More. MOAR!
Oh, how I am enjoying social media this week. I’m pretty sure this much schadenfreude is bad for my spleen, or something. I have nothing insightful to add.
In honor of our new overlord, please enjoy this delightful scrap of futuristic pulp misogyny. The artist is Ed Emshwiller.
Please, continue to discuss the election in the comments. Your words, they are like delicious candy.
November 10, 2016 — 10:42 pm
Comments: 26
Spare a thought for me…
Sadly, my neighbors and co-workers weren’t nearly as salty as I expected. All kinds of hostility in the run-up to the election, and now just a little languid and fatalistic moo.
But social media — that’s a different story. I have wasted (!) most of the day enjoying the beautiful deluge of salt on Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. O frabjous day!
It surely is dawning on EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE that we have been incredibly badly served by the media and pollsters (not counting Drudge).
Trump may well make a lousy president, but he has well and truly smashed the Clinton Machine forever. And for that, my gratitude.
November 9, 2016 — 8:39 am
Comments: 48
Nothin’ to do but wait
Cartoon is from Tom Gauld. Who works for the Guardian, sadly. I almost typed that he sadly worked for the Guardian, but he’s probably pretty happy about it. His official website is here and isn’t very fun, but his old Flickr page is. Fun, that is.
The election results won’t start coming in until very late my time, and the earliest the shebang could be called is 4 am. So I won’t be staying up for it.
I wouldn’t anyway. That shit is soul-killing.
November 8, 2016 — 9:01 pm
Comments: 7
How have I never seen this?
Holy shit, look at this thing! It’s a tiny part of this necklace which was found in a grave in Tolstaya Mogila, Ukraine and is thought to date from about 400 BC. (Here’s a big, color view of that detail).
It’s Scythian. I mean, I’ve heard of the Scythians, but I won’t say I knew anything about them. I had no idea they were exquisite goldsmiths. Wikipedia says they were a group of Iranians, the very first horse warriors. So, proto-Mongols. Famous warriors.
But I can’t get over the workmanship on this, particularly given the date. Banging around the web looking for more information, much has been said about how this particular piece had influence from classical Greek art. And it clearly does. But the stuff that isn’t classically inspired is still lovely and technically sophisticated. See Google Images search.
And still most of the articles are about how martial they were. Boo.
November 7, 2016 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 11
…and then the rains came…
This picture. It’s part of the wedding ritual of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.
I am NOT making that up.
I was looking for old footage of somebody baling out a canoe, because that’s what I’ve been doing to my kitchen all evening. We haven’t had rain in ages (driest October in a thousand years, or some shit) and then the heavens opened for a couple of hours.
So, like an old fishing smack, our kitchen roof had dried out and the seams opened up. It was leaking in parallel lines across the stove and working surfaces. Yay.
Fortunately, the kitchen is the only room in the house that does this, as far as we can tell, and it doesn’t do it often. The frame of it is old, but the roof is Seventies. Like Nineteen-Seventies, brrrr.
Anyway. All clean. Hamburgers tonight. It’s the weekend, w00t!
November 4, 2016 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 6
insert thread pun
Eh. I stayed late at work to meet a client who never turned up. I don’t have much to show for myself today.
This guy recreates old master fragments using round frames and a single spool of thread. The text says he usually does computer art and I’m sure he devised a program to work out how to cross over from what angles to get the dark spots just right make the picture. Still cool.
Speaking in my capacity as somebody who went to art school and later dropped out, we need a word for works that are extremely cool but ultimately pointless and emotionally sterile. I don’t have a suggestion, I’m just pointing out the need.
Yes, yes…I am reduced to trawling Bored Panda tonight. Now I’m’a go to Skyrim and shoot more arrows into my horse.
November 3, 2016 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 8
Yoo-hooo? Hel-looo? Anybody in here?
Gab is calling itself “the free speech alternative to Twitter”. Which (inevitably) means “hotbed of disinfranchised righties”, barring a few obvious trolls. Registration isn’t open; if you click the link, you get yourself in a queue.
When I clicked about a month ago, I was told I was number ninety-six thousand something something in line. I finally got in over the weekend.
Annnnnd…now what? Anybody here? JoanOfArgghh! was the first name I recognized. I went and followed everybody in her list, but it’s still early beta (the service was started in August) and slow going.
Here are some articles on Gab in Breitbart, Digital Trends, BuzzFeed, Libertarian Republic and Heat Street.
If you’ve been avoiding Twitter because it’s a sinkhole of SJW nonsense, sign up for Gab. And then look me up, please.
If you’ve been avoiding Twitter because you think the whole idea is stupid…carry on!
November 2, 2016 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 20
Return to Skyrim
So Bethesda Softworks just released a version of Skyrim for PS4, five years after the original PC version. As part of the new port, they updated the background textures and decided to give PC players the newly refurbed version for free. Which is cool.
The new version is hilariously buggy. Well, the crashing all the time wasn’t so hilarious, but that was simple (if strange) fix: disable the Touch Keyboard process using Task Manager. (How people figure out these obscure bugs so fast, I do not know).
The funny thing is, I can tell the difference between the old textures and the new textures, I’m just not sure I prefer either one. Scroll down this article to see what I mean. They should call it Skyrim: Vaseline Edition.
Anyway. Don’t care. Happy to be playing this old favorite again. Anyone on Steam who hasn’t friended me yet, feel free. AuntieWeasel. Gives me the warm fuzzies to see you guys playing games instead of doing anything productive with your lives.
November 1, 2016 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 8
Boo!
Carving pumpkins is one of those things I think I should be good at, because arty. Crosswords is another, because wordy. In truth, I suck at both.
So Uncle B buyed me this nifty pumpkin carving toolkit last week. Did it help? Meh.
Here’s a proper link for the day: Ten Spooky Archaeological Finds. (Ancient Origins is a better website than it looks. I find interesting stuff there and, when in doubt, I cross reference it to more boring sites).
Happy Halloween! (Shoot, I should be doing an invoice tonight).
October 31, 2016 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 19
Happy Halloween, peeps!
In Issue 63 of Creepy (1974), Bruce Jones and Bernie Wrightson collaborated on a nasty little story called ‘Jenifer’. If you search the name, you’ll find plenty of comic book fans calling this the best horror comic EVAH.
I realize that’s a pretty low bar in literary terms, but this ugly work of fiction has a certain…something, I hope you agree.
I found lots of reproductions online, but none very good. They were too big or too small or scanned from a later recolored version, making the text illegible. So I’ve taken the best copy I could find (looked like it was scanned from an original copy), cleaned it up and optimized it a bit. This size works best on my monitor; I hope it looks and reads okay on your screen.
My Halloween gift to you — Jenifer
Have a good weekend, y’all. Our clocks change this weekend, so my Halloween gift to me is — an extra hour’s sleep. Ahhhhh.
October 28, 2016 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 9