firehose

Makeup artist Lisa Berczel, aka Battledress, gives a nod to Gray’s Anatomy with this man’s head that is painted like a medical illustration of a skull.

No prosthetics – only a bit of medical grade paper tape to close the eye and an brow blocking…

via The Queen is not Amused…but I am., Fashionably Geek

“Jackson, Travolta, Keitel, and Tarantino pose in front of the house where Tarantino’s character lives.”

For the Vanity Fair article “Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction,” journalist Mark Seal catches up with director Quentin Tarantino and the producers and cast of the 1994 independent movie Pulp Fiction. In addition to the detailed article, Vanity Fair has posted photos and ephemera from the set.

The project was Pulp Fiction, three intertwined crime stories set in Los Angeles. “Like the way New York is an important character in New York crime films, I would make Los Angeles an important character,” Tarantino tells me. “Then I started thinking about all of the characters overlapping The star of one story could be a small character in the second story and a supporting character in the third story and all that kind of shit.”

“From the collection of Linda R. Chen”

images via Vanity Fair

thebaconsandwichofregret:

mutilatedmemories:

I will never understand girls who throw their bras at guys on stage those things are fucking expensive and he has no use for it like what do you want him to do pass it down to his first born daughter

I thought this was going to be slut-shaming but it’s glorious

By Nathan Grayson on March 2nd, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

The absolute most surefire way to kill my in-game immersion isn’t graphical glitches or frustration or a trench-coat-clad man who grimly grumbles, “But maybe your entire life is a videogame.” It’s accents. Seriously, if I’m in some crazy fantasy land or multicultural space civilization, I refuse to buy the notion that everyone sounds like a bored 30-something American man. Refuse. Jade Empire, for instance, very nearly drove me mad. Mass Effect too, actually. But it’s not just BioWare. I honestly can’t think of many developers who’ve gotten it honestly, truly right. However, if nothing else, CD Projekt’s at least trying with Cyberpunk 2077.

The developer explained its plan for a fascinating translation system in a (fittingly translated) YouTube interview. Here’s the gist, via Cyberpunk’s forums:

“As of yet no decisions have been made, but we’re thinking about a system that could tell the world’s story. The idea is to record everything in original languages, i.e. if we’ll meet Mexicans in the game, they’ll be taking – Mexican slang even, portrayed by Mexican actors. The player would be able to buy a translator implant, and depending on how advanced it is, he’ll get better or worse translation.”

“You can’t reliably recreate street slang of Los Angeles or some other American city, you can’t simply dub it and reproduce those emotions, rhythms of speech, mannerisms. Everything has to be cohesive. Otherwise we’d simply hear that Polish actors are trying to imitate Americans. That won’t work.”

In short, yes. A thousand million billion times yes. It doesn’t take a rocket-scientist-level cyberbrain to see that this is the right mindset. But yeesh, the potential logistics of this plan make my regular meatbrain ooze confusion, like some kind of exceedingly bewildered sponge. That’d require an insane number of voice actors from different regions – especially given how much CDP’s touting Cyberpunk’s size and scope.

But I respect the train of thought behind this, as I do think it’s more important than most developers give it credit/resources for. So I’m definitely pulling for CDP to succeed here, if only to show everyone else that it’s semi-doable – on a triple-A scale, if nothing else. And then, finally, 30-something generic American male – my arch-nemesis – will be out of a job once and for all. Just like I planned.

30-Sided Dice - Individual | EAI Education:

woefully underutilized dice beat see also http://www.eaieducation.com/Product/530754/24-Sided_Dice_-_Set_of_5.aspx

abigaildonaldson:

Hussein Chalayan Fall/Winter 2013

No, I didn’t just tear up at this, there’s something in my eye. Honest. Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003)

Metal Slimes by Jordan Mello

The best Slimes of all — maybe even the best enemy you can come across in any video game.

BUY Dragon Quest games, upcoming games

Dr. Who

Brooklyn, 1947

Forever

Life during Wartime

Give the drummer some

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Mar 02, 2013 at 11:30a

Game designer Soren Johnson, best known for his work on the Civilization franchise, has joined Stardock Entertainment "at least for a while," CEO Brad Wardell announced via the Elemental forums.

Johnson will be working on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes (pictured above), a standalone expansion to Fallen Enchantress that adds new monsters, abilities and more. Legendary Heroes was announced in February.

"We've brought on board someone many of you know — Soren Johnson (designer of Civilization 4) who has come to Stardock, at least for awhile, to oversee the design of all our games," Wardell wrote. "Obviously my boss, Derek [Paxton] ... will still be the one to ultimately approve and massage these designs, but we're grateful for Soren's help."

Wardell added that Johnson's influence "will be pretty obvious" in 2014-2016. For more than a year, Johnson has served as the design director at Zynga. Prior to that, he worked for Electronic Arts and Firaxis as a designer and programmer.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes is expected to launch in April.

• Source
• Elemental Game forums

If you’re thinking of trying the acetone-vapor polishing process to smooth your 3D printed objects you simply must check out [Christopher's] experiments with the process. He found out about the process from our feature a few days ago and decided to perform a series of experiments on different printed models.

The results were mixed. He performed the process in much the same way as the original offering. The skull seen above does a nice job of demonstrating what can be achieved with the process. There is a smooth glossy finish and [Christopher] thinks there is no loss of detail. But one of the three models he tested wasn’t really affected by the vapor. He thinks it became a bit shinier, but not nearly as much as the skull even after sending it through the process twice. We’d love to hear some discussion as to why.

There is about eight minutes of video to go along with the project post. You’ll find it after the jump.

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, chemistry hacks

New submitter joelville writes "After noticing artifacts and a 1600 × 900 image in the output from Apple's new Lightning Digital AV Adapter, the Panic Blog sawed it open and found an ARM chip inside. They suspect that video bypasses the cable entirely and instead uses Airplay to stream three inches to make up for the Lightning connector's shortcomings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Obama to Create U.S. Department of Cities: President Obama has announced that he plans to create a...

Famous Photographers Posing with Their Even More Famous Photographs via Gizmodo

- Julius Shulman

- Jeff Widener

- Douglas Kirkland

- David Doubilet

Chronological Projection of Anamorphic Space by Sam Bland

The project aim is to produce a time based architecture that experiments with a range of technologies and scientific theories.  The city of New York acts as the catalyst to the program allowing a specific context to be read by the design. The design will become a redevelopment of the rundown Battery Park Pier. Concentrating on the idea of architecture as a time based system the project moves from methods of time keeping to how time effects light, geometry and society. It will also investigate reusing and mixing technology that deals with time and movement both from old derelict technology and new technology.

Structure by Poulain JB

“Your life isn’t a work of art - it’s a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else’s collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.” — Kurt Vonnegut

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Mar 02, 2013 at 4:30p

In honor of Robot Entertainment's fourth anniversary, the company announced a 75 percent off sale for select games and downloadable content this weekend.

Orcs Must Die!, Orcs Must Die! 2, Hero Academy and corresponding DLC packs are currently included in the promotion. While Orcs Must Die! is priced at $3.74, its sequel is $2.49. Hero Academy is available for $1.24. Purchases can be redeemed via Steam.

Both Orcs Must Die! titles are tower defense games. Hero Academy is turn-based and strategy focused, and players face off to destroy each other's crystals.

Robot Entertainment was founded in 2009, following Microsoft's shutdown of Ensemble Studios. Robot was previously responsible for maintaining both Halo Wars and Age of Empires 3, until Microsoft Game Studios assumed control of both.

• Source
• Robot Entertainment

Lori and I stopped by a street market in Chelsea today. There was some amazing stuff, but by far this was the most unique item I saw on display. The alligator staple remover is a nice touch.

photo by Scott Beale

Metal Slime Keyboard!

Today has turned into an unintentional theme day on Tiny Cartridge, with the discovery of Hori’s Metal Slime version of its excellent Slime keyboard, complete with removable Slime figures on the buttons, and even a Liquid Metal Slime on the escape button … naturally.

Ostensibly, it’s for use with Dragon Quest X, and includes some in-game Metal Slime stuff, but who cares. It’s USB, it’ll work with things.

This is going to be released sometime in the spring for ¥4980 ($53), and judging by how quickly the last one sold out, I don’t have much time to think about it if I want to buy one of these. Is a novelty keyboard something I need at this point in my life…

BUY Dragon Quest games, upcoming games

Billly Gates writes "It appears Microsoft is following Chrome's agile development model like Mozilla did. At a recent tech conference, Kurt DelBene, president of the Office division, said they have mechanisms in place to update Office on a quarterly basis. Of course to get these new wondrous features and bugfixes you have to have a subscription to Office 365. Are the customers who most prefer subscriptions (corporate) going to want new things in the enterprise every 90 days? It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation. At the same time, the accountants notice significant savings by keeping I.T. costs down with decade/semi decade updates to their images, while I.T. only puts out fires in between. Will this bring change to that way of doing things, or will Microsoft's cloud offerings with outsourced Exchange and Sharepoint make up for it using cost savings and continually updated software in the enterprise?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dark Horse kicked off its Emerald City weekend with a panel dedicated to its new line of superhero characters, a push that turned out to be quite a bit more substantial than we initially thought. While the publisher had already released revivals of the Dark Horse-owned Ghost and X, the ancient pulp hero Captain Midnight and the original characters The Victories and Black Beetle, the new year will see all of those graduated to ongoing monthly series alongside several more projects including BloodHound, a lost DC Universe series that will finally be collected and continued by Dark Horse.

The Victories by Michael Avon Oeming

An ongoing series will follow the in-progress shorts in the Dark Horse Presents anthology. The new title will expand on the approach of the original Victories miniseries, delving deeply into the characters' motivations for becoming costumed crime fighters. Oeming cited Steve Rude and Mike Baron's classic indie space opera Nexus as a primary influence on this work, as it too dealt explicitly with its hero's emotional well being.

The Black Beetle by Francesco Francavilla

Obviously this has been a big success for Dark Horse, and Director of Public Relations Jeremy Atkins and Francavilla assured the Seattle crowd that the Black Beetle isn't going anywhere. The first storyline, "No Way Out," will be collected in a characteristically lovely hardcover volume in August.

