Wait – I thought you guys *LOVED* Darwin…?
So, according to da pundits, we’re going to hear a lot of trash talk from Obama about Romney being a social Darwinist.
Social Darwinism is apparently the idea that if granny can’t support herself, she should do us all a favor and starve already. Turns out, nobody has ever believed in this idea except Ebeneezer Scrooge and maybe Ayn Rand hopped up on goofballs. But they’re going with it as a campaign theme.
Which is awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesomely incompetent. Anybody at this moment who has the slightest effing idea what social Darwinism is already a firm believer in one side or the other.
The whole rest of America is going to be, like, “Darwin? Wasn’t he that evolution guy? So Romney is big into evolution? Is that a Mormon thing? Doesn’t Obama believe in evolution?” As slogans go – FAIL.
Speaking of social Darwinism…when did we decide our leaders shouldn’t be rich guys? Aren’t successful American men the very tippy-top of the Terran food chain? Is that what they’re campaiging against – x-treme competence? Good luck with that!
April 17, 2012 — 10:56 pm
Comments: 19
Posted without comment
You know, I don’t think my patented Weasel Brand Snark ™ would add much to this story, so I’m’onna recommend you go read the original. It’s oddly worth your time.
Meanwhile, the drain thingie on the fridge is clogged with chunks of eel and lamb spleen, or whatever’s in those pasties we eat. I have to go pick it out and mop the kitchen floor.
February 29, 2012 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 17
That’s my stat camera!
As I’ve mentioned before, I started my career in commercial art a handful of years before computers began making in-roads into graphics. That means I had to learn to do everything one way, and watch as, bit by bit, computers swept away most of the jobs I had just learned to do.
It was awesome.
If the bomb ever strikes, we will never go back to doing things the old way again. Pre-digital printing technology was as complex and far more time-consuming and expensive as anything you can do with a computer. It was all photographic materials and layers and fiddly alignment tools and calculation charts and masking. In a lot of ways, it was fun — sort of a cross between flower arranging and carpentry — but it was a whooooole lot of work.
Anyhow, someone on an art forum posted a link to the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. If you’ve ever taken so much as a mechanical drawing class in High School, you will recognize and (I hope) enjoy paddling around in this collection. The sheer amount of junk we need to do our jobs was staggering.
So many old friends <sniff>
February 28, 2012 — 11:39 pm
Comments: 27
A good idea
Hm. So. I bought Dear Esther last night, which is an Indie game.
Actually, I would dispute calling it a game. You don’t really interact with stuff. You wander around a surreal landscape at will while a narrator (who is presumably you) randomly declaims fragments of a story. That’s potentially a cool ride, but it’s not a game.
I “finished” it tonight — that is, I reached the end scenario, though I haven’t seen all the content. If you watch the trailer at the link, you’ll pretty much have the whole experience, right there.
Dear Esther started life in 2007 at the University of Portsmouth as a free mod, using the Source game engine (Half Life 2). They decided to develop a commercial version, which was released on February 14 of this year. They cleverly charged a pittance (well, £7), and — much to their surprise — made their investment back in six hours.
So. Well. It was kind of like watching many indie films (something I did a lot of in my yoot). It was pretty to look at. Evocative. But after a while, you figured out that nothing was going to happen, nothing was going to be resolved, and they weren’t really ever going to tell you anything. If you like that kind of movie, you’ll love this.
Anyhow, I do hope they keep developing off-beat stuff like this. I think it could be a spectacular experience, with a bit less hippie and a bit more…meat.
February 22, 2012 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 11
Great news!
This hideous piece of shit is for sale. They think it’ll make $80 mil, easy.
Actually — I did not know this — there are four versions of The Scream. So somehow, inexplicably, this is exactly what Munch wanted this image to look like.
Three are in the National Gallery of Norway. Only this one was in private hands. This one, in pastels.
Yeah, eighty bazillions for a work on paper. In chalk. Nobody sneeze!
February 21, 2012 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 38
Heh.
This picture tickles me.
So Grant Wood saw this neat old Gothic farmhouse in Cowtitty, Iowa and thought it looked cool. He imagined what sort of people would live there and made up this little story in his head about a bank manager or store owner and his grownup spinster daughter.
The woman is the artist’s sister. The man is the artist’s dentist. I’m not sure they ever stood next to each other before this picture was taken, but they certain never stood next to each other in front of this house. All three — woman, man and house — were painted separately.
