Cary

By Victor Ivanov

Chicken Skin Teddy is a post from meh.ro

Drinking is bad, feelings are worse.

Humans like to think that we're different from other animals, even down to our sexual behaviors. But as we've previously shown on this blog, we still have a lot in common with our furry (and sometimes non-furry) pals, from fellatio to ménage à trois. Well, here's something else you can add to the list: mating seasons. Previous work has shown that signs of human sex and mating behaviors--for example, births, STDs, and condom sales--follow a seasonal pattern that peaks every six months. Here,

Vespa, espresso bar in Brussels

via Thisispaper: Mount Fuji Architects: Treehouse (northern Tokyo)

Give them Bogg's Tawny Port. It tastes like alcohol, but it's really cocaine syrup.


via The Beautiful New

(Video)

After years of stop-starting various endeavors related to this website I have decided to go all in on the New Republican Bible project. I am re-writing the Gospels and other highlights of the New Testament with Jesus as a modern Republican in the vein of Scott Walker or Sam Brownback, hopefully to be completed by Christmas 2015. It will make the perfect gift. God willing, it will be available in print and electronic formats. The foreword will be written by Jesus himself.

Though I am on record as anti-crowdfunding and though it would be entirely within reason to call me a hypocrite, I've set up such a page. My goal isn't to solicit donations but rather to get pre-sale/pre-order numbers high enough, potentially, to interest a publisher. I certainly don't consider self-publishing beneath me but ideally I can get someone interested in this who isn't me. If you think you are a person who would buy such a thing, why not go ahead and do it now?

With any luck – which, of course, is not something that seems to apply to my endeavors in most cases – this will work. It's just ridiculous enough to.

"Japan's cherry blossoms usually get all the attention for their short-lived beauty. But equally ephemeral are Japan's Nemophila, or Baby Blue Eyes. And once a year, around late April to Early May, an astounding sea of 4.5 million of these little flowers cover the land for a little over a week."

Despite an active volcano, intense winds, and a location 10 days by boat from its nearest neighbor, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas — the most remote human settlement in the world — has endured for nearly two centuries. The community, located on the islands of Tristan da Cunha, is looking to the future in anticipation of its bicentennial in 2016, and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is hosting a Design Ideas Competition.

The open call is “seeking ideas to help the community become self-sustainable and ensure that Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is viable for future generations.” Now before you start drawing up plans for shipping container homes or solar arrays for this far-flung British territory, please take note of the almost absurd extremes that characterize the everyday lives of its roughly 280 inhabitants.

“Many would-be visitors have sailed to Tristan, but failed to land,” Tristan da Cunha’s official site ominously warns. The archipelago includes four islands, although Edinburgh of the Seven Seas — or “the Settlement,” as the Tristanians call it — is the only permanently inhabited site. Alongside Tristan are the islands of Nightingale, Gough, and the aptly named Inaccessible. Most of Tristan is taken up by the towering slope of a volcano, with the metal-roofed structures of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas clustered in its shadow. Back in 1961, the eruption of that volcano forced the entire population to evacuate; remarkably the majority returned in 1963. Alas, their essential crayfish factory was destroyed. Aside from the community and the volcano, the spare geographic features of Tristan include the Ridge-Where-the-Goat-Jump-Off.

The UK annexed Tristan da Cunha back in 1816, and a military presence was set up whose primary purpose was to keep the French from freeing Napoleon from the relatively nearby Saint Helena (1,500 miles away). Shipwrecks are not uncommon in the area, as even the harbor at Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is so shallow that most ocean vessels can’t fit. At times, shipwreck survivors have made up a large chunk of the community’s population. Houses in the 19th century were mostly built from driftwood, some of it washed up remnants of shipwrecks. In some ways the island’s inhabitants have entered the 21st century, and they buy their goods from the few establishments on Tristan da Cunha with the British Pound, but internet access remains limited and low-bandwidth. The inhabitants of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas have only seven different surnames, so everyone knows everyone and family relations run deep. And for would-be tourists, the island is only accessible by boat (there is no airstrip) for about 60 days of the year, and once you’re there, there’s only one road, and rare are the cars that drive it.

This is all to say that designing for Edinburgh of the Seven Seas presents some incredibly unique challenges, but it’s also an exceptional place. Considering how connected and accessible much of the world is today, it remains a place where people obstinately survive. The RIBA competition calls for an examination of the built environment to consider energy efficiency and a way for the Settlement to be self-sustaining. Currently diesel engines and bottled gas are the town’s main sources of energy. According to the competition brief, “[t]he Island trialled a small wind turbine in the mid-1980s, but this was destroyed after a few days by the high winds, and since then, there has been a general reluctance to re-visit renewable energy technology.” To meet the island’s goal of 30–40% renewable energy by 2020, it will take some sturdier technology.

