Author: Trent

  • Giant Bomb » Blowing up this summer

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    Welcome to Giant Bomb: The Blog. It’s sort of like Alien 3: The Gun, only with more explosions and less track. After working on this in secret for as long as we have been, it’s totally exciting to be able to finally let you in on what we’ve been doing. I actually still haven’t gotten used to freely speaking the name of the site in public, or even typing it, really. It’s always been “The Site” or “The Thing I’m Doing” or “If Marion Cobretti Was A Website.”

    So let me start by telling you what Giant Bomb is, and then I’ll briefly touch on what Giant Bomb will become. Right now, we’re opening up this blog, where myself and others will be writing about games, covering them in much the same way I’ve been doing on my personal blog for the past three months. Sometimes it will be off-the-cuff, sometimes it will be reasoned and well-thought-out. We’ll review games here, and we’ll talk about upcoming stuff, as well. We’ll occasionally chime in on the news that surrounds the game industry, both here in print, and in our podcast, which will grow out of the Arrow Pointing Down podcast that I’ve been doing with Ryan Davis for the past few weeks. Yes, we will still continue to speak our minds on the latest happenings in the beverage and snack food industries. Don’t you worry about that. We’ll talk about games there, too. Surprise!

    Check it out here.

  • Punknews.org | NOFX to air world tour documentary on Fuse

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    NOFX has announced the details for their long-promised documentary covering their recent world tour. The show will be aired on Fuse and includes their visits to o Singapore, Peru, Israel, South Africa, Turkey and South Korea.

    Check it out here.

  • Russian Arms Dealer Arrested in Thailand – washingtonpost.com

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    U.S. officials said today they will seek extradition of an infamous Russian arms dealer known as the “merchant of death” who was lured out of hiding and arrested in Thailand in an intricate sting by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

    Viktor Bout, a former Soviet air force officer who has multiple aliases, has been hit with numerous international and U.S. financial sanctions for his longtime role as a suspected arms dealer to some of the world’s most notorious terrorist and insurgency groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

    Check it out here.

  • AP Chief: Press Freedoms Among Casualties of Terrorist Attacks

    The shadow of the Sept. 11 terror attacks is eclipsing press freedom and other constitutional safeguards in the United States, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley said Thursday.

    “What has become clear in the aftermath of 9/11 is how much expediency trumps safeguards,” Curley said in remarks prepared for the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation.

    “Congress steps back from its constitutional role of executive oversight. Civilian oversight of the military wanes. A Justice Department interprets laws in ways that extend police powers. More drastically, prisons are established in places where government or military operatives circumvent due process or control trials,” Curley said in accepting the foundation’s First Amendment Leadership Award.

    “It’s at moments like these when a free press matters most,” he said.

    Check it out here.

  • Has Ashton Kutcher 'Punk'd' the paparazzi? – USATODAY.com

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    “He’s really changed my life,” Paris Hilton told paparazzi from her car, adding she offered the necklace “because the greatest gift is to give.”

    Turns out, as some outlets later discovered, the “mystic” was an actor named Maxie Santillan Jr., who has appeared on CSI and My Name Is Earl. And though some accused Hilton of getting Punk’d, the joke’s on them: The entire scene was staged for a new show from Punk’d producer Ashton Kutcher premiering Sunday on E! (10:30 ET/PT).

    Pop Fiction, an eight-episode series, is a prank show targeting paparazzi and gullible media outlets. It’s made with the eager help of stars, who were the laughing stocks of Kutcher’s former MTV show. This time the shoe’s on the other foot, and the series has been kept so tightly under wraps that E!’s own website fell victim to the Hilton hoax and other planted stories that producers won’t yet divulge

    Check it out here.

  • what it all looks like: Ladies…He's Single & an Artist

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    Tomorrow night the art world will be torn asunder by the uber six foot genius of Keith “Gumby” Johnson. Keith’s Holga images will be on display at the Bladework Studio on 1340 East and 200 South in Salt Lake City from March 7th until April 4th. This Friday there is an opening reception from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Swing by if you are in town and have any taste whatsoever. Keith will be the large guy probably talking to a girl half his age. Really, come by it should be good.

    Check it out here.

  • Tech Support Gets a Reprieve While Users Take a Hit – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog

    I learned that when they say, “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones.

    They actually gave me one of those “Best Of” disks at the end of my day in the call center. Herewith: a few actual calls from that disk or that I heard about from the agents themselves.

    Check it out here.

  • Environmental Illnesses Haunt Some Who Covered 9/11 – PDN

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    On September 11, 2001, Keith Meyers cut short a vacation and raced to New York to help with coverage at Ground Zero. Four days later, Meyers climbed aboard a Coast Guard helicopter to shoot a series of historic pictures, the first aerial news photos of the still-burning World Trade Center site.

    As he leaned out of the helicopter, Meyers could feel the rising smoke.

    “It was like breathing fire, and I could feel my skin tingling and burning,” he says. A doctor later told him he probably had been exposed to chemicals as caustic as Drano.

    Check it out here.

  • Esquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’t – New York Times

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    After Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment on Jan. 22, David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire magazine, dispatched a writer named Lisa Taddeo to report on the actor’s final days.
    Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

    None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

    Check it out here.

  • Rob Galbraith DPI: Public beta of Microsoft Expression Media 2 now available

    A public beta of Microsoft Expression Media 2, the application formerly known as iView MediaPro, is now available. New in Expression Media 2 is hierarchical keywording, faster catalog creation and updating, basic catalog sharing across a network, better use of multiple monitors, support for new, mostly non-image file formats and more.

