June 17, 2012

Thomas Kinkade: High or Low, Yes or No?

Painter of Light: Two Letters Worth $15mil, or more, Under Dispute (previously) [more inside]
posted by snaparapans at 6:46 PM PST - 97 comments

friendship bracelets

Friendship bracelets! A photo tutorial for chevrons and another photo tutorial for basic stripes, chevrons, & diamonds. More basics with simple patterns & advanced. The BeyondBracelets thorough video tutorials (& on her blog is a bracelets 101 to gradually progress your skills). For complicated patterns check out these, and also these (with alphabet patterns & instructions), and also this crowdsourced free pattern-sharing site (patterns & tutorials), and finally this dollar-a-pattern pay site. If you're not interested in bracelets you can use the same idea for tangle-free headphones or wrapping tech cords & cables. (previously: lanyards)
posted by flex at 6:01 PM PST - 33 comments

'OK, we are on our emergency plan'

Raising the Dead:'At the bottom of the biggest underwater cave in the world, diving deeper than almost anyone had ever gone, Dave Shaw found the body of a young man who had disappeared ten years earlier. What happened after Shaw promised to go back is nearly unbelievable—unless you believe in ghosts.'
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:47 PM PST - 68 comments

The handsome man who was the Alien

Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Bolaji Badejo, aka the Alien.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:54 PM PST - 34 comments

" America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.....You can’t lose what you lacked at conception."

When divorced mother Jean Hilliker was discovered murdered under lurid circumstances in 1958, it came as no surprise that her young son James grew up a bit disturbed. Sent to live with his alcoholic accountant father, a man with "a 12 (to 16) inch schvantz " who had purportedly once "poured the pork to Rita Hayworth", James Ellroy became obsessed with his mother's murder. Some of this obsession was transferred to police procedure, detective novels and especially the spectacularly grisly murder case of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia. [more inside]
posted by jake1 at 3:24 PM PST - 88 comments

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

Upgrade Your Nintendo 3DS’s Sound. [SLYT] "Of the variety of things one might find to complain about in regards to the Nintendo 3DS, the sound doesn’t immediately come to mind. It’s not great sound, mind, but there are a litany of things that are more obvious. Thanks to one intrepid inventor, however, you are now just a series of tubes, clips and metal funnels away from awesome sound. Now, in order to figure out the exact combination of these things you’ll need to translate the instructions from Japanese." [Via].
posted by Fizz at 2:59 PM PST - 14 comments

How to kill a rational peasant

How to kill a rational peasant: America's dangerous love affair with counterinsurgency. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 2:00 PM PST - 67 comments

For Everything Else, There is MarxCard

The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz recently launched a Karl Marx credit card. It needs a tagline.
posted by vidur at 1:26 PM PST - 53 comments

Being Brave

Before and after photographs of children who have had teeth removed. Part of a exhibition showcasing behind the scenes observations of The Children's Hospital, Sheffield
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:50 PM PST - 23 comments

Literature and porn stars

Consider everything here potentially NSFW, even if not marked. Lots of background and sidebar images that may offend.

Kayden Kross (NSFW) and Stoya (previously) aren't stereotypical porn stars. For the release of Adam Levin's Hot Pink, Kross interviewed Levin on the McSweeney's website. Stoya was featured (along with Paul Dano) in the book trailer for Adam Wilson's Flatscreen. And together Kross and Stoya discussed Chad Kultgen’s Men, Women & Children — a novel that mentions Stoya by name. Kross digs David Foster Wallace; Stoya digs some good stuff, too. Both keep (very NSFW) blogs (Kayden 1, 2; Stoya 1, 2) where they write about all kinds of stuff. Last November on Fleshbot (NSFW) Stoya did a five-part series on sex in Japan. And check out Stoya's guest post on Warren Ellis's blog. [more inside]
posted by skilar at 12:20 PM PST - 52 comments

Head like I/O

Pretty Eight Machine - an 8-Bit rendition of the Nine Inch Nails album.
posted by Artw at 12:02 PM PST - 29 comments

Stop measuring happiness!

Happyism: The Creepy New Economics of Pleasure. Economist Dierdre McCloskey, in the New Republic, digs into the mathematical underpinnings of the scientific study of happiness. Executive summary: she doesn't like what she finds.
posted by escabeche at 11:44 AM PST - 26 comments

My Old Man - The Five Spirits of Rhythm 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Father's Day Edition

My Old Man - The Spirits of Rhythm [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 11:33 AM PST - 11 comments

"In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color."

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains -- A two-part essay about (part I) how perception of colors affects our naming of colors which (part II) affects our perception of colors. Guest celebrities include Darwin's children, xkcd, a mantis shrimp, and Benjamin Whorf.
posted by ardgedee at 11:08 AM PST - 44 comments

Aone in the Arctic

Snowdrifter (single link Vimeo).
posted by Dipsomaniac at 10:56 AM PST - 5 comments

Can't we all just get along?

Rodney King, victim of a 1991 police brutality incident that became the catalyst for civil unrest and rioting a year later, was found dead by his fiancee at the bottom of his swimming pool. He was 47. [more inside]
posted by radwolf76 at 10:04 AM PST - 137 comments

ahl_5am

Action Half-Life is a multiplayer modification that focused on cinematic gun-play. The game featured maps by Hondo, who was famous for incorporating massive puzzles in to his levels. These sprawling mysteries are explored by YouTube user bobandalot through narrative walkthroughs uploaded to his channel. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 AM PST - 17 comments

Kubrick In The 60s

Stanley Kubrick didn’t like giving long interviews, but he loved playing chess. So when the physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein paid him a visit to gather material for a piece for The New Yorker about a new film project he was writing with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick was intrigued to learn that Bernstein was a fairly serious chess player. The result was an unusually long and candid recorded interview for the New Yorker. (77 min)
posted by The Whelk at 6:57 AM PST - 8 comments

#nodads

The philosophers have only sought to impregnate the world in different positions; the point is to pleasure it. "What is it to Philosophise Fatherlessly?" The inaugural post of the (slightly NSFW) #nodads Tumblr, which celebrates the #nodads Twitter hashtag. #NoDads Is Our Principal Of Solidarity. Happy Father's Day!
posted by gerryblog at 5:01 AM PST - 61 comments

The App of Life

"Thanks largely to smartphones, this is probably the best time ever to live in a packed city... Steve Jobs was a lifelong suburbanite, but it turns out he perfected the city." [google cache for those getting a log-in page.]
posted by nickrussell at 4:25 AM PST - 89 comments

Come for the raining fish, stay for the funeral beer

Isle of Spagg... On the other side of the Vertic Sea where things are distinctly fishier, lives the proud fisherman Inger and his half-mermaid (but not the half you'd expect) daughter Herring. When the least respected old character on the island dies, conflict ensues and a favorite garment is ruined. Meanwhile two haberdashers with a checkered past deal with their own loss. Can Dr. Beez or one of the Oracles help? Can the Isle's 15 minstrels make music to make things better? And what about little Claude? It all happens in a 30 minute cartoon from the Brothers McLeod, Greg and Myles, who have also animated (scroll down for video clips) Fuggy Fuggy for MTV, Pablo and Frankensheep and Quiff and Boot for the BBC, Billy for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Existential Pleading of the Inner Heart for anybody who wants it and other very random stuff.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:02 AM PST - 4 comments

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