Happy National Dog Day! Share Your Pet Pictures FOX40 Tuesday, August 26, is a day set aside to celebrate those lovable companions that we just can't live without. Also known as International Dog Day and national Dog Appreciation Day, it is celebrating on August 26 every year. Share photos of your favorite pup ...
Emily Carroll’s collection of horror comics, Through the Woods, operates largely on the alienation of the inexplicable experience. More specifically, with one exception, it explores that alienation in women, particularly young women. The struggle for many of these characters is the insidious horror of trauma, and all of the ways that trauma pulls you apart, both from yourself and your community, and leaves you susceptible to further terrors.
This trauma that suddenly makes you unreliable to the world around you, and indeed unreliable to yourself, provides much of the claustrophobia that characterizes the slowly closing trap of Carroll’s flashlight-whispered tales. These are spellbound stories through which every strength of the comics medium is put into employ. There are frankly very few writers in comics who can go toe-to-toe with Emily Carroll in this regard. The totality of these comics is a testament to the largely untapped potentials inherent in this medium.
One of the aspects of the whole that powers Through The Woods is its lettering. Carroll’s lettering has a handwritten character of its own, and oftentimes the twisting bending nature of the letters and words drive the composition of the pages as a whole, which allows Carroll to move effortlessly through sometimes complex layered montage pages.
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A good example of the role her lettering can play is in the story ‘A Lady’s Hands Are Cold’, where we see the titular woman’s bloody song reed its way through the chambers of the blue mansion. Here, the words and their presence have more meaning and shape for much of the story than any character besides our protagonist.
Carroll’s color palette also demonstrates command of the medium. Oranges and reds bleed out of bright whites, themselves dusted across dark mysterious black shadows. Her color choices function both in spooky service to the atmospheric mood and narration, and also in aid of the stories’ larger thematic threads.
In ‘A Lady’s Hands Are Cold,’ the color blue is matched with the caption, “And there was a man,” introducing the reader simultaneously to the color and to the man our heroine is forced to marry. The next two pages reveal a blue mansion at the end of a blue path, and leaves subtly tinged in red — the color associated with the woman. Or, more accurately, women.
Because of how color functions in this story, even though the husband is away for most of it, neither we nor our heroine can ever escape his presence. This is his house, and within its blue walls our heroine is trapped. When we finally encounter the other woman, the one referred to in the title of the story, we see that her body is blue — both from the coldness of death and because of the role the man played in her life. Not only is blue used to convey a general dark creepiness, but we also now see that it is being used to tell us about a character’s history in shorthand, and to fulfill a functionary role; to show simply that she is cold. These dual levels imbue Carroll’s colors with a thematic and atmospheric complexity that few colorists today can match.
From a purely aesthetic level, there are uses of black and grey in Through The Woods that are truly magical. In one of the best stories of the book, ‘The Nesting Place’, Carroll executes a nighttime hallway sequence in grey and black that is every bit the candle lit beauty of Deborah Kerr in The Innocents.
‘The Nesting Place’ may in fact be the pinnacle of Through The Woods. The way that it juggles an early 20th century countryside story of familial displacement and distrust with monsters that evoke Alberto Breccia’s Lovecraft illustrations and are on par with any of the best things that have come out of Guy Davis’ head is fairly marvelous.
‘The Nesting Place’ falls into the wonderful dramatic comfort zone that you might expect in a Val Lewton film before whipping back around through monstrous terror, and in doing so gives us one of the truly great jump scare pages in recent comics memory. There’s shades of Junji Ito laced in here too, and one can also make fair comparison to Ito’s work both in terms of how Carroll operates and in the larger sensations of anxiety that occur when reading some of these stories.
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‘The Nesting Place’ works as both a wonderful climax to Through The Woods and as a promise of the potential that Carroll’s storytelling holds. Reading it, you could easily see the potential for longer work from her, built more upon her dramatic storytelling chops than her straight horror game. Even though most of the characters are isolated, the interplay between the characters and the communities around them is always really powerfully felt.
There is also a poetry to Carroll’s written word that you rarely get in western comics. One has the sense in reading her work that no word has been misplaced, and the result is a very literary vibe. To pick one stellar example; “That evening, the sun set bloodred in a white sky. And when I saw it… I knew our father was dead.”
