Butt-crack daisy
I’m going to be the #1 Google hit for “butt-crack daisy” or my name isn’t Seraphina Terwilliger Weasel. (Original photo is a Man Ray).
I’m not yet. Feh. Google used spider me in really fast, back in the day.
Interesting…when I did a search of “butt-crack daisy” (only when it’s punctuated exactly like that), a notice appears at the bottom of the search listings: In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.
At the link: Child Pornography Complaint to Google. The cease-and-desist or legal threat you requested is not yet available. (Child pornography butt-crack daisy. Oh, let’s not dwell on that, ‘K?)
That Chilling Effects site is interesting, though. From my quick trawl, it looks like they’re gathering cease-and-desist letters and linking them up to FAQs. Cool.
Anyway, I just can’t deal with politics at the moment. Sorry. Between the presidential hoo-ha in the States and all the crap about Greece and the Euro, current events at the moment is like a great hooting of spider monkeys.
November 3, 2011 — 10:24 pm
Comments: 22
I see naked people
Finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years — found a local life drawing class and signed up. Just had my first two-and-a-half hour session.
Woo! Have I ever slipped. It’s been thirty years since I’ve drawn from the model, but I was kind of hoping all that other drawing I did would make up for it.
Nope.
Nude models, as a class, are not especially attractive people. Just people who feel comfy being naked and holding poses.
Our lady tonight had a butt-crack tattoo. A single Chinese character. My opinion of her would soar to great heights if it turned out to be the Chinese word for “butt crack.”
When I was in art school, tattoos were unusual — and tattoos on young women were unheard of. But one of our models had one. She was a dumpy young woman with a daisy tattoo’d growing out of her butt crack. The whole class was riveted to that thing. You could walk around the room, and I guarantee you the darkest, most fully rendered object on anyone’s drawing was that daisy.
No, you may not see my drawings. Not until I get a whole lot better.
November 2, 2011 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 25
Yeah, this guy
His name is Ray Villafane and his motto is “You bet it’s a real Pucking Fumpkin!”
I love this guy. He’s an exquisite modeler, and his choice of media reflects a refreshing humility (he works in pumpkins and also sand).
I know you’ve seen his stuff before; they trot him out every Hallowe’en. This year, the Last Vegas Sun ran a couple of excellent slideshows of his work (here and here).
On his website, he’s selling a set of his seven indispensable carving tools and a pair of instructional DVDs (also a couple of rad t-shirts).
I’m sorely tempted — pumpkin carving is one of those things I think I should be good at, and I am not — but international postage and duties would probably make the whole package eye-wateringly expensive.
Anyway, Happy Hallowe’en, y’all! (Yeah, I know the 31st Monday, but I wanted to leave you with some cool stuff to look at over the weekend).
October 28, 2011 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 22
On My To Do List
Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806 – 1865). Don’t know why he popped into my head tonight. He was a Belgian painter in the Romantic tradition (though “Romantic” is a brain-hurty way to describe most of his work). After art school, he won the Prix de Rome, a fellowship that allowed him to live and study in Rome for a few years.
He entered a few bits in at the Paris Salon of 1839. That didn’t go so well.
Up to that point, he’d specialized in big, bombastic historical paintings. After the French snub, he went back to Brussels and got weird. The Belgian government was anxious to promote local painters, so they built him a studio in 1850. He holed up in it, writing and painting all on his ownsome, until he died in it fifteen years later.
He had a prodigious output. He did the usual historical and Biblical subjects, but also lots of paintings that were macabre or erotic. Or both. When he died, he left his studio and its entire contents to the Belgian government on condition that they make it a museum in perpetuity.
I bet they’re real sorry about that now. His paintings have gone way, WAY out of style; their museum is a bit of a laughing stock. It’s been on my “things to do across the Channel” list forever.
Some typical examples: Human Insatiability. Suicide. Two Young Girls (one of ’em dead). Two Witches. The Burned Child. Oh, and he was also involved in a distasteful experiment with a freshly severed head. So I learned that today.
Not a very good painter, but the situation is self-correcting. He experimented with the composition of his paints. This is always a bad idea; his stuff is gently falling to bits.
September 20, 2011 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 22
Oh!
Huh. I didn’t know they were working on a Martin Luther King memorial on the Mall in DC. But they were, and here it is. Opened yesterday.
As a piece of civic monumental art, I really, really like this thing. It’s beautifully modeled. And — because beautiful is not enough for the modern artard — it’s also conceptually neat.
From the Dream speech, it’s a play on the line, “out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” You can see there’s a sort of mountain of granite in the background, and King’s rock is flying forward out of it, and he is emerging from the rock.
Neat.
It isn’t often that I like modern civic art. Most of it is long on concept and short on art.
The really astonishing thing? The commission was given to a Chinese artist, Lei Yixin. I am totally not going to rag on them about that; I think it was a surprisingly mature decision from an area of civic life not known for mature decisions (O, the contemporary angst that Lady Liberty was a frog).
As the committee head put it:
“We chose him because we really believe that Dr. King’s message is true that you should not judge a person by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character,” said Johnson. “In these terms, we are thinking artistic character.”
Refreshing.
Oh, there was drama. Lots of it coming from disappointed American artists, especially ones of color, but none of them had experience in stone work at this scale.
