence, from New Madrid’s written musings on their own tunes. Asked to elaborate on this intriguing prompt, McGill said, “Being blown away by [long pause] OK, so it’s hard for me to think specifically [long pause] the fervent religiosity of the South…”
This sort of muzzy, non-committal way of answering a fan’s questions about art doesn’t jibe well with our expectations of the artists we spend time on, not in a world where so many people who make beautiful or challenging music are also asked to take the time to be eloquently televisable and quotable and often seem to enjoy it.
That doesn’t change the fact that the newly confident, assertive opening riff of “Manners” makes a listener want to shake her ass a little. It doesn’t taint the easy pleasure of the rootsy-funky “Forest Gum,” which, by the way, McGill can’t seem to decide is or is not related in some way to the movie Forrest Gump. (“Yeah it probably does loosely [...] It’s hard to unmarry that idea. That song is a strange one.”)
“I guess a lot of [Sunswimmer’s sense of place and lyrical focus on the natural world] is, like, escapist, “ McGill said by phone, while driving through Kansas’ endless flat expanse. “The natural part is untainted by bad things. On the New Madrid fault line, there was this earthquake. It hit big in the 1800s and made the Mississippi river run backwards. No one really talks about it because the Civil War happened right afterwards. I don’t know if there is a specific place that this record is about. Maybe Athens. There’s a lot of green stuff, a lot of rain, the drive between Chattanooga [where some of the band members used to live] and Athens. Maybe the memory of that is more on this record. None of that is really direct or specific.”
Oh, well. As the band said themselves in an email, “Music is a spiritual thing, it’s unexplainable magnetism, that invisible anchoring force but there’s a lot of stuff to comb through to get there.” Talking to bands about the music they make, or reading what they have to say about it in a magazine like this, is our own way of trying to comb through things, to untangle someone else’s profundity. Sometimes we simply forget: that’s what the music’s for in the first place.

