firehose

jaminthetardis:

It bewilders me that that they didn’t give the Hogwarts first years maps

like

have fun navigating an ancient castle full of shit that could literally kill you by yourselves suckers

art-of-swords:

Sword Photography

• With Samantha Swords, winner of the open longsword competition in Harcourt Park World Invitational Jousting Tournament
• Photography by Rey Alabastro
• Armour by Shari Finn

Source: Copyright 2013 © Samantha Swords

by @irokie

dwellerinthelibrary:

dboybaker:

the awakening

An anonymous reader writes "Google has snapped up a parcel of patents from Hon Hai Precision Industry, the Taiwanese electronic manufacturer more commonly known as Foxconn, in a move seemingly designed to bolster its Glass headsets against potential competitors. In a statement obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Hon Hai described the patents sold to the Chocolate Factory as 'Head Mounted Technology' that can create virtual images 'superimposed on a real-world view.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In your search for clues in Gone Home's big ol' house, you may have spotted a few forgotten games in the cupboard. The fictional SNES games of yesteryear were each concocted by established video game artists.

Adventurous The Cat Returns, created by Double Fine artist Lee Perry, is the easiest cartridge to find, developer The Fullbright Company notes in a blog post. Perry's directive was to create "an overly 'cool' Bubsy-esque character" and we'd say he nailed it.

Journey of Crystal, seen above, was clearly created by Supergiant Games art director Jenn Lee. This hypothetical JRPG sequel to Secret of Time Crystal is chock full of the fantastical, with a towering castle beckoning off in the distance. Check out the Fullbright post for the rest.

Gone Home, currently available for PC, Mac and Linux on Steam, has you returning home after a year abroad, only to find no one there to greet you and a cryptic note on the door. You explore and examine the house interior to piece together the story of the people who live there.

The artists behind the SNES cart art in Gone Home originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 24 Aug 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Is Mumbai going the Delhi way?” a poll by a newspaper asks. Insensitive? Flippant? Divisive? All that and more—with absolutely no thought to nuance, opening no new discourse, asking the wrong questions, and trivializing the issue.

The posturing, the silly games of one-upmanship played across cities—mine is safer, mine is better—lull us into a false sense of security. Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez would not have been stabbed to death two years ago for standing up to hooligans who were harassing the young women they were out with, if Mumbai was particularly safe. Cities don’t rape, men do. Bombay might seem safer by default because it is so crowded that you rarely find a secluded corner to conduct a rape. In the case making headlines now, the suspects in the gang rape of a photojournalist found an empty mill and they used it. Violence comes in many forms and to the most unexpected places; last year Mumbai had the case of a Spanish tourist raped in her own bed by a thief who shimmied up through the window. And being a stranger in any part of the world, not knowing how to play by their rules, leaves you most vulnerable. That partly explains why a recent CNN report went viral as Michaela Cross, a US student at the University of Chicago, who spoke out about her sexual harassment in India.

We all have stories: I was new to Bombay and waiting to board a local train. I didn’t know where the ladies coach stopped and happened to be near the door of the general compartment when the train pulled in. The crowd pushed me in with one mind and then molested me for what felt like a lifetime. I fell out a few stations later, in tears, my clothes in tatters. A few days later, my cab was followed home from Churchgate station by another cab with a man reaching in to grab me—I made the cabbie drive straight to the police station. Some weeks later on an early morning, a pujari, mind you, a man of God, followed and propositioned me on a relatively empty stretch of road.

It wasn’t the city I was in, it wasn’t my clothes (I was in an office uniform), it wasn’t the color of my skin. It was opportunity. Given the right time and place, no woman in India is safe.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Most people don't give garbage a second glance. Artist Francisco de Pájaro gives it a second, third, and fourth glance, and then returns later to doll it up into something resembling a really mess-up human face.

