Caseymalone

I always enjoy seeing new new art prints by Raid71. “Cultural Impact – St. Paul’s” is a 19.5″ x 27.5″ screenprint, has an edition of 100, and costs £35. “Cultural Impact – London” is a 17.5″ x 31.5″ screenprint, has an edition of 75, and costs £40. Visit his shop.

I’ve been traveling through the South for the past week and am truly in awe of the nature that surrounds this region of the country. From the changing foliage and glistening streams, to the towering pines and wild flowers, the South just has a way of captivating the senses. On my way up through North Carolina, I decided to take a drive through the Blue Ridge Parkway (if you’ve never driven it, I recommend it at least once in your lifetime!) and I was blown away by the immense pines and forest around me. So in homage to the natural beauty of the Appalachians, I decided to round up some favorites of the forest green variety for me, my home and my dog. –Stephanie

HUMAN – I’ve become a bit of a backpack fanatic and have started a collection. This delightful forest green one will be joining the group soon enough.

HOUSE – An armchair can really become the sole focal point of a room if you choose correctly. I love Anthropologie’s eclectic assortment of armchairs, especially this dark green, kilim rug upholstered option. So moody, yet charming.

HARVEY – As much as I’m a backpack fanatic, Harvey has gathered his own collection of jackets. (Believe it!) I know he’d probably have his eye on this casual hoodie for our evening strolls through the city.

photo source: endlessdogs.com

I’m lucky enough to have a pup who absolutely loves car rides. A jingle of the keys, and he comes running, ready to hop in the back and cruise the city streets.  So as I headed out east for a southern road trip, I gladly invited Mr. Harvey along – much to his delight.

Road trippin’ with your pup can be such a joy, but if you’re a bit timid or unsure about handling the car ride with your dog, here are a few general tips to help you out:

• Get your dog acquainted with car travel. I’m assuming you are already aware of your dog’s like/dislike of the car, but if this is your first long journey with your pup I’d recommend getting them used to car travel by taking several longer drives prior to your trip and even feeding them in the car so they associate joy with the backseat. Practice makes perfect…or at least more tolerable.
• Fasten those seat belts. There are so many safety harness, belts and seats that keep your pup safe in the car. I use a simple harness that attaches to the seat belt and allows Harvey to sit up or lie down with ease and gives me some peace of mind.
• Keep your pup’s head inside the car. I know some dogs get such a thrill from letting the wind rush through their fur as they stick their head out of the car window, but it can be quite dangerous…especially at high speeds. So the best rule of thumb is to keep your dog’s head inside the car until you’ve reached slow speeds…and then they can enjoy a little wind action.
• Be prepared for pit stops. Every  2-3 hours (or whatever you feel is best for your pooch) it’s best to stop for a break.  Be sure to have poop bags, water bowl and fresh water ready for your dog and see if it’s possible to fund an area where they can run around safely for a bit. It’s their vacation too after all.
• Pack a pet first aid kit. You never know what will come up along your journey and vet care is not always readily available. So I recommend packing a small pet first aid kit (most larger pet stores carry them pre-packaged) as preparation for smaller medical issues.

 

It’s time for another 1980′s flashback courtesy of Alex Jones (Orion Pax Designs) who returns to the Brothership with the transforming big-rig Optimus Prime. One of the many reasons I admire Alex’s work is because he’s a grinder, willing to rebuild again and again and again to get things just right. While I’ve heard some of the great builders brag how they “threw it together in 2 hours”, it’s nice to hear Alex admit that he’s been working through an idea or a project for months or even years.

“Building transformable versions of the G1 Transformers out of LEGO bricks is one of my strongest passions, and I’m working on this series since the year 2000 – unnumbered versions of Optimus Prime, Soundwave, Blaster, Starscream, etc went over my desk during those years – improving them over and over again until i got their design as close to the original as possible.”

If you’re a stone-cold purist, you may object to the KRE-O headpiece, but I bet you’ll look anyway. Alex also has a short video with some crazy zooming and a neat sequence showing the transformation from truck to robot.

In case you missed its premiere Monday as part of Logo TV’s What!? documentary series, the cable channel has made Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony available online. The documentary, which explores the phenomenon of bronies — adult- and teen-male fans of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic [...]