The main source of food for inhabitants of the island is livestock that graze freely and crops — mainly potatoes grown in an area called “the Patches” — and both need better systems to keep them going year-round. There’s also the issue of the architecture, with the 120 homes (all owned by Tristanians as local law forbids sale to non-residents) facing the end of their structural life cycles, and with a major limitation of available building resources. Above all, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas wants to remain self-sufficient, and bring in experts to advise on how to keep this improbable pocket of life going for another 200 years.

Read more about the Tristan da Cunha Design Ideas Competition online at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The deadline to enter the first phase is June 2. 

h/t Architects Journal

Landscape suicide

prettyyiinpunkk:

skindeeptales:

Double mastectomy floral tattoo

“The response to this piece is incredible. Tattooing is a beautiful and absolutely viable option for concealing or altering scars. When coupled with an artist you’ve researched and feel connected to… taking the reigns and regaining some sort of control can be empowering. There is healing in this!” ( David Allen )

by David Allen - Pioneer Studios - Chicago

This is so beyond beautiful and awesome.

did-you-kno:

Never, ever, ever thought of it this way. I’m all about opening people up to ideas, events, facts, stories, and theories they may not have seen/thought about/realized they needed to know, so I thought it was important to share this. Happy Monday! Get yourself to the ball. (

So you’re trying to avoid being killed by a bear policeman? Here’s what to do.

You might be tempted to argue that bears policemen should not be killing people in the first place, but don’t bother; you’re asking for something contrary to their nature.

So familiar. A police officer claims a black man struggled with him for his weapon, and then the officer had to shoot him to protect himself.

Only problem with the story: a passer-by recorded the incident on his cell phone. The reality was that the black man was running away, the officer fired 8 shots into his back, and then threw his taser onto the ground next to him to fake the evidence of a struggle, in full view of his fellow officers. The video is horrific: after shooting the guy, he’s lying on the ground motionless, and Officer Michael Slagger walks over, yells at him to put his hands behind his back, and cuffs him.

He’d been hit 5 times. He was dead. There was no attempt at resuscitation.

The police killed a man in cold blood, and lied about it.

So, so familiar.

The dead man, Walter Scott, had been stopped for a broken tail light.

You know what? Fuck the police. They are disgracefully screwed up.

pleatedjeans:

via

Portrait modeling, Lee Griggs

The title lies. Nothing can make sense of a cat. I don’t even know why I have a cat at home — I blame the brain parasites.

While the mind of the cat is imponderable, at least we can understand coat colors, right? Mine is black with a white spot at the throat. Simple? No, not at all: you need to read this page that categorizes cat coat colors and patterns and sink into the madness. All that variability! The simple genetic models all talk about eumelanin and phaeomelanin expression as covering all the bases, but nope, that’s not sufficient.

I’ve shown this to my genetics students. I’m just teaching introductory genetics, but I occasionally like to point out to them that there is a level at which genetics becomes far more mind-blowing.

Tonight at Curiosity Club we'll learn about exercises in futility and social good with Karl Anderson! Starts 6pm at the Hand-Eye Supply store, and streaming online on the Curiosity Club homepage. 

At first glance, Futel is nothing more than a collection of pay phones installed in publicly accessible locations, no different than the phones found on every street corner. Except one doesn't have to pay to use them. And if the caller doesn't have a human to interact with, one will be provided. And there aren't any pay phones around anymore, anyway.

Find out what we hope to achieve by starting a free telephone network. We will discuss our spiritual ancestors in the phone phreak and mail artist community, as well as our philosophical background in creating useful and nonuseful devices out of discarded junk, and the importance of retaining skills with obsolete interactive technology.

Karl Anderson is a hardware and software experimenter who is good at thinking up projects but bad at predicting whether or not they will be practical. With C.H.U.N.K. 666, he has created amphibious human-powered vehicles out of trash. With the Church of Robotron, he has built a post-apocalyptic training facility, indoctrination center, and reading room based on the tenets of a coin-operated video game.

A conversation with Louise Bourgeois in Incontrollable Beauty

darylfranz:

ねこあつめにはまってるかのような戦国時代の鎧武者ｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ - ハムスター速報

Ryan Heshka

France has enacted a law limiting excessively thin models from working until their BMI reaches a minimum level set forth in the law. Fines and even jail time can be leveled against fashion houses and modeling agents trying to use models that are thinner than the law allows. Its about time we quit letting vanity destroy our little girls.

April 04, 2015, 05:29:19 PM
"Though forgotten, OS/2 never really went away. It wasnt the breakout success on desktops that IBM had hoped for, but thanks to its security and stability it did find a niche on specialized hardware, » more

francavillarts:

HAPPY EASTER
Art by Francesco Francavilla

HAPPY EASTER, everyone!
Here’s a Easter Egg for y’all :)

Cheers,
FF

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Back to collage, Merve Ozaslan