Well, not just human – using bright, messy paints and a knack for arranging trash that rivals Japanese ikebana masters, Pájaro has transformed a construction dumpster into a toothy shark, a stack of cardboard boxes into a lecherous centipede, and piles of bin bags into what looks like a Smurf snuggle party. "Art Is Trash," as he is known in street-art circles (in his native Spain, it's "El Arte es Basura"), has never met a heap of rubbish that he can't in some way make googly-eyed hilarious.

James Buxton, an editor at Global Street Art, recently interviewed Pájaro through a translator to find out how he became the Banksy of dreck. It seems he was almost forced into this odd line of personal expression, according to part of the interview:

Rubbish is the only legal place you can make art on the street. There was a law in 2006 in Barcelona which outlawed painting on the street, suddenly all of the freedom was eliminated – all the best artists from Barcelona left. I couldn’t paint on the floor, on the walls, anywhere, but I had a need to express myself, so where? Three undercover police officers came when they saw me painting on an electricity box, so I started on rubbish, on a chair, on a mattress, little by little, I made little discoveries. First of all I just painted on cans, objects, and then I thought I can put an arm, as a way of getting round not being able to paint on the walls on the floor, I started painting on rubbish. You’ve got to improvise. (Tears a piece of a tape sticks it to my beer can) That’s an arm or a leg. The police in Spain they are much stricter, they don’t let you do anything, here the police are different, they are more tolerant, here they see it and they say: “Hey okay, it’s rubbish, it’s intelligent.” Street art has a short life, you make it, it lives and dies.

Pájaro's installations have such a short life that they're often gone by the next day, rearranging by garbage collectors, the wind and rain, and presumably animal and human scavengers. Fortunately, the artist photographs them for future generations to chuckle over. People in London currently can see some of his new works at the West Bank Gallery. Below are photos from the street component to that show, taken in Notting Hill, Manor House, and east London's famed Brick Alley, a destination spot for heavy-hitting urban artists like ROA and D*Face:

From the gallery show in London:

These are earlier works in Barcelona, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca, and Ibiza. The creatures have sloppy-looking features, like they put on makeup during a roller-coaster ride. That's because the artist had to work fast to avoid the police:

Images used with permission of Francisco de Pájaro. H/t to Vandalog

America's civilian space program may be on life support now that the Space Shuttle's gone. But its military space program is very much alive — and about to get much, much bigger.

Greenheart Games is gearing up for a Steam release of its satirical game development studio sim, Game Dev Tycoon, next Thursday, August 29.

Game Dev Tycoon received community approval via Steam Greenlight back in May. Prior to its Greenlight campaign, Game Dev Tycoon game earned a degree of notoriety for its unique anti-piracy measures, which punished player theft in-game with studio failure and bankruptcy.

The Steam version of Game Dev Tycoon is currently up for preorder at a 20 percent discount.

Game Dev Tycoon hi-res on Steam next week originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 23 Aug 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I know you've been told 10,000 times already, but here's time 10,001: Ben Affleck is playing Batman in the Man of Steel sequel. When the news was announced last night the Internet was... well, let's just say "not pleased," at least for the most part. Personally, I don't mind it—Affleck's OK, plus with Zack Snyder as the director chances are pretty low I'll like the move anyway. But others took the casting much more to heart. A few of our favorite reactions are behind the jump.

Got a bunch of laptops at a table? Got Patrick Stewart?

This Jareth/David Bowie prayer candle is by Etsy seller Greaser Creatures, who's also sanctified Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Elvira, and more.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

based on popular bande dessinée Le Transperceneige

Oh, did not know this.

Snowpiercer opened in South Korea earlier this month to rave reviews and box-office breaking sales. But the 126 minute film, based on popular bande dessinée Le Transperceneige and starring Chris Evans, is to be cut by a whopping 20 minutes for the eventual English language release – removing the intelligence and leaving a simplified action film in its wake.

I’ve talked at length before here on The Beat about both Snowpiercer and Le Transperceneige, as it really looked set to the be surprise hit of the year. A dystopian future tale, set upon a perpetually circuiting train that houses the remnants of the human race, where class tensions arise and revolution is in the air.

