Archive post #6 from the sixth month. May we all know such joy and such freedom.

Over the weekend, the biggest unauthorised takeover of outdoor ads occurred in 10 UK cities over 2 days involving 350+ pieces of subversive artwork. The movement is part of "Brandalism" which is a campaign against corporate take-over of public space. If you visit the site, Brandlism offers instructions for how artists and activists can employ similar ad takeovers in their cities.

By John Fekner

By Paul Insect

By Zabou

By Dr. D

To see more great ad takeovers, visit the Brandalism site here.

 

From now on, I’m only clicking on the most mundane, ambiguous headlines.

“Here is how the internship scam works. It’s not about a “skills” gap. It’s about a morality gap.

1) Make higher education worthless by redefining “skill” as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.

2) With “skill” irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.

3) End on the job training for entry level jobs. Educated told skills are irrelevant. Uneducated told they have no way to obtain skills.

4) As wealthy progress on professional career path, middle and lower class youth take service jobs to pay off massive educational debt.

5) Make these part-time jobs not “count” on resume. Hire on prestige, not skill or education. Punish those who need to work to survive.

6) Punish young people who never found any kind of work the hardest. Make them untouchables — unhireable.

7) Tell wealthy people they are “privileged” to be working 40 hrs/week for free. Don’t tell them what kind of “privileged” it is.

8) Make status quo commentary written by unpaid interns or people hiring unpaid interns. They will tell you it’s your fault.

9) Young people, it is not your fault. Speak out. Fight back. Bankrupt the prestige economy.”

-

The moral bankruptcy of the internship economy | Sarah Kendzior (via brutereason)

solarbird added: see also the intrinsic fraud of the prestigious internship. (via solarbird)

this comes from the top rope.

(via bainard)

SlideRider es un tobogán desplegable. Su objetivo es convertir las escaleras de casa en un tobogán por el que puedan deslizarse los niños (también es muy útil para sacar borrachos inconscientes de casa sin tener que arrastrarlos).

Se guarda en un cómodo maletín que ocupa muy poco espacio. Parece bastante seguro, pero, por si acaso, yo añadiría unos cojines al final del trayecto (esas esquinas no me inspiran mucha confianza). Los que presuman de amantes y escaleras de emergencia externas también pueden hacer uso del tobogán si la pareja está a punto de sorprenderlos en la cama; con un rápido despliegue combinado con el sudor, el amante puede deslizarse fuera de la habitación y llegar al suelo en un parpadeo. Desnudo, sí, pero sin magulladuras (voluntarias, se entiende). Cómo llegue a su casa y la humillación inherente a ese viaje es otra historia que no nos concierne.

Visto en The Awesomer

Ver más: escaleras, Niños, tobogán
Seguir @NoPuedoCreer - @QueLoVendan

 

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1655/

Don Moyer es un simpático tipo que ha decidido dar un ligero toque personal a la típica vajilla de porcelana china: la ha poblado de monstruos.

Lo que antes eran paisajes bucólicos de templos o ciudades ahora son invasiones en toda regla, no exentas de humor y, por qué no decirlo, calidad. Porque la verdad es que Don es muy buen ilustrador.

El proyecto, llamado Calamityware, está en activo en Kickstarter y todo parece indicar que va a salir adelante. Las opciones disponibles incluyen una invasión de monos voladores (esto caerá en Quelovendan seguro), el ataque de un robot gigante a un apacible pueblo, un monstruo marino, piratas sanguinarios y, por supuesto, una invasión extraterrestre.

Visto en Geekosystem

Ver más: monstruos, platos, porcelana
Seguir @NoPuedoCreer - @QueLoVendan

 

Readers and colleagues, at my publisher’s request, I will be taking the next 6 weeks away from presenting new content to finish the remaining material for the upcoming release of this tragedy series as a fully comprehensive physical volume. I made this bargain in the presence of my cat so I must adhere to it. The book will be worth the wait; I promise you.

I will be posting content from my archives, and those of you who are in the Portland area might just see some of the work in progress if you attend the final ‘Comics underground event’ next month.

Thank you for your understanding and your support.

I don't have the guts to actually do this in real life, but I definitely have the guts to make a comic pretending I did.

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1649/

When the shouts of the fishmonger, bootblack and hansom cabbies ring too loudly, you need time to finish your symphony celebrating the cetaceans or simply mean to pine for halcyon days as they fade fast into the oblivion of memory… retire to your chambers and post this helpful tag around the entry mechanism; in this way, your fellow hominids will know that you’ve grown grim about the mouth and/or require solitude to improve this maddening orb.

Follow these simple instructions and make your needs plain: 

1. Print out on sturdy stock at a scale of 11 X 8.5 inches
2. Separate the tag (seen on the right) from the inserts be means of common shears, sever the cards from each other.
3. Cut out the central circle and make small incisions on the black corner frame lines by means of a razor.  
4. set in whichever miniature placard best describes your private task.

Today's comic is a response to this individual.

(NSFW) My friend Spike has a new compendium of comics. It's a classy collection of sexy comics, most of which were written and illustrated entirely by women. They're finishing their kickstarter in the next two days, so please give it a look!

Billion-Story Building

My daughter—age 4.5—maintains she wants a billion-story building. It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome.

Keira, via Steve Brodovicz, Media, PA

Keira,

If you make a building too big, the top part is heavy and it squishes the bottom part.

Have you ever tried to make a tower of peanut butter? It's easy to make a little tiny one, like a blobby castle on a cracker. It will be strong enough to stay standing. But if you try to build a really big castle, the whole thing smushes flat like a pancake.