Catching Up With Wil Wheaton: International TableTop Day

Catching Up With Wil Wheaton: International TableTop Day
Catching Up With Wil Wheaton: International TableTop Day
Wil Wheaton—actor, writer, host and geek icon—stands in front of a brick wall, stand-up style, wearing a shirt that says “CRUSH ALL HUMANS” and launches into an opening monologue:
“When most people think of a small world, they think about being on a boat surrounded by creepy dolls who won’t stop singing. But when gamers think of a small world, they imagine a fantasy-filled land full of crazy races with outrageous powers where the world is covered in blood as we battle to see who can take it over and win the game.”
So begins Episode 1 of Wheaton’s online show TableTop, where he and three of his friends play a board, card or dice game. The 30-minute video has nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube. But if the idea of watching other people play a game doesn’t immediately grab you, that’s okay with Wheaton. His real goal is to get you to play.
Wheaton has had several vocations since starring in Stand By Me and spending time as the youngest member of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When the series ended, he did one more film—the 1991 boarding-school action flickToy Soldiers—then left the spotlight of Los Angeles for Topeka, Kansas, where he worked for NewTek, helping develop a video production tool called Video Toaster 4000. He returned to film in the late ‘90s, opting for independent projects. He also started voice acting again—he’d gotten his start playing young Martin Brisby in The Secret of NIMH at the age of 10. He’s now appeared everywhere from Family Guyto Batman: The Brave and the Bold. In 2001, he launched the blog Wil Wheaton dot Net and was named Best Celebrity Blogger by Forbes two years later. He’s hosted several TV shows and guest-starred on The Big Bang Theory. He’s written several books, including his first memoir Dancing Barefoot and amassed 2.5 million Twitter followers. But it wasn’t until recently that his passion for table top games intersected with his career.
Boardgames, dice games, deck-building games—Wheaton has kept a habit of finding new games to play with a group of friends who he’s known since high school. And a couple of years ago, he decided he wanted to help others discover the hobby he loved. At the encouragement of his friend Felicia Day—creator and star of The Guild, where Wheaton played her nemesis/love interest—Wheaton developed an idea for a show where he’d invite friends to play a different game each episode. TableTop has been a hit for Day’s Geek & Sundry YouTube channel, often generating more than a million views per episode thanks in part to guests like Seth Green, MythBusters’ Grant Imahara and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Jeri Ryan.
Wheaton expanded his gaming evangelism beyond the screen to the real world last year, helping found International TableTop Day, a series of events across the globe where anyone can join in the table-top game renaissance. Last year, more than 3,000 events were held on all seven continents (thanks to researchers in Antarctica). The second annual TableTop Day is April 5, and Wheaton hopes to have 11 million people participating. The stated goal: for us to “put down our worries and play more games.”
We spoke to Wheaton about his love for games and the success of TableTop.
Q: Did you grow up playing boardgames as a kid?
Wil Wheaton: When I was a kid, I played lots of the old-school tabletop games with my parents and my sisters—Life and Sorry and Risk and things like that. But when I was about 14 or 15, I was introduced to real tabletop games by my friends in high school. We were all awkward nerds, and we were all into RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons. But I didn’t know what tabletop games really were. As a result of that, tabletop games are the mortar which holds together the longest friendships of my life.
Q: Do you still get together with that same group of friends?
Wheaton: We get together on average about twice a month—probably five of us that are in the core and another three or four who come in and out. We all have families now; a lot of these guys have kids. We get together as couples, and we all game together. If we say we want to have dinner or a barbecue, nobody will show up. But if we say let’s have dinner and play a game, we have to pull the card table in from the garage and crowd around it.
Q: What was the first game you remember falling in love with?
