Sissyfight, the groundbreaking 1990s online game of playground politics, is to receive an open-source, crowdsourced remake: "We've gotten some “interesting” press about how the game delves into uncomfortable territory around bullying and sexist stereotypes, but we've always meant Sissyfight to be an intervention into the male-dominated culture of games," writes co-author Eric Zimmerman. It'll be a launch title on Venus Patrol's Indie Arcade; Sophie Prell at Penny Arcade and Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra take a look at how the game fits in a decade on.
"Quaestus" is the latest assemblage from sculptor Jud Turner. He sez,
“Quaestus” is a latin word meaning “gain or profit extracted from work”, a concept darkly represented in my latest sculpture: 5 tiny employees are trapped in an endless task inside a gigantic machine, toiling to keep up with the conveyor belts they are walking on. Each work station has a 2 digit counter which seems to be keeping some kind of score. If the employees don't keep up with the machine, they will fall off the ends of their conveyor belts and be fed to the machine.. The employees actually power this machine, but are unaware and unable to stop moving forward for fear of falling behind.
It's an amazing piece. Click through for hi-rez and details.
"Quaestus" is the latest assemblage from sculptor Jud Turner. He sez,
“Quaestus” is a latin word meaning “gain or profit extracted from work”, a concept darkly represented in my latest sculpture: 5 tiny employees are trapped in an endless task inside a gigantic machine, toiling to keep up with the conveyor belts they are walking on. Each work station has a 2 digit counter which seems to be keeping some kind of score. If the employees don't keep up with the machine, they will fall off the ends of their conveyor belts and be fed to the machine.. The employees actually power this machine, but are unaware and unable to stop moving forward for fear of falling behind.
It's an amazing piece. Click through for hi-rez and details.
The good people at Adafruit have an easy way to make your Chucks glow!
Make your logo light up with this simple Converse sneaker mod. All you need is EL panel and an inverter tucked into the tongue of your shoe to get the stars in your Chuck Taylors glowing. Two styles!
The good people at Adafruit have an easy way to make your Chucks glow!
Make your logo light up with this simple Converse sneaker mod. All you need is EL panel and an inverter tucked into the tongue of your shoe to get the stars in your Chuck Taylors glowing. Two styles!
Every single thing about this ad is great: the illustration, the typography, the industrial design of the gadget, the copy. What a beauty.
The Record Eater ‘45 rpm’ record player ad, 1967. (via BruceS)
North Carolina May Ban Tesla Sales To Prevent “Unfair Competition” (Thanks, Marty!)
I've heard loads of good things about crossfit, but I've never tried it myself. Nevertheless, I have to admit that there are some pretty impressive options for sports accessories in it, such as this "Primal Bell" kettlebell, which is a pretty handsome artifact in its own right.
Noah Scalin sez, "Thought you might enjoy this little video I made to promote the latest release from my science fiction project League of Space Pirates (yes, apparently they still have As Seen On TV commercials in the future). It's a return to the classic book & record format of the 70s/80s. In this case the 16 page comic book features illustrated stories based on the lyrics of two original songs from the League of Space Pirates band"
Book & Record single now available throughout the galaxy! (Thanks, Noah!)
I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he's taken to spouting some opinions that I'll frankly call claptrap. He's mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He's implied that it's easy (if you're not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he's disparaged the very idea that some people don't like to cook.
Thankfully, my personal food guru, Lynn Rosetto Kasper, is here to call shenanigans on all this nonsense. She gave a fantastic interview on NPR this afternoon, shooting down the idea that everyone would love to cook if they only tried it. In fact, says Kasper, you don't have a moral obligation to cook at all. The world needs eaters, too.
Tom Crann: What are some of the pressures, and why? Where do they come from, for people who feel pressured to cook if they're not very good at it?
Lynne Rosetto Kasper: The new food awareness that we've seen over the past decade. Here's the flip side. We cook if we are smart. We're supposed to cook to save our families and ourselves from dysfunctional, unhealthy lives. We cook to fight the obesity epidemic. We cook to save our identities, culturally, our traditions. We cook to strike out against the forces we feel are evil -- you name them. We cook because it shows how cool we are. ... the pressure today is we all should be doing this thing. And yeah, it's great to cook, it's wonderful to cook. But this is not something you take on if you really think you're going to hate it.
I think we should - if we possibly have an option -- do what we really enjoy doing. Because no matter what it is, that's what we're going to be good at.
You can read a transcript online, but it leaves out some of the discussion and I recommend listening to the audio. It's an interview of beauty. And I say that as somebody who loves to cook. The key, though, is that cooking every meal is not something I alone am solely responsible for, no matter how I'm feeling or what day it is. It's not something that takes up a large portion of my life. And it is something that I just happen to find relaxing and fun. If any of those facts weren't true, my thoughts on cooking might be very different. And it's silly to expect otherwise.
What better subject for a t-shirt than an Adventure Time/Katamari Damacy mashup?
Cartoonist Jess Fink, creator of the erotic Victorian-era robot graphic novel Chester 5000-XYV has a new memoir out called We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir.
