Cooper Griggs

hey-assbutt-its-a-parade:

finndicate:

vjezze:

Amsterdam is turning rainbow for a visit of the Russian president Putin. The council of the city of Amsterdam has decided to hang out the gay pride flag on all council owned buildings and offices, in protest to Russia’s new anti-gay law.

there’s several of these as well;

pretty sure Amsterdam is now the sass capital of the world

Pizza.

Beware.

via http://aubzillatron.tumblr.com/

The folks over at Teehan+Lax have just released a new tool (you’ll need Google Chrome and a pretty kickin’ internet connection) that lets you scrape public data from Google Street View to create sweeping hyperlapse videos. What’s a hyperlapse? Via Teehan+Lax:

Hyper-lapse photography—a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest—has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.

The team turned their new UI over to one of their motion designers, Jonas, who made the stunning clip above. Incredible. Some other great examples of art made with Google Street View: Address is Approximate and this clip from Giacomo Miceli. (via it’s nice that)

Photographer Dan Marker-Moore shot a dramatic time lapse video of the full moon rising behind downtown Los Angeles, and then turned the video frames into a collage and animated GIF.

images via Dan Marker-Moore

via PetaPixel

Convention season is fast approaching, and with the advent of convention season comes the return of the furor over the problem of convention harassment and how to deal with that. And because I read several blogs in other areas of geekdom besides gaming, this is a theme that I’m seeing repeat over… and over… and over.

Most recently, the internet shitstorms have been circling around the case of Adria Richards, a woman who tweeted about bad behavior at Pycon and was ultimately fired when the internet exploded with rape and death threats.

Now, yes, Pycon is a tech conference, not a gaming convention. However, tech and gaming are both male-dominated nerd subcultures that have a history of tolerating rape culture and punishing women who dare to speak out against those who perpetuate it. And the same kind of wrong-headedness seems to pervade discussions of convention harassment no matter which sphere of geekdom the conversation happens to be taking place in, so I thought I’d address some of the most common points that I’ve seen circulating in my feed the last week or so.

Trying to enforce anti-harassment policies puts you in a he said/she said situation, because one person’s “assault” can be another person’s “hi, how are you?”.

This argument is wrong-headed for two reasons. FIRST:

The spectre that is always raised in these discussions is the issue of false reporting and the fear that those nasty evil sneaky women are going to go around accusing men they don’t like of harassment to get them booted from the event. Because I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do than risk damaging my professional reputation, my personal safety, and having to face ostracism from my community so that I can falsely accuse a man I don’t like of sexually harassing me for some lulz. …yeah.

From Hark! A Vagrant

Here’s the thing. The number of people who falsely report harassment, assault, and rape is vanishingly small. We live in a rape culture that trivializes the victimization of women and stigmatizes those who experience sexual violence. Is it entirely impossible that someone would falsely report? No. But the social, professional, and emotional consequences of reporting are so great that it is not something that is going to be done on a lark.

SECOND, this sort of thinking assumes that sexual harassment is something that you can accidentally fall into. Like you go to start talking to somebody and you trip on something and then you’re sexually harassing them. And, man. All I have to say is that if you’re worried that you don’t know how to talk to someone without sexually harassing them, let me just propose that that says more about you than it does about them. If you’re really not sure where that line is, then maybe it’s best for you not to attend such events until you figure that out.

Enforcing rules is scary because lawyers!

Businesses make rules all the time that must be followed if you want to be served by that business. Despite the fact that toplessness is perfectly legal in New York, I’m sure I would have trouble finding a restaurant willing to seat me were I to walk in topless and ask to be seated. How hard is it to say that if you violate the rules of the convention, you will be asked to leave? No one’s asking anyone to chase purported harassers down, tackle them dramatically, and turn them over to police at the head of a ticker-tape parade.

If you feel you need to add a blanket disclaimer to the effect that attendees can be ejected from the convention at any time at the discretion of the convention organizers, cool! Do that. But if you’re going to make a rule to the effect that harassment of your fellow convention attendees will not be allowed, you need to be prepared to enforce that rule. Failing to enforce it is just going to send the message that harassment is tacitly condoned by your organization.

We can’t expect everyone to be safe at a convention. Come now, that’s just being silly.

You know what? I’m so done with hearing this one. SO. DONE. Especially because this argument inevitably gets used by people who have sufficient privilege that they don’t have to be concerned for their safety at such events. You try going to a convention and having to be aware of who you get into an elevator with, or having to ask people to walk you to your car or your hotel, or having to be aware of where exits and potential allies are in case a situation arises and then tell me that I’m being unreasonable for wanting a universal expectation of safety.

If you are willing to accept the proposition that some classes of attendees should not have the reasonable expectation of safety, then fuck you. I will never attend one of your events, and I will preach it from the rooftops that other women should stay away as well. Bad enough that I have to worry about being victimized by members of my own community. I don’t need convention policies to tell me that I’m “asking for it” simply by attending.

This kind of thing is just part of gaming culture. If you can’t handle that, then don’t go to conventions.

