If you love concept art as much as we do, then you're going to want to bookmark the new site of artist Thomas Scholes. Along with tons of art he's created for Halo 4, Guild Wars 2, Ashen and other properties, he's also posted some "making of" GIFs that are amazing to watch. Over and over.
This is the way Texts From Cephalopods imagines the octopus in this video would describe those events. It turns out that the squid is the octopus' sensible friend.
Homer Simpson (The Simpsons) and Shinji Ikari (Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Parallels
It’s been fun to see folks getting a lot of use out of the new eyeball pieces from the very popular Mixels sets. But legendary Japanese builder Moko has just taken us into a whole new realm with this build, which is literally a piece of crap!
Hopefully this isn’t Moko’s commentary on the Mixels theme, as I think it would make a swell additional to the forthcoming Brown Fang Gang range of Mixels sets. Maybe the next image will put things in context…
…or maybe not. Why is the poo angry? Why does it have a tongue? Is this what can happen if I don’t get enough fiber in my diet? Unfortunately Moko’s usually very detailed blog does not yield any clues, just a bunch of potty humor. I thoroughly approve!
The rest of the country won’t be able to speak freely until white men choke to death on their own privilege. A good cartoon.
I don’t think that is what this is trying to say at all.
If you notice in the bottom corner is a Reagan.com email address. Reagan.com, aside from being an email site for conservatives, is advertised for by Rush Limbaugh.
Then I decided to look for the other cartoons that Branco has drawn and found these gems.
His Bio over at conservativedailynews.com reads:
A.F. Branco is a renowned Conservative political cartoonist discovered by Conservative Daily News in 2011. His artful drawing and witty style have given rise the best political cartoons in America.
With all of that in mind, I think that the implication is that “white privilege” is the excuse liberals use to silence white men. That even though we have free speech in the US, the white man does not.
Which is, well, Bullshit.
And that is why it is not a good cartoon.
Thanks to Li for sending in her awesome wearable thesis project. Check out her site here.
This installation expresses a person’s physiological activity when meeting
a stranger, uses three physical shell shape objects to exaggerate such
reactions by covering the wearer’s face. Each object has its own framework
and moving patterns representing different personalities.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Madi Maxey and Mari Kussman (aka CRATED) have been experiementing at a residency at the Visible Futures Lab at SVA, and Zygomatic is one of their prototypes:
Zygomatic is a tessellating shirt controlled by a computer interface. We think this is just a small segue to modular clothing systems and a different kind of manufacturing. The pattern for this garment is essentially a square and has minimal waste, making it (hypothetically) simple to produce.
We believe that technology should integrate seamlessly into wearables. With this in mind, Zygomatic’s “brain” attaches to a tag at the back-neck, allowing the shirt to function normally when not attached to a computer.
Stanford researchers, lead by electrical engineer Ada Poon, are working on midfield wireless power for medical implants, ranging in application from nerve stimulation to medication delivery.
Could this be the most meta thing on the entire internet? Just so we’re clear, the title isn’t a typo. This really is a GIF of a Vine of a video of a flipbook of a GIF of a video of a roller coaster. Created yesterday by Televandalist using a handy Flipbookit.
“Handwritten note on the back: “Aunt Velma, she never married.”
There are no actual birds in this oddball animation about birds. Instead, it's filled with strange creatures made of eggs, worms, leaves, and other things we associate with our feathered friends.
The black-and-white video game Limbo is already tricky enough with its looming spiders and ubiquitous death traps. But what if you also had to jump and push your way past the myriad creatures from Hayao Miyazaki's movies?
Bunker.jordanblargh
Thought crimes could prevent you from getting help to cover your medical bills. A woman who needed money to help pay for a dangerous skin condition found that her online fundraising site was demolished, and her money taken away, after she tweeted about pornography.
Bunker.jordanSaw these at Maker Faire and got to talk to bunnie about them. Super impressive! Very excited!!
Highly hackable, open source laptop smashes crowdfunding goal.
A project to build a highly hackable, open source computer has raised $700,000 through crowd funding, more than twice its original goal.
The Novena is designed for modders who want to tinker with both the software and hardware inside their machine.
The device ships with a 1.2GHz Freescale quad-core iMX6 Arm-based CPU coupled with a Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a high speed I/O expansion header.
