David O'Reilly's 'Heaven's Countryland' is Almost As Strange As The Reality It's Based On

I'm not one for pulling the "real-world" into the topic of posts, but given all that's been happening lately in regards to North Korea and the Sony hack and the indefinite suspension of The Interview's release, I thought it would be apt to turn some attention to David O'Reilly's terrifically animated short series for Adult Swim, Heaven's Countryland.

North Korea is a notoriously isolationist country known for its perpetual raw-nerve feud with its neighboring sister country. It's also most famously know for caricaturing the United States with claims of dick-dastardly do-no-goodery so absurd that they more often miss the point of legitimate criticism. I think O'Reilly and South African animator Mike Scott managed to encapsulate that paranoid vibe of personality worship and farcical weirdness perfectly in this 4-part series. Check out the rest after the break!

1 Up Fever - Bitcoin Collecting As A Game

I can definitely see this concept taking off in our future sometime soon, it's only going to be a matter of 'who.' This faux documentary follows the interesting concept of a city of people in the full throes of addiction to a truly fun looking game called 1 Up Fever, in which protagonists hunt Super Mario Bros. style coin around the city with a minimal Bitcoin value attached. It's a truly interesting concept, as the collective processing power of all these phones could be used to mine coins for a larger entity while the user acts like a worker, akin to Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' crowdsourcing initiative for getting their tedious work done for pennies up to dollars a task.

In the Berlin city everyone is going crazy for a viral new app. Anyone with a smartphone can play a sort of Super Mario Bros arcade game in Augmented Reality. In the game a coin corresponds to 0.01 Bitcoins. Citizens’ habits are tainted by the game. Coins are hidden all over the city, you can spot them just scanning around with your device, not always they are easy to grab. People started to leave their jobs in order to collect Coins in the streets. 

All over the city people are jumping and running around with their smartphones, trying to grab as many virtual coins as they can… The shooting itself is been a game in the game: all the interviewees were asked to imagine the city as the app release happened for real and to answer thereby, sometimes they were even asked to play with it. Part of the work was dedicated to the Bitcoinkiez, a small Berlin district where local owners started to sell their products in Bitcoins through the Bitcoin Wallet App, which would be the 'real'  app to whom the Super Mario app is corresponding.

Luke's Change : An Inside Job

Luke's Change is a tongue in cheek reference to Loose Change, the somewhat conspiracy theory lead documentary series relating to the 9/11 attacks being an inside job, but set in the Star Wars universe. Using an investigative journalist approach, this fun little spinoff offers a take on the events leading to the Death Star's explosion being rather..Unlikely.

'An examination of some questionable events and circumstances leading up to the destruction of the Death Star, through the eyes of an amateur investigative journalist within the Star Wars galaxy. The focus is mainly on the connections between the people who created and operated the Death Star and those responsible for destroying it.'