    Check it out here.

  • JS Online: Iraq copter crash kills area airman

    As an aspiring photojournalist, Christopher Scott Frost wouldn’t stop until he got that one shot that would bring a story to life, his father said Wednesday.
    And as a member of the U.S. Air Force serving in Iraq, he got to employ his relentless pursuit of stories as an editor of a military publication, Gary Frost said.

    “He was ecstatic when one of his stories got picked up by a Spokane, Washington, newspaper,” Gary Frost said in a telephone interview Wednesday night, after learning that his son had been killed in Iraq. “He is esteemed by the people who worked around him for his willingness to tackle any assignment or any mission.”

    According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Frost, 24, died Monday near Bayji, Iraq, in a crash of an Iraqi Army Mi-17 helicopter. The circumstances surrounding the crash are under investigation. He was assigned to the 377th Air Base Wing, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.

    Check it out here.

  • 'I fell in love with a female assassin' – Americas, World – Independent.co.uk

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    Jason P Howe:

    Sitting naked on the edge of the bed in a cheap, sweltering hotel room in the heart of a war-torn, drug-producing region of Colombia, I lit a cigarette and listened as the girl I had just made love with told me a secret dark enough to shake anyone from their postcoital bliss.

    I had been in Colombia for a few months to learn how to become a photojournalist. Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.

    Check it out here.

  • Rob Galbraith DPI: Photo Mechanic 4.5.3.1 released

    Camera Bits has recently released Photo Mechanic 4.5.3.1, a maintenance update to its pro photo browsing and transmission application for Windows and Mac

    Check it out here.

  • A Camera, Two Kids, and a Camel: My Journey in Photographs

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    In this charming and captivating volume, National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt discloses the secrets of a peripatetic life, revealing in often hilarious detail how she managed to juggle two children, bulky cases of camera equipment, and everything needed for a nurturing family life as she traveled to far-flung destinations around the world.
    Belt was one of the first female photographers hired at the National Geographic Society. When her children were born, she kept right on going—and this book is a loving compendium of the wisdom she gained. It chronicles three decades of international travel, a moveable family, and the art she created along the way.

    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.

  • The World From My Front Porch – Larry Towell

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    A mid-career retrospective, this exhibition explores the issues of land and landlessness in two parts. The first section reveals Larry Towell’s family and their relationship to their land in Ontario. Most of the photographs in this section were taken within 100 yards of his front porch. The second section reviews Towell’s work over the past twenty years documenting the crisis of human landlessness throughout the world, from Central America to the Middle East. Writes Towell, “We must address these crises in order to achieve a more stable and peaceful world.”

    Check it out here.

  • +KN | Kitsune Noir » The Desktop Wallpaper Project

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    Here’s the plan: I’ll be releasing one desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning (California time) until I run out of wallpapers. They’ll be free to download, and come in a multitude of monitor sizes, as well as iPhone and PSP versions just for the fun of it. As of writing this, there are 60 artists involved with the project, some of them providing multiple wallpapers. Who are these 60 artists that are participating? Well I’m not telling because I really like secrets and surprises, and I want you all to be surprised and excited come Wednesday.

    To get things started though, I’m releasing three wallpapers by three amazing artists, Tim Biskup, Mcbess, and IMAKETHINGS.

    Check it out here.

  • Remixing the London police's anti-photographer terrror posters – Boing Boing

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    Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

    Check it out here.

  • PDN's 30 2008

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    Nearly ten years ago, towards the end of 1998, we here at Photo District News embarked on an endeavor we called PDN’s “30 Under 30.” Sitting in a small room in our then Times Square offices, Holly Stuart Hughes, Darren Ching, former photo editor Mackenzie Green and myself gathered together a large pile of promising portfolios and an even larger pile of slides (yes, slides) and began the process of choosing a list of 30 gifted photographers we felt would make an impact on the photographic industry. I can still remember the excitement we all felt at the start of this enterprise. With some assistance and advice from peers in the photo community, we were very pleased to present among that first congregation such future luminaries as Taryn Simon, Jason Fulford, Jonathan Kantor, Guy Aroch, and Norman Jean Roy. We were off to an excellent beginning

    This year’s 30: Ian Baguskas, Aya Brackett, Michael Christopher Brown, Michal Chelbin, J. Bennett Fitts, Taj Forer, Emiliano Granada, Katie Kingma, Andreas Laszlo Konrath, Adam Krause, Eamon Mac Mahon, Tiffany Walling McGarity & John McGarity, Mike McGregor, Domingo Milella, Graeme Mitchell, Morgan & Owens, Ed Du, Christina Paige, Birthe Piantek, Espen Rasmussen, David Rochkind, Jennifer Racholl, Dustin Snipes, Brian Sokol, Mikhael Subotzky, Daniel Traub, Munem Wasif, Donald Weber, Shen Wei.

    Check it out here.

  • WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Good Morning, Mr. Kokomo (mp3s)

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    At exactly three forty-five on September 19, 1957, unemployed organ grinder Bob Hannon entered RCA Studio 4 and made monkey history with this two-sided tribute to Today Show Animal Editor Kokomo, Jr. the Talking Chimpanzee.

    Check it out here.

  • North American Nature Photography Association – 2008 Member Showcase

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    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.