jimko

Relatively interesting has three good optical illusions in this post. My favorite is the Coffer Illusion, which was a Top 10 finalist in the 2006 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, but is new to me. Do to see all 16 circles? For me, it took a while.

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.

PLEASE DO JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, irrelevant insights, giveaways, and much more.

ALSO DO NOT NEGLECT TO PURCHASE Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.

More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Many of us who play fantasy and sci-fi roleplaying and tabletop miniature games struggle with our ability to paint minis so that they look halfway decent on the table. Getting me to paint my minis is like getting 8-year-old me to eat his broccoli. I'm something of a perfectionist and I look at a lot of pro painted miniatures, in gaming magazines and online. My miniatures never look as good as what I see, so it's an effort for me to even bother. But also being a perfectionist, I wouldn't think of "gaming in the nude" (playing with unpainted miniatures). And so I press ahead, and try to do at least a little painting every night.

My pal, James Floyd Kelly, who I wrote about previously when he launched his new dungeon crafting channel, Game Terrain Engineering, was in a similar boat of not being happy with his painting chops. So, he decided to buy the Reaper Miniatures Learn To Paint Bones Kit and record a series of videos of him painting the three minis that come in the kit. It's really encouraging to watch the series and to see how much his painting improves over the three videos and three miniatures. Bolstered by that improvement, Jim plans on now getting the next kit in the series, the Layer Up Bones Miniatures Learn to Paint Kit and to paint (and hopefully document) those three miniatures.

https://youtu.be/vX4--iJvz5w https://youtu.be/WYaQCb1noVQ https://youtu.be/WCAGMYY3TRY

Also: Here's a list of beginner painting tips that I ran into recently. These are all of the same tips that I share with people. I would also add great lighting. I just broke down and finally got one of those swing-arm magnifying florescent lights and it makes me feel like I've been painting in the dark up until now. Jimmi recommends a wet palette and I couldn't agree more, now that I finally have one of those. Thinning your paints and building up paint in layers makes a huge difference in achieving great results. A wet palette helps keep the paints properly thin for you. Here's the wet palette that I got, based on a friend's recommendation. I love it.

In Hamburg, NY, Kevin Karas' home surveillance camera captured a tornado touching down and lifting his car and pretty much everything else around it right up into the air.

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Warped Perception ignited an Estes D12-5 model rocket engine in a glass tank of water.

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Fatherhood raises several questions, and gives you answers for questions you never knew you had. If you’re a dad, you can use a little support. And no one knows what you need like other dads do. There’s always the option of going to a community of kind Redditors like /r/daddit. But God, that’s just one more thing to do, and one more person to talk to, and you need a moment by yourself! So, sit back and find a father like you from these sites and blogs, who will help you gain the perspective you need. 1. Single Dad: Single...

Read the full article: 5 Different Dad Sites for a New Perspective on Fatherhood

If you’re a fan of anime you may dream of creating your own series. Or maybe you just want to learn how to draw your favorite characters. Either way, you need to learn how to draw anime and manga.

To help you get started on your journey, this article lists written resources and video tutorials designed to help you learn how to draw anime and manga.

Written Resources

While videos abound for drawing and manga, written resources prove more scarce. So be sure to keep these to hand before diving into YouTube tutorials.

/ic/ Fundamental Art Advice Support Page

If you’ve never visited 4chan, the site consists of several sub-communities. One of those sub-communities is /ic/ for artwork and critique. But even without accessing the community, the support page links you to information on tutorials, YouTube channels, reference, figure drawing, and more.

The /ic/ community also has an excellent 61-page guide for newbies and first-timers. It covers all kinds of fundamentals and walks you through common beginner topics: mindset, techniques, tools, software, etc. It isn’t manga-specific, but it will help sharpen your skills.

Complete Guide on How to Draw Manga

The folks behind Corel Painter, a piece of drawing software used by many artists, offer a collection of art tutorials meant to get you started from base zero. The tutorials cover traditional art, photo art, and illustrations.

Within the tutorial collection, one provides an overview on drawing manga, which covers eyes, faces, inking, and coloring/shadings.

Clip Studio Paint Manga Tutorials

As with Corel Painter, Clip Studio Paint provides tutorials for its program. However, unlike its competitor, it provides many manga-specific tutorials that go through the entire manuscript process. Whether you plan to use the software or not, it’s worth checking out the professional manga tutorials.

For those looking to learn to draw anime, the animation tutorials also are worth exploring. Once you’ve studied a bit, take a look at how the professionals do it. Visit the best websites where you can watch anime online for free to see the end results.

Video Tutorials

With the popularity of YouTube and its expansive amount of free content, manga tutorials are much easier to find. However, before diving straight into manga creation, it’s important to examine the fundamentals in video form as well. The playlists below provide a solid mix of the fundamentals as well as manga-specific content.

Proko

Proko isn’t specific to manga, but it is a must-watch YouTube channel for any aspiring artist. If you get through all of his videos from start to finish, you’ll have experienced some masterful advice.