Here's the wraparound cover for the collected edition as well as some some pages from Black Beetle: No Way Out #3, which is on sale March 27:

BloodHound by Dan Jolley, Leonard Kirk and Dave Johnson

Originally published by DC Comics in 2004, BloodHound is the story of Travis Clevenger, an ex-cop and current convict whose sentence is commuted when the FBI needs this non-powered, morally dubious man's singular talent: tracking down superhuman criminals. The book was not marketed particularly strongly during its DC run, sold very poorly, and was never collected. Writer Jolley was able to recover the rights to the character and bring BloodHound to Dark Horse, who will finally publish a collected edition of this lost series. New BloodHound stories will appear in Dark Horse Presents.

Catalyst by Joe Casey and Dan McDaid, Paul Maybury and Ulises Farinas

This title sees Joe Casey telling new stories about characters from Dark Horse's reawakened superhero library such as the Agents of Change. Their histories probably aren't that important given Casey's tendency to re-imagine things from the ground up, but the book is structured as a nine-issue miniseries divided into three-issue sections that will be drawn by Dan McDaid, Paul Maybury and Ulises Farinas. Covers will come courtesy of Rafael Grampa and Paul Pope.

Trekker by Ron Randall

Another comic book resurrected by its original creator, Trekker was a cult favorite science fiction series about a woman bounty hunter in a dystopian future. The book was notable at the time not just for its great artwork, but for starring a strong female lead who was distinct from the over-sexualized "bad girls" of the '80s and '90s. Dark Horse will collect all of Randall's previous Trekker stories in an omnibus edition and bring out new stories in Dark Horse Presents. Here's a Trekker cover from back in the day:

Ghost by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Phil Noto

At once slick and moody, this re-imagining of the Dark Horse heroine has been successful enough to prompt a new ongoing series. DeConnick will continue to write the title when it beings anew in October but the panelists could not confirm Noto's involvement going forward. The title character is (was?) a journalist whose work found her running up against very bad and powerful people, and the almost literal hell that crashed down on her as a result. DeConnick said that the character's strength, ethics and bravery were inspired by Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights activist whose widely acclaimed work was critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and who was murdered, possibly as a grotesque kind of gift, on the leader's birthday.

X by Duane Swierczynski and Eric Nguyen

Another revival from Dark Horse's company-owned cast of superheroes, X is a straight up vigilante justice comic that made its return in rent issues of Dark Horse Presents. Duane Swierczynski and Eric Nguyen will be taking X ongoing in May. Atkins said Swierczynski was born to write the character. Here's a variant cover by Paolo Rivera:

Captain Midnight by Josh Williamson and Victor Ibanez

This character has also been appearing in recent issues of Dark Horse Presents, but is not an original creator-owned concept nor one of Dark Horse's '90s stable. Captain Midnight dates all the way back to the 1930s, when he was the star of comic books, radio serials and Ovaltine commercials. Back then the character was a genius inventor who fought Nazis and sought to improve the world through technology. As Williamson's story goes, the Captain disappeared for decades before returning in the present day. Unfortunately he's disappointed to discover what who've done with the time and decides to "retrace his steps" and help to fix the world. This character's ongoing series begins in July, and was said by Williamson to be influenced in part by James Robinson and Tony Harris' Starman.

Blackout by Frank Barberie and Micah Kaneshiro

Created and designed by Dark Horse President Mike Richardson, this hero was introduced by writer Frank Barberie as an everyman character in the tradition of Peter Parker. The hero discovers a special suit that grants him access to a mysterious "Blackout" dimension, and Barberie's story attempts to depict what would really happen to a normal person in such an extraordinary circumstance. Barberie cited Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris' Ex Machina as an inspiration, being a superhero story that deals primarily with the character behind the mask. Here's a peek:

Brainboy by Fred Van Lente and Freddie Williams II

Another pulp revival, Brainboy has the power to manipulate people psychically, which he exercises at the behest of various organizations. The panelists said this is an especially amusing and well drawn serial that will begin in Dark Horse Presents in the summer. Here are a couple of in-progress pages:

2 Past Midnight by Duane Swierczynski and Eduardo Francisco

This project finds Captain Midnight, Ghost and X crossing over, but is only available as a reward for members of the ePlate credit card service. While no confirmations were made, it was strongly hinted that the material would eventually become available by more traditional means. Here's a cover by Paolo Rivera:

The Answer by Mike Norton and Dennis Hopeless

The panelists were all big fans of this in-progress creator-owned series by Hopeless andNorton, which tells the story of a nerdy librarian and expert puzzle-solver whose success on a gaming website led to her being recruited to a team of the world's smartest people. Unfortunately, her bosses are less than noble in their pursuits and the mysterious hero known as the Answer attempts to rescue her from their influence.

Hamlet is the story of a man named Hamlet.

GopherVR was a 3-D environment for Gopherspace, allowing you to “walk around a server” and get a graphic view of its contents using a simple VR-type world.

This version of GopherVR… is still unfinished, but you can play with it. It builds and runs on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6.