There are so many cleverly constructed turns of phrase here that through all of the horror, sometimes you have to also stifle a grin at the sheer joy of one word next to another next to an image. Through The Woods is, without question, one of the singular experiences in comics this year.
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Through The Woods is on sale now in finer comic book shops and bookstores from Margaret K. McElderry Books.
cartechboy writes Google showed us what it feels is the car of the future. It drives itself, it doesn't have a gas or brake pedal, and there's no steering wheel. But that last one might be an issue. Back in May California's Department of Motor Vehicles published safety guidelines aimed at manufacturers of self-driving vehicles. After seeing Google's self-driving car vision, the California DMV has told the company it needs to add all those things back to their traditional locations so that occupants can take "immediate physical control" of the vehicle if necessary. Don't for a second think this is a major setback for Google, as the prototypes unveiled weren't even close to production ready. While the DMV may loosen some of these restrictions in the future as well all become more comfortable with the idea of self-driving vehicles, there's no question when it comes down to the safety of those on the road.
If you hate back to school time, we’ve got a bit of good news: This year brings with it the opportunity to study dinosaurs online for free. University of Alberta has an online course in dinosaur paleobiology that anyone can join as long as their relationship with computers is better than Dr. Grant’s.
The course begins on September 3 (next week!) and runs through January 10th, 2015. There’s no prerequisite knowledge required for Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology, and here’s what you can expect from the course description page:
Course material is delivered in a student-friendly short-form fashion, with numerous formative feedback sections. Many lessons are delivered from actual dinosaur dig sites. Students will gain access to a number of special interactive modules designed specifically for this course. These modules will grant users access to their very own virtual fossil collection, allow them to build dinosaur skeletons and provide them with an interactive visual representation of geologic time. This course’s unique lesson delivery, combined with a classic quiz structure, will enable students to quickly gain a solid foundation for understanding dinosaurs, their adaptations and behaviours, and their place in the long history of earth.
The course is part of a research program into online learning, so students can choose to remain anonymous or share their identity if they’d like to earn a verified certificate from completing the course. If you’re a student, it’s up to your own school whether or not to grant you credit for taking the course, but if that’s what you’re in it for, you’ll also have to pay a fee to take the final exam and be awarded credit.
It is important to understand that Coursera and the University of Alberta can’t actually grant you credit at your university or college. The decision to grant you credit is always up to the professors at your university or college. The University of Alberta and Coursera are committed to giving you everything you need to take to your university to request credit. We have built a complete course explanation package available to you when the course starts that gives you everything you need to take to your professors at your university for them to evaluate.
If you’re interested, you can head over to the course page for a video with more about the class and sign up for yourself. They also have a breakdown of what each week of the course will focus on, like “Week 3: ‘We’ll Have to See the Dinosaur’s Droppings’” and “Week 4: ‘They Do Move in Herds’” “Week 3: ‘Eating’” and “Week 4: ‘Moving Around,’” so you know exactly what you’ll be learning.
No word yet on whether cosplaying as Chris Pratt’s Jurassic World character earns you extra credit or not, but you were going to do that anyway.
(via tipster Dr. Victoria Arbour, Science Digital Learning Manager — University of Alberta, image via Jurassic Park)
Appeals court questions Indiana and Wisconsin gay marriage bans TheCelebrityCafe.com A U.S. appeals court aggressively questioned attorneys defending the Indiana and Wisconsin same-sex marriage bans, giving the appearance they could follow in the footsteps of other federal courts and strike down the restrictive laws. A three-judge panel for ...
Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors.
When Vladimir Putin declined to support the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to limit carbon emissions, he famously quipped that higher temperatures might actually benefit Russia since its people would have to spend less on fur coats.
Well, he’s getting his wish. Changes in wind and ocean currents caused by global warming shift heat around unevenly, causing some areas to heat up dramatically even as other regions cool. Russia, it turns out, is in the unusually hot category. Between 1976 and 2012, average Russian temperatures rose 0.43°C (0.8°F) a decade—more than twice the global average of 0.17°C—according to a new report out by Russia’s climate and environment agency (pdf, link in Russian).
