February 1, 2011

WATCH: Lazy Teenage Superheroes vs. Robot Bollywood [Videos]

Speaking of pot, the charming little stoner film embedded below brings $300 worth of special effects to a plot just a tad more absurd than Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Though sadly lacking in Neil Patrick Harris cameos, it’s still worth a watch, if only to see what $300 will get you these days in the way of ninjas and giant robot effects. (Answer: A lot.) Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow sums it up thusly:

Lazy Teenage Superheroes is an extremely funny, extremely well-executed 13-minute rude little superhero movie, made by Michael Ashton for a mere $300. It’s full of cussin’, lewd speculative scenarios involving the private lives of slacker teen supes who are mostly interested in using their powers to get loaded and/or laid. And there’s ninjas and herpes jokes.

Watch LTS below:

But wait: What could possibly be better than a $300 action film about superheroes who use their powers only to get high? You guessed it: Robot Bollywood. Alas, no Neil Patrick Harris in this clip either, but the lo-fi special effects are still pretty darn awesome. Watch it below:

Top image: Lazy Teenage Superheroes.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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