Chris Hardwick's Blog, page 2361
August 2, 2016
Make Your Own GAME OF THRONES Wildfire Using Science
What are the odds you’re going to be sent to King’s Landing to stand in for your father as acting Hand of the King? At best it’s got to be 10/1. Since your chances of meeting with the pyromancers of the Alchemists’ Guild are so low, you are unlikely to get your hands on any caches of wildfire any time soon. That’s why you might want to learn how to make it yourself.
Actually, don’t make it yourself, because even though this video from NurdRage (apparently run by someone in the FBI’s Witness Protection program that needs to hide his real voice) is very cool and full of science (SCIENCE!), this is still potentially harmful stuff that needs to be handled with care.
The first batch of homemade wildfire made here (and before any of you complain, we are talking about the volatile green liquid imagined up by George R.R. Martin for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones in the sense that it is green, and not that it can burn on water like ancient Greek fire) was simply methanol mixed with borax, which produced a green flame. It wasn’t particularly bright or long lasting though (orange flames began to appear shortly after lighting due to sodium in the borax).
To create something more substantial, he mixed 200 grams of borax and 650mL of methanol, then (carefully) added 100g of sulfuric acid, and set up a fractional distillation. After 10 hours at 54 degrees Celsius, it gave him an azeotropic trimethyl borate that produced a “purer” wildfire. You can see the difference in the intensity and length of the green flames for each substance.
(This is the same stuff used by the scientists that made this video we brought you before, but this time we got the actual science behind it all.)
So even though you might never be called on to save your city and family from an invading fleet, it never hurts to be prepared. Wildfire might not be real, but science is.
What other fictional substance would you like to learn how to make in real life? Light up our comments section below with your thoughts.
Images: NurdRage
ALIENS: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY Book Goes Behind the Scenes of the Classic Film
This summer marks thirty years since James Cameron, then a newbie director with one hit film to his name, created one of the best sci-fi sequels ever made with Aliens. Together with Sigourney Weaver, who reprised her role as Ellen Ripley from the original Ridley Scott 1979 Alien film, Aliens turned the action up to 11, and introduced a whole new series of characters that audiences grew to love, like the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen) and the sole survivor of the colony on planet LV-426, a little girl named Newt (Carrie Henn).
While Ridley Scott’s original classic was essentially a sci-fi horror film, a “haunted house in space” so to speak, Aliens embraced the aesthetic of an ’80s Stallone/Schwarzenegger action flick, while keeping just enough of the scary elements from the first movie to satisfy all the horror fans out there too. It was the perfect example of all the right elements coming together at just the right time.
Now publisher Titan Books is celebrating Aliens’ anniversary with their new book Aliens: The Set Photography, which reveals a unique new perspective on the making of James Cameron’s classic film, as the focus shifts behind the cameras to capture the director, cast and crew as they bring the second action-packed installment of the Alien saga to the big screen.
Aliens: The Set Photography also features brand-new insights and memories from actors Carrie Henn (Newt) and Jenette Goldstein (Private Vasquez). The book included a wealth of never-before-seen pictures including casting publicity shots, behind-the-scenes ‘between-take’ breaks, weapons, vehicles and much more, Aliens: The Set Photography acts as a sumptuous visual celebration of one of the greatest science-fiction action films of all time.
Aliens: The Set Photography will be released on August 9, and in the meantime, check out some amazing images from the book in our gallery below:
Are you excited about this behind the scenes look at the classic film, and do you have any Aliens memories you’d love to share? Let us know in the comments below.
Images: Twentieth Century Fox / Titan Books
A Mysterious POKÉMON Monument Popped Up In New Orleans
The power of Pokémon and Pokémon Go is great and can compel people to do some amazing things, as has been well documented thus far, but in terms of mysterious events, we may have just reached the peak: Overnight in New Orleans, a large statue of a defiant-looking Pikachu popped up, and nobody seems to know how it got there. Since Sunday, Coliseum Square Park has been the home to this “Pokémonument,” as it’s being called due to the inscription on the back, and fans are flocking to see the statue that looks like bronze, but is actually made out of fiberglass.
