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Updated 64 Days ago
Pencil Face: The Creepiest and Best Independent Short Film You'll See This Year
Un-Sexy Update: The Pencil Face video is no longer on Vimeo! To watch it now, you need to go to the Pencil Face page and click on "play" in the lower right corner.
Original post follows...
Reason #1,209,823,409,834 why the internet is awesome: Because you can be sitting around killing time until your daily King of the Hill rerun fix comes on at 12:30am, and you run across something as wonderful and creepy as "Pencil Face," and independent short film from director Christian Simmons (of thedandydwarves.com).
The synopsis of the film, from the director himself, is simply:
He’ll help you draw, he’ll help you erase; waste not want not… he’s Pencil Face.
Awesome!
Does this have anything to do with St. Louis? Hell no! ...but dude! Pencil Face! Look at that picture! Dude! Pencil Face!
For more information you can check out the interview IndyMogul.com did with the director, the behind the scenes video at the Pencil Face page, and of course you can see more of his work at thedandydwarves.com.
What are you still reading this for?! Go to the Video tab and watch "Pencil Face!"
About The Author:
Mike is the sole developer and associate editor for ToastedRav.com.He has been a blogger for over 5 years both on personal and professional websites and has a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Truman State University.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.