The same thing happens with buildings. The buildings we make are strong, but we couldn't make one that went all the way up to space, or the top part would squish the bottom part.

We can make buildings pretty tall. The tallest buildings are almost 1 kilometer tall, and we could probably make buildings 2 or even 3 kilometers tall if we wanted, and they would still be able to stand up under their own weight. Higher than that might be tricky.

But there would be other problems with a tall building besides weight.

One issue would be wind. The wind up high is very strong, and buildings have to be very strong to stand up against the wind.

Another big problem would be, surprisingly, elevators. Tall buildings need elevators, since no one wants to climb hundreds of flights of stairs. If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms.

Maybe you can think of a way to get people to their floors without having too many elevators. Maybe you could make a giant elevator that takes up 10 floors. Or you could make fast elevators that work like roller coasters. Or you could fly people up to their rooms with hot air balloons. Or you could launch them with catapults.

Elevators and wind are big problems, but the biggest problem would be money.

To make a building really tall, someone has to spend a lot of money, and no one wants a really tall building enough to pay for it. A building many miles tall would cost billions of dollars. A billion dollars is a lot of money! If you had a billion dollars, you could rent a giant spaceship, save all the world's endangered lemurs, give a dollar to everyone in the US, and still have some left over. Most people don't think giant towers a few miles tall are important enough to spend a lot of money on.

If you got really rich, so you could pay for a tower to space yourself, and solved all those engineering problems, you'd still have problems making a tower a billion stories tall. A billion stories is just too many.

A big skyscraper might have about 100 floors, which means it's as tall as 100 little houses.

If you stacked 100 skyscrapers on each other to make a mega-skyscraper, it would reach halfway to space:

This skyscraper would still only have 10,000 floors, which is way less than your billion floors! Each of those 100 skyscrapers would have 100 floors, so the whole mega-skyscraper would have 100 times 100 is 10,000 floors.

But you said you wanted a skyscraper with 1,000,000,000 floors. Let's stack 100 mega-skyscrapers to make a mega-mega-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-skyscraper would stick out so far from the Earth that spaceships would crash into it. If the space station were heading toward the tower, they could use its rockets to steer away from it.[1]They'd probably get pretty grumpy after having to dodge your tower repeatedly, so you might want to launch fuel and snacks out the window with a rail gun as they go by. The bad news is that space is full of broken spaceships and satellites and pieces of junk, all flying around at random. If you build a mega-mega-skyscraper, spaceship parts will eventually smash into it.

Anyway, a mega-mega-skyscraper is only 100 times 10,000 = 1,000,000 floors. That's still a lot smaller than the 1,000,000,000 that you want!

Let's make a new skyscraper by stacking up 100 mega-mega-skyscrapers, to make a mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper would be so tall that the top would just barely brush against the Moon.

But it would only be 100,000,000 floors! To get to 1,000,000,000 floors, we have to stack 10 mega-mega-MEGA-skyscrapers on top of each other, to make one Keira-skyscraper:

The Keira-skyscraper would be pretty close to impossible to build. You would have to keep it from crashing into the Moon, being pulled apart by the Earth's gravity, or falling over and smashing into the planet like the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

But some engineers have an idea sort of like your tower—it's called a space elevator. It's not quite as tall as yours (the space elevator would only reach partway to the Moon), but it's close!

Some people think we can build a space elevator, but other people think it's a crazy idea. We can't build one yet because there are some problems we don't know how to solve, like how to make the tower strong enough and how to send power up it to run the elevators. If you really want to build a gigantic tower, you can find out more about some of the problems they're working on, and eventually become one of the people coming up with ideas to solve them. Maybe, someday, you could build a giant tower to space.

I'm pretty sure it won't be made of peanut butter, though.

Submitted by joannapea81

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1641/

Twogag’s got a standing tradition of being inspired by being uninspired.

Feeling uninspired? Like the Twogag Facebook Page.
feeling inspired? Like the Twogag Facebook Page.

Xhongkai Xiang tiene 20 años y ya ha conseguido crear toda una colección de seres extraños con cartón, de los que la figura de Iron Man es sólo un ejemplo. Dragones, criaturas alienígenas,... cada uno de ellos es más espeluznante que el anterior y no cabe ninguna duda de la habilidad del joven taiwanés.

Digo esto desde la más profunda y despreciable envidia, por supuesto. Y eso que hace mucho que pasé los veinte. Si me das un trozo de cartón lo más probable es que levante los bordes y lo use como cenicero: ese es mi nivel. Hasta ahí llego. Además fumaré sin ganas, sólo para demostrar que el cenicero funciona y que, efectivamente, sirve como receptáculo de las cenizas.

Lo más triste es que considero un gran logro llegar a un lugar nuevo y conseguir transformar cualquier cosa en un cenicero; hay que tener una visión estructural del sitio e ir directo a superficies a salvo del viento, y hacerlo en el tiempo en el que uno tarda en liarse el cigarrillo. No es fácil. Estúpido, sí, pero no fácil.

Visto en Laughing Squid

Ver más: cartón, iron man
Seguir @NoPuedoCreer - @QueLoVendan

 

QueLoVendan La tienda de regalos y gadgets divertidos - Cupón dto. 5% -> SOY_FAN_DE_NPC

New poster in store!

I am back and rested from ECCC 2014. Nice to meet so many fine people. This comic-illustration might be of use for those of you who find yourselves in a similar situation wishing to avoid offense.

Please visit me at Emerald City Comiccon, table 1214, this weekend! I will have had crumpets & am thus likely to be in good spirits.

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1625/