The site actually used to be home to a fountain, which is no longer in operation. “It’s a defunct fountain,” a member of the park’s neighborhood association said. “It’s actually on our list of fountains to get running again. So as long as it’s sitting here without any water flowing, it’s okay with me.”
There’s certainly no compelling reason to move the Pokémonument just yet, considering this is what the site looked like back in March, according to Google Street View and Reddit user SpenceMan01:
We’d say that a glorious depiction of the flagship Pokémon is an improvement over two tires in a dirty square pit. If you happen to be in New Orleans and want to pay homage to the mighty and powerful Pikachu, here’s the location of the statue. As a few Reddit commenters speculate, it’ll probably be a while before Niantic gets wind of this and rolls out an update that ruins the Pokémonument:
Heck, maybe a bunch more will pop up and we’ll have a Ruins of Alph situation on our hands. Pikachu himself seems to approve:
I hope nola leaves up #pokemonument 4ever. Ppl were leaving offerings & rubbing Pika belly. What a time to be alive. pic.twitter.com/ZwwUjZdkF1
— Angel Giuffria (@aannggeellll) August 2, 2016
Featured image: @LASwae
Marilyn Manson and Shooter Jennings Covered Bowie’s “Cat People”
A testament to David Bowie’s far extending influence is the fact that in the musical landscape the luminary helped create, two figures as stylistically disparate as Marilyn Manson and Waylon Jennings’ son Shooter have teamed up to cover Bowie’s “Cat People” and made a 16-bit noir video. That is an insane premise that sounds like some sort of unaired SNL skit or like it was borne from one of the Nerdist editorial team’s notoriously obscure inside jokes. But alas, that is the power of David Bowie, the great unifier of all cool/strange people.
Jennings’ cover of “Cat People” comes from his most recent record Countach (For Giorgio), which is an homage to ’80s mega producer Giorgio Moroder (for all you Stranger Things fans, Jennings’ album and Moroder’s discography are must-listens). It is a noir-ish take on one of David Bowie’s darker, brooding tracks, and Marilyn Manson’s vocal timbre is weirdly perfect for the task. It makes me think that these two would do a great job covering the entirety of Bowie’s final record, Blackstar, which confidently plumbs the depths of existential dread.
Visually, the pair offer a 16-bit video that follows a cult of women who are somehow related to a rash of fatal animal attacks. We see a semi-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, shady business in motels, and of course, the two singers getting into their fair share of trouble. It is a truly bizarre tribute, and I think Bowie would be ecstatic about it.
Do you think Jennings and Manson successfully put out the fire with gasoline? Let us know on Twitter if you have any other favorite Bowie covers that we have to hear.
Image: BCR Media
Matt Grosinger is the music editor of Nerdist, and you can find him thinking about David Bowie on Twitter.
Avocado Burger Buns Are a Weird New Fad
We are entering an era of food innovation! The time is now to shed the breads that have been weighing us down all these years! Goodbye brioche! Later sesame buns! Avocados are here to revolutionize the burger scene! Maybe.
Colette Dike is an Amsterdam-based food stylist who blends food with decoration. A love story if you will, per her website Fooddeco’s description. Her real passion seems to be avocado, as it takes front and center stage for most of her photos.
Her Instagram is an ode to the beloved avocado, using it to create shapes you wouldn’t have even thought of as you sat in your kitchen slicing it into chunks with your butter knife like a heathen. Here, her avos are ribboned, swirled, sliced and flowered.
A photo posted by F O O D D E C O (@fooddeco) on Jul 28, 2016 at 7:28am PDT
However it’s Dike’s concept of the avocado burger bun that’s capturing food lovers’ attentions. Rather than a gluten-ladened squishy buns, she chooses to house both traditional and vegan burgers between avocados that have been halved and skinned.
Mashable spoke with Dike who suggests that for those who think that seems like an awful lot of avo in one sitting (raises hand), that they look at the meal as a “stacked salad instead of a burger.” Hm. That may take a little more fine tuning as a campaign to convince staunch burger lovers but we get the idea. After all, for the health conscious here in LA, the replacement of lettuce leaves for buns aka “Protein Style” is a popular seller at burger-slinger In-N-Out.