All the documentation for the printed circuit boards is open and free to download, the entire OS is buildable from source, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping.
A Crowd Supply campaign to fund the building of the laptop closed on Sunday, with backers pledging $702,445.
The Novena was devised by xobs and Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang, former hardware lead on the open source Chumby internet appliance, who last year described building a laptop as a “geek fantasy”.
Read more.
DarthRachel is yet another cosplayer I admire. We recently highlighted her Alia Atreides costume, but that’s far from the only impressive build on her cosplay resume. Besides her skills, she has the all-important can-do attitude. I know it’s a silly and often overused phrase, but if you don’t have that outlook towards cosplay, you’ll have trouble when you get to your first hurdle. And in cosplay, there are always hurdles. At the same time, you can usually find a creative solution. Read our interview with DarthRachel about how she started cosplaying, materials she’s used, and more to get inspired.
Alia Atreides
Adafruit: How long have you been cosplaying and what inspired you to start?
DarthRachel: I guess technically I have been cosplaying since 2009, when I officially joined a Crazy 88 group (from Kill Bill) at DragonCon. I met them in 2004 back when I was just doing conventions in plain clothes, and they were always having tons of fun. I wanted to have fun like that. They are so welcoming. Just a great group of people. Plus, being an 88 is a fantastic costume to start out with. It was easy, and it comes with a big group of people. And the rowdier we get, the more in character we are. It helped me get over that “omg I’m in costume at a con” fear pretty fast. It’s anonymous, and people love it when they see it. The Crazy 88s have become a tradition, and because it’s DragonCon where people go a little wild with their costume concepts, we always have fun doing weird add-ons. We give away stickers and masks to people who take pictures with us. We all have business cards with numbers (I’m #2), and one year we all made kaTRONas using our katanas and some EL wire from Adafruit.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I actually sat down and made a costume that I designed – my Asha Greyjoy costume. I got to learn how to chainmail! A lot of my friends make the coolest costumes and I thought, “well, I can do that”. Especially when my friends are willing to give me advice. Since then, I make a couple new costumes a year.
Crazy 88 group
Adafruit: How many costumes have you made so far?
DarthRachel: I think it is not quite 10 so far. Asha Greyjoy (Game of Thrones), a couple versions of Wonder Girl, a Scythian Wonder Woman based on an illustration by Rory Phillips (my first foray into Worbla armor!), Alia Atreides (Dune), a couple of very lazy group costumes for Game of Thrones (The Frey Wedding Band and a group basically made of GoT Fandom Tears). I’ve done Reba McEntyre’s character in a group Tremors costume a few times, and last year I made a gigantic pair of antlers for a Party Elk of Mirkwood costume (that involved yet more EL wire from Adafruit. Stuff is gold.). I strutted around with my friend who costumed as Thranduil (The Hobbit).
This year is my most ambitious yet, and I’m probably going to go a little loony by fall. I’m working on a Tali’Zorah (Mass Effect) costume, more Game of Thrones stuff, and I’m planning a Fool costume since Robin Hobb is publishing a new volume in the Farseer series and I love the Fool. This is definitely the year of sewing. There might be even more in the pipeline.
I guess I’m kind of all over the place when it comes to costumes.
Thranduil and Party Elk
Adafruit: Which costume has been the most challenging and why?
DarthRachel: The Tali’Zorah costume by far. I learned a lot last year making armor pieces for my Wonder Woman costume, but the Tali costume is forcing me to learn so many techniques and work with materials I’ve never worked with before. It’s also going to be my most expensive costume. I live in NYC, and there are some things I just don’t have room to build. A vacuum table is one of those things I wish I had a garage to house. Because of that, I’m getting my Tali helmet made by someone else. The Tali costume involves pattern making, sewing, fabric printing, foam armor (I’m doing a costume variant), and lots of painting techniques. It’s crazy. My boyfriend is making a Shep costume, and our friend is making a Wrex costume. He had to cast the head and everything. When I compare Tali to their costumes, it makes it seem doable. But sometimes I feel like I will never be done.
Adafruit: What has been your favorite material you’ve worked with and why?