The original comic, by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, is utterly incredible although sadly an English-translated edition is not yet available. In a market often slow to recognise the wonderful works in the European market, this perhaps explains why a film starring Captain America, Tilda Swinton and John Hurt flew under many radars.

The distribution rights for North America, UK, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand were picked up a while back by The Weinstein Company. Harvey Weinstein of course is also known as “Harvey Scissorhands” for his penchant for slicing international films to bits in order to remove complexities that he thinks Americans just can’t handle. Snowpiercer is merely the latest victim, despite gathering very positive reviews and doing well in South Korea.

The film, a Korean-American-French collaboration directed by Joon-ho Bong, is being released in Denmark at the end of August and in France at the end of October in uncut form.

The idea that such a film needs to be dumbed down for English speaking fans is rather bizarre, with Weinstein reportedly asking for “ introductory and closing voice-overs to be added in“. As film critic and programmer Tony Rayns says, “TWC people have told Bong that their aim is to make sure the film ‘will be understood by audiences in Iowa … and Oklahoma.’” Rayns also says that the UK is protesting the cuts and hopes other countries follow suit.

The cuts remove a lot of the character work in order to make the film play like a more traditional action movie, with voiceovers at beginning and end to club viewers over the head with plot explanations.

Chris Evans was careful to remain diplomatic, telling Collider:

“I’ve heard that he’s looking to cut some things down and, you know, it’s tricky… This is the tricky part about making movies.  There’s usually a method to Harvey’s madness.  I just got back from Korea so I wanna go in and see—I’ve gotta see a lot of things and I’d love to have a discussion with him.  It’s one of those things that’s just tricky.”

Would be fans such as myself are left with a difficult conundrum. The film deserves to do well as both the rave reviews and original bande dessinée show. But English-speaking viewers won’t get the chance to see the true film until a director’s cut is hopefully released on dvd and blu-ray. But avoiding it at the cinema will not help the original film either, yet supporting it might give the impression that the cuts were right to make…

So in conclusion, I shall begin my protest. To my warrior keyboard!

Remember to watch the trailer. Oh and go on then, have some more new images:

#call_to_action h4{padding:0px 5px;} #social-essentials {margin: 0 0 10px 0;}

Original Source

Cologne

assgod:

never

Now that the outrage-o-tron has moved from torture to movie casting, here is a round-up of reactions to the “Torture Cover” post the other day. Actually I don’t even need to write anything, as the Outhouse already summed it up with CROSSED TORTURE VARIANT CONTROVERSY SPARKS SURPRISINGLY CIVIL DEBATE ON INTERNET. It’s true. No one was blackballed, castigated or petitioned. The effects and provenance of disturbing material were widely debated, but it was generally decided by everyone involved that those who like it can like it, those who want to throw up can move right over to the toilet.

Now, I did come in for some criticism for calling people who might like violent misogyny sick fucks. I will stand by my statement on that, but people who just like equal opportunity torture seem to be peaceful, law-abiding folk. New Crossed writer Justin Jordan wrote an interesting rebuttal to my piece on his blog, which was also reprinted on Facebook, where the discussion took place.

What might surprise you is that I don’t actually like gore. I’ve never been a gorehound, and most of the time I don’t find it all that entertaining. Shit, some of the scariest and most disturbing movies are some of the least gore filled. Note that despite their reputation, the first Halloween and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre are relatively tame affairs from a strictly blood and guts perspective.

But I am a fan of horror, and as mentioned, I do write a lot of extremely violent things, so I’ve had occasion to meet a lot of gorehounds. So I am at least in some position to offer an opinion on what kind of sick fucks they are.

Not sick fucks at all, usually. They are, as most people are, by and large nice and normal people with no particular urge to violently torture and murder people. People that know the difference between real and not real, which seems to be lacking in some people’s ability to imagine stuff.

There was also, if you can believe it, an incredibly civil Reddit thread, of all things. Again, some people were ready to rack the Torture Variants right next to their Cannibal Corpse albums, others thought they were revolting.