Still, I don’t see a drive-thru shoving your delicate avo-burgers into paper sacks just yet. For now we can just revel in the gloriousness of Fooddeco’s instagram and dream of whirly, swirly avocados.
Check out more of Colette Dike’s avocado burgers on her Instagram. Would you rather have a traditional bun or an avocado with your burger? Let us know in the comments!
Images: Fooddeco
HBO Wants You to Vote GAME OF THRONES This Year
This year’s election cycle in the United States has left most of us feeling some unholy mixture of terrified, disheartened, and shruggingly bemused. There’s so much fuckery in politics that you have to be made of steel to get through it without any lasting damage. But if we could vote for something else for president, maybe like a TV show we all love, then we’d all feel a lot better. And HBO is here to make sure that we do exactly that, launching campaign for you to vote for who should win Game of Thrones. The GOT Party is here!
The video above does a great job of riling up all the different factions of people (those who “don’t see their banner on the ballot” while showing the Bolton’s flayed man reminds me a lot of real life at the moment) and points us in the direction of a site called TheGOTParty.com which then has a four-way voting system between candidates and you can read their individual platforms.
And who are the candidates this year? Well, we’ve got two heroes and two decidedly not heroes; Daenerys Targaryen is running with Tyrion Lannister as her running mate, and she’s coming in a solid second place at the moment (35% of voting) on her platform of bringing freedom to the known world. Who could possibly be beating her? Well, none other than Jon Snow and his seemingly unstoppable running mate Lyanna Mormont, who have 49% of the vote right now. His platform is much more pragmatic but just as compelling.
And on the other side of the ticket, we’ve got two candidates who are doing rather worse in the current polls. Lord Petyr Baelish is proving to be a solid third party candidate with 13% of the votes, and his running mate Sansa Stark is likely a big part of that. He wants to support small business and reducing Westeros’ debt to the Iron Bank. And he’s doing infinitely better than the fourth potential ruler. Reigning Queen Cersei Lannister has only 2.7% of the votes with her running mate Qyburn. I think you can pretty much guess why she’s doing so poorly.
The voting ends in a month, so be sure to get your voice heard, and no matter what happens in November, sit pretty with the knowledge that at least the Realm is protected. Let us know who you choose (the vote ain’t secret, dude) in the comments below!
All of our Game of Thrones Season 7 predictions!
Image: HBO
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. Follow him on Twitter!
Pump Enough Electricity into a Steel Chain And You Become IRON MAN 2’s Whiplash
Warning: The video you are about to watch was made by someone with 25 years of electrical experience. Do not try this at home, because while it is obviously very cool, it is also extremely dangerous.
Sometimes your father and Tony Stark’s father have a whole “thing” between them, a rift between geniuses that causes you to dedicate your whole life to seek out revenge. But sometimes you’re just an electrician with a YouTube channel whose goal is to “crank” things with enough power until they vaporize.
In either case, if you know what you’re doing, you end up becoming the Marvel villain Whiplash.
In this latest video from the YouTube account Photonicinduction, our local internet electrician in slippers (yes, look closely, he’s wearing slippers during all of this) decided to run current through a steel chain, and what he ended up with is a charged, glowing red string of power that can’t help but remind us of Ivan Vanko, the Iron Man 2 nemesis played by Mickey Rourke, whose primary weapons were high energy whips.
The first transformer he tried pumped 50 amps and 30 volts worth of electricity into the chain, producing a partially red-glowing chain that made some firecracker-like noises. Since the chain offered more resistance than he expected, he moved to a bigger transformer with 50 100 amps and 50 volts and that’s when the Iron Man 2 fireworks really started.
(Note: All videos that remind of us of comic book super villains should contain friends with British accents that rub their hands together like a mad scientist.)
As someone abnormally terrified of being electrocuted, these videos always look so horrifying to me, but this is still way better than Iron Man 2. Even with the slippers it still made more sense.
What would you like to see him pump full of electric current next? Light up our comments section with your thoughts.
Images: Photonicinduction
Watch a Red-Hot Katana Bend When Submerged in Water
The history of the katana goes as far back as 11th century Japan, and the sword variety has endured because it can be easily used with two hands, and of course, because of its strong, long blade. They’re still made today, and the process is fascinating. You can watch the entire process in the video below, but we’re going to focus on how the edge is made to be so damn sharp.