Wheaton: One of the first games that I completely fell in love with was an old Steve Jackson game called Car Wars. It’s effectively a table-top mini-game, but instead of using mini figures, there were cars were printed out on little pieces of cardboard. The game takes place in post-apocalyptic America where all the vehicles are kind of outfitted like the Road Warrior. The whole game is designing vehicles with weapons and driving around the countryside or an arena and trying to destroy all your friends. What I really liked about it was that I’d never played anything that had the same kind of tactical visual component to it—I’d played Risk but that was a different thing. I really liked the reality of that game. I loved imagining that I was this character in this post-apocalyptic future and letting that—in my mind at least—be real and letting my imagination create that place. I loved it so much—I was playing a game, but I was also being this weird character. I’ve become friends with Steve, and I found out years later that Steve Jackson says, “All games are role-playing games.” The way that D&D or role-playing games where you assume the identity of another person or creature in a world that you collaborate to build. Every game you play is just going to be a role-playing game and you just let whatever role you’re playing in that game inhabit you. What’s funny is I don’t play it anymore. It doesn’t scratch the same itch that I have as a player anymore. These days, I’d rather play a Euro-style game that has a different approach to gaming. But that will always hold a place in my heart and my memory that taught me that boardgames didn’t have to be Monopoly or Payday.
Q: How did International TableTop Day get started?
Wheaton: In the first season of TableTop, just a few episodes into the season, we became aware that not only was it successful, but it was a hit. It’s success exceeded anything any of us expected or prepared for. And I can’t even remember who came up with the idea, but someone said, “We should have a TableTop Day where people are encouraged to get together and play games together.” Because that’s whyTableTop exists. I created the show because I wanted to give people an excuse to get together and play games. And I wanted to show people how awesome gaming is. And TableTop Day takes the things that people see on our show TableTop and makes it real and puts it into their homes or their game shops or their libraries or whatever. The first TableTop Day wasn’t even finished and people were asking, “When are we going to do this again? This is so great. This is so fun!”
Q: I’ve been getting more into table-top games lately. We just brought on our first boardgames writer, Keith Law, who by day is an analyst on ESPN.
Wheaton: Oh, cool.
Q: It seems like table-top games are having a boom right now. Why do you think that is?
Wheaton: Well, I think that TableTop has certainly helped because people who are curious about games can look at it and see what the gaming hobby is all about. People who are already gamers who have non-gamers in their lives can show themTableTop so they can see what the hobby is about. But also table-top games are everywhere. I recently went into a bookstore and the table-top games section of the bookstore was nearly as big as the table-top game section of the dedicated table-top store that I went to in high school. And with big box retailers and stores like Target carrying table-top-style games, people who maybe would have needed to go into a game shop to find a game like Takenoko or Settlers of Catan would see it in their normal places where they’re shopping for entirely non-gaming-related reasons. The availability of it as well as the existence of a show that lets people see what it’s all about has contributed to the gaming renaissance. We’ve also noticed that there’s all these people who identify as gamers. They may have worked in the same office for years and never really knew because it never really came up. We’ve worked hard to demystify the hobby so that it’s just a natural thing people talk about. This is a great time to be a gamer.
Q: I watched the last episode of TableTop this morning and I was surprised how entertaining it could be to watch other people play boardgames. What made you decide to create the show and what made you think that this could be something fun for other people to watch?
Wheaton: Through the early part of this century, I really loved watching people play poker on TV. That showed me that it was possible to watch other people playing a game, and even if I’m not playing it, still be entertained. So when Felicia [Day] asked me to if I wanted to start a show for Geek & Sundry and we were talking about what kind of show it was going to be, I said, what if we did a boardgame show that was like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, with table-top games instead of poker. We’ll get interesting people to come and play games with us ,and we’ll draw in lots of different people. If someone’s a fan of Grant Imahara or someone’s a fan of Grace Helbig, they might come and watch the show to see this person they love doing something and hopefully they will leave being interested about playing table-top games. Or someone is already a table-top gamer, but they’ve got a person in their life who isn’t. And they want to be able to say, “Hey, look, this is why I get together with my friends twice a week to play games,” and they show them the show. We’ve been really pleased to see that the predictions we made of how entertaining this was going to be to be correct. And this is really important: We have phenomenal editors. I bring to the editing process the eye and the brain of a gamer. Felicia brings the eye and the brain of a filmmaker. And the two of us are able to work with our editorial team to bring out the strongest entertainment and gaming elements and make sure those get into the show. And then the editors work really hard to put together something that is easy to follow, entertaining and visually interesting. Because we all have to acknowledge that this is a visual medium. But TableTop is a show that comes together in editing and it’s always very important to me that Steve [Grubel] gets the credit he deserves.
