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Bloomberg: SoundCloud Is About to Sign Deals With Record Labels

Bloomberg is reporting that Soundcloud is close to signing deals with the world’s largest music labels that will protect it from legal wranglings over copyright violations. The news agency reports that Soundcloud—to music in 2014 what MySpace was to bands in 2004—is negotiating with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. According…

Amazon Is Begging the FAA to Push Drone Tests Beyond Regulations

Amazon has started begging the Federal Aviation Administration to let it start testing drones in its own backyard, according to a letter that was made public Thursday. The request explains that Amazon wants to test drones outside of the testing sites designated by the FAA. There are six FAA-approved sites scattered throughout the country for…

Do Not Take Writing Advice from the Worst Muse

Twitter account the Worst Muse isn’t even a week old, but it’s already a premiere source of hilarious writing advice from writer Rachel Edidin. Below’s a selection of our favorites. [viaMetafilter]

Here’s every Transformers robot fight scene in one video

Instead of making the Marky Mark Transformers sequel, Michael Bay should have just sent in this sick, non-stop supercut of every single robot fight scene from the Transformers trilogy to theaters. Yep. This video is an orgy of explosive metal on metal battle scenes without any of the pesky humans screwing it up. I would…

Apparently, the US Navy got itself some cool alien spaceships

The Northrop Grumman X-47B carrier-launched drone really feels like the future of aviation in this image taken on board the USS Harry Truman. And, while it looks like some alien spaceship from a sci-fi show, these beasts will completely replace those F-18s in a couple of decades. The X-47B in night tests at the Naval…

Wiley Meets Snow

Wiley discovered snow for the first time over the July 4th weekend. Won’t lie, this is pretty darn cute.

The Dragons Who Hoard Out of Anxiety

Mittie Paul, whose dragons we’ve covered before, has now produced a series of drawings answering the question, “What if instead of being proud miserly creatures, all dragons were just super nervous? They hoarded out of financial anxiety and whatnot.” Paul did two series of these drawings, so head over to tumblr for more commentary. The…

Seeing strangers take off each other’s clothes is quite awkward

Here’s the official, anted up sequel to First Kiss,called Undress Me, which means “strangers” are taking off each other’s clothes now in a video to promote the new season of Masters of Sex. It doesn’t quite have the well acted charm of the original and you feel more like a voyeur this time around but…

Imagining Google as a real person is still so embarrassingly hilarious

If Google were a real person, he would probably have the world’s most frustrating job. I mean, Google has to deal with all the crud we type into the search engine and spit out results that match up to our perverted tastes, stoned questions, deepest fears, doddering mistakes all while trying to not to judge…

With Ridley Scott’s David, Are We Entering a New Age of Biblical Epics?

Ridley Scott’s Christian-Bale-as-Moses epic Exodus: Gods and Kings won’t be out until December, but he’s already working on another Old Testament story: King David. So we’re forced to wonder: Are Biblical epics officially back? Save for The Passion of the Christ, big-budget Bible stories fell out of vogue in Hollywood in the 60s, when their…

10 tricks that famous movie directors use as their trademark

With some directors, you can immediately tell you’re watching a movie they directed just by looking at a still frame without any context. There’s a visual style they stamp on their films, a certain special effect they like, a narrative preference they utilize, basically, a trademark they have. WatchMojo came up with a list of…

It Was an Unexpected Sunset

He’d heard the ships would be arriving at dusk, but he didn’t realize that they would actually be causing the dusk in question. This is a detail from Michael Heath’s award-winning cover of the middlegrade novel Earthfall. You can see more of Heath’s amazing work on his website.

Orphan Black Got Stiffed At The Emmys, But You Should Still Watch It

The 2014 Emmy Award nominations came out today, and fans of BBC America’s Orphan Black were understandably upset when lead actress Tatiana Maslany didn’t get nominated. Maslany, after all, plays seven distinct characters on the thrilling, original, weird clone drama. I started watching Orphan Black last week after friends recommended it, and I can see…

New and Improved Bird Bath, Now With Extra Coyote!

Bird baths aren’t just for birds any more. A crafty coyote at Death Valley National Park decided to escape the heat by squeezing itself into a small bird-sized bathtub. And how could you blame it? The overnight low last night in Death Valley was a “cool” 93 degrees Fahrenheit! The photo comes courtesy the US…

The Movie That H.R. Giger Spent Decades Trying To Make

Artist H.R. Giger left his mark on movies forever, through his contributions to Alien and other classic science fiction films. But he never got to make The Mystery of San Gottardo, the movie he was working on since the 1970s. See some more of the fantastic art from this project below. According to a 1994…

Future Islands: In the Fall

The relationship between scent and our memory centers is well-documented, but I’m guessing sound must be located nearby, too. Certain songs and albums have a powerful tendency to cement themselves to the moment in time when you first discovered them. Four years before the success of Future Islands’s most recent album, they released a 12″…

This Vintage Typewriter Is Actually a Keyboard For Your Tablet

For some of us who type all day for a living, the world is too quiet. We pine for the whir of the Xerox machine, the rattle of rotary telephones, the clackety-clack of the typewriter. A slightly romantic vision, maybe, but no longer completely impossible, thanks to this keyboard modeled to look exactly like a…

13 behind-the-scenes photos from Metropolis

Are open relationships the next sexual revolution? Over at Alternet, Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson ask whether “designer” relationships that include more than two people could go mainstream in the future, offering people more options when it comes to romance and marriage.

How To Train For Space On Earth

Pictured here: ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who will serve as a flight engineer on Expedition 42/43 aboard the ISS, practicing extravehicular activity (aka “EVA” aka repairs in spaaaaaace”) in the Partial Gravity Simulator test area in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. What a badass. Photo credit: NASA/Lauren Harnett via nasagoddard