And then, bullshit happened. It’s been described as a satire on wicked nasty puritanical rural Midwesterners. Or, alternatively, a noble portrayal of the indomitable American spirit (it was the Great Depression after all). Or…whatever. Pick your flavor. Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with Grant Wood.
Take any great painting. I will guarantee you, the artist’s main thought process was, “whoa, that looks cool!”
February 20, 2012 — 11:25 pm
Comments: 25
One of my great heroes
Winsor “Silas” McCay (1869 –1934) was a cartoonist for the Hearst papers. Dude was enormously prolific and incredibly innovative — his surreal comic strips still stand as some of the best sequential art, ever.
Why is it that the first guys in any new medium are often unsurpassed by the people who follow?
If he’s remembered much at all today, it’s usually for creating some of the very first moving cartoons. Which he did all by himself. By inking, like, ten thousand key frames by hand.
The most famous is Gertie the Dinosaur, which he took on the road as a Vaudeville act. Where you see the speech panels in this YouTube version is where McCay would stand on stage talking and appearing to interact with Gertie on-screen. It must have been a corker of an experience for people who had never seen a cartoon before!
Hearst didn’t like McCay to be on the Vaudeville circuit, though, so he pulled strings to choke off his stage career. Which suits me — so many more McCay comic strips!
The most beautiful is the Little Nemo in Slumberland series, but my favorite will always be Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.
It depicts the terrible dreams people have after eating toasted cheese just before bed. Sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, often spectacularly drawn and always trippy, this has been one of my favorite bedside books for decades. My copy has damn near fallen to bits.
So you can imagine my squee when I discovered there were 190 large-format Saturday strips I’d never seen before. Found the book by accident and ordered it straight away.
It’s funny. I can’t really find one good “representative strip” that gives a full idea of McCay’s talent. I think you have to see dozens in aggregate to see what a flipping genius the man was. But click here to see the full panel this one goes with.
Then imagine, like, 500 hundred more.
February 18, 2012 — 12:18 am
Comments: 8
Hm. Must’ve had a fight with mom
Nope. No idea the backstory on this one. I was flipping through images on an old hard drive and ran across it.
That’s the great thing about being a nartist: your petty grudges are immortalized in mean-spirited images.
January 19, 2012 — 11:47 pm
Comments: 10
The giant chicken, obviously
Boxed: Fabulous Coffins from the UK and Ghana
Free novelty coffin show at the Southbank Centre, London, January 20-29. “A vibrant collection of bespoke coffins from the famous Pa Joe workshop in Ghana and Crazy Coffins in Nottingham.”
Pineapple. Nokia phone. Skateboard (“urban decay”. Nice). Ballet shoe. Corkscrew (“Special Scented Reserve.” Mmm). Shark.
I get the impression the Brits are taking the piss, while the Ghanaians are just really, really hoping the afterlife will be decent enough to front them a Coke.
Give it a miss, shall we?
January 12, 2012 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 16
We are building something ever so strange…
Look, it’s me! I’m a naked acid-puking necromorph!
This is the multiplayer Dead Space 2, which is played on servers belonging to Electronic Arts. It’s a fairly long wait before enough people jump in to make up a game (it’s played in two teams, humans versus aliens; you need a good 6-8 people to start) so I listen in on the the chatter of players who’ve left their microphones open.
Now, I realize I’m in Britain, so the closest servers are probably in Europe somewhere, but I’m gob-smacked at the range of voices I hear. Not just European languages…there are quite a few from further afield. Russians and Chinese. Indians, I think. I’m not the best at identifying languages. The voices belong to older people than I would have guessed (or maybe it’s just older people who are dumb enough to leave their mics on). I often hear children and TV in the background.
Thing is, this mirrors my observations in art and music forums: thanks to the internet, we’re cobbling together a weird international monoculture. It’s heavily but not exclusively American. Anime and Manga are powerful influences in the visual arts, for example. Chinese martial arts in gaming.
In many countries, it can only be a tiny minority who have access to broadband and gaming-spec computers. But among those people, we are all sharing a single culture: music, movies, comics, animation…and especially video games. I have no idea what this means, but I’m sure it’s important. And weird. And completely unprecedented.
There are kids in Beijing and Bangalore playing rock and roll, and you would recognize the song.
November 18, 2011 — 12:06 am
Comments: 20