Austria’s Michael Hacker has quite the sense of humor on him, both in-person and via his work. First of all, his poster for The Hives is one of my favorite of 2013 so far. It’s a 13.5″ x 19.5″ screenprint, has an edition of 90, and costs €30. Then there’s “Mooning”. It’s a 10″ x 13.5″ screenprint, has an edition of 74, and costs €20. Visit his shop.

It was so hot this summer, I had a daily ritual of stopping by a gelateria on my way home to get some very brief relief.  It is now fortunately about 30 degrees cooler (but still pretty warm), but I still am weaning myself from my gelato habit.  Kate Taylor, author of the whole food blog Cookie and Kate, has just the recipe this week to help me transition to autumn.  Her recipe for gingersnaps and pumpkin ice cream sandwiches combines my favorite flavors into a nice little package perfect for this season. -Kristina

About Kate: Kathryne Taylor is the author behind Cookie and Kate, a blog that celebrates whole foods with fresh vegetarian recipes. She is an avid supporter of the occasional indulgence and enjoys nothing more than eating good food in good company. She lives
in Kansas City with her trusty sidekick, a funny mutt named Cookie.  You can find her online at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

See Kate’s recipe after the jump!

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With a little help from the Beagle Boys, we have successfully gained access to Scrooge McDuck’s fortune, and we’re planning on sharing the wealth with customers who purchased posters from our recent DuckTales poster series! Packaged in every tube, we are sending a little bit of Scrooge’s fortune, comprised of Gold Coins and Gems. While getting these to go out, we accidentally dropped Scrooge’s Number One Dime into the mix of coins and jewels and it’s been mailed out!

Please, check your tubes when they arrive! If you have Scrooge’s lucky dime, send us a photo of you with it and you will be the proud owner of this brand new Anne Benjamin Original!

 

 

EDIT – THE LUCKY DIME HAS BEEN FOUND!

“What you’ve seen over these decades is less of a black and white between the heroes and villains. Back in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and [...]

Michael Thomas built the adorable BMO (Beemo) from Adventure Time that features a fully functional Raspberry Pi computer. You can see a video showing its features on YouTube.

Alright—if you live in the UK, I am seriously jealous of you right now. For the past several months, my boyfriend and I have been renovating our home while listening to music on a set of $10 computer speakers from Target. While this has been okay-ish so far, the plan was to upgrade when we found a better alternative, preferably one that could play from our phones wirelessly through bluetooth. Many of the bluetooth speakers on the market, though, are beyond our budgets and not particularly attractive (I’m looking at you, Beats Pills). I get that this is a total first-world problem, but an attractive, affordable radio that compliments the home would be nice, right? This is why my eyes lit up when I discovered Newman Radios, a tiny company that has been taking real vintage radios and giving refurbishing them with bluetooth capability. They’re cute and they retail for about £65 (which, by my estimation, is pretty much half the price of the aforementioned Beats Pill). SCORE. Unfortunately, the company is located in England, so the cost of shipping prevents me from picking up one (or all) of these bad boys. UK Residents, though—get on that! —Max

[It's Popsicle Week, wherein I admit that I had something of a popsicle incident this summer, wherein incident = gotta a little carried away, made too many and now can't let summer end without sharing the queue with you. This is Popsicle 2 of 3.]

Once you realize that popsicles are more than juice, frozen on a stick, but are in fact a format in which to reformat your favorite desserts, things go downhill. I mean, one minute, you’re slurping your summer away on fairly innocent banana purees and there’s not a thing on earth you would change, and the next minute, you’re wondering why none of your so-called loved ones have ever loved you enough to make you a strawberry cheesecake popsicles (something I came soclose to making last week but my husband begged me to give our freezer a break). I may have even assembled the ingredients for tiramisu popsicles before realizing that my husband had a point, that maybe things were getting out of hand? But it was too late for the butterscotch popsicles, which were already setting up in the freezer, and after he tried one, all the arguments stopped.

Of course, who likes butterscotch pudding, anyway? I mean, yeech, right? Brown sugar, butter, cream and sea salt bubble together until dark and syrupy with the complex notes of everything worthwhile in this world (vanilla, brown butter, aged bourbon, kittens) then expanded with milk and a little thickener into a pudding that sets as it cools. I cannot imagine anything worse to eat. In Opposite Land.

