You’ve been reading or watching Game of Thrones. You’ve lovingly lingered over the descriptions of Gray Wind running into battle with Rob. You cried for Lady and cheered when Nymeria used Joffrey’s arm as a chew toy. Perhaps you’ve even caught yourself looking back over your lease agreement and wondering if “dire wolf” qualifies as an exotic pet.

Well, now your dreams of owning a dire wolf can finally come true!*

*sort of.

[More @ Underwire]

(Source: Wired)

AUSTIN, Texas — Each year, movie nerds flock to the South by Southwest Film Festival for the chance to see scads of movies at the cinephile-friendly, beer-serving Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s Ritz Theater. This year, however, Alamo Drafthouse is offering something for TV fantasy nerds too — a gallery show of original Game of Thrones art.

That’s right. The brains behind Mondo – the Alamo collectible-art division responsible for all of those rad movie posters – have asked a talented crew of artists to make original pieces based on the HBO show. The result is a series of eight screen prints and nearly 30 pieces of original art – the latter of which, along with two of the screen prints, will be on display at a Mondo gallery event beginning Friday and running through March 14.

[More @ Underwire]

Nate Silver fact: he also predicts Oscar winners.

(Source: Wired)

Beck’s astonishing 10-minute recreation of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” racked up more than 300 thousand Youtube views in the last week, and now Beck and music video director Chris Milk  (with the help of car maker Lincoln) are releasing an all-new way to experience the performance for all the fans who wish they could have been there. Call it the next best thing: an interactive 360-degree version of the performance that allows online viewers to navigate the concert similar to the way you navigate roads in Google Maps Street View, while surrounded by sound and movement.

“The perspective you have watching it in 360 and the way you move around is probably similar to how a player in a videogame moves around the space,” Beck told Wired. “But in this you’re obviously moving around a real space. It’s sort of imposing the way you navigate in a videogame into a real-life experience.”

Navigate Beck’s performance of ‘Sound and Vision’ as a 360-degree interactive video.

Animated GIFs have become so huge. They’re everywhere. But why? On the surface, they’re pretty silly—a few frames of video, endlessly looping in time. There are GIFs of Star Trek‘s Picard facepalming, of Dwight from The Office dancing, of one penguin shoving another into the water. There’s Tom Cruise laughing, sports-play flameouts, tons of porn.

This is the sort of one-note joke that—like rickrolling or ermahgerd pics—normally fades after a few revolutions of the international meme cycle. But animated GIFs aren’t dying. They’re metastasizing: People festoon their Tumblrs with them, pass them around in email, and use them as Twitter avatars or signatures on discussion boards. Oxford Dictionaries even chose GIF as its USA Word of the Year for 2012. This is all the weirder considering that GIFs date back to the prebroadband late ’80s. As a medium, they’re quite old.

Ah, but it’s this ancient vintage that helps explain their true appeal. To really understand the value of animated GIFs, you have to go back even farther—to 1879 and Eadweard Muybridge’s “zoopraxiscope.”

Read more @ Underwire!

(Source: Wired)

Earlier this week the University of Chicago received what might be an elaborate hoax, a miracle, or the best college admissions application of all time: Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The journal came in a package addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. but wasn’t sent through the U.S. mail — its stamps are fake. It’s a near-perfect replica of the journal Indiana Jones uses in Raiders, but it’s not the real deal – Lucasfilm also doesn’t know its origins — and the university has absolutely no idea how it found its way into Rosenwald Hall, which houses the school’s admissions department and where the staff initially thought it was just a piece of mail meant for a professor that got lost on the way.

“This package was a little perplexing because we couldn’t find the staff member or the professor [it was intended for] in the directory,” Garrett Brinker, director of undergraduate outreach for the university, said in an interview with Wired. “So that’s when the plot thickened.”

Read more about the mystery package over @ Underwire!

(Source: Wired)

Breaking Bad’s Walter White will go down as one of the most popular heroes-turned-villians in television history. For five years now, White and Bryan Cranston (who plays him) have created a cult-like following among groupies – resulting in geeky forms of adulation like Walter White animated GIFs and now a lookalike contest.

Last week dozens of wannabes showed up in Albuquerque for the event hosted by Steven Michael Quezada, who plays DEA agent Steven Gomez on the show. Fittingly held in the city that serves as the series’ backdrop and Quezada’s hometown, the contestants came clad in everything from those now-famous opening-scene underpants to the ubiquitous yellow hazmat suit that has taken over later seasons.

“Bryan Cranston has just killed it, and that’s why he gets the props,” says Quezada. “He’s fucking kicked ass, bottom line.”

(Source: Wired)