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R.I.P. George Lowe, voice of Space Ghost

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George Lowe, voice actor of the cult favorite Adult Swim series Space Ghost Coast To Coast, has died, a representative confirmed to The A.V. Club. Friends reported Lowe had been suffering from illness for some time before his death on Sunday. He was 67 years old. 

“George Lowe’s family has been grief stricken and unable to respond regarding his passing, on March 02, 2025, until now,” the actor’s family shared in a statement to The A.V. Club on Wednesday. “George Lowe had elective heart surgery and as he recovered, was met with many challenges. Over the past few months, his family and friends have been by his side in support and care for him. The family will honor his wishes and his exceptional life with a private celebratory service.”

Lowe was a voice actor best known for his role as the titular Space Ghost on the Cartoon Network (and later, Adult Swim) series. The talk show spoof revived the ’60s-era Hanna-Barbera superhero to conduct interviews with live-action guests, including the likes of David Byrne, Michael Stipe, Jim Carrey, Tyra Banks, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many more. The influential cult comedy ran for more than 10 years and spawned various spin-offs, including The Brak Show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Perfect Hair Forever, and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Lowe reprised the role of Space Ghost on many of those programs, further lending his voice for projects like Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters and Robot Chicken

Space Ghost writer and voice actor mc chris shared on Twitter/X in 2023 that Lowe had been suffering from health issues including an aortic dissection that required intubation twice. On Tuesday, Florida radio DJ Marvin Boone posted a tribute on Facebook, writing, “I’m beyond devastated.  My Zobanian brother and best friend for over 40 years, George Lowe, has passed away after a long illness.  A part of me had also died. He was a supremely talented Artist and Voice actor. A true warm hearted Genius. Funniest man on Earth too. I’ve stolen jokes from him for decades. He stole some of mine.  He was also the voice of Space Ghost and so much more. Pweeloto.”

This story has been updated to include a statement from George Lowe’s family.



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InShaneee
7 hours ago
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Chicago, IL
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French University to Fund American Scientists Who Fear Trump Censorship

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French University to Fund American Scientists Who Fear Trump Censorship

A leading French university is inviting American scientists who fear their research on subjects like climate might be censored by Donald Trump’s administration to do their work in France.

“The program is called ‘safe place for science,’ and will provide 15 million Euros in funding for some 15 researchers over a 3-year period,” Clara Bufi, a spokesperson for Aix Marseille University, told me in an email. “It targets, but is not limited to, climate and environment, health, and human and social sciences.”

A press release from Aix Marseille University today said that the program is for American scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered in their research,” and is “dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.”

In an interview with AFP, University management said that the invitation is in the “DNA of Marseille” values, and that it has previously invited researchers from Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine as part of a program that supports researchers and artists forced into exile. 

Aix Marseille University’s press release doesn’t mention Trump by name but is obviously referring to his administration’s unprecedented dismantling of the federal government and specifically its withdrawing of support for any research that even mentions “climate.” 

The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in particular have already frozen federal grants and loans for the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundations, and fired thousands of workers across the federal government, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, critical for weather forecasting for natural disasters. The language of many of his executive orders is also so broad, researchers at public universities and other research institutions worry they’ll lose funding for their work if they even mention climate, gender, race, or equity, terms that the Trump administration has been trying to wipe off any federal site and program

Generously, Aix Marseille University is offering a kind of lifeboat to scientists that will not only help them earn a living, but also continue to do presumably important research on some of the greatest environmental, technological, and medical challenges facing humanity. More cynically, another developed nation is perhaps seeing an opportunity to benefit from an imminent braindrain in the United States because of the rise of an anti-science authoritarian regime. 

Either way, the offer is a dire sign of the situation in the United States. Historically, scientists and artists defected to America and other democracies from places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, not from America. 



