The post-apocalyptic expiration date

I’ve been compiling a list of post-apocalyptic movies for the past five years. I started the list because similar lists online are cluttered with movies I don’t consider post-apocalyptic.
Many of those lists include movies about dystopian futures that take place after catastrophic events, but civilization has recovered and rebuilt. “The Hunger Games” series is a good example.
Post-apocalyptic periods can have an end date, writer JJ Shurte argued in an article on Post Apocalyptic Media. For instance, the Black Death in 14th Century Europe must have seemed like an apocalyptic event, but the region eventually recovered.
“Paris got hammered by the Black Death back in the 14th century, but it’s had time to heal,” Shurte wrote. “Not many people would consider modern day Paris to be post-apocalyptic.”
Yesterday I did a review of my list of post-apocalyptic movies and culled a bunch of movies about dystopian futures that take place after apocalyptic events. Movies cut from my list include “Logan’s Run” (1976), “Aeon Flux” (2005), “Dredd” (2012) and the “Divergent” series. I ended up deleting over 30 movies from the list.
A true post-apocalyptic movie depicts the struggle of people to survive following a major devastation. It must show a hardscrabble life where finding food, shelter and safety are the norm.

Related reading:

Comprehensive list of post-apocalyptic movies

Photos: Posters from “Here Alone” (2017) and “Into the Forest” (2016)

Ancestry.com, Cover Stories, Will Robots Take My Job? and other interesting websites

In nine years of blogging, I’ve called attention to 300 websites that I found interesting, informative and entertaining. What follows are some more sites worth noting.

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com is the world’s premiere online genealogy service, hosting a massive collection of historical records, documents and family trees.
I’ve been a subscriber for many years and should have included it on my list of favorite websites long ago.
Ancestry.com has more than 2.7 million subscribers who have access to 20 billion records from 80 countries, as well as 90 million family trees.
The Lehi, Utah-based company also sells AncestryDNA genetic testing kits that can tell you where your ancestors were from. The kit is now available for $79 for the holiday season, $20 off the regular price.

CalendarHome

CalendarHome.com lets you print out calendars for free.
I like to print out monthly calendars for planning purposes. CalendarHome.com is a simple but valuable resource. It was created in 1997 by Justin White.

Cover Stories

I love magazines and like tracking noteworthy magazine covers. I’ve previously mentioned Cover Junkie as a great resource. Another is Cover Stories.
Cover Stories, formerly MagLove, is a regular column on MarkLives.com by designer, writer and artist Shane de Lange of Cape Town, South Africa. Cover Stories deconstructs magazine cover designs, both past and present, and highlights the week’s best covers.
In addition to the column, Cover Stories is on Pinterest.

Will Robots Take My Job?

Advances in automation, computerization and robotics are taking their toll on the human workforce.
The website Will Robots Take My Job? answers that question as a percentage of likelihood. (See article by Business Insider.)

Car logos and car company logos worldwide

Recently I saw a truck with a logo that I didn’t recognize. Thanks to the niche website Car-Logos.org, I was able to find an answer: It was a truck built by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors.

Movie Heds

Movie Heds is a Twitter account that curates newspaper headlines from fictional movies. The novelty Twitter account is the work of Travis Greenwood of Portland, Oregon.
(See articles by AV Club and Laughing Squid.)

Jody Draws

I’m a fan of the artwork of Jody Nilson. She likes to illustrate pop culture subjects like actors and actresses from shows like “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead.” (Check out her work at JodyDraws.com.)
She first came to my attention sketching illustrations on the back of Netflix envelopes and posting them on Twitter.

Scientwehst

I’ve written several times about artists who dare to mix the worlds of art and pornography. (See “The intersection of art and porn” and “Porn-inspired art.”)
The latest example is a New York City-based artist named Giulia, aka Scientwehst on Instagram. She creates “brazenly-feminine digital collages.” Giulia likes to overlay images of modern architecture on pictures of the female body.
Giulia especially likes to superimpose church interiors and exteriors on naked women in erotic poses. These photo collages are seen as sacrilegious by some.
(See articles by Maxim, Office magazine and Highsnobiety.)

Websites and online resources increasingly disappear over time

I’ve written a fair amount about the lack of permanency on the web. It’s a sad fact that in the digital age, information and other data stored on the World Wide Web doesn’t have staying power.
For instance, between August 2009 and March 2015, I spotlighted 250 websites that I found interesting or entertaining. Of those, 40 are no longer available. That’s 16% of the websites I wrote about.
Of the 300 websites to which I’ve called attention over the past nine years, 41 are no longer online. The more time passes, the more likely a website or online resource will disappear.
Every so often, I run a scan on Tech-media-tainment to remove links to websites or articles that no longer work. This weekend, my latest scan discovered about 30 bad links mostly to news articles that were no longer available. It was five months since my last scan using BrokenLinkCheck.com.

