Posts tagged with art

You've got to try this.

It's like a tiny little myst adventure in beautiful steam-punk 2D flash game.

Play Little Wheel a tasty little morsel by One Click Dog.

via Das Cartoonist.

Tinselman should like this.

Intelligent online cartoons:

• xkcd. yes everyone already knows about this one. IPv4 space (notice how apple has as much space as all of japan? trust me they don't need it). how pure is your scientific discipline? frequently a bit ... odd.
• Basic Instructions. How to make a good impression at a job interview. How to converse with someone you don't want to talk to. Scott Adams experimented with him in turning it into a print cartoon but it just wouldn't fit into the restricted size.
• Savage Chickens. Peace and wisdom. Dachshund. My most recent discovery.

There's plenty of crap out there. Can you add any other good ones?

When I was just a young tyke, getting beat up by my peers every day, I retreated to the little school library to immerse myself in visions of the future. Little did I know that some day the mythical year "2001" would come and pass in a blaze of ... nothing spectacular. Well anyway, I think it's fun to look back at those visions of the future and look in awe at the coolness of how we should now be living.

My absolute favorite of all time series was called "World of Tommorow" by Neil Ardley, who also collaborated on the famous "How Things Work" with another of my favorites, David Macaulay (see him talk at TED!).

I love how Ardley saw us with huge gigantic wall-sized computers completely taking over our houses:

Or maybe you'd prefer to see what the tank of the future will look like (n.b., it's robotic!)

Playing holographic games could also be fun...

And there's more—two whole books are online: World of Tomorrow - Health and Medicine, and World of Tomorrow - School, Work and Play. I want my wall-screen TV.

Check out this artist hiding out in an Ikea store using a unique urban camouflage. Watch as he disappears in plain sight!

This Japanese clothing designer has another safety-minded approach: a vending-machine dress.

And finally, something I really wish I could buy. A sure-fire way to hide on the street when life just becomes too much:

It comes complete with vents so you can look out and watch the world go by while you hide and wait for your therapist.

I just wonder how you get into it without being noticed...

Wow, WYM Editor is so cool that I can just like type in a new blog post whenever I want to. Wild!

So anyway, I've been saving up a whole load of links and stuff for months until I had this new site all sorted out. So here's something.

Hmm... where did my "stuff to blog about" folder go?

Oh, here's an awesome one. Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad. These guys kick ass. Watch as they take apart a MacBook Air and declare "No Waste Outside, Nothing but Waste Inside".

About 30 screws were used to attach the keyboard alone. "The total number of screws in the MacBook Air was several times the number used in a PC we make," one of the engineers said.

Burn, baby, burn!

OK, here's another one from the files. Nathan Fawkes Art. He's part of a network of film animators and illustrators and concept artists who all have their stuff up on blogspot.

And I'd like to remind myself particularly about this post about science fiction.

So Saxite is the new name for my siteware project. For those of you not paying attention, it's all written in XSLT and XML and it runs on AxKit.

I decided to make an icon so I came up with this icon, below.

Like it? I was inspired by a recent issue of Computer Arts Projects (one of the fantastic UK graphic design magazines that my local Indigo store carries) that was all about fonts, to do some of my own font work. So, I had a visual idea of what I wanted the logo to look like, with the X as a white space in the middle, and then I looked for a font on my system that was very blocky and thick and wound up with Arial Black. "ITE" on Arial Black are very generic, but I really didn't think that the S worked at all for me, and the A didn't fit, and the X I didn't like either (not wide enough).

So I started with the A. I actually did the A from scratch, not even bother to look at the Arial A. It's more like half of an A anyway. Next I got the X in the shape I wanted, and filled in the negative space on the right side with the I. Getting the hole in the A to look right was tricky, right now it's actually a white copy of the shape of the A!

Oh yeah, and check out the arrow in the A too :-) (it's pointing right). And check out the angle bracket on the right side of the X :-)

I spent by far the most time on the "S". I didn't like the original Arial S and wanted to replace it the most since it's by far the most identifiable letter of the ones I used. Also it didn't look blocky and aggressive enough in my opinion. There was quite a bit of variation in the width of stroke which I didn't like, so I drew my own "S" over top of it with a more even stroke (drawn with beziers). I also didn't like the flat ends so I switched over to ends on 45-degree angles. Getting it to balance was interesting ... the bottom end of the S actually extends out beyond the curve above it, while the top end is shorter than the curve below it. Weird.

I actually tried out another one which was even more streamlined, with the top and bottom strokes ending totally horizontally (like in the Star Wars logo) but that looked too, I don't know, sci-fi?

Finally I added the hole to the right of the X, before the I. And then I redrew the rest of the letters by hand so that they would all flow together. Now there's no Arial Black left at all.

Oh yeah, and post-processing in Photoshop to give it that 3d look.

Although I love graphic design, I've never been able to get the hang of colour. I usually work in black and white. My colour palettes usually suck. The colours on this site are nice but that's a very lengthy evolution and they could still be better.