Q: The show gets anywhere from a quarter million to over a million views each episode. Were you surprised at all by that response?
Wheaton: [Long pause] No. I was really excited about it. I always expected that it would do well. When we see episodes get up over the one-million mark, I always have to sit down for a minute because that’s actually pretty amazing. And one of the things that I think is really cool about that is that I know from talking to gamers, that gamers will get together—four or five people will sit down to watch TableTopand then play that game or other games. So those numbers don’t necessarily mean one million people. It could mean two million or even three million people.
Paste: So what are your favorite table-top games these days. What do you most enjoy?
Wheaton: At the moment I’m playing a ton of Lords of WaterdeepTakenoko, a bluffing game called Skull, and a brand-new game called T’Zolkin. I want to say it just came out last year. Those are the ones that we’re playing the most. I’m also spending a lot of time reading sourcebooks for Fate Core and Savage Worldsbecause I’m about to start an RPG campaign with some friends.
Q: I know you’ve gotten to know some of these game creators. Have you considered creating your own game or collaborating with those guys?
Wheaton: Yeah, sure. It’s something that I’ve talked about with some friends. Every now and then I’ll talk to one of my friends who’s a designer and we’ll say, “Gosh, you know, it’d be fun if this happened in a game.” And my friend said, “Well, so why don’t we just make that?” “Oh right, of course, we can do that. I didn’t even think of that.” So yeah, it’s something that I thought of and it’s something that I’d really love to do. But if I’m going to do that, it’s got to be a passion project and it needs to be something that’s really awesome. Because there are so many great games right now and no time to play them all. It’s the same way I feel about writing a book. If I’m going to ask someone to trust me with their time, I better make it worth their while.
Q: In getting ready for this interview and watching TableTop and reading about International TableTop Day, I’ve thought, “Oh we’ve got to host something here—game nights at the office.” So you’ve inspired me to dive into that. I think it’s a wonderful way to get friends together. We’ve enjoyed that when we’ve been doing it at our house, but I think it’d be fun to do here.
Wheaton: I love that and I’m so happy to know that because that’s one of the main motivations I had when I created the show. I wanted what you are describing to happen. And it’s a really great thing to do at work. I worked in offices years ago where we played Counter Strike after work. And it really brought the team that I was on really close together. And the same thing happens with table-top games now. People get together and form new bonds that really wouldn’t necessarily be forged in a work environment.
Q: Well, you’ve been a huge presence on social media and people say there’s danger in that taking away from actual real friendships and real face-time, and I love that this is the way you’ve taken that social-media cache and tried to plug it back into real-world connections.
Wheaton: Yeah, one of the things we really hoped to accomplish with International TableTop Day is giving people a good reason to get into the same place and sit down together and enjoy sharing a game together and hopefully create some relationships that persist beyond International TableTop Day. Last year tons of people met people at a game shop that became their gaming group. And that’s really great, and I’m really hopeful that that happens this year and every year that we do this.
Q: So where will you be spending International TableTop Day, and what will you be playing?
Wheaton: We actually have an event planned here in Los Angeles. I’ll be playing with Felicia and a bunch of our team at Geek & Sundry. We’re going to live-stream it on the Internet just like we did last year. I’m not sure what we’re going to play; we haven’t decided yet. But last year we played a game that I really love called Seven Wonders which is a game that wouldn’t necessarily work on TableTop. It doesn’t fit our format, but it’s still a great game. So I’m thinking maybe we’ll do that again—play a game that we all really love, but that’s a little bit different than the ones we really play.