Trends in Russia’s average temperatures.Russian Hydrometeorological Service
This is a big problem for a variety of reasons, say Russia’s climate scientists. Hotter temperatures appear to be driving a spike in episodes of dangerous extreme weather:
The frequency of forest fires (Russian) in the Siberian taiga, Evenki, and Khabarovsk regions and in the far northeast have surged between 30% and 50% in the past two to three decades.
Those extreme-weather episodes are taking their toll on Russians’ health. The report notes that the forest fires that often accompany summer heat waves give off noxious fumes. In 2010, this smog caused Moscow mortality rates to double.
Balmier climes are also making Russia more hospitable for certain diseases. The report notes that by 2010, the breeding ground for harmful insects was twice what it was in 1973. This trend, says the report, is linked with a flare-up of West Nile virus in the last 15 years, as well as an expanded range of Crimean hemorrhagic fever and tick-borne encephalitis.
One of the arguments that Putin and others have advanced in favor of global warming is that it will make more of Russia’s land arable. The report notes that is happening, as agriculture shifts to central and northern parts of the country. However, it’s something of a wash given that drought is also hurting output in Russia’s breadbasket region. Others note that the melting of permafrost could galvanize Russia’s mining and oil industries by making nickel, copper, diamonds, oil and natural gas more accessible.
my experimental dsp box from 2002 and backup eprom's for richard's box - 2008 - photo dave burraston
i have been asked many times over the years for pix of the special grey dsp box i built for richard james / aphex twin back in 2002. the internal details are top secret / classified, but a few little notes can be disclosed about its inception along with a few pix of it being built.
it all started when we were on the rephlex tour of turkey / israel / egypt in 2000, me & damo were doing video projections/vj. that was a time! rephlex co-founder grant was asked by Spannered"What are the 3 most cherished memories you hold from 20 years of Rephlex?" one of which was :
— a super fat Turbosound system with a few thousand ravers and 16 of my posse on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel.
In other words, being in a band of travelling minstrels, taking serious
tunes for nice people all over the world, trying to do our bit for
science with music.
:]
at some point i was telling richard about an experimental hardware dsp box i had made for my studio sometime around 1995. this box did real time processing of audio to make a weird old school computerised speech version of the original signal - any signal not just vocals. pretty nutty stuff, so i was immediately commissioned to build one.
we discussed it more after the tour and towards the end of 2002 i started putting a box together for him, just before zipping to australia to do my phd. many other people have asked me to build these but i had to have my arm twisted to make richard's. i generally dont make my little top secret boxes for outside of noyzelab activities, otherwise they wouldn't be secret. but once in a blue moon...
there's quite a few experimental recordings in my archives, and you can hear it processing female vocals on the track on computable numbers, with an application to the electric landlady problem bydave noyze :
<a href="http://cataclyst.bandcamp.com/track/on-computable-numbers-with-an-application-to-the-electric-landlady-problem">On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Electric Landlady Problem by Dave Noyze</a>
there's probably a lot more i could write, but that will have to wait for declassification (highly unlikely!). for those wondering, the total number of boxes in existence = 2 (his one and my one:)
my friend simon is a fellow hardcore techno boffin so he insisted on taking a few general release approved digital pix, well done & these are all that were ever taken.
building richard's dsp box, yoghurt munch soldering action - 2002 - photo simon steward
well chuffed about finally getting that bbc quicksilva box scanned - 2002 - photo simon steward
coding in my bedroom at simon's farm - 2002 - photo simon steward
listening for bugs - 2002 - photo simon steward
almost finished brick of a top secret dsp box for richard on top of my mc4 at noyzelab - 2002
The young homeless man who accompanied Miley Cyrus to the MTV Video Music Awards has a warrant out for his arrest in Oregon.
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Jesse Helt, 22, was arrested on charges of criminal mischief, criminal trespass and burglary in 2010. According to court records, he broke into the apartment of a man who had been selling what Helt believed to be bad marijuana.