Putting the onus on people who experience harassment to put up or shut up is BUUUULLLLLSHIIIIIIT. Sexual harassment is illegal. If I was to say “well doing lines of coke at the game table is just part of gaming culture, if you don’t like it then you just shouldn’t come” or “stabbing people is just part of game culture, you just need to learn to deal with it”, you would (correctly) look at me as if I were from the moon. But because we’re talking about sexual harassment, criminal behavior is suddenly okay? Yeah, no. You’ve just branded yourself a willing enabler of rape culture, and this is the end of our conversation.

(Convention harassment is bad. This isn’t rocket science. originally posted on Gaming As Women.)

“Tie Chi” is a comic on Incidental Comics by Grant Snider that demonstrates how to tie a tie using martial arts (Tai Chi).

Game of Thrones Cello Cover - Break of Reality (by BreakofReaIity)

CARGO - Tropfest Australia 2013 Finalist (TSI “Balloon”) (by TROPFEST)

via http://convoy.tumblr.com/

Like a freak midnight rainbow, this ongoing series of lit waterfalls titled Neon Luminance is part of a collaboration between Sean Lenz and Kristoffer Abildgaard over at From the Lenz. The duo dropped high-powered Cyalume glow sticks in a variety of colors into various waterfalls in Northern California and then made exposures varying from 30 seconds to 7 minutes to capture the submerged trails of light as the sticks moved through the current. To accomplish some of the more complicated shots they strung several sticks together at once to create different patterns of illumination. For those of you concerned about pollution, the sticks (which are buoyant) were never opened and were collected at the end of each exposure, thus no toxic goo was mixed into the water. See more from the project on their website.

might i posit that, in this case, they’re no longer doors. perhaps they’re now merely “windows”.

FLUIDIC is the result of a unique collaboration between Hyundai’s Advanced Design Center and Berlin-based studio WHITEvoid. The interactive light sculpture is made from 12,000 suspended spheres that act as three dimensional pixels, or voxels. Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time. Via WHITEvoid:

A seemingly floating point cloud above a water pond and consisting of 12,000 translucent spheres marks the heart of the installation. Due to a complex computer algorithm the spheres are arranged seemingly random within the cloud. At the same time the algorithm observes the positions and projection angles of eight high-speed laser projectors that are being arranged around the artwork. They are sending out beams scanning through the arrangement of the cloud. Generating bright and dim light points, this creates a highly organic and natural distribution of voxels (3D pixels). Emerging lines and shapes finally form graphical compositions without any sweet or blind spots. Keeping the same density and intensity the FLUIDIC graphics enables their viewers to observe and interact with it from every point of view.

FLUIDIC will be on display at the Temporary Museum for New Design in Milan through April 14th.

If you liked this project, there are several other artists working with interactive light fields lately, many of which have appeared here on Colossal including the flexible Firewall, the Water Light Graffiti system and also Submergence.

These rock pillars, or hoodoos, tell the geologic story of erosion seen in treasured natural landscapes worldwide. Over millions of years, changes in climate conditions shaped them by washing away sediments and chipping off slabs of earth.

See more photos: Fantastic Hoodoos gallery | Bryce Canyon National Park group

Photos from martin zalba, ladigue_99, marichica88, Luke Notsoblack, and geoGraf.

my initial reaction: “oh, was she still alive?”

my tumblrsphere reaction:

yeah, horrible person. but the time to get all up in it about her being a horrible person was while she was busy being a horrible person.

sure, go ahead and party now. but… didja do all you could to stop the horrible while it was happening? all that you could? then? when it mattered?

this is the struggle i’ll have with bush 2, cheney, et al.

sure - dance on their graves. but did we do everything we could to stop the things we found so repugnant while they were happening?

if you’re gonna dance on their graves, be sure you’ve earned the right to.

Works on Gnats too!

Items needed:

1 cup of water
1/4 cup of brown sugar
1 gram of yeast
2-liter plastic bottle

1. Cut the plastic bottle in half.
2. Mix brown sugar with hot water. Let cool. When cold, pour in the bottom half of the bottle.
3. Add the yeast. No need to mix. It creates carbon dioxide, which attracts mosquitoes.
4. Place the funnel part, upside down, into the other half of the bottle, taping them together if desired.
5. Wrap the bottle with something black, leaving the top uncovered, and place it outside in an area away from your normal gathering area. (Mosquitoes are drawn to the color black or white.)

Change the solution every 2 weeks for continuous control.

via

Thanks Cari

So you've been bitten by a zombie. So long, conscious brain activity, hello craving for human meat. But the protagonist of the short film Cargo has bigger problems than his impending demise: he has to find a way to save his infant daughter, even if he has to die first to do it.

Read more...

The "Polar Bear Ice Tray" is a sealed bottle that makes icecubes and then facilitates their easy removal. The sealed container keeps freezer flavors away, and once it's all frozen, you can dislodge the ice by giving the bottle a whack on a countertop and then pour it out of the mouth. Looks like a clever way of solving an old problem, though I haven't tried it myself.

polar bear ice tray (via Red Ferret)

teamfortress2blog:

vanehwasreal:

i mean what

what the fuck

gustav no

stop it

gustav please

He has an amazing taste in hats

This was probably the most emotional moment of that season for me.