He covers two extremely important topics that are rarely taught in detail in YouTube videos: gesture and anatomy. Start with the Figure Drawing playlist (to give your drawings life and motion), then study the Anatomy of the Human Body playlist (to give your drawings proper scale and details).

Once you know these fundamentals, you’ll be closer to learning how to draw manga and anime. There are no shortcuts when learning how to draw, but the sheer amount of resources on this channel will help you progress.

The Art of Wei

The Art of Wei YouTube channel is a good first stop for newbies. While he does have several videos dedicated to manga art, you’ll actually learn more from his series on drawing fundamentals.

Start with the Basic Tools for Drawing and Sketching and Best Ways to Pencil Shade Drawings playlists. Then make your way through the Drawing Lessons for Beginners playlist. Lastly, check out the How to Draw Manga and How to Draw Hair playlists.

Whyt Manga

Whyt Manga is the best channel for manga-specific tutorials. With lots of themed content that touches on all kinds of overlooked topics, you’ll be learning for a long time.

Start with the Manga Tools, Drawing Anatomy, and Manga/Webtoon Tutorials playlists. After that, you’ll learn plenty from the How to Make a Manga Series playlist (fight scenes, storyboards, character design, etc.) and the Manga Camera Angle playlist (paneling and other tips for visual storytelling).

With the frequency of his uploads, you can check back on his channel frequently to examine almost any question you’ll ever have about creation. Once you’ve reviewed his content, you’ll want to check out what you’ve learned.

Use these sites to read manga online for free legally.

Mark Crilley

Mark Crilley works well for manga newbies, plus he has a lot of content that will keep you busy. The artwork in his earlier videos isn’t as good, but the techniques are sound, so just keep that in mind and don’t let it turn you off.

The How to Draw and How to Make Comics/Manga playlists are good starting points. Also, check out his How to Draw Hair and How to Draw Eyes playlists. And don’t forget the Speed Drawings playlist, which will teach you a lot about the practical application of drawing theory.

Koizu

Koizu’s YouTube channel focuses on drawing manga and related techniques. You’ll learn genre-specific tips and tricks, like How to Draw Manga Body Proportions, Shading Techniques, and Drawing Poses.

The only downside is that the channel isn’t updated frequently. Fortunately, the channel offers plenty of content in the meantime.

Alphonso Dunn

Alphonso Dunn’s YouTube channel doesn’t touch on manga or anime at all, but he inks all of his artwork. And if you’re going to draw manga, inking will be one of the most valuable skills you’ll learn.

You should go through all of his videos so that you can pick up as many techniques and tricks as you can. But if you’re in a hurry, the most important videos are contained within the Shading playlist.

Mikeymegamega

Ignore the gaming half of the Mikeymegamega YouTube channel and focus on the drawing half.

The Draw, Simple, Easy playlist contains medium-length videos that show you how to draw certain characters from manga and comic books. The Draw With Mikey playlist contains longer videos of him free drawing and chatting with his viewers.

While this channel doesn’t offer much in the way of direct instruction, it’s a great way to learn by watching. Plus, you’ll pick up various tips and tricks along the way.

Learn to Be a Better Digital Artist With Manga Tutorials

If you want to figure out how to start drawing anime, it begins with manga. And if you’re looking to become a digital artist towards that goal, it helps to have the right tools. So, check out our list of the best drawing tablets for digital artists to help get started.

Image Credit: Bartosz Budrewicz/Shutterstock

Read the full article: How to Draw Anime and Manga Comics: 10 Tutorials to Get Started

The 2017 Sand Marble circuit (marbles "racing" one another down a carefully-cut path in sand) is underway, and here's the Netherlands leg for your enjoyment.

In this tournament, a ghost marble will chase the competitors to push up marbles who got stuck on the course. The ghost marble does not count on the end results and will not be shown on the results list.

It's almost as good as puppy bowl, but I wonder if it would be even better with just the ASMR clacking of glass rather than the parodious commentary.

It's basically hiding bad things in good things.

I recently came across a subreddit called "Expectation vs Reality." It's a place to post side-by-side photos of something promised compared to what was actually delivered (usually a smaller, crappier than expected).

A taco I actually got from taco Bell last night....

This is supposed to make my daughter happy, not frighten her.

This is supposed to make my daughter happy, not frighten her.

The Slo Mo Guys wanted to find out what would happen if you went inside a big balloon and filled it with water until it pops. There is probably a rule 34 subreddit for this.

[via]

The USS Fitzgerald ran into the ACX Crystal off the coast of Japan, and human error is a likely culprit.