Now if I ever need a colour palette I'll just go to this flickr set by lunaryuna called quest for colour . It's bloody brilliant.

Here's a random sample, just reload to see another 4, or click through for higher-rez versions...

I came up with this image yesterday when I was thinking about Disney's role in the fantasyland movie that ABC just broadcast (Disney owns ABC and apparently backed the film).

To be honest, I just like the colours. I always thought this was a cool logo. But anyways, no more Mr. Nice Guy or whatever. I had a look at the font on their original logo and it looks to me like Rockwell Light so I had a go in PhotoShop and changed "Pictures" to "Politics". Now Disney can put this up on the front of all their political propaganda pieces.

It didn't make much of a splash when I posted it in my diary so I figured it wasn't that good, but I guess that there really isn't any proper correlation between Recommendations and actual merit on DKos—at least in the "long tail" of non-superstar diarists. I think that has something to do with their horrible, horrible tagging browser.

A bunch of links and things.

Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.

mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800' 

My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.

How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.

Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .

Enough for now...

First up. Could marquetry be automated? It's the process of making very complex patterns with inlaid veneer wood . I've always though of veneer as being a bit cheap, because of all the veneer particleboard furniture you can get these days, but real wood veneer can actually have aesthetic purposes if you're mixing different kinds of woods. Or, you can use it to have a surface of some very high quality wood (like oak) which would expensive to get solid. And also destructive to the environment. So, question is, could you make a machine that could automatically do inlaid veneers on a production line? As complicated as these exhibited at the Getty?

Next. University of California at Santa Barbara. Party school? No doubt. But nonetheless their library has produced this fine online collection of ancient cylinder recordings from the turn of the 20th century. Voices out of the past. Too cool.

Finally. ISOC is the Internet Society , a non-profit organization based in the US chartered to uphold the principles of the internet. It's an organization that has a slightly bizarre history, like a lot of techie organizations that try to do something non-technical. Oh well. I want to draw your attention to the year 2001. Put yourself in Salt Lake City, Utah, December 8 and 9.

Prior to that year ISOC was a membership organization . Technically speaking that means that the members have ultimate control over what the organization does. (This is non-profit lingo.) But at that meeting, the Board of Trustees of ISOC decided to change the rules. Using a virtual majority vote they exercised their power to effectively eliminate membership oversight and put in place a self-perpetuating board . Which means that the board as of that meeting can now stay on the board basically forever and maintain control of the organization perpetually.

Now you can argue plenty that the board is well meaning but the Salt Lake City meeting minutes show that only one or two of the trustees seem to have been concerned about the change.

Another point of contention is the definition of the election or nomination to the board: Manuel points out that the proposed wording would in theory allow for a self perpetuating board. This is however mitigated by the term limit provisions of the bylaws, but Marty points out the term limits allow someone to serve on the Board for six out of every seven years, and therefore a group can control the ISOC Board almost in perpetuity by having Trustees take one year off after every two consecutive terms.

Marty's analysis is correct, by the way.

Another interesting point is that if you look at ISOC documents (bylaws, etc.) from before the Salt Lake City meeting, you can do that using the Wayback Machine at the awesome Internet Archive. According to the bylaws just prior to the S.L.C. meeting , the bylaws require that notice be given of proposed changes ... presumably so that people who are concerned can raise their voices. In this case, notice was not given . So, you can easily form the opinion that the change from a membership body to a self-perpetuating board was made in a slightly undemocratic way.

[UPDATE 2006-02-19: I was wrong about notice, because the bylaws don't actually require notice of the changes to be given to anyone but the Trustees. They were (apparently) given notice.]

You might well ask "who cares?" and I for one might not care all that much, because as people have pointed out, ISOC is doing good work. Right now. However it bothers me that this change was made and it seems that ISOC doesn't want to repair it. ISOC's Board claims that they are membership-driven, and operationally, they are ... for now. But what will happen in the future? Another Salt Lake City-style power grab? It's hard to say. And they are in charge of .ORG registrations because of their speaking-for-the-public cred.

What can you do about it? Well, start by complaining, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Or considering running for the board on a reform platform. That's what I would do if I didn't hate travelling so much (they fly you to meetings around the world).

So I was just putting the finishing touches on the beginning of my wikipedia article on the History of computer science , writing about that great wronged genius Alan Turing (wronged in his own time, not ours), when I was reminded of my "famous" math NEWS cover on the subject of Turing's machine .

The cover appeared in this 1999 issue of the magazine best known for profquotes. If you've never looked before, put on your sunglasses and maybe start with The Best of mathNEWS .

Does Wikimedia Commons take cartoons?

Some bookmarks are just too good to keep to myself. The Canadian Architect and Builder is an online archive of fully-scanned images of this journal, published between 1888 and 1908. They've got some really beautiful drawings. Run, do not walk, to the "plates" ... the rest is text & ads, which I find a bit dull. But the pictures rock. Especially if you then go and google for the buildings and see what they look like today vs. 100 years ago.

The Gallery of Computation

More: The Processing gallery (I liked Tokyo).

A cool timeline with pictures .