Cooper Griggs

The bulk of any Electronic Entertainment Expo is spent paying attention to the new—the upcoming games, all-new or redesigned consoles, and new services (or policies) that will soon change the way you play.

Tucked away in a corner of the south convention hall, though, is the antithesis of E3. It's an assemblage of old arcade cabinets, classic consoles hooked to standard-definition TVs, and gaming curios that you may never have heard of let alone seen. It's an exhibition of hardware, software, and collectibles put together by the Videogame History Museum. Even if the next big high-definition shooter games hold no appeal for you, you'll get a kick out of all the great stuff they've gathered together here. Take a look at just a small subsection of what they had at the show.

Sit for a spell

Large portions of the Videogame History Museum's sprawling booth were dedicated to playable old-school console games. The authenticity of that horrible 70s couch is impressive.

Andrew Cunningham

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Large American cities breed complacency. We grow up in the suburbs, we move to the cities after college, we get jobs and buy apartments and curate routines. We find comfort in the monoculture of coffeeshops, the ubiquity of free wifi and indie periodicals. College students flip through biology textbooks, their thumbs skimming over blue-framed iPhone screens.

The small town of Marfa, Texas subverts urban complacency. The streets are hot, desolate, effortlessly dusty. Buildings arranged sparse like haiku lines. A lone gas station on the corner offers only two varieties of bottled water.

Upon closer inspection, a startling fraction of the blank-faced single-story buildings in Marfa reveal themselves to be contemporary art museums.

At night, the heat departs the sidewalks reluctantly like rising angels on their way to the dentist. Warm lamplight floods the streets, supplanting the blues and purples of a late desert sunset. We walk to a bar down the block, where a high school graduation party is underway. The high schooler is nowhere to be found, but his family members run plentiful. 2-4 middle-aged couples dance the macarena as the DJ shuffles windows around on a laptop.

At 11:20 pm, an old man hands us beers and drives us down a dark lonely highway in an obnoxiously loud bus. He herds us out into a field of moonlit grass rife with ant hills. As we shiver in the stiff breeze, he points into the distance at a pair of faint pulsing lights, orange and yellow, bobbing on the horizon. The Marfa Lights, he says. Nobody knows what they are, not even the scientists from Austin who came and studied them for months. Some say aliens; others say cars on the highway.

“What happens if you look at them through a telescope?”
“Well you see the same thing, only bigger.”

The next day, we are fed sweet French toast and taken to art. We walk from bungalow to bungalow, gazing. There are rows upon rows of aluminum blocks whose gleaming surfaces cast geometric deceptions, chaotic multicolored masses of twisted metal, rooms suffused in unearthly neon light, cartoonish paintings of tesselating women, and an abandoned Soviet schoolhouse left in disarray.

Marfa feels like an alien outpost in the morass of stereotypes that is America.

things that are making me happy today

• unlocking the truth
  two talented kids putting their brains and abilities into something cool and owning themselves at an age when i was still likely having tantrums and pouting.
• summer fruit
  when we’ve burned down the earth, i will miss summer fruit only second to sushi. (yes, i understand the irony of saying sushi - please don’t write in to point out i’m a seafood eating asshole - i know i am.)
• paris
  today i got the gift of giving the gift of helping my godson with an airline ticket to paris - his first big trip. i am fortunate beyond counting.

What creates these long and nearly straight grooves on Mars?

via http://www.arcademi.com/studio-greiling/

via http://blog.theblakewright.com/archives/1158

via http://curseofthemultiples.tumblr.com/page/2

Artist Ramon Bruin (previously) recently drew this fun anamorphic illusion that appears to be a 3D ship but is actually a skewed drawing on three sheets of flat paper. You can see more of his recent work over on deviantART. (via my modern met)

Captain America as played by Charlie Faith #actor #actingschool #starz #sketch #comedy #webseries #internet #humor #funny #captain #america #hollywood #losangeles #california #iphone #silly #theater #costume @bestkevinbest @manboynice (at Underground Theatre Company)

Few visitors to the temples at Angkor Wat are unimpressed. But, as a team of international archaeologists recently discovered, the visible buildings represent merely a portion of a formally planned urban environment whose existence has been hidden beneath the jungle for a thousand years.

Using lidar, the aerial mapping tool that is revolutionizing the search for lost cities, the team uncovered a medieval cityscape "without parallel in the pre-industrial world." Lidar, which uses lasers to detect hidden variations in topology (it works like radar), can discover shapes invisible to the human eye. Even in this heavily trafficked area, the remnants of a 13-square mile city, complete with an orthogonal grid of streets and canals, were not visible until now.

In short, Angkor was far more urban than previously thought, and the geometric rigor of the famous enclosures actually extended far into what is now jungle.