DarthRachel: I loved making my chainmail. I had to work on it every day for 2.5 weeks so it bruised my hands up but it was worth it. I’m still really proud of it. It’s mostly just labor. It’s very time consuming but the actual linking isn’t that hard. Anyone can do it.
Tremors group
Adafruit: Any tips or tricks to offer other cosplayers, especially those new to the hobby?
DarthRachel: I still feel like a newbie! Online tutorials are the best. I think the ability for cosplayers to share their knowledge online has created an amazingly creative atmosphere in cosplay. So many people have figured out what does and doesn’t work. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel! It makes me more confident to try things I’m not sure about or try a material no one is talking about. Just to see. Just so I can report to others – this will work!
Other cosplayers are your best resource. If someone has done a costume you want to do, don’t look at it as competition. In my experience everyone is happy to talk about craft, to give advice, even share patterns. If someone isn’t communicative, there are a ton of other people who are, so don’t get discouraged, and pay that advice forward in the future!
Also – my number 1 piece of advice (that I never follow) is to always make sure you can easily pee while wearing your costume.
Keep up with DarthRachel’s cosplay projects at Twitter!
What happens when you apply of love of small things to an art form that’s already all about small things? In recent years Bonsai—Japan’s art form of growing miniature trees in miniature planters—has undergone a miniaturization trend. Industry experts consider bonsai plants less than 3 cm (about 1 inch) to be particularly difficult, but artists have taken on the challenge, creating tiny plants and tiny planters that, literally, are at your fingertips. It’s given rise to a new category, known as cho-mini bonsai, or ultra-small bonsai.
It’s no secret that the Japanese excel at making things smaller, whether it’s automobiles, electronics or food. In fact, Japan’s love of small things can be found in literature dating back over a 1,000 years. When it comes to the land of the rising sun, it’s clear that beauty comes in small packages. (via Archie McPhee, RocketNews24)
Bunker.jordanblah
Bunker.jordanTRIPPY
Here’s the latest experimental piece from artist Jake Fried (previously) who works with layer after layer of ink, gouache, white-out and coffee on a single canvas to create his bewildering, psychedelic animations.
We rescued two PDP-11/34 computers and their associated equipment from a storage unit in the Bronx and have been working on getting them running again. The computing system included multiple RK05 hard drives, two RL02 decpack drives, a TU11 tape drive and tons of media, including “digitized monkey brains“. Read on for more details and the exciting boot sequence.
The PDP-11 uses a wire-wrapped Unibus backplane with functions split across many cards. The top four are the CPU/FPU and cache, the next is 64 KB of memory, then a few “bus grant cards”, the console controller, some others, and finally the disk controller.
Adding or removing cards required adjusting the wirewrap on the bottom of the backplane as well as installing bus continuity cards, so the rack slides are built to allow the CPU chassis to be positioned at 45 or 90 degrees for easy access.
The boot sequence had to be toggled in on the earlier models, but the /34 has an octal keypad so you can type the addresses and values rather than flipping binary switches. One of ours has a sticker with the boot sequence printed on it and we’ve singled stepped through it to verify that it works.
However, we’re lucky that this machine has a M9312 “bootstrap / Unibus terminator” board, which has a several small bootroms for different devices like the RK05 decpack drive, RL02 harddrive or TU11 tape drive and also includes a serial console interface. This card allows the the machine to be booted with push button convenience using the VT100 terminals that we’ve restored.
UPDATE: somewhat as expected, RT-11SJ is not y2k compliant. 31-DEC-99 23:59:59 rolls over to 0-H99.
Bunker.jordanshared for Motorcycle Safety video
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| The fantastic '70s title drawing of 'Not So Easy' (1973) |
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| Evel Knievel was under contract with Harley-Davidson in 1973, so H-D's permission was required to film him at his Anaheim stadium jump in 1973. Here Cliff Vaughs pats Evel on the back, as he tests the ramp, and his Sportster, the day before the big jump |
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| Cliff's wife Wendy Vaughs rides an Aermacchi/Harley two stroke in an evasive move |
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| Luckily, Evel's jump was a success, and Vaughs' shot of him airborne, in slow motion, is a thing of beauty |
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| Peter Fonda addresses the audience at the beginning and end of the film, in his usual laconic style |
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| Cliff Vaughs riding on the Pacific Coast Highway during 'Not So Easy' |