The controversy even led Rich Johnston, whose Bleeding Cool site is owned byCrossed publisher Avatar, to write a think piece about the content of Crossed—which he labeled satire. But see more on that below.

Manny people linked to this very recent Warren Ellis piece called Blood in Your Eye: Why We Need Violent Stories which discusses the need for violent material so that we can stop distancing it from ourselves as “The other.”

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

 

While the covers themselves were roundly criticized, publisher Avatar was mostly left alone—and to be honest they’ll probably sell a lot more because of all this so it was all good for them. And it was pointed out that Avatar does publish mostly horror including also works by Alan Moore (the very controversial Neonomicon) as well as Ellis, Garth Ennis, David Lapham and so on. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are, so there was no hypocrisy involved. Some wondered about the artists who draw the stuff, but Spanish artist Raulo Caceres (oh just Google it), who drew many of the most lurid covers (including the seesaw one) has a long career as an S&M artist, and his Elizabeth Bathory was published in the 90s at Eros Comix. It’s what he likes to draw and it’s incredibly sick, violent stuff. Another willing participant.

While discussion seemed to waver between the covers themselves and the interiors of Crossed, when they were labeled satire, several of the book’s actual writers disagreed with that. I’ve collected a bunch of the tweets into a Storify, but perhaps the most interesting fact was that at least one writer on the book had never SEEN the covers. So some disclosure was made along the way.

Anyhoo, what have we learned? That free speech is AWESOME. That I will never buy a Torture Variant, and I still find them very creepy as a standalone artifact.

As for the larger sense, I don’t disagree with Warren Ellis, really, in that this kind of disturbing material allows us to process our own horrific impulses and those of others around us. Personally, I look to art as a means to explore the BETTER side of the world, and to see things that expand my own consciousness and hopefully ennoble this already debased flesh. I don’t mean just unicorns and puppies. I’m a huge fan of the work of Renee French, Jim Woodring and Hans Rickheit — all of them turn out work that is very upsetting. Throw in Junjo Ito, and other horror manga creators. Yet, I despise work that promotes suffering for the sake of suffering, or bullying or insult humor that are often used as an excuse for abusive behavior. But that is a topic for another doctoral dissertation.

Let’s leave this with the Hero of the Week, Antoinette Tuff, who used common humanity to save her life and that of many others—even the shooter who she talked into laying down his arms. Was there ever a more human or moving moment than her sobs of “Oh God, oh Jesus,” after she was finally safe? We face up to the darkness without, and are either swallowed by it, or light a candle.

I'm going on vacation for a week. Honestly, I really need it. But before I do I couldn't help leaving with you not with anything particularly insightful but something actually pretty obvious to anyone who has a brain and/or doesn't harbor a lot of racial animosity toward black people that needs to find some comeuppance or 'I told you so' about Trayvon Martin.

So here goes.

For the last week or so, the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian in the United States on a baseball scholarship. Lane was jogging when three young kids (two black, one either mixed race or white) decided to follow and kill him. The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, "We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody."

In other words, it's the Trayvon Martin case in reverse but now the liberal media is mum and President Obama isn't rallying his gangbanger peeps to get all up in arms about it. Except of course when you consider that unlike the Martin case -- where the press buzz and scandal was basically exclusively tied to the fact that George Zimmerman wasn't arrested let alone charged with anything -- two of the three boys allegedly behind Lane's killing were arrested and immediately charged with capital murder. So young thugs kill an innocent man in cold blood and then get to walk free to death row or life imprisonment in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

Yeah, except that.

If you have any profile on the web and thought there was any problem with the Martin killing you've probably been inundated with a lot of emails or tweets or whatever jagging about the 'double standard' when the same thing happens and the races are reversed. And it's always a bit of a challenge to distinguish the people who simply are lazy or dimwitted and haven't considered the pretty obvious difference in the case that led to the media uproar in the Martin case and the majority of people searching for the 'anti-Trayvon' and hankering for evidence of the increasing struggle of white people to get a fair shake in America.

