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submitted by oPHILcial [link] [61 comments]

OakOak is one of my favorite street artists. Street Art News says of him that "placement is king." That strikes me as just the right description. OakOak knows how to make use of pre-existing forms to create scenes. We've seen him do that very effectively with Calvin & Hobbes and Spider-Man.

Now here's Sideshow Bob, the arch-nemesis of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. He spent lot of time in prison for his failed attempts to kill Bart. OakOak shows him back where he belongs: behind bars.

-via Street Art News

 

Thanks Bella

 

submitted by SemiHollowCarrot [link] [57 comments]

The featured image above is before reader Kenneth edited it to add his own view, below.

Professor Jacobson-

Thought you would appreciate this Jetta I witnessed at the grocery store in MA today.

Edited, and unedited, attached.

We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.

Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?

If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:

And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.

That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.

Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.

Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.” 

There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.

MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.

Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.

Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:

Grab your browser and your axe and download the Outerra demo and MED-EM’s dataset.

[via Reddit]

Chuang Chih-Yuan and Jean-Michel Saive play table tennis like they’re the Harlem Globetrotters or something. Saive is all over the place, like a wrecking ball. At one point, they “turn the tables” so to speak, and the line judge has to duck down to keep from being hit! She gets back at them, by putting a second ball in play. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

What you see here are highlights from their exhibition match at the 2014 Tai Ben Invitational earlier this month in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The full match is nearly an hour long and can be seen here. (via Metafilter)

1. The full-body reset

Leave your mind and problems at home and let your body get back to nature. The only thing you think of during the day is how hot you are and how much water and beer you should be drinking (one day I drank 20 bottles of water and 20 beers and peed thrice). Night falls and it’s still perfect weather for the beach. The beats are bumping and you could give a hoot about the unchecked emails in your inbox.

Last year, I was having trouble getting motivated to put in work on my thesis. It was the only thing I thought about, but the last thing that I wanted to work on. Coachella took it off my mind, and when I came back I was ready to make some progress. Use a getaway like this to give your brain a break from whatever you think about most.

2. The people watching

There are people everywhere. A lot of them use this weekend to do a lot of drugs in public. Watching someone scream, yell, and love on an inanimate object never gets old. My favorite times to people watch come during the nighttime main-stage events where all the different drug cultures come together to watch an artist they’re all familiar with. The ravers come out of their techno-tents full of flashing lights and pumping bass to mingle with the ultra-chill and relaxed stoners who sprawl out on the grass to enjoy the calming tunes, while the psychedelic crews are always close by, just wanting to touch everything with a look on their face that shows they aren’t anywhere close to this reality.

Everyone is fascinated and driven by something a little different, and the building tension is just hilarious to watch as they all come together to get a good view of the stage and listen to some music.

3. The technology

All of the lights. The lights. The sound. The video. I get geeky on it. Check out the video above and just think about all the work that had to go into setting it all up. Organizers also make a conscious effort to be as green as possible by having trash, recycling, and compost bins everywhere.

There’s even been a stage powered by a generator run off of people riding stationary bicycles, as well as several other very creative initiatives to minimize waste throughout the festival.

4. The artwork

5. The energy

You can feel it as soon as you enter the venue and it continues all weekend. It’s fantastic.

Research shows that if you’re trying to buy happiness, your enjoyment from experience-based purchases starts out high and goes up over time, whereas enjoyment from tangible goods like a new TV or clothes decreases over time. So if you’re in the market to perk yourself up with a purchase, make it a trip to Coachella instead of that new iPhone.

This post was originally published at The Quest for Awesome and is reprinted here with permission.

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This is what happens when your swag might be just a little too high.

source: twitter

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Bentonville, Ark. based Wal-Mart announced nearly 2,300 Sam’s Club layoffs to take place in the bear future. Both hourly and salaried workers will be affected. Assistant managers will represent nearly half of the cuts.

These cuts come on the heels of large cuts made by JC Penney, Macy’s and Target. Between the four retail giants, nearly 5,700 jobs have been or will soon be eliminated.

According to ABC News, Sam’s Club currently has 630 stores in the US and Puerto Rico and plans to add at least 15 new stores in the coming fiscal year. Their existing stores generated $56.4 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year and represented 12 percent of parent company Wal-Mart’s $466.1 billion in revenues.

An average store will lose four employees. The cuts will not be uniform, however. According to The New York Times, Sam’s Club spokesman Bill Durling gave this as one of the reasons for the Sam’s Club layoffs:

“We realized we had pretty much the same club structure whether a club had $50 million in revenue or $100 million in revenue. What we’re trying to do is balance our resources.”

The layoff will affect roughly 2 percent of Sam’s Club’s 116,000 employees. According to Durling, affected workers will continue to receive pay for 60 days. They will also be eligible to apply for open positions within Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart. When the 60 days is up, those who have not found new positions will receive a severance. Durling says that Wal-Mart is “trying to treat our associates with utmost care and respect.”

This year’s layoffs represent the largest layoff by Sam’s Club since 2010, when they outsourced their food sampling department and laid off 10,000 workers.

In addition to deep cuts to their assistant management cadre, Sam’s Club will eliminate some positions, such as telephone attendants, entirely. The upcoming cuts and layoffs are part of Sam’s Club’s attempts to run a tighter ship in order to better compete with rivals such as Costco and Amazon Prime.

Durling told the Associated Press: “We felt this was the right move to make sure we are positioning ourselves for growing in the future. We are trying to rebalance our resources in the field to make sure we are investing in the clubs that have the higher growth potential and balancing resources across the chain.”

While the layoffs are bad news for over 2,000 Sam’s Club associates, there is one group of employees who will benefit from the cuts. According to a CNN Money report, Durling suggested that assistant managers who keep their positions and work in departments where other assistant management positions are subject to the Sam’s Club layoffs will be paid more.

Sam’s Club Layoffs Coming, More Than 2,000 Losing Jobs is a post from: The Inquisitr News