Favorite websites in review, part 12

Over the past nine years, Tech-media-tainment has shined a spotlight on 300 interesting and entertaining websites.
What follows is the latest roundup of 25 websites given the seal of approval by Tech-media-tainment.

276. Phil Grishayev: Movie locations revisited (instagram.com/phil_grishayev)
277. Empty Pressers
278. Arsenic (instagram.com/arsenic)
279. Thrillist (thrillist.com)
280. Google Plus Collections
281. Literally Unbelievable
282. Post-Apocalyptic Media (postapocalypticmedia.com)
283. Seph Lawless (sephlawless.com)
284. SuspiciousMinds (suspiciousminds.com)
285. DeadMalls.com (deadmalls.com)
286. Chicago’s Extinct Businesses
287. Rich Kids of Instagram
288. Rich Kids of London (instagram.com/richkidslondon)
289. Rich Kids of Singapore
290. Boyfriends of Instagram (instagram.com/boyfriends_of_insta)
291. Passenger Shaming (instagram.com/passengershaming)
292. Can I Stream It?
293. JustWatch (justwatch.com/us)
294. HoaxEye (hoaxeye.wordpress.com)
295. HoaxEye on Twitter (twitter.com/hoaxeye)
296. Hoax of Fame (hoaxoffame.tumblr.com)
297. Hoax of Fame on Twitter (twitter.com/Hoaxoffame)
298. This Is Not Porn
299. PicPedant (twitter.com/PicPedant)
300. Aydin Buyuktas (instagram.com/aydinbuyuktas)

Photo: Disgusting picture from Passenger Shaming.

The trippy photography of Aydin Buyuktas

I adore the photography of Istanbul artist Aydin Buyuktas.
He has created a trippy style of imagery that feels like it’s from the movie “Inception.”
He bends the landscape in his images so objects in the distance are pulled forward at a 90-degree angle so you can have an overhead view of the terrain while looking at the horizon. Like I said, it’s trippy.
Check out his website and Instagram page.

Photos: Samples of artwork by Aydin Buyuktas.

Crusaders in the fight against fake photos online

The flood of fake news and information online is scary. From lying clickbait to bogus material shared via social media, the problem has become almost overwhelming.
Thankfully the problem has created a cottage industry in websites to debunk false information.
I’ve called attention to the problem of misleading and erroneous photos used with clickbait, but there are other websites tackling the spread of phony pictures and misidentified photos on social media.
HoaxEye identifies fake photos distributed online. HoaxEye is a project of product security professional Janne Ahlberg of Finland. HoaxEye has a Twitter page and Facebook page. HoaxEye also has a website.
Hoax of Fame has created a database of internet photo hoaxes. It is a project of journalist Nicolas Filio of Paris. Hoax of Fame has a Twitter page and a Tumblr website.
PicPedant is a Twitter feed that exposes Photoshopped fakes, misidentified pictures and photos appropriated without attribution. PicPedant is a project of by Paulo Ordoveza of Washington, D.C.
Historical celebrity photo website This Is Not Porn has a section titled Debunking Fake Celebrity Photos. The site is run by Patrik Karlsson of rural Sweden.
Check them out and support them.

Photos: Tweets from HoaxEye.

President Trump depicted as creepy clown, wrecking ball on latest magazine covers

As Donald Trump nears the one-year anniversary of his election to U.S. president, magazine covers still mostly depict him in a negative light.
The New Yorker pictured Trump as a creepy clown like Pennywise from Stephen King’s “It” for its Oct. 30 cover.
Time magazine illustrated Trump as a wrecking ball for its Nov. 6 cover.
Newsweek showed Trump straddling an airplane and throwing money in the air for its Nov. 10 cover. The cover line says “Snakes on a plane: Trump’s jet-setting White House may be the most corrupt in U.S. history.”
Esquire depicted Trump as a diseased creature for an alternative online cover for its November issue.
It was an illustration for the article “The Pox Americana: Martin Amis takes on Donald Trump.”
News magazine The Week pictured Trump as a vandal destroying President Obama’s legacy on its Oct. 27 cover.
Forbes was the outlier, presenting Trump in a positive light for its Nov. 14 special issue on the richest people in America.
German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel continues to hammer Trump with its covers.
Its Oct. 21 issue on powerful men sexually abusing women featured Trump’s trademark long red tie draped over a woman’s shoulder.
Its Nov. 4 issue showed Trump as a massive wave flooding Washington, D.C.

Related articles:

President Trump depicted as Nazi, racist, insane on latest magazine covers (Oct. 13, 2017)

Magazine covers depict President Trump as warmonger, KKK member and mental patient (Aug. 20, 2017)