Russian Sledges

Why does a cup of single-origin coffee cost $3.50?

Illustration by Sunra Thompson.

(RNS) In one minute, the April 25 earthquake in Nepal toppled, destroyed and damaged a millennium of religious history. This 'Splainer looks at the damaged sites and their religious and historical significance.

The post The ‘Splainer: What religious sites were lost or damaged in Nepal quake appeared first on Religion News Service.

Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in everywhere, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it’s true, if you’re genuine or false. Such questions matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. 

Persona | dir. Ingmar Bergman (1966)

Developer trays of famous photographers. Photography by John Cyr.

sweetbuttandhellabooty:

BUNE

trembling-colors:

Cambiare

Bar & Grill

1-1-7 2F KabukichoShinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan

Espresso, Wine, Beer and Antipasto. Cambiare is an Italian Bar inspired by Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria in Golden Gai.
 Open Mon-Thus 6:00pm - 2:00am, Fri-Sat 6:00pm - 5:00am. Liquors ¥800-, Soft Drinks ¥600-, Foods ¥500-. No cover charge.

はなにほっぺを舐められ続けるまる。
実際にはもっと長い間。
Maru is licked by Hana for a long time.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis added his voice Wednesday to the feminist anthem of equal pay for equal work, saying it's "pure scandal" that women earn less than men for doing the same job.

Francis also lambasted the attitude of those who blame the crisis in families on women getting out of the house to work. He said such attitudes are a form of "machismo" that shows how men "want to dominate women."

Francis made the comments during his Wednesday general audience, which he has been devoting to different aspects of family life before a big meeting on family issues in October.

For the serial selfie photographer looking to conceal their rampant narcissism, artists Aric Snee and Justin Crowe have created the Selfie Arm, a combination selfie stick and dummy arm that creates the illusion that a friend is taking the picture. The fiberglass arm is positioned so that it extends from the bottom of the frame in a gesture that seems to say “enchanté” or “shall we dance?”

photos via Aric Snee and Justin Crowe

via designboom

One of the things reviewers have commented on is Daredevil’s unexpected grittiness. The violence is real, and the consequences of that violence are also real. When Matt Murdock snaps a man’s arm, the femur (ulna?) bone breaks through the skin. When Karen Page is choked with a sheet, the welt shows on her neck for several episodes afterwards. People make their choices, and then they face the consequences. This realism quickly made Daredevil one of my favorite elements of the MCU.

The other thing that I love is how the show’s brutal world is informed by the particularly Catholic morality of its hero. There have been a few conversations online about whether this show gives us an accurate portrayal of Matt’s religion, and I would argue not only that it does, but that by taking his religious beliefs seriously, and weaving Catholicism into the fabric of the show, Netflix has given us the deepest, most emotionally resonant version of Daredevil we’ve ever had.

Warning: this post comes with SPOILERS for the ENTIRE SEASON.

[Plus confession comes with a latte!]

Read the full article

In an effort to comply with a government mandate to remove all swastikas before Victory Day, celebrating Russia's WWII victory over Germany, bookstores nationwide removed Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-wining graphic novel: "Maus."

130186:

Aristocrazy Fall 2014

beatonna:

myimaginarybrooklyn:

Cigarette cards depicting possible professions for women, circa the 1880s.

100%

I already wanted to go to Japan – this makes me want to go even more! Via Spoon & Tamago.

In Kinokawa City (Wakayama, Japan) there’s a peculiar train station manned by Tama, a peculiar station master. And “manned” is certainly not the right word because Tama is a cat. And Kishi Station is perhaps the only station in the world where work has been outsourced to our feline friends.

The cat’s tale begins in 2003 when a small railroad company, struggling to stay afloat, was consolidated with another railroad company forming Wakayama Electric Railway. One victim of this consolidation was a small cat shelter that was eventually told to vacate the premises in order to make way for new roads leading to train stations. In 2006, the old woman who had looked after the cats approached the president of the railway after an opening ceremony with a desperate plea: to let the cats, who were now facing eviction, live inside the station.

