| Source please! |
[07 Nov 2009|08:52pm] |
Does anyone know what movie this guy comes from?
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| Tumblr |
[05 Nov 2009|11:23pm] |
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Hey guys, I've joined Tumblr. I don't know if any of you are on it, I'm not usually the early adopter with this kind of thing, but I like its attitude. It's somewhere between blogging and Twitter, a kind of "hey, look at this, this is neat" service with inline images and no character limit. If you like the kind of stuff I like then you might wanna add that RSS to your thing.
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| The world's most dangerous and most fun piece of playground equipment |
[06 Oct 2009|08:46am] |
There used to be, near our old cottage on Île d'Orléans, a massive and dangerous monument to either the cruelty or naïvety of adults. It consisted of a wide, circular ring of wood, a bench of sorts, suspended to a metal cap high above by means of narrow steel rods. This cap held the whole operation off the ground a good three or four feet, and allowed the bench to swing and pivot around the pole. Functionally, it was a cross between a tire swing and a merry-go-round, but what really made it fun and dangerous was its sheer mass.
The net effect of both swinging and spinning, especially with a balanced load, lead to an unpredictable ride. The period of the swing and the rotation of the bench rarely matched, so most of the journey was spent off to the side, tilted at a slight angle as you rocketed up to the highest point or swung down and into the claustrophobic nadir, only to miss the peaks just slightly. It was deliciously unpredictable.
One of my favourite things to do on the thing was to first spin the thing, building up as much momentum as I could, before pushing the ring toward the pole as far as I could and letting it swing back. The thing's mass meant that it didn't lose momentum easily, and if I timed my entry right, I could wrap both my arms around the wooden bench and be hefted not only high up off my feet into the air, but also be whipped around in a circle at high speed.
It wasn't that I was ignorant of how dangerous it was at the time. The prospect of the momentous steel and wooden contraption breaking my arm by catching me on the upswing, crushing me between the inner rail and the unbumpered post, breaking both my legs as a vigorous push nudged the cap off the top of the post and the wooden bench fell with all its weight on my tiny, fragile calves wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. Most kids who injure themselves on playground equipment do so because they took a calculated risk but miscalculated, high on adrenaline or too bored to avoid upping the ante. It's always been my philosophy, even as a youngster, that these kinds of mediated dangers are great for kids, and that though accidents are never deserved, or predictable, they sure as hell teach a lesson.
A woman in Geraldton in Australia tried to save this delightful relic, which resembles the one from my childhood quite a bit (except for the bench, which on the island had a rounded, protruding bench which was painted red, and for the fact that this one has a safety bumper and a thicker, sturdier post) but she was ultimately unsuccessful. More's the shame. AFAIK, I don't think they were ever mass-produced, and so every iteration has a unique design. Sadly, nobody seems to have archived any information on dangerous playground equipment of yore.
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| Why I woke up at 4 AM. |
[06 Oct 2009|04:08am] |
The scene: a film festival afterparty in a tropical seaside cave in the wee hours of the morning. The cave isn't very deep, but its opening isn't as wide as its breadth, and is extremely dark in the corners. The cavern's walls are covered in a continuous cabinet of curiosities, objects and reproductions of objects lost at sea. Embedded into the wet sand underfoot are accurate scale replicas of rusting, illicit Russian freighters, whose cabins and entire human population were "scraped off", to use a vivid image, before being deposited ashore and sunk deep under beaches such as these in narcotic numbers. On the shelves are airplane parts, reproductions of fuselages behind plexiglass barely discernable in the darkess, and the skulls and corpses of animals from all around the planet which had fallen into the sea. Human, plant, animal and mineral mingled arbitrarily and without annotation.
One of these shelves' custodians seems to be a small, doglike landshark, which goes about its collection in an automatic fashion, heedless of the men in their suits and the women in their dresses and all of their martinis. It wetly waddles into the cave, holding a decomposing skull in its maw, deposits it in a lewd pile on a bottom shelf, before returning to the ocean. I step gingerly away from its trap-like jaws, but I'm told that it won't bite on land (being a shark, of course, it needs to keep its gills well moistened).
