Paleolitiquero

ianbrooks: Time Kills All Gods by AJ Fosik Fosik’s surreal...

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:07:46 -0500

Time Kills All Gods by AJ Fosik

Fosik’s surreal animal head totems make me envision chemically-induced meditations in the desert where one communes with gods who were never meant to be freed from their ancient stone trappings. I know the members of Mastodon must have been thinking the same thing (or perhaps already partaking in said chemical-inducedness), because they commissioned Fosik’s art for their latest album, “The Hunter”:

Artist: flickr / website

(via: hifructose)

prostheticknowledge: 8-Bit Pop-Up Cards Two ways to create...

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:57:42 -0500

prostheticknowledge:

8-Bit Pop-Up Cards

Two ways to create your own: firstly, a tutorial from Mini Eco to create your own Space Invader and pixel skull:

Hello! Remember that pixel heart card I made a while back? Well it has been one of my most popular tutorials to date so I thought I would add another few designs to the collection. Meet ‘space-invader popup’ and ‘skull popup’

… You definitely need a craft knife (and a steady hand) to make these cards this project is only really suitable for adults or teenagers.

Full tutorial here

If, on the other hand, you would like to design your own, there is a piece of software that has been around for years called Pop-Up Card Designer from Japan:

The latest version is Ver.2.1.1

Pop-up Card Designer is a Windows application, which generates unfolded patterns of Pop Up Cards.

With simple interface, you can get unfolded pattern of your original Pop Up Cards.

There is a limitation on the number of grids until you enter a password. Please purchase a password if you want to design more detailed work and to continue the use of this software.

This piece of software comes in both free and Pro versions, which you can check out here

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Wed, 16 May 2012 19:53:28 -0500

"For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable..."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 05:22:15 -0500

“

For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. New examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim, with what I am sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’. This is all very well, but there is no doubt what ‘Five items or less’ means, just as only a dolt can’t tell from the context and from the age and education of the speaker, whether ‘disinterested’ is used in the ‘proper’ sense of non-partisan, or in the ‘improper’ sense of uninterested. No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

”

- Stephen Fry (via carolineslavin)

What he said.

(via cosmogyros)

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Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:42:14 -0500

daysrunaway: via the ever incredible and...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:26:01 -0500

daysrunaway:

via the ever incredible and immaculate vodkaofthegods

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Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:49:33 -0500

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Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:34:18 -0500

Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:09:57 -0500

Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture:

For the past 200 years, ever since Thomas Malthus published hisEssay on the Principle of Population, big thinkers have been wondering whether Earth-dwellers will eventually run out of food.

Today, a global group of scientists released a fresh look at the question. They add a different, environmental twist to it. Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?

It’s a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.

Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet’s land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts for a third of all the emissions of greenhouse gases that humans release into the environment. (Those greenhouse emission come from clearing forests or grassland for crops, the emissions of methane from rice paddies, and the conversion of nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas.)

[…]

via NPR