“The moment I met eyes with Tama, I was immediately struck with an image of Tama as station master,” recalls Mitsunobu Kojima, of the sudden revelation that would come to transform his railway. Although Kojima had generally been a dog person, he saw Tama as a maneki-neko (literally, beckoning cat), a Japanese lucky charm in the motif of a cat and thought to bring good business. Tama did not disappoint.

News of the feline station master was quickly picked up by the press and spread like wildfire. A train line that had been seeing annual decreases in ridership by over 5% suddenly saw a 10% jump in just the first year. The following year in 2008 an article published by Sankei News estimated that an increase in ridership, revenue from memorabilia like photobooks, commercial appearances, as well as a tourism boom was responsible for a combined economic impact of 1.1 billion yen.

For her hard work and dedication, in 2008 Tama was promoted to Super Station Master. She was given a brand new window office, a hat with gold lining and a badge. Tama’s annual compensation package includes 1 years’ worth of cat food.

Read more.

cornflakepizza:

19990620: Hope, Fish, Despair

Two hungry cats saw a big fish on the frozen lake park. They excitedly jump straight to the frozen lake where the fish away, to the front paw is caught is flexible, persevering fish separated by a layer of ice, visible touch them, spent a long time effort, still to no avail. Finally, the only hope, fish sigh, the disappointing.

To the handsome man I sometimes see at St Francis Chapel; I sit at the left hand side every Sunday and sporadically see you in Mass. We have never exchanged words other than, maybe, a peace be with you. Occasionally you attend Mass with the cutest o [...]

sushiesque posted a photo:

2015.04.24

Owl café in Tōkyō

While most of us have taken to social media to make new connections, Toronto-based Dorota Pankowska tries to bring friendships back to the real world with her Facebook-inspired pin.

Made to look like the site’s ‘+1 Add Friend’ button, the lapel is meant to be pressed whenever the wearer makes a new pal. It’s a great conversation starter at parties, as well as making things really awkward – especially when someone presses the lapel and the other person doesn’t want to accept the friend request.

You can purchase a pin here for $6.

The post Facebook ‘Add Friend’ lapel helps you make new friends in the real world appeared first on Lost At E Minor: For creative people.

Brittany Wright, a photographer in Seattle, thinks of food as an art form--for both the eyes and the mouth. One of her recent explorations of this field includes arranging foods from her garden and grocery into assemblies sorted by color gradient. Each edible canvas is a smooth blend of colors, from light to dark. You can track her progress in the series on Instagram.

-via Junkculture

glamoramamama75:

myimaginarybrooklyn:

Vintage Japanese Toy Ray Guns.

Yes, please…

Awwww, fee fees. #sadtrombone #THECLOUDISALIE (at Teh Interwebs)

things-u-people-wouldnt-believe:

Entertainment Effects Group.
Blade Runner.
Hades Landscape.

The combination of the best distance, camera angles and perspective were the major tricks employed in deceiving the eyes of the audience from seeing the shots of the Hades Landscape miniature scenes as mere photographs.

The sequence was created using a forced-perspective miniature built on a 15ft x 8ft wood table, cut in sections. The detail comes mainly from hundreds of rows of acid-etched brass hand drawn silhouettes inspired from photos taken of towers, pipes, tubes, and other industrial skylines they could find in several El Segundo and Torrance industrial parks from the 80′s. Those brass pieces were arranged on Plexiglas sheets and cast foam foundation and supplemented with painstaking model making of buildings and small structures to fit in-between the brass silhouette rows. Only the front buildings closer to the lens are fully-detailed three dimensional miniatures.

The idea of detailing only the front quarter of the Hades miniature models is an interesting approach which is similar to those used in computer generated 3D models today. In CG, low poly 3D models are often used in places where detailed information is not very important or in areas that are out of the focus of the CG camera. 