Suddenly, beside me is a young woman. I can't see her in the dark, but I can sense her long brown hair, and she seems nervous and vulnerable but she's trying to keep above it, and I feel an automatic impulsive attraction to her. Besides, I'm feeling anxious, with the darkness, the animals underfoot, and the constant reminders of the infinite and unknowable capacity for the ocean to murder and bury everything I might hold to value. It's the young woman that spots the hummingbirds flitting about me, which I proceed to photograph as they fly up to me and the crooked fingertips of my left hand. "Is that camera yours?" she asks. "No, I just found it here." I said. It has no other photos on it, so I figure it's fair game.
She also spots a single lit display near the cave mouth. Inside of the small plexiglass box, taller than wide and square at the base, is a slope of rigid cobweb trapping dozens of lima-bean sized hummingbirds, each as docile as a drop of dew, gemlike in a white, gauzy parabola of silk. I aim the camera to take a photo of it, but I have trouble focusing in the dark. I step backward, and overfocus. Hovering somewhere between the box and my camera is a dime-sized spider. I attempt to focus past it, but now the light from inside the box is obliterated. I look up to recompose, and the young woman shrieks. Sitting against the glass is a gigantic spider, hairless and black, pressing a bundled hummingbird against the wall. Its body is so large that it has eclipsed the light. The darkness multiplies its body, and I imagine into existence spiders just as large, if not larger, that will climb up my legs, that will leap down off the ceiling onto my face as I sleep in this wealthy but tropical nation. The biodiversity here horrifies me, as it stands to overwhelm my humanism and unceremoniously strike me from the ledger of time, turning the ultimate proof of my life and identity into an anonymous husk whose paper-thin, tentlike skin stretched over bones is carelessly used as a home for an aggressive beetle in the darkest heart of the jungle where no human being will ever come across it. The terror becomes too much to bear.
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| Sculpture Proposal |
[15 Sep 2009|01:10am] |
Livejournal, you are my dumping ground for schoolwork. Here is a proposal for a sculpture I'm, well, proposing. I can't wait for people to start tearing this shit to pieces!
Project Proposal
Working Title: I Promise I Won’t Lie To You
During the Auditing process, the “preclear” Scientologist uses the E-meter to measure their electrical field, which indicates their response to past life experiences. The Neuro-Programmer 2 is a product designed to “help you stimulate your brain and achieve lasting personal change” and “help you transform your mind and enhance your mental abilities.” Alex Chiu sells magnetic rings that can make you immortal, and an entire alternative medicine industry, homeopathy, is based on the concept that water retains vibrations able to cure serious illnesses.
It’s very difficult to avoid being taken in by pseudoscientific claims, especially when they assure us mental, spiritual, and physical well-being. Despite being placebos, these devices do have physiological and mental effects, although not necessarily the ones they claim to have. People can become addicted to them, relying on them for salvation, even to the point of dismissing any contradictory evidence of their effects as a conspiracy to snuff out the truth.
“I Promise I Won’t Lie To You” is an enclosed, light-tight box on a stand, with binocular eyeholes to allow the viewer to peer inside. Using different wavelengths and patterns of light and suggestive imagery and text projected onto a frosted screen, the brain is stimulated to reroute the neural pathways responsible for belief in pseudoscience. In fact, this makes the viewer perceive the truth in all matters, rendering them impervious to lies. All of this is explained in the laminated brochure hanging by a chain to the side of the box.
In truth, of course, it does no such thing. The device does not increase anyone’s abilities. Paradoxically, it works just perfectly when the viewer realizes that it can’t possibly work.
Installation space would be minimal: about five feet square, ideally against a wall. Proximity to a plug to power the lights and electronics is a must. A dark room would be desirable. The duration of the interaction with the device is planned around approximately one minute, although it may last longer. A toggle switch, within reach of the viewer turns the device on and off so that they can time their exposure to its effects.
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| Daaaaamn I want this! |
[04 Jun 2009|03:41am] |
Finally, some Alan Wake gameplay! And it looks FUN. And SPOOKY. It looks like all the time spent working on it is paying off!