"Role-players, boardgamers, writers, coders, artists, graphic designers, teachers, house-cleaners, lucid dreamers, gym-rats, distance runners, commuters" can enjoy over 100 ambient atmospheric loops with names like "Orbital Promenade," "Lunar Outpost," "Testing Chamber" and so on. (more…)

Is there anything worse than having to re-do work you’ve already done? Spending hours on a paper only to have Microsoft Word crash when you’re about to finish is crushing. While you should get into the habit of pressing the Ctrl + S shortcut regularly, thankfully Word automatically saves backups in case of crashes. Next time Microsoft Word crashes, try this method to recover unsaved documents. Open a File Explorer window, then navigate to This PC. In the search box in the upper-right, type .asd. This is the file extension for Microsoft Word backups. Give your computer a minute to...

Read the full article: If Microsoft Word Crashes, Do This Right Away to Recover Unsaved Work

Watch the men of Dude Perfect squeeze as many trick shots as possible into this five-minute video.

As the YouTube channel Eater explains, it all comes down to factory efficiency.

We can't be far off a time where we can order buckets of paint by punching in RGB color values. The big paint companies could obviously do this, but right now all they seem to offer are elaborate, bloated interfaces wrapping their own marketing-driven color schemes. And I'll grant that the paint pigment gamut might have some very weakly-covered areas, lightfastedness issues, and so on. I hope whoever eventually does this (brand suggestion: LATHEX) also creates a robust API for it and a affiliate program, so that Paint Colors Invented By Neural Network can be tested and refined against thousands of actual purchases.

The new site aims to be "a loud light in the darkness." The post Meet PatriotHole, the Onion's New Right-Wing-Skewering Mockery Machine appeared first on WIRED.

Friday's edition of German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel; this shot was everywhere this weekend, sadly unsourced!

The Windows 10 Creators Update has finally landed. If Microsoft still hasn’t offered you the upgrade, you can download it for free right now, although you might want to wait. Some of the new features and apps are well-documented. Paint 3D (our Paint3D review) gives the ubiquitous MS Paint its first major overhaul in a generation, the much-loathed forced Windows updates are gone, and Microsoft Edge has become the only browser that can play Netflix content in 4K resolution. But what else is there to enjoy? What has Microsoft included that didn’t make the headlines? In this article, I’m going to...

Read the full article: 7 New Windows 10 Features You May Have Missed

Neural networks, it is said, cannot explain their decisions. Which is probably a good thing, at least when it comes to the machine mind's ideas for new Dungeons & Dragons spells, as guided by Janelle Shane. [via Patrick Ziselberger‏]

It’s a really small dataset, actually - so small that in almost no time at all, it learned to reproduce the original input data verbatim, in order. But by setting the “temperature” flag to a really high value (i.e. it has a higher chance of NOT going with its best guess for the next character in the phrase), I can at least induce spelling mistakes. Then the neural network has to try to recover from these, with often entertaining results.

Moss Healing Word
Hold Mouse
Barking Sphere
Heat on Farm
True Steake
Finger of Enftebtemang
Fomend’s Beating Sphere

For the best one you'll have to click through.

Here’s a dilemma I’ve struggle with for years: I love programming but I never want to make a career out of it. Where does that leave me? How can I take joy in this activity without making it the center of my life? Maybe you’ve had thoughts like this, too. The answer is to approach it as a hobby. Doing this is great because it can help you sharpen your skills in a practical way. It can also be a fantastic way to master a new programming language. And if you’re an ex-career coder, the hobby approach can help reverse...

Read the full article: 10 Rewarding Hobbies That Involve Programming or Scripting

As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they're rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information. The post What Happens When You Mix Thermodynamics and the Quantum World? A Revolution appeared first on WIRED.

Each weekend we round up the news stories that we didn't break or cover in depth but that still deserve your attention. The post Security News This Week: Oh Good, Hackers Beat Two-Factor to Rob Bank Accounts appeared first on WIRED.

In the new 'Geek's Guide to the Galaxy' podcast, the author of several rulebooks for the RPG discusses the game's very intense nature. The post The Bonkers Role-Playing World of Rifts Just Got Even Bigger appeared first on WIRED.

Here is The Simpsons' take on Trump's 100th day in the White House, which includes Sean Spicer hanging himself with a sign that says, "I Quit!" and a strangling match between Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. We also get to see Trump in his jammies, lying in bed with a remote in his hand. An aide comes to his side and asks him to read a bill that will lower taxes for Republicans. "Can't Fox News read it and I'll watch what they say?" the president asks.

With the 100th day hitting us this Saturday, thank god for comic relief!

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You can improve Windows 10’s speed in lots of ways. For example, you can get rid of any pre-installed bloatware, refresh the operating system (OS), add more RAM, perform system maintenance tasks, or change the power settings. However, one tweak many people overlook is the HomeGroup feature. Disabling the HomeGroup can not only improve the performance of your OS, it can also dramatically increase your network connection speed. But how do you disable and remove the HomeGroup? Here’s how. What Is a HomeGroup? A Windows HomeGroup lets you share files and devices (such as printers) between trusted computers on the same local...

Read the full article: Speed Up Windows by Disabling and Removing HomeGroup

Incredibly satisfying to watch.