It's got a premise that reminds me of something Nicholson Baker would come up with: Fink invents a time machine and travels into the past to visit younger versions of herself to warn herself not to do things that she ended up regretting as an adult. She visits her college-age self and tries to stop her from taking a drug that gives her a bad trip. She tells her high-school-age self not to make out with an unsavory boy. She tries to save her elementary-school-age self from a scary encounter with her mentally ill, violent father when he goes on a rampage with a crowbar. She intervenes dozens of times, but does it do any good? I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.
Unlike Chester 5000-XYV, there's no nudity involved in We Can Fix it!, but it does contain a fair number of scenes in which Fink has sex with versions of herself, and many of the incidents are about Fink's sexual encounters as a teen and young adult. Despite some of the heavy subject matter, Fink tells the story with charm and a light heart and renders it with appealing art.
We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir
As you know, Abercrombie and Fitch is a horrible shitshow of a company whose owner refuses to make large sized clothes so that "unattractive people" can't wear them, and who burns surplus clothing rather than donating it to charity to keep their clothes off poor peoples' backs. So Gkarber has set out to make the brand synonymous with homelessness, by clearing out thrift shops' supply of A&F and bringing it to skid row and giving it to homeless people. He'd like you to participate by clearing out your closets and donating any A&F to your local homeless charity..
Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless
Artist Ed Fairburn selective colors in maps, revealing faces lurking in potentia in their many lines, contours and shapes. He sells prints. These are gorgeous. Shown here: Paris.
Ed Fairburn (via Neatorama)
Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro is Scottsdale, AZ gained some small notoriety when it became the first restaurant that Gordon Ramsey gave up on in his show Kitchen Nightmares, in which the restaurateur helps failing businesses reform their ways. The Ramsey segments show the owners of the restaurant, Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, screaming obscenities at customers, taking servers' tips, and generally behaving very badly.
But that was just for warmup. After the episodes aired and showed up on YouTube, the Bouzaglos took to Facebook to condemn their critics on Reddit and Yelp with a mix of profanity, Bible-thumping, spurious legal threats, and, finally, a claim that it wasn't them at all, all the crazypants stuff had been the work of hackers who took over their Facebook account.
In a world with innumerable social media hissyfits and bun-fights, the Bouzaglos' meltdown stands out as a world-beater. Truly, this is an exceptional episode of bad behavior.
This is the Facebook page for Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.
This amazing retro-gamer wedding cake was made by Wedding Cakes By Nicole of Bunbury, Australia. The cake pays homage to many of the arcade greats:
I created a 3 tier square cake, with each of the sides representing a popular retro platform game. Topped off with a game off Pong, with the score depicting Stephen's "30" years. The board had a joystick, buttons and coin slot. Pacman (my favourite), Donkey Kong, Frogger & Tetris
Dimity asked me to create a cake for her Fiance, Stephen, who loves "old school" computer games. (via Geeks are Sexy)
Dictionary of Numbers is a Chrome extension that watches your browsing activity for mentions of large numerical measurements and automatically inserts equivalences in real-world terms that are meant to clarify things. For example, a story about a 300,000 acre forest fire would be annotated to note that this is about the area of LA or Hong Kong; or that 315 million people is about the population of the USA.
I noticed that my friends who were good at math generally rely on "landmark quantities", quantities they know by heart because they relate to them in human terms. They know, for example, that there are about 315 million people in the United States and that the most damaging Atlantic hurricanes cost anywhere from $20 billion to $100 billion. When they explain things to me, they use these numbers to give me a better sense of context about the subject, turning abstract numbers into something more concrete.
When I realized they were doing this, I thought this process could be automated, that perhaps through contextual descriptions people could become more familiar with quantities and begin evaluating and reasoning about them. There are many ways of approaching this problem, but given that most of the words we read are probably inside web browsers,** It might be interesting to to develop a similar system for use in spoken lectures. I decided to build a Chrome extension that inserts human explanations of numbers into web pages. Dictionary of Numbers
(via XKCD blog)
Peter "brokep" Sunde -- who co-founded The Pirate Bay and founded Flattr, a system for allowing fans to directly pay the artists they love -- is standing for the European Parliament in Finland on behalf of the Finnish Pirate Party. Sunde was raised in Sweden, but has Finnish roots, and is able to run there. His platform sounds like an admirable and sensible one, and my personal experience of him is that he's a good, thoughtful and honorable person. If I were in Finland, he'd have my vote:
“Non-commercial file sharing should of course become legal and protected, and must re-think copyright all together. Copyright is not the thing that makes ARTISTS money, it’s only for their brokers and distributors,” Sunde says.
“I’d rather see us sponsor culture by pushing more money to music education, and facilities for your people to create music. It would be much more sane for cultural advancement then extending copyrights.”
If elected Sunde hopes to be aggressive rather than defensive. This means not just responding to treats to Internet freedom, such as ACTA, but ensuring that this type of legislation doesn’t even make it onto the political agenda in the first place.
“I think there’s a huge possibility for us to impact the EU and I would like to be part of it,” Sunde says.
The Pirates are delighted to have the Pirate Bay founder on board. Harri Kivistö, chairman of the the Finnish Pirate Party, says that Sunde’s candidacy will raise the visibility of the party during the upcoming election. Perhaps more importantly, his values fit well within the Pirate Party movement.
Pirate Bay Co-Founder to Run For European Parliament [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]
(Image: Peter Sunde, Amphiteater, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from shareconference's photostream)