Video via The Age.

Top image: Mannfred Werner, via Wikimedia Commons.

IMAGE: vivianjohnson.com

via http://www.new-territories.com/biennal of venice 08.htm

via http://sophisticated-simplicities.tumblr.com/

via http://instagr.am/p/UbOgd/

Mashed #truck #mash #4077 #tv #television #medic #location #shoot #hike #malibu #losangeles #california #iphone #weeds #70s #show #overgrown (at M*A*S*H 4077)

via http://www.calligraffiti.nl/page/3

Who would Jesus fire?

Catholic Holy Trinity School in El Cajon, California told second-grade teacher Carie Charlesworth she is out of a job. Charlesworth’s infraction? Funny story: There isn’t one.

She is a victim of a stalker who happens to be her ex-husband. The school has decided that Charlesworth is too unsafe to be allowed back in school, not because of anything she did, but because of the behavior of her former spouse.

Back in January, the man, who has a history of inflicting domestic abuse, showed up in the school’s parking lot; in a likely overreaction, the school went into lockdown mode. Charlesworth, who is just now coming forward, was put on indefinite leave for three months, then fired.

The letter confirming her dismissal stated:

“…while you were still physically at Holy Trinity School, … the temporary restraining order in effect was not a deterrent to [the ex-husband]. Although we understand he is currently incarcerated, we have no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve and we understand from court files that he may be released as early as next fall. In the interest of the safety of the students, faculty and parents at Holy Trinity School, we simply cannot allow you to return to work there, or, unfortunately, at any other school in the Diocese.”

So Charlesworth, having done exactly nothing wrong, is out of luck, and so are her four kids.

“They’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids,” said Charlesworth. “It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere. … The kids and I are being punished for something we didn’t even do.”

The children also attended Holy Trinity School, but, like their mom, they haven’t been back since January.

While it’s not difficult to sympathize with the school district and the concerned parents of other kids, who acted out of an abundance of caution, it doesn’t seem particularly Christian to kick this teacher while she’s down.

And her firing doesn’t just affect her and her family: it sends a terrible signal to abused women everywhere, many of whom are already reluctant to speak out. To victims, the prospect of getting fired is surely as daunting, and as effective in forcing their silence, as any embarrassment or fear of spousal retaliation.

Charlesworth does not know where she’ll turn next. The Catholic community that long employed, supported, and literally nourished her is crumbling and retreating around her in the face of a bad situation. She’ll get paid through August, and then… well, no one knows.

It remains to be seen whether her faith will sustain her. “I have not been back to a Catholic church since this happened,” she told a reporter for her local NBC station. “Everything I thought I had, I don’t.”

via http://everythingyoulovetohate.us/post/49039378953

Sometimes you don't realize your behavior is actually compensating for a design flaw. That is, until you see the solution. When borrowing a car and carrying anything heavy or delicate—a full toolbox, a few bottles of booze, a birthday cake—I always place it in the rear seat footwell. It would be much more convenient to load into the hatch, but I don't want those things sliding around because I took the corner too hard after watching Fast & Furious 6.

That's where the Stayhold comes in. The Velcro strip on the bottom adheres it firmly to the carpeting inside your car, allowing you to wall things off against the edges or build your own little fort.

As humble as this device is, to me it represents the ideal of what industrial design has to offer: It's simple, largely monomaterial, addresses a valid need, and is relatively inexpensive. Sure it's not going to wind up in the MoMA, but then again, neither is anything in the trunk of my car.

"Racetrack Playa" sounds like the screenname of an online teenager you're competing against in Need for Speed, but scientists recognize it as the name of a dried-up lake in Death Valley. For a century, scientific minds have been puzzled by a well-documented, poorly-understood phenomenon occuring at Racetrack Playa: Enormous stones, some up to 700 pounds, appear to have somehow moved themselves across the lakebed floor in random patterns, leaving a furrowed trail behind them.

No one had ever seen these "sailing stones" move, but many photographed the end result. The original thought was that the lakebed forms a thin sheet of ice on it, and that the wind then blows the rocks across it; but that theory was discounted after researchers calculated it would take wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour to move the rocks, while the wind at the Racetrack maxes out around 90 m.p.h. And if you're wondering why they don't just strap a GoPro camera onto a rock to see what's going on, scientists returning to the site over the years have calculated that the rocks move for short periods of time, just once every three years. That's a bit longer than your battery's likely to last.

However, a fortunate collision between two of these magic rocks provided planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz with an interesting discovery:

uppereastside:

Jurassic Park

via http://society6.com/agrimony/The-Great-Lunar-Cycle_iPhone-Case