... Read the rest of butterscotch pudding popsicles on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to butterscotch pudding popsicles | 170 comments to date | see more: Photo, Popsicles, Summer

[Welcome to Popsicle Week, wherein I admit that I had something of a popsicle incident this summer, wherein incident = gotta a little carried away, made too many and now can't let summer end without sharing the queue with you. This is Popsicle 1 of 3.]

This — and amazingly, not the fudge, banana-nutella-salted-pistachio or the strawberry-lime-black-pepper ones before it — is the popsicle that sent me into a tailspin that begin in late June and continues to this moment, when we managed to squeeze in one last vacation before summer was over but are maybe kind of sad we forgot our popsicle molds? No, that would be weird. Which doesn’t mean that it’s not true, just that I’m not going to admit it.

You’d think that the one that sent me over the edge into some sort of popsicle fevor/fervor would at least been insanely decadent, all salted caramel ganache and peanut butter penuche. At the least, it would have been extraordinary in complexity, one of those recipes that imagine you’d like to tether yourself to the freezer for an afternoon in the name of a stunning striated popsicle, frozen in segregated layers (but that, sadly, disappear in the exact same amount of time as the frozen juice varieties do). You wouldn’t guess that it might be a popsicle with but five ingredients, one that is no more complicated than a pinch of salt and another that comes straight from a can.

... Read the rest of key lime pie popsicles on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to key lime pie popsicles | 148 comments to date | see more: Lime, Photo, Popsicles, Summer

Flickrite Obedient Machine recently posted this adorable little version of Han Solo’s blaster (technically the DL-44 heavy blaster pistol), chock full of interesting parts use. The brown carrot as the handle is especially nice.

Temperatures are almost back to normal summer levels in Rome, which is still hot, but at least you can go outside now.  That means gelato stops periodically to refresh.  I have worked my way through Rome food whiz, Katie Parla’s list of gelaterie and have settled on my favorites (and no, Giolitti and San Crispino don’t make the cut!).  For those of you who prefer to make your own cool summer treats, however, I thought I’d highlight a few of ours from the archives.  If our archive just won’t cut it for you, I learned just last week that there is a Gelato University in Bologna.  I don’t know what it is like, but the idea is definitely enticing!  Stay cool! -Kristina

Above and below images by Stacy Newgent of a recipe for Sweet Corn and Raspberry ice cream, from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home.  See other great recipes after the jump.

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I’m liking this new Batman-inspired art print by David Stoupakis. “Bat Girl” is a 14″ x 20″ giclee, has an edition of 70, and costs $65. Visit MetroOrangeArt.com.

Another day, another killer LOTR diorama, this time the perpetrator is -infomaniac- and the subject matter is the Golden Hall of Meduseld from Rohan’s capital city Edoras. This diorama would make a great companion piece to The Council of Elrond featured by Sister Caylin earlier this week. Enjoy tonight’s single-serving of Tolkienian boilerplate with details so accurate you can almost smell the horse manure….wait, that didn’t come out right. Any hint of manure should be attributed to this foul write-up and not the delightful model. My love of the halfling leave has clearly slowed my mind…

BACK TO THE FUTURE

30 YEARS - REAL vs MAKE-UP 

I could talk about the literary impact of the scene depicted from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I could write about the technical pieces about the sculpting, the curvature and natural look of the build, and excellent manner Paul (Disco86) has captured just a small portion of Rivendell.

But really, just look at it:

Gorgeous.

I highly recommend looking around his photostream; for more Lord of the Rings themed builds, you can check out this gallery.

I like to think of MOCpages as a sort of condemned public housing block, cut off from the rest of the world and occupied by squatters. Indeed, all that seems to remain are roaming packs of feral youths and an intrepid band of hold-outs who have barricaded themselves in the basement with a stockpile of food and ammunition. I’m not talking about the builders who retain a sort of dual-citizenship on both MOCpages and Flickr; I’m talking about the hardcore…the loyalists. The MOCpage building still has power, mind you, but there are frequent blackouts and a general breakdown of services and over-watch. While such an environment is far from ideal, there is action to be found there and nowhere else. Case in point is this gem of a diorama depicting a famous scene from the last great Star Wars movie, 1980′s The Empire Strikes Back. I’m not typically one to prattle on about the details, I figure you can make them out without my help, but the technique Markus 1984 uses for the center of the floor is brilliant.