'turning part of the parking into a patio, complete with an outdoor bar, a brightly mural, a living wall and spaceship-like fire pit that he's going to fabricate himself. He's also promising that it won't be cheesy, but will instead be cool and mod'
Who cares about future-dogs? Call of Duty: Ghosts mind-controls its dog, Westwood’s Blade Runner game blew its up, and Dog of Dracula, well, just look how he turned out. Is life so grim for all future-dogs? Not if you’re any good at cyberpunk bartending game VA-11 HALL-A (or Valhalla, because that’s just awful). Sukeban Games have released a prologue chapter of their tend ‘em up for pre-orderers, which has you mixing drinks for a load of adorable talking corgis. They run their own dog toy company and have hired your bar for a private party, see.
Valhalla’s part visual novel, part mix ‘em up. Folks (or dogs) roll up to the bar and you have a bit of a chat, then ask you for a drink. These are mixed from five ingredients, in varying proportions, and prepared and served in various ways. Mixing’s mostly clicking the right buttons and a little timing, a simplified version of a cooking game. Pleasingly, drinks are your dialogue options. You can’t choose what you say, but you can shape conversations by mixing different beverages–something alcoholic for the designated driver, something to calm down an over-excited corgi–or simply cocking it up. But this is tricky, and getting enough orders wrong ends the game.
It’ll tell you a drink’s ingredients but not how to mix it, leading to frustrating trial-and-error or inexplicable failure. When it suggests alternative drinks for characters, it won’t even tell you the ingredients. My character might have all this knowledge, but I certainly don’t.
But the writing is jolly pleasant. It’s fun to chat with drunk dogs and their humanoid helpers. Some of Valhalla’s politics, channelled through the corgis’ prejudices, can feel a mite heavy-handed, mind.
Pre-orders are $4.99 (£3) on Itch.io, giving instant access to the prologue chapter. The full game is expected in December. Sukeban Games are switching engine from Ren’Py to Game Maker for the full thing. Our Bargain Bucketeer Cassandra did some sort of work on this game, I should say. I don’t know what. I don’t know what everyone’s up to. Who do you think I am, their bartender?
"The only time heavy Facebook and Twitter users were really galvanized to speak? If they were reasonably sure that the majority of people in their online community agreed with their opinion, in which case they became twice as likely to join a discussion."
guilty
One of the biggest criticisms against social media is that its users must think their opinions are the most important ones to ever have been held through all of history and that everyone must hear them all the time for the good of humanity. Not true! According to a recently published study, most of us are actually kind of shy online and will withhold our real opinions, all because we don’t want people to hate us.
Shortly after Edward Snowden made international headlines for leaking classified files from the National Security Agency last year, Pew Research Center and Rutgers University in New Jersey teamed up to use the controversial news to their scientific advantage. Of the 1,801 adults polled, 86% said that they would be willing to discuss Snowden if the topic came up in public, offline situations, but only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users said they would join a similar discussion online. Those 14% who didn’t want to discuss Snowden in public are even more clammy online: fewer than .05% were willing to take their opinions to Facebook or Twitter.
Researchers also determined that the amount of time you’re on a social media network over the course of the day also appears to correlates with how willing you are to discuss controversial subjects. In the Snowden case, those who accessed Facebook multiple times over the course of a day were half as likely to discuss him in public as non-Facebook users; Twitter users were a quarter less likely than non-Twitter users.
The only time heavy Facebook and Twitter users were really galvanized to speak? If they were reasonably sure that the majority of people in their online community agreed with their opinion, in which case they became twice as likely to join a discussion.
“Because they use social media, they may know more about the depth of disagreement over the issue in their wide circle of contacts,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center Internet Project, said in a press release. “This might make them hesitant to speak up either online or offline for fear of starting an argument, offending or even losing a friend.”
According to Rainie, this failure to engage might be creating a “polarized” society due to the fear of offending someone. Me, I think it’s the argumentative, insensitive jerks who don’t know how to civilly disagree with someone and are driving everyone away with names and insults. But sure, let’s blame the people who don’t want to make each other mad, I guess.
As of late, most news involving Morrissey has been tied to his battle with Harvest Records. So it’s refreshing to find a Morrissey-related music project not mired in controversy—mostly because it’s not his own music—as in the announcement that the singer has curated a Ramones best-of compilation for Sire/Rhino.
