Rebel Scum is a Star Wars fan film, created by Blood Brother Cinema Co., about a rebel pilot who wrecked his snowspeeder and is now stranded on Hoth in Empire controlled territory. The clever pilot, who goes by Echo 12, does whatever it takes to survive and get back to his family.

Rebel Scum was filmed over a period of 2 months at the Columbia Icefields in Alberta Canada on the Athabasca Glacier. Due the nature of the hostile environment a custom thermal rig was built to keep the cameras from freezing in -30C/-22F. Nearly all visual effects have been achieved without the use of CGI using time-honored methods such a stop-motion animation.

images via Blood Brother Cinema Co.

via reddit

In a wonderful tribute to the tragically late David Bowie, editors at Vox compiled a visual list of nine songs by other musicians that sampled his incredibly prolific and influential work. A complete list of these songs can be found on the sampling information site Who Sampled, which shows nearly 18 pages of Bowie songs that have been sampled, many by more than one musician.

But one thing that will always travel forward now that David Bowie is gone, is his music. Countless celebrities poured on about his influence yesterday, but we also can track those who directly documented his influence in quotations or sampled his music.

Christian Brandes, FunGt, and jedijosh920 recently teamed up to create a PC mod for Grand Theft Auto V that allows people to play the game as legendary Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister. The modders added in special commands to make the character smoke, drink, rock on the guitar, and more. The mod is available to download from GitHub.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

An orange and white one-eyed cat named Kuli who was rescued from the streets as a tiny, malnourished kitten, amazingly took to water like a fish and loves to go swimming and surfing with his loving humans in the gorgeous blue-green waters of Honolulu, Hawaii.

A photo posted by @kulithesurfingcat on Dec 22, 2015 at 1:54pm PST

A photo posted by @kulithesurfingcat on Oct 21, 2015 at 3:40pm PDT

A photo posted by @kulithesurfingcat on Jul 14, 2015 at 9:35pm PDT

In 1995, the late great David Bowie and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails joined together during their Outside tour, to perform a gorgeously haunting electric version of “Hurt“, Reznor’s banner ode to the tragedy of addiction from the 1994 album The Downward Spiral.

Also in 1995, the two musicians sat down with Kennedy of MTV’s Alternative Nation to talk about their collaboration.

In 2013, Reznor spoke with Studio Q about the profound effect that Bowie had on his music.

Getting into Bowie. The first Bowie record I really got into was “Scary
Monsters”. …Yeah it to seem like the weirdest, coldest, scariest kind of something really interesting and seductive to me about it, but it wasn’t friendly and it took me a while to understand that record and I still listen to it to all the time. …But to me it was like finding this …artist that seems to have not only created one larger-than-life identity but then while it was getting bigger threw it out and create another one, and then threw that out and create another one and seemingly skipping from genre to genre, style to style. Fearlessly not putting his career first, not putting “hey this was successful, so I better hold on track here”.

via Erika Hall

Wally the rescued squirrel, who once buried a bunch of nuts in the fur of his Bernese Mountain Dog buddy and politely used a fork to enjoy a bit of almond butter, was filmed chewing his yummy treat in slow motion by his human Shannon. It’s almost certain that Wally never has nor will ever eat that slowly again.

The New Yorker magazine and Amazon Studios have partnered with filmmaker Alex Gibney to present “The New Yorker Presents“, a weekly series that encompasses documentary and narrative subjects similar to their longstanding editorial content. The series will be available to stream on February 16, 2016 through Amazon Prime Video.

From award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, Amazon Prime Video presents a groundbreaking new series that brings America’s most award-winning magazine, The New Yorker, to the screen with documentaries, short narrative films, comedy, poetry, animation, and cartoons from the hands of acclaimed filmmakers and artists. Produced by Jigsaw Productions and Condé Nast Entertainment.

In the sixth episode of his new series “The Weird Lense Challenge“, French photographer Mathieu Stern took a 136-year old, early iris diaphragm lens from a large format camera from 1880, modified it so that it would fit and focus onto his Sony A7II and posted the resulting footage.

The Lens is incredibly sharp for a 136 years old simple metallic lens, from my test it’s even sharper than most of my modern canon lenses, the results are amazing … but it also gives some strange lens flares and light leaks that are pretty dreamy (some would say it’s horrible)

Stern also posted the still photos thar he took using the lens.

photos by Mathieu Stern

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips