Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
When I Tell People I Work from Home
When I Tell People I Work from Home
More and more people every day find themselves working a real job from home, but that is still a novel idea for most of the folks around them. Actually, my home office looks like this. And when I tell people I work from home, they assume I am a housewife and have plenty of time to drive them somewhere or volunteer for their community project. Link
Top 10 Security Assessment Tools - LINUX For You
Saturday, February 25, 2012
[humor] Blind date. Featuring Ellie Kemper
Is this the kind of thing you want to tell someone on a blind date? Featuring Ellie Kemper from NBC's The Office.
Bizarre painters and their weird & gross techniques
Yea, most of these are cheap-shot novelty painters, a few even tasteless to the general public, but anyway, if you must express yourself, whatever floats your boat...
The man who paints with his p*nis
The painter who uses vomit
The painter who paints with basketballs
The painter who uses human blood
The underwater painters
The painter who uses her breasts
The painter who paints with his tongue
The painter who uses dead ants
The painter who uses his eye
The painter who uses human ashes
Phone booths as book exchanges
Even as they are rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of smartphones, I’m interested in pay phones because they are both anachronistic and quotidian. Relics, they’re dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, a skeuomorph hearkening back to a lost shared public space we might no longer have any use for. Something to be nostalgic for, in the way I can’t think about a phone booth without conjuring up images of an old, impatient woman banging on the door to one while I was inside using a calling card to ask for money.
Volkswagen Imperial AT-AT Walker
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/laughingsquid/~3/8FN9wk8Cl9I/
In 2009, EMPIDOC posted images of this Volkswagen T1 van that has been awesomely transformed into a Star Wars Imperial AT-AT Walker.
via Jack Schofield and ThinkGeek
images via EMPIDOC and Lozerifornia
The Films of Cinematic Pioneer Georges Méliès, as Seen in Hugo
Pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès, seen here playing two roles in his 1902 film “L’homme à la tête de caoutchouc” (aka The Man with the Rubber Head), made more than 500 films between 1896 and 1914. The film Hugo, one of 2011′s most award-nominated films, features Georges Méliès as a character and shows excerpts of some of his most famous films. We’ve collected a few of those and others here, plus a little more context on Méliès’ life and work.
Méliès began his career as a magician, and in The Vanishing Lady, one of his first films, he recreates a classic magic trick with the latest in film editing sorcery: the jump-cut. More details for film nerds here.
In another early film, The Haunted Castle (aka Le manoir du diable), also from 1896, Méliès uses more tricky edits to bring characters in and out of the film, sometimes in a puff of smoke and usually startling the trespassers in the nefarious castle. Very mild suspense elements by today’s standards, but nonetheless groundbreaking. This film is considered both the first horror film and the first vampire film. It’s the first (not last) fake-bat-on-a-string-that-turns-into-a-man film, for sure.
Méliès innovated constantly in his work: he was one of the first to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. Keep in mind the first film shot with a motion picture camera was in 1888–these were very early days. His films had no sound, if they were accompanied by music in theaters it was played live and was different each time. So any music on these videos is a much later addition.
Hugo features scenes from 1902′s A Trip to the Moon, probably Méliès’ most famous film:
[A Trip to the Moon] includes the celebrated scene in which a spaceship hits the the man in the moon in the eye; it was loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. In the film Méliès stars as Professor Barbenfouillis, a character similar to the astronomer he played in The Astronomer’s Dream in 1898.
The film was distributed in black & white and hand-painted color prints. No color prints were known until a discovery in 1993. After 10+ years of work a restored color print debuted at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival with a new soundtrack by the band Air. See a clip below and the full black & white film here. The whole film is also available at The Internet Archive.
One topic not covered in Hugo is that this film was an early subject of film piracy, perpetrated by none other than Thomas Edison. This was a contributing factor to Méliès’ financial ruin and the end of his film-making career. Ironically, if not for the pirated versions we probably wouldn’t have copies of many of the 200 of his films that survive today.
Other notable Méliès films include the fairy tales Cinderella (1899) and Bluebeard (1902), Le dirigeable fantastique (1905) and 1911′s Les hallucinations du baron de Münchhausen–the first of many films made about a real German nobleman’s exaggerated adventures. The Film Journal has a great blog on Méliès and his work from a few years back.
Finally, one last colorful short Danse du feu from 1899, which like The Vanishing Lady above features his future wife Jeanne d’Alcy who is also a character in Hugo. Here’s more on this short from The Film Journal.