Beyond its title, Best Of The Ramones, information about the compilation remains sparse, with the brunt of the details coming from Morrissey fan site True To You. Exactly what Ramones songs Morrissey ended up picking, or when the compilation will be released, both remain a mystery. Meanwhile, Morrissey thanks the Ramones’ management for having him curate the project and allowing him to choose the album’s cover art seen above—which is slightly out of character for the Ramones, but spot-on for Moz.
Of course, all this stands in stark opposition to the opinions of 17-year-old ...
You've been permanently banned from the RPGnet forums.
You're not being banned for the specific post I've attached the infraction to-- I had to pick a post in order to get a message field to work with, and a deniable backhanded complement in a + thread seemed like as good a post as any to hang this on.
You're being banned because you cannot, cannot, cannot just walk away from anything you hate and let other people enjoy it. Your posts in every single D&D5 thread have made discussion of that topic dreary and miserable for months. You racked up not one but two topic bans in Game of Thrones threads. After reading a unanimous decision that something had to be done about this, we were getting ready to simply ban you from the D&D forum when moderators from Other Media Open and Videogames Open stepped forward to ask if you could also be removed from those subforums, as your relentless negativity has been poisoning the community there as well. At that point, looking at your two-page infraction history, all of it for the exact same kind of behavior, including a nigh-mythical double topic ban, we decided to just cut you loose.
If you wish to appeal this ban, or have any questions, please direct them to admin.rpgnet@gmail.com
Secret is a social networking app that allows users to share pictures and text anonymously. It's become the hot new thing in some circles, but not everyone is happy about it. A court case in Brazil has resulted in Judge Paulo Cesar de Carvalho issuing a preliminary injunction requiring Google to remove the app from the Play Store and remotely delete it from users' devices. Apple was hit with the same ruling.
Over the past few weeks, users on Microsoft's support website have complained of overheating in the Surface Pro 3. Fan noise becomes excessively loud, the tablets become too hot to handle, and in some cases the device shuts down completely with a temperature warning. At launch, the Surface Pro 3 required a day-one patch to prevent boot failures, but this patch in turn caused some Wi-Fi connection issues.
'The fight started on a United Airlines flight because one passenger was using the Knee Defender, a $21.95 gadget that attaches to a passenger’s tray table and prevents the person in front of them from reclining.
The Federal Aviation Administration leaves it up to individual airlines to set rules about the device. United Airlines said it prohibits use of the device, like all major U.S. airlines. Spirit Airlines and Allegiant Air take the reclining mechanisms out of their seats, leaving them permanently upright.'
'The fight started when the male passenger, seated in a middle seat of row 12, used the Knee Defender to stop the woman in front of him from reclining while he was on his laptop, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak.
A flight attendant asked him to remove the device and he refused. The woman then stood up, turned around and threw a cup of water at him, the official says. That’s when United decided to land in Chicago. The two passengers were not allowed to continue to Denver.
Both passengers were sitting in United’s Economy Plus section, the part of the plane that has four more inches of legroom than the rest of coach.'
Ridley Scott has been working on a sequel to Blade Runner for at least a couple years, and it now appears that the script is ready to roll. "It’s written and it’s damn good," he tells Entertainment Weekly. The story will bring back Harrison Ford, who starred in the 1982 film as one of the eponymous replicant hunters. Scott says that Ford's character is "a survivor after all these years," which, certainly, is a curious fact in and of itself given the ambiguous ending of certain cuts of the film. There's no specific timetable on when the sequel will be made, but Scott sounds confident. "So yes," he tells EW, "that will happen."
Up next for Scott is an adaptation of The Martian, the best-selling novel first released in 2012. Scott suspects that Blade Runner will come after this, though he has a lot on his plate — including a sequel to Prometheus, which also has a finished script. Basically, Scott's been super busy for the past few years, and if Blade Runner doesn't get done soon, it may just be because he has a lot of other projects on his plate. He's latest film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, comes out on December 12th.
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Secret is a social networking app that allows users to share pictures and text anonymously. It's become the hot new thing in some circles, but not everyone is happy about it. A court case in Brazil has resulted in Judge Paulo Cesar de Carvalho issuing a preliminary injunction requiring Google to remove the app from the Play Store and remotely delete it from users' devices. Apple was hit with the same ruling.