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InShaneee
1 day ago
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Cult Text-Based Zombie MMO 'Urban Dead' Is Shutting Down After 20 Years

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The long-running text-based zombie MMO Urban Dead is shutting down on March 14, 2025, after nearly 20 years. The reason: compliance concerns with the UK's Online Safety Act. Games Radar+ reports: "The Online Safety Act comes into force later this month, applying to all social and gaming websites where users interact, and especially those without strong age restrictions," [writes Kevan Davis, the solo British developer behind the game]. "With the possibility of heavy corporate-sized fines even for solo web projects like this one, I've reluctantly concluded that it doesn't look feasible for Urban Dead to be able to continue operating." "So a full 19 years, 8 months and 11 days after its quarantine began, Urban Dead will be shut down," Davis writes. "No grand finale. No final catastrophe. No helicopter evac. Make your peace or your final stand in whichever part of Malton you called home, and the game will be switched off at noon UTC on 14 March." The original website is still online if you want to play the game before its shutdown later this month.

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InShaneee
1 day ago
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Martin Scorsese on David Johansen: “The energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut”

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David Johansen, one of history’s most consequential New York rockers, died yesterday, and his absence will be felt throughout the Five Boroughs for some time to come. Few could verbalize what Johansen brought to popular music better than New York City spokesperson Martin Scorsese, and he’s been generous enough to share a few words about his fallen friend. Scorsese, who used Johansen’s music and visage in his tribute to New York rockers of the 1970s, Vinyl, and directed a documentary on Johansen, recalled, “the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets.” Scorsese would know. As the New York Dolls burst onto the scene, Scorsese put the Dolls’ atmosphere on-screen with Mean Streets. Additionally, Scorsese highlights the impressive understanding of music history, inspiring all of Johansen’s output, from the New York Dolls through Buster Poindexter to his own collaboration with Johansen, Personality Crisis: One Night Only. Here’s the statement in full:

“With David Johansen, it started with the music, of course. Actually, with a New York Dolls song, “Personality Crisis.” I heard that song, I can’t remember when or where, and it stayed with me. I listened to it obsessively. The sound was rough, the playing was raw, the voice was wildly theatrical and immediate. And the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets. After the Dolls broke up, I kept watching and listening to David. He never stopped growing as a songwriter and a singer, always exploring, always staking out new paths. There was the Buster Poindexter alter ego. And the radio show ‘Mansion of Fun,’ which amazed me and which I listened to obsessively. That was when I understood just how wide and deep David’s knowledge of music history was—all of music history, from Debussy to the Cadillacs to Loretta Lynn to the Incredible String Band to Gregorian chants to David’s beloved Maria Callas, all of it mysteriously connected. And then there were the cabaret performances at the Carlyle, which David Tedeschi and I were lucky enough to capture with our film Personality Crisis: One Night Only. As the years went by and David became increasingly fragile, he would always be there for screenings and gatherings, with his beloved Mara and Leah by his side. He would sit quietly, preserve his energy, but he was always fully there, right up to the end. What a remarkable artist. What an amazing man. I was so lucky to have known him. I just wish there had been more time.”

Johansen died shortly after his family made his illness public, revealing that the singer had been suffering from stage four cancer for most of the past decade. The family also launched Sweet Relief, a non-profit organization to help professional musicians needing medical or financial assistance.

[via Vulture]



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InShaneee
2 days ago
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'Why Can't We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?'

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Apple users noticed a change in 2023, "when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot," noted the film blog Screen Slate: At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there's no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change... For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class. "I'm not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is," tech blogger John Gruber wrote this weekend, "but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware..." These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can't capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don't think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by "protecting" their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can't screenshot it; if it's not, you can. On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, tooâ — âby default. But in Chrome's Settings page, under System, if you disable "Use graphics acceleration when available" and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video... What I don't understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platformsâ — âthere is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a timeâ — âand even if they tried, they'd be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it's not like this "feature" in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content. Gruber's conclusion? "This 'feature' accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they're watching."

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InShaneee
3 days ago
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R.I.P. David Johansen, of New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter fame

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David Johansen has died. Although best known and celebrated for his work as lead singer of formative American punk band New York Dolls, Johansen was an unabashed artistic chameleon, who also achieved mainstream chart success under his Buster Poindexter pseudonym, and worked frequently as an actor. (Including a memorable turn as the cab-driving Ghost Of Christmas Past in 1988 Christmas Carol riff Scrooged.) Per Deadline, his death this week was confirmed by his daughter, Leah Hennessy, and comes just a few weeks after Johansen revealed that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer. Johansen was 75.