Catching Up With Heather McIntosh

Catching Up With Heather McIntosh
Catching Up With Heather McIntosh
Music fans probably know Heather McIntosh best as the “house cellist” for Athens’ legendary Elephant 6 Collective, which spawned such obsession-worthy acts as Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal, Elf Power, Beulah and countless others. But she’s equally lauded in the film world as one of the most exciting young composers on the scene. We caught up with Heather at this year’s SXSW to hear about the three films she had at the festival.
We’re here with Heather McIntosh, an amazing composer whose work you might have most recently heard in Craig Zobel’s masterpiece Compliance. You’re here with more projects at SXSW this year, correct?
Heather McIntosh: I’m here, actually, with three films. Faults, directed by Riley Stearns, and I’m here with a Midnighter film called Honeymoon, directed by Leigh Janiak, and then I’m also here with a documentary I co-composed with T. Griffin, called Vessel, which is a documentary about ladies on the high seas offering abortions to people where you can’t quite have them. That’s my three.
Q: Well let’s hit Vessel and Honeymoon quickly, because we’ll probably append this to the podcast that talks about Faults. I guess a good first question would be, tell me about three different films, three different approaches, what’s it like for you to have to wear some different hats as far as what the score is doing in the film?
McIntosh: With Honeymoon, with Leigh’s film, it starts off very gentle, almost like romance. “We’re on our honeymoon!” And it’s all this very sweet, waltzy loveliness. Then it sort of degenerates into…not the best time. It definitely goes down that avant-garde, like, lots of dripping strings and the classical scary movie kind of category.
Q: A Hitchcockian kind of thing?
McIntosh: Maybe even like, you know, it’s a little bit like your Ligeti and Penderecki, so your real sort of shiny, drippy stuff. Real…you can’t get this hand gesture, can you?
Q: No, it’s great radio.
McIntosh: That does not work well; this I realize is a failure on my part. But, Leigh also really knew what she wanted. She was very specific in her intention, and we were really able to hit some notes right off the bat. Then, it was just finessing the beats of it. With Vessel, it was interesting because Todd asked for me to come on board for the score, and they had a lot of cello music in the initial score before we got a hold of it. So what better to have a cello-playing composer working with you? So I did like a super blast-out weekend, an extended weekend with Todd, and we just recorded tons of little interworking cells, where you have all these different layers sort of in a minimalistic way, where you could have it all going at once or have these little bits. He’s also really great at sampling, reusing and shifting, so he did a bunch of that, and I would add to it, and we would go back and forth. I think it worked out pretty well.
Q: Before we move on to Faults, is the process for you as a composer different for a documentary as opposed to a narrative, or is it similar?
McIntosh: It’s interesting, I kind of feel like you’re always dealing with a story. Aside from the fact that sometimes in documentary work there is a bit more score, that works as a bed throughout the whole thing, not all the time but that can happen. Overall, you’re still just supporting the story of the film, so in that way it’s not really any different at all, I’d say. I do feel that sometimes there will be a wash of score that can exist that will get us from the boat to the this to this. I do really think it’s how do you carry the story on. With Vessel, you know they’re kind of on the high seas. It’s very sort of Greenpeace pirate thing they’re doing. It’s kind of action-y; you wanna get that momentum going so it’s fun to see that fall into place when they’re doing all their…shaking things up, we’ll say.
Q: And then Faults. Tell me about, sort of what I was said before, different things with different films and what each film needs. What did Faults need?
McIntosh: With this one, it’s funny because I saw his short play about a year ago. And his short has no music in it—The Cub has absolutely no music in it. But I went up to him right after the screening and was like “if you ever do anything, if you ever do a feature…” And it is a great short. You can find it on the internet. I was so excited about that, and he said at the time “I am working on a feature, but I don’t see any score in the film.” Then, right before this festival adventure, I got an email from him and we hopped on board.
So I knew it was coming from a place where he expected there to be no music at all, but I got to really play around in that sound design space. Which is so fun for me, because I come from an electronic music composition background, sort of an artsy-fartsy kind of place. To get to pitch-shift down cellos to the point where they just sound like room tone, to get to have that kind of fun and have it be so easy where it’s just like “Yes!” I just think there was also a matching of the minds immediately. It didn’t take much to get to the right place.
But he also really knew what he wanted, so it wasn’t ever a question. We could have the talk, “Oh I think you should take out this one voicing,” and I’m so flexible when it comes to stuff like that. I’m not precious with my music. I don’t want to be heavy-handed with a score. If it doesn’t need to be that kind of character in the film, it should be pulled back. There is absolutely no reason for me to hear more notes if they’re not necessary. I feel like it’s really effective. There is a lot of framing, there are some through-composed parts of the score where it’s like, this is music, it feels like music, and you’re not questioning whether or not it’s sound design. It’s a good mix to be able to put on both of those hats, the scoring composer hat and then to just be a weirdo. It’s a happy, happy place for me, to be a little bit of a weirdo. So, it was great, it was exactly the right thing to get involved in and at the right time. It just felt so easy and fresh, and it’s a really great film too.
Q: Have you seen the finished film?
McIntosh: Yes, yes. I saw it just last night. I went for the mix, which was great too, but there were still some last steps that needed to be made at that point. So, to see the finished film with all of its color correction and everything was really fun.
Q: How was the audience reaction?
McIntosh: I think they liked it. They responded really well, and it was crowded, which is great. It had the right feeling and I think everyone was really on board. You know it’s funny, but it’s dark. It gets pretty dark, but it’s pretty funny too. His timing is just great, and it’s all very intentional. Everything is on purpose, and I think that everything that is on purpose works.
Q: Is Riley [Stearns] excited?
McIntosh: I think he’s excited, yeah. His whole family was in town for the screening. I guess they live sort of slightly outside of Austin, which is cool. I think it was successful. I feel really good about it.
Q: So, tell me what you have next on the docket. What are you working on next?
McIntosh: Well, I’m about to start working on a feature. I don’t know if I should talk about it yet…
Q: A mystery feature.
McIntosh: I’m working on a mystery feature that I am traveling across the country to record. I’ve been working a whole bunch, so I’m going across the country and I’m recording all these tracker organs, old-timey pipe organs, and recording some choral music and about ready to get up some cool stuff. I’ll tell you about it really soon.

Iranian media: Fake U.S. ship spotted in Gulf is a movie set



A replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier spotted near the coast of Iran is nothing more sinister than a movie set, Iranian media said on Sunday.
The New York Times, quoting U.S. intelligence, said last week that the Iranians were building a mock-up of a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, possibly so they could then blow it up for propaganda purposes.
Satellite photos showed what looked like one of the U.S. Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, complete with planes, rising from Iran's Gachin shipyard, near the port of Bandar Abbas.
Iranian newspapers said it was "part of the decor" of a movie being made by Iranian director Nader Talebzadeh on the 1988 shooting down of an Iran Air civilian plane by the USS Vincennes. The United States says the downing of the plane, which killed all 290 passengers and crew, was an accident.
"The issue has turned into a good excuse for another wave of hype against Iran," said the Alef news website which carries views close to the official line in Iran.
"Without any proof or real basis, Western media have jumped again to paint a more negative picture of Iran."
A spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain acknowledged that the replica was "more akin to a Hollywood set than a warship."
"We know it's not an actual aircraft carrier. It's made to look like one of ours ... but makes us wonder: what is it all for?" Spokesman Jason Salata told Reuters by telephone.
"We've seen them make target barges before and tow them and shoot them out as missile exercises and use it for state-run media. This one is a little bit of a head-scratcher. If you're spending resources on this, what would it be for?"
Iranian officials were not available to comment. 