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| KITTY ACQUIRED |
[19 Apr 2009|07:35pm] |
His name is Finlay. Everybody say hi! :)
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| Ghostwatch |
[16 Apr 2009|07:26am] |
It's in 10 parts, about 90 minutes long. If you haven't seen it or heard anything about it, I don't want to say much, only that actually believing what's happening is secondary to finding this actually kind of terrifying. It's one of those the less you know going in the better situations.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) drinky_lemur and schroedingrscat in particular, I think you two will dig where this goes.
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| A short snippet from a dream, since I should be logging these more often. |
[11 Apr 2009|12:04pm] |
I was lying at the base of a large building, in the driveway, when I heard birdsong from the roof. The birds in question were singing "Stand by Me". I backed off a bit, so that I could see what was going on up there, and on the sloped roof I could see the backs of several dogs, and a few other animals. They'd all turned out to watch this show, you see. I kind of wanted to go up there, but I didn't want to ruin it by having some human being suddenly pop out on the roof, so I decided to join in (badly, but with heart) at the bridge from where I was standing. It would at least be funny.
But no, no sooner had I done singing than I looked back up and the animals had turned into people and were jumping off the roof and leaving all annoyed that I'd ruined their show. It was quite a large building. Imagine industrial silos, top-heavy with lots of concrete and corrugated metal. The ones that jumped were landing perfectly safely, which startled me. I digress, though. Only a few of them were willing to acknowledge me, and it was usually with a snort or "whatever."
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| That UN thing. |
[29 Mar 2009|07:25am] |
So the UN passed a resolution that conflates "defamation of religion" with human rights abuses. This was a specific bid by Islamic countries to curtail Islamophobia (which is abhorrent, I mean I see the demonization of Muslims when I turn on the news, when I sit through movie previews, although I like to TRY to avoid things that are underhandedly racist) but it also seeks to legislate against things like the Danish cartoon fiasco by using really vague language like:
Urges States to take serious steps to address the contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and in this context to take firm action against negative stereotyping of religions and defamation of religious personalities, holy books, scriptures and symbols.
It goes on for a bit about the Palestinians too. Snippets and commentary here. My heart goes out to the poor Palestinians, but they don't need a UN resolution against defamation of religon. It's not the defamation that's killing them, it's explosives and guns. I understand the paranoia, it's more than a little skeevy, and more than a little biased. I mean, there's no mention of Tibet at all in this thing, and you'd think that a defamation of religion resolution would be all over that.
What's more troubling is that there's never going to be any resolution that protects secular people like me because, well, majority rule. Nobody seems to be criticizing this resolution because of its egregious bias toward religious people, instead they're criticizing it because it's vaguely anti-Western, anti-Semitic, hypocritical, an affront to free speech, and everything besides the main crux of the issue that it preferences religious people as needing protection from defamation, while non-religious people get no such protection against defamation of atheism, secular humanism, or any other such thing.
I hope this isn't a general trend for the world.
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| Rood Txen Eob Eht |
[22 Mar 2009|10:36pm] |
If you load a film in backwards, it does this.
Part 2 soon.
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| This is kinda sad. |
[22 Mar 2009|06:47pm] |
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music |
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Let Down-Easy Star All-Stars-Radiodread |
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The pastor of church in North Carolina pretends to be an atheist on the internet, saying stuff like...
"What’s wrong with killing babies? I see no problem with it. I have enough mouths to feed. I don’t get the argument and I am an atheist. Since I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in anything characterized as good, bad / right, wrong. So, what’s the big deal?"
If you read the article, you can also read his apology, which I don't doubt is sincere. But I don't know if he quite got what was WRONG about his caricature, which is something that really bugs me. There's something really dehumanizing about the implication that being an atheist means that we have no sense of morality and are guided by our whims to do horrible things. It's also ignoring the fact that human beings are driven to do horrible things regardless of their beliefs. The Inquisition was horribly unethical, to put it mildly, and so were Stalin and Mao. To think a pastor, of all people, would find this a totally cool and ethical argument tactic to use is pretty twisted. He's in a position of authority and I would expect he'd be setting a good example.
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