Then, the lighting was added. The Plexiglas foundation had photofloods beneath it. There was a single Xenon strong source of light from below the miniature. Next, tiny bulbs the size  of grains of wheat were put at different areas of the miniature. Other parts of the miniature that were seen to have required further lighting were illuminated with tens of thousands of ultra-thin-fiber-optic strands. The process involved feeding one thing edge of the fiber optic cable in to the area of the miniature to be lit and the other edge into a light box that had a small bulb in it. Twenty boxes were used and once the light bulbs in the boxes were turned on, they would carry light through the fiber optic cables. In order to simulate the different colours of light, the tips of the fiber optic cables that went into the rooms were coloured with different shades of red, yellow and orange using gel filters, allowing for all the windows you see in the scene, as well as helping to define the pyramid in the background, that was made with small wood cutout pieces. The footage of the flame in the Hades Landscape was obtained by Bob Spulock and his crew as they filmed some 35mm explosions in a car park at night, and the explosions were taken from pyrotechnics shot in the California desert for another movie Trumbull worked on, but did not see through to the end. Both elements were then optically added by means of cover mattes and rear projection on white paper cards.

The thick atmosphere was also an idea Trumbull had used before in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and it works to good effect here too. The use high density smoke helps to define the layers, while taking advantage of a lot of lights underneath the table to give the right glowing effect of a bustling future Los Angeles. 

Basically, the miniature sets were put in a room filled with vaporised oil and was filmed. However, the camera was controlled remotely from another room as the smoke was said to be hazardous to the camera operators. Trumbull and his crew also had to deal with a considerable amount of heat from the sheer number of lights being used to lit the model. They even had to bring in fans to keep everything cool and the room at a temperature they could work in, and bee-smoke puffers wired to modified domestic smoke detectors to measure and regulate the right balance of smoke needed for the filming operation. 

The success of the filming of the Hades Landscape was the proper use of front projection techniques and motion control passes to enhance the miniatures. 

The basic technology behind motion control photography is the use of a camera that is electronically and mechanically manipulated in capturing different scene objects on the same piece of film at different times. The same movement is precisely repeated a number of times in filming other objects or scenes depending on the nature of what is required.

The principle of front projection works by placing a camera and a projector at right angles to each other. A special mirror that reflects half of the incident rays and allows the other half of the light to pass through it is then place between the camera and the projector. When the projector is switched on, half of the light from the projector goes through the mirror and passes through while the remaining half is reflected off unto the mirror, foreground elements and a reflective screen on the stage. The reflective screen that is placed of the stage reflects and redirects the light through the path it came through the first time. The redirected light travels back through the mirror and is seen by the lens of the camera. The camera records the image it sees from its point of view and all shadows caused by the reflective mirror are not seen from the camera’s point of view because objects perfectly cover their shadows. 

The motion controlled camera EEG used in most VFX sequences in Blade Runner was a bulky 65mm 8-channel computer controlled camera, named the “Icebox” by the crew. Basically, the camera was programmed to record the miniature elements in a pass and other elements such as smoke and lighting effects in other passes. The film would then be rewound after each pass and the subsequent passes are recorded on the same piece of negative. In filming the miniature sets however, the camera had a fixed focal length and the miniatures were designed for the field of view of the camera. The procedure was running the sequence with a timer, shot a pass, rewind and repeat as many times as needed. Then, develop the film (about 8-10 hours of waiting time) and see if the shot was a successful one. If not (or if the film was damaged from the rewinding), the crew had to repeat the whole operation, day after day until the shot was done. 

smithsonianlibraries:

“Hello Fish? This is Bird…”

Isn’t the future amazing?

Raven’s Lace PeachBerry Whiskey is a flavoured whiskey with both a wild and sweet side. Offering an alternative to masculine dominated flavoured whiskeys, Heaven Hill Brands describes Raven’s Lace as a “one-of-a-kind whiskey with a vibrant attitude and feminine touch with the juxtaposition of a darker side”. Available in June, Raven’s Lace PeachBerry Whiskey infuses juicy peach and sweet strawberry flavours with the smoothness of Bourbon whiskey at an approachable 60 proof. Raven’s Lace PeachBerry Whiskey primarily appeals to the growing segment of female consumers for whom traditional whiskey is not necessarily their drink of choice but are interested in the sweet taste of flavoured whiskeys.