Toby Kebbell Joins Fantastic Four Cast as Dr. Doom

Toby Kebbell Joins Fantastic Four Cast as Dr. Doom
Toby Kebbell Joins <i>Fantastic Four</i> Cast as Dr. Doom
The new Fantastic Four team was revealed back in February, but yesterday the announcement that Toby Kebbell would be joining the cast surfaced.
If Kebbell signs on, he will be playing the Fantastic Four’s enemy Victor von Doom, otherwise known as Doctor Doom. The Fantastic Four reboot will be directed by Josh Trank (Chronicle) and is slated for a June 19, 2015 release.

Janelle Monáe and M.I.A. Holograms Share Stages in Calif. and N.Y. By Kristen Hill

Janelle Monáe and M.I.A. Holograms Share Stages in Calif. and N.Y.
Last year, it was reported that Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham could be the next hologram, but M.I.A. and Janelle Monáe beat him to the punch.
Yesterday, the two singers shared a stage thanks to the technology of holograms. M.I.A.’s hologram appeared next to Janelle Monáe in Hollywood at Quixote Studios, while Monáe’s 3-D project performed with M.I.A. in New York at SIR Stage 37 for Audi’s M3 bi-coastal launch parties.
The last high-tech duet occurred when Tupac’s hologram performed with Snoop Dogg at Coachella in 2012. This time around the performance required a little more than just a 3-D projection and video mapping. M.I.A. and Monáe sung together in person to create the holograms, but were unable to see the conclusion until their performance last night. According to the Associated Press, neither singer got to see their own hologram, but said they would be excited to use holograms again in the future if it were more affordable.
Here’s a fan clip from M.I.A.’s side of the tech-savvy performance:

a Water Resistant Wireless Boombox For the Outdoors

a Water Resistant Wireless Boombox For the Outdoors
Finally, a Water Resistant Wireless Boombox For the Outdoors
Being able to take your music with you wherever you go is important business. The right music for the right occasion can really complete a great time which is why bluetooth speakers are so popular. Many aren’t very good at withstanding damage or water though, so how about a new solution that’s a lot more rugged? That’s the idea behind the Big Turtle Shell. It’s a wireless Bluetooth speaker that’s ‘built for a life of action’, according to its creators at Outdoor Tech Design Lab.
Currently available via a Kickstarter campaign, the boom box is tough to say the least. It’s shock proof and water resistant with a huge battery that doubles as a PowerBank. Whether you’re using it in your backyard for the summer BBQ, around the campfire, or even during the pool party, it’ll be stoically working hard to entertain you.
The Big Turtle Shell promises to bring you 110 decibels of crystal clear audio from a range of over 30 feet. It’s backed up by the ability to play for 16 hours on a single battery charge, ensuring you can enjoy music for so much longer than with other devices. Plus, that battery life means you can charge your iPhone 4 times or Samsung Galaxy 3 times, if you’d rather devote the battery to such practicalities.
It’s a powerful piece of kit for those who want to listen to music wherever they are, and it looks suitably cool, living up to its name with a Turtle Shell style appearance. It even has a nifty mount that makes it possible to even attach it to handles of your bike or
It’s already easily surpassed its Kickstarter goal with the campaign left to run till May 1. There’s still time to dive in with $150 snagging you one Big Turtle Shell BoomBox. A $225 pledge will provide you with a Big Turtle Shell BoomBox, as well as a Little Turtle Shell BoomBox plus a Calamari 3-in-1 USB charging cable. That should cover all your auditory needs for a while to come.