Stepping back from the projectile vomit of ignorant nonsense about this tragic murder, the response to it is part and parcel of the mass of writing on the right about the growing tide of black 'mobs' killing white people. Read World Net Daily and you'll find virtually every other issue has a Birth of a Nation-like story along these lines (actually a topic I've wanted to commission a piece on for some time and one well-mocked here.)

Young black men commit murders in this country at a vastly disproportionate rate to young white men. But murder victims of both races are overwhelming killed by members of their own race. 86% of white were killed by other whites and 94% of blacks were killed by blacks, from 1976 to 2005, a period that includes the highest murder rate era of the late 20th century. The differential today is likely lower since as murder rates have declined to historic levels over the last 20 years, the fall has been particularly sharp among black men - a small data point that among other things lends some additional credence to the theory that lead poisoning was a significant driver of crime rates in the late 20th century.

This is the part where this kind of article falls back to say, well, race is complicated. It's not as simple as it was in the old days. But actually, it's still not that complicated. This whole episode amounts to little more than another plea from the subsection of aggrieved white Americans who still crave both social dominance and to sit at the front of the racial victimization bus.

Although you would think that Ben Stiller would have learned his lesson—after Lelaina saw how he cut up her work for a bunch of network suits, turning it into, like, a joke, when she was just trying to make something real—Stiller is at it again, aiming to transform 1994’s Lisa Loeb-song-of-a-generation Reality Bites into an NBC sitcom. According to Deadline, Stiller will executive produce alongside original screenwriter Helen Childress, replicating the film’s early-‘90s story of a bunch of slacker-era slackers who are armed with zero ambitions, but scores of references to 1970s pop culture. But maybe they cut it up a little, because maybe the movie was a little slow.

And it’s like, okay, you have this great piece of work, and they were just trying to market it. And it's like, they have this audience, and it’s like trying to feed ...

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Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief John Pistole said this week that airport security should be focused on “non-metallic threats.”

The comments came during an interview with the Tampa Tribune newspaper in which Pistole was touting the TSA’s “risk-based” security initiatives. 

“There has been a migration to nonmetallic threats, including liquid and plastic explosives,” Pistole told the paper. “Our focus at the checkpoint must be detecting improvised explosive devices and the components that could be used to construct IEDs. That is why we have the limitations on liquids that passengers can carry on board.”

Christine Haughney at the New York Times reports:

National Public Radio will continue for now to refer to Private Manning as “he,” according to a spokeswoman, Anna Bross. “Until Bradley Manning’s desire to have his gender changed actually physically happens, we will be using male-related pronouns to identify him,” she said.

What the fuck, NPR? This is some draconian bullshit, right here. Gender is not just physical. And anyway, the content of Chelsea Manning's underwear is none of NPR's business. Is an editorial board going to demand photographs of her crotch before they agree to switch pronouns? I can understand some news organizations having some difficulty yesterday as they transitioned from using "he" to "she" with Chelsea Manning. An announcement of this scale has never happened before, and I don't think it's happened to these kinds of reporters—the ones covering breaking national and international news (thanks to Chaz Bono, entertainment and gossip reporters are actually ahead of the curve on this issue). But for a whole organization to demand proof of a physical change in gender before they respect someone's wishes is more than just institutional ignorance; it's outright aggression.

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As the world continues to reel from the announcement that Ben Affleck will play Batman—staggering into the streets to erupt in randomly flung fisticuffs with no particular target, just the unfocused rage and confusion that need find its purpose somewhere—the news has had some other, actual effects on real things and people. For one thing, Affleck has already entered into an intense workout routine according to US Weekly (who one imagines has a special phone that rings with such news), with the actor reportedly spending “two hours a day in the gym” preparing to have the sort of physique that will automatically render moot any criticism of his portrayal. And for another, he’s had to drop out of some non-Batman things, like directing movies. 

Along with The Wrap reporting that Affleck is no longer attached to remake the French thriller Tell No One, and The Playlist ...

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