Archive for November, 2007
My Dad made this awesome piece of art for the office:
It is etched in Ferric Chloride (FeCl3) onto a four inch diameter copper water pipe. My Dad used to be the executive director of a migrant clinic in Pasco, Washington called La Clinica, and a lover of copper, he took some of the pipes home with him when the clinic was being remodeled. He then cut them apart using an arc-welder, etched the bunny logo onto them, and then mounted them on this red stained wood. It is attached using homemade copper rivets, which he cut and fashioned from copper wire. He then painted inside the etching so as to give it more dynamic contrast.
According to my Mom, he was tap-tap-tapping on those rivets for quite some time. Probably almost driving her crazy.
Thanks, Dad! It’s gorgeous!
Far from the usual “Where u at?” or “WAN2 GO 2 MV?”, Maoist rebels in Jharkhand (it’s a state in India – don’t worry, I had to look it up too) have taken to using SMS messages for psychological warfare against the government!
Sukhdeo Singh, principal secretary to Chief Minister Madhu Koda, received an SMS Wednesday from the mobile number of Chatra district Deputy Commissioner (DC) Puja Singhal that Maoist rebels had killed the district superintendent of police (DSP) along with 25 security personnel in an ambush.
…
The same evening, Singhal received an SMS from the DSP’s cell phone that said: ‘Please come, we are holding a janata durbar’.On contacting the DSP, Singhal realised that he had not sent any SMS.
This is a classic disinformation and terror campaign, but done through sophisticated – yet elegantly simple – means. Proof that even grassroots can and do find ways to make technology suit their goals. Now they just need to vote for Jharkhand’s Next Top Model and they’ll be all set.
Source: Indo-Asian News Service, via EarthTimes.org
This is an actual law, on the books, in California:
“Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both.”
Must be a holdover from the glory days of EC Horror comics and Dr. Wertham’s crusade against entertaining children. (You can enjoy a little walk through crime comic classics here.) It does kind of make you want to start distributing horror comics as promotional material, just to see what happens.
A fun game to start off the week:
What is it? First to guess correctly wins a ham sandwich!
Every few months I – like every other living human – struggle through one of the eternal quandaries of our time: is there a worthwhile Flash video player out there for our own use? I’ve asked this question of developers, media consumers, even the faces behind YouTube, Revver, etc… and I’m still not convinced I’ve ever gotten a good answer.
The problem is simple enough: we want to move away from Quicktime for serving our videos, since it has versioning and platform problems which Flash does not. I know this. I’ve known this for a long time. And yet.
Our building, the Spring Arts Tower, has been very intent about building an arts community downtown, and even more specifically, within the building. They operate as the Spring Arts Collective, and regularly participate in Downtown Art Walk, as well as putting on their own shows. A lot of people volunteer their time, and do good work to make it all happen.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I will have some art on display in the Spring Arts Collective Gallery (in Spring Arts Tower, 453 S. Spring St) for a show sponsored by the LA Conservancy this sunday from 10am to 4pm, and also the following Thursday for Downtown art walk. There will be a reception on Thursday from 7-9pm, with free wine and things, you know, for art.
Also, art walk is just a good time, so if you’ve never been, maybe now is your big chance.
Every now and then I’m lucky enough to come across someone creating a piece of new media where you can instantly tell that there is something going on here.
Stop and think about the last thing you saw that really grabbed your attention and sucked you in on a level beneath “that was pretty cool.” You can see the gears moving and find yourself connecting or interacting with it on a different level. It is mysterious. It is difficult to quantify. It is what I imagine it was like to be lucky enough to walk into a certain gallery in Paris in 1871 and seeing this renegade thing called Impressionism. Or, a little closer to home, being in the room the first time someone fired up PONG and realizing that this was a new kind of experience and associated set of emotional responses your brain didn’t have a place to file away just yet.
Take my recent exposure to flickrvision.
We Bunnies just got back from the Online Video Conference that was put on by The Daily Reel, and while all these viral thoughts have been spinning around my head, I had an idea about how to make the YouTube viewing experience better.
Whenever I watch a video on YouTube, the “related videos” section rarely includes any videos that are actually related. I think this is due to the fact that what YT deems “related” are just videos that have the same tags. But videos with similar tags are rarely similar. For instance, watching our quirky animation “Junk Science,” the top related video is about global warming (junk science vs. real science). That has nothing to do with the things I like to watch.