Oh, and the design was firmly rejected by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Yeah. There’s a U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Who knew? Seven white dudes, apparently.
Still. There is something slightly…ornamental around the eyes, isn’t there?
August 23, 2011 — 8:12 pm
Comments: 35
I gotcher three words right here
What did we do before the internet? How on earth did we disseminate badly drawn comics with brain-hurty punchlines? Because I live for this shit.
Really. I derive huge enjoyment from entertainment products that would never have survived the tender mercies of a proper editor. In a better world, I would drunkenly browse LOLcats and homemade YouTubes until my mousin’ finger fell off.
Anyhoo, this is from a webcomic called Three Word Phrase. Must be fairly recent; I read through the whole collection in a half hour. The dog one isn’t my favorite (though I like it), it’s the one that best shrunk down to Weasel Blog size and stayed legible.
I think this is my favorite. Or this one. For the first couple of years I used email, I was pretty sure this is exactly what happens after you hit SEND. Or go here if anyone has ever patiently explained to you that the Death card doesn’t mean what you expect it to.
He relies heavily on the Five P’s – pee, poo, puke, penises and pudenda, so it’s also a mind-expanding intellectual romp.
To be fair, it’s more about butts than anything else, but that would’ve screwed my alliteration. And no, thank you, I didn’t want to use “posterior.”
By the way, I am so stealing “I want this because of reasons.”
July 13, 2011 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 20
The cheese stands alone
I’ve always found the phrase incredibly sad and disturbing. This is what it looks like in my head.
Poor cheese. Poor damn cheese.
Is that all I have for you today? No, of course not. I also have this.
PocketFart ™ uses advanced flatulence simulator technology to produce custom audio events, anything from a short and sweet toot to an epic monster blast…With just a finger gesture, you can stylize one-of-a-kind farts. Modulate qualities such as fart duration and sphincter tightness, allowing you to produce unlimited combinations!…Many kinds of farts included: O Tight One, Monster Butt and more…Convenient fart playback styles for added flair…
Today’s secret word is cheese.
March 7, 2011 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 25
MOAR FREE TOY!
Oh. My. God. This is so turbly, turbly fun to play with.
Pixologic, the people behind the astonishing but pricey Zbrush, offer a free tool called Sculptris (download link is at the bottom of the first post).
Fire it up, and there’s a big gray ball in the middle of the screen. You use your mouse to poke it and pull it and crease it and smooth it until it looks the way you want it to. Then you can output a mesh for use in other programs.
It takes about two seconds to learn the interface (start with D for draw, X to toggle whether you’re poking or pulling, [ and ] to make your brushes bigger or smaller, and Alt-LeftMouse to rotate your viewpoint).
Even if there’s not an artistic bone in your body, I bet you’ll enjoy mashing on this big ol’ digital ball of Play Doh. G’wan, it’s free!
Thanks to gogman for the recommendation. Sorry for all the artardalation this week. When I’ve got new toys, there’s NO getting anything sensible out of me.
February 16, 2011 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 10
Calling all artards!
Have I got a deal for you!
Project Messiah offers an industrial-strength, professional level 3D modeling and animation tool (it’s called “Messiah” because the code was originally developed to do special effects for the film Dogma. Or so they said at Boing Boing. It’s not listed on their film credits).
Serious professional tool. The basic edition is usually $599 and the pro version $1,195, but they’re trying a viral marketing experiment.
Sign up now and you can reserve a copy of basic for $10 or pro for $40. The deal is, if they reach a certain level of sales by a certain date, then everyone who signed on gets a copy at that price (and then the software reverts to its regular price). If they don’t reach that level of sales, we all get our money back and go home empty handed.
They won’t say what their intended level of sales is, or the closing date — but the progress bar has gone from 0 to about 50% on the first day, so it’s looking good.
Fair warning — animation tools aren’t fun toys to fiddle around with casually. Not at first, anyway. There’s a very steep learning curve just to get on top of the basics, and powerful computing needed to render any kind of serious animation.
But when you get the basics down, 3D modeling is the most fun I have ever had with my eyeballs. It’s fantastically engaging.
It’s like carpentry without all the splinters and blood and severed fingers.
Anyhow, it’s an interesting marketing idea. I’ve ponied up my forty bucks and we’ll see what happens.
p.s. If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s always Blender. It’s free.
p.p.s. A strangely hypnotic animation I did in 3DS. Also, my favorite comment thread ever. If I do say so myself.
February 10, 2011 — 2:03 pm
Comments: 26
Here. Have some chickens, then
I blew all my free time tonight playing through to the end of Dead Space. I sure got my £5 worth out of it. It was great fun.
As the game went along and the ship got all veiny and mucus-y and organic and I ran across alien/human hybrids stuck all over the walls, I thought, “I’ve played this game before! It’s called Doom!”
Yeah, it’s pretty Doom (1993). Which in turn was pretty Alien (1979).
So we only have one space-horror plot. We just get better and better at telling it.
ANYHOO! The chickens? They’re fine. Not laying again yet. I’ve entered into negotiations with the Chicken Man for another two birds next month, so we’ll see how that goes.
February 7, 2011 — 11:42 pm
Comments: 20