Okay Yaramanoglu (Oky – Space Ranger) built a lineup of mini-racers for Lego’s super heroes minifigs. Each racer is suited to the driver’s style (just like in Mario Kart). Which ones are your favorites?

One of the most spectacular collaborations unveiled at Brickworld 2013 was a cyberpunk city full of tall buildings lit up with working lights. I had the privilege of providing a bit of input on the Japanese signage (a lot of which is very, very silly), and I was overjoyed by how wonderful the end result was.

Like all great collaborations, the display involved many builders — Carter Baldwin, Chris Edwards, Nate Brill, Kyle Vreze, Forest King, Ignacio Bernaldez, Sam Wormuth, and Alex Valentino.

It’s beautiful in the dark, but you can see a lot more of the detail in the light.

Some of the signage is built from EL (electroluminescent) wire, though there’s plenty of brick-built lettering too. Carter saved my personal favorite for himself — a big building in the background that says “Foreign Girls” in giant red letters.

Chris Edwards’ main photo has links to lots more photos.

I am beyond impressed by these new art prints from Joe Carr’s Antiquated Press. These are all mid-sized intaglio prints (13″ x 16″ and 16″ x 16″), have editions of 60, and cost $35-$80 each. These are a great deal, highly recommended. Visit AntiquatedPress.com.

Here at ROBOT 6, we’re hardened hacks who generally don’t get too excited about any old rumor that’s doing the rounds, or report it as a news story, but seeing how I really want this one to be true, I’ll make an exception. Also, some great art vaguely relating to the story turned up recently, [...]

No, Hummaera isn’t an American life insurance company, or a cutting edge hybrid car from Japan; it is the latest model from TBB newcomer Ballom Nom Nom. Welcome to the Brother Ship Mr. Nom Nom, you’ll find hors d’oeuvres available on the Lido deck.

A few summers ago I found myself on a hillside in Portland, Oregon having my star chart mapped. If you’d told me I’d be doing that a few years ago, I would have laughed myself silly. But over the last few years, my willingness to try new things and open my mind a bit more has drastically changed. So when I saw this series of prints inspired by both star charts and stars of the silver screen, I was hooked. Designed by Dorothy, these Hollywood Star Chart litho prints feature constellations named after some of the most culturally significant films of our time. Right now Dorothy is offering two chart styles, Golden Age (based on the night sky over Los Angeles on October 6th, 1927- when ‘The Jazz Singer’ was released) and Modern Day (based on the night sky over New York on June 16th, 1960 – the date of the first showing of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ at the DeMille Theater in New York). I love seeing Pulp Fiction charted next to Easy Rider and Chinatown. It’s a great spin on a popular theme and a perfect gift for the film-lover in your life. Click here to check out the charts and place an order online. xo, grace

Last year I wrote several articles for Edge Magazine about the psychology of various video game topics. Somehow I missed that Edge put these online for viewing, so in case you didn’t catch the print editions I’ve helpfully aggregated them all here in one post. Wait …hang on, I’ve got to check something. Okay, yes. “Aggregated” is the right word here. Sorry.

Simply click with as much authority as you like on any of the images below to read the full article.

Enjoy!

Last minute post for this rare box set.

Auction Here

Jason Latour, artist on the Mignola-verse titles Sledgehammer 44 and B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Pickens County Horror, has posted the image below to his blog, and its a doozy. His work on those two Hellboy spinoffs has been under-praised, pitched perfectly between the contributions made to Dark Horse’s flagship line by the likes of Guy Davis and Duncan Fegredo. This composition was produced as badge designs and program cover for this year’s HeroesCon, which as Latour points out, has been an ambition of his for most of his life. That’s another one scratched off the bucket list.

Close-ups of several of these panels can be seen at Latour’s Instagram feed, in various stages of completion. He’s on something of a hot streak as an artist and a writer these last couple of years. I don’t buy that many Marvel comics these days, but his presence on Winter Soldier sold it to me. I’ll miss it, but here’s hoping he makes his way back to Dark Horse for more digging around in Mignola’s sandbox.