The featured video at the top of this post (via Sploid) shows a blazing hot blade being quickly dipped in a vat of water, at which point it bends downward before recoiling and concluding its transformation in the familiar katana shape, with a slight upward curve. The question is, why does it happen this way?
It has to do with the shape of the blade, which features one side (the edge) that is thinner than the other (the back). In the video, the edge is face down, and because this side has less material, it cools down and contracts more quickly than the back, which results in the downward curvature. Once the back has a chance to cool down as well, the blade regains its normal shape. This process results in a stronger macro-structure of the metal, and therefore a stronger sword.
Many people might now realize how intricate the sword-making process really is, so for further viewing (and if you have an hour to kill), check out the 50-minute documentary on the history of the katana below.
Featured image: Rama
DJ Yoda’s STRANGER THINGS Mixtape Takes You Back to the ’80s
Let’s be honest — the new Netflix series Stranger Things is the best pop culture anything of the summer so far. The show, a spooky sci-fi mystery set in a small Indiana town in the early ’80s, is what would have happened if Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and John Carpenter decided to get together and make a TV mini-series in 1983. If that sounds as awesome to you as it should, then you owe it to yourself to check out Stranger Things at your earliest possible convenience.
But for those of us who have binged watched all 8 hours of the show already, what do we have to tide us all over until an official release of the official Stranger Things soundtrack (which we have been assured is coming soon), or a second season?? Well, thanks to the folks at Vice’s Noisy blog, we’ve learned that UK-based DJ Yoda has just released an hour-long mixtape inspired by the show that should satiate our need for all things Stranger in the meantime.
Not only does DJ Yoda’s mixtape contain music used in the series itself, but it also has a healthy amount of snippets of dialogue from the show dispersed throughout, mostly from the series’ amazing kid actors. The mixtape includes songs by Toto, Dolly Parton, Jefferson Airplane and more, with pop hits from the era that would have fit right into the show.
There’s also music from films that were clear inspirations to Stranger Things — you can hear Freddy’s theme from A Nightmare on Elm Street in there, as well as “People are Strange” by Echo and the Bunnymen from The Lost Boys. And there are other cool surprises throughout.
You can here all of DJ Yoda’s Stranger Things mixtape, via Soundcloud, down below.
Did this cool mixtape give you all the nostalgic feels that the show did? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
Image: Netflix
Pokéball Fireworks Explode During Japanese Fireworks Displays
Given their prominence on the Fourth of July, fireworks are seen as a very American thing, but they’ve been a part of Japanese culture for far longer than we’ve been lighting them off in our backyards. Japan has been hosting fireworks festivals since the 1700s, when they would be fired into the sky to ward off evil spirits. Today, the tradition continues, mostly in July and August.
Over time, groups of pyrotechnical experts would compete for the most impressive display, which led to a great deal of artistry that, again, has carried over to today. Naturally, since Pokémon has been a Japanese pop culture phenomenon for the past 20 years, the franchise has worked its way into the festivities. We can’t exactly expect people to paint a Charizard in the night sky using only colorful explosives, but the Japanese sure have figured out how to make a Pokéball:
モンスターボール花火 pic.twitter.com/Xc8CM7XhjJ
— たぁくん@ポケGO 赤組 (@t19870709s) June 3, 2016
ポケモンのモンスターボール花火。いろんな花火があるな。 pic.twitter.com/W21F5iLrKL — 執行秀一 (@earthrunnerakab) August 13, 2015
They’ve even recreated the rarest Pokéball of all: The Masterball:
@mochidamaskt マスターボールもあったよ pic.twitter.com/n9peMx9gZZ
— 餅玉 (@mochidamaskt) July 31, 2016
With how popular Pokémon is once again in the U.S. thanks to Pokémon GO, we wouldn’t be surprised if some Pokémon fireworks popped up in American fireworks displays. Regardless, let us not forget that fireworks have long been a part of Nintendo’s history:
What would be the best Pokémon-themed fireworks display? Let us know in the comments below.
Featured image: @N_Starmie
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