Decisions, decisions. Sometimes we torture ourselves with all the pros and cons and the fear of choosing unwisely. Often one option is just as good as the other, which makes deciding all that much more difficult. The secret is to make the jump and don't look back. Once you've found the dress, or house, or career you select, quit shopping and tell yourself you made the right choice. Nothing is set in stone, not even regrets.
This is the latest from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics. Read more about his inner conflicts in his book The Shape of Ideas.
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The Zymoglyphic Museum in Portland, Oregon, is full of fantastic exhibits from fictional worlds. There are mermaids, eyeball plants, and clams wearing eyeglasses. But there are also specimens of Xenophora, a genus of mollusks that are very real -and very weird. These sea snails decorate their own shells with other shells! Well, some species prefer rocks for accessories. It's a method of camouflage, but you can see why each shell can be seen as once housing an artist of sorts. See lots of Xenophora shells from the Zymoglyphic Museum at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Philippe Alès)
When Captain James Cook and his crew landed in Hawaii (which they called the Sandwich Islands) in 1778, the meeting set off a culture clash that has repercussions to this day. The islanders had beliefs, customs, and rituals that sailors misread through the lens of their own culture. And once their reports were published, it was almost impossible to change the impressions of those outside Hawaii. The hula was a ritual performed by both men and women that included dance, poetry, and music for both religious and secular reasons, but what stood out to the sailors was that the women were topless.
In his journal, Captain Cook described the Hawaiians’ hula: “Their dances are prefaced with a slow, solemn song, in which all the party join, moving their legs, and gently striking their breasts in a manner and with attitudes that are perfectly easy and graceful.”
In The Natives Are Restless, Hale explains, “To be sexually adept and sensually alive—and to have the ability to experience unrestrained desire—was as important to ancient Hawaiians as having sex to produce offspring. The vital energy caused by desire and passion was itself worshiped and idolized.”
Cook and his men—and the merchants, whalers, artists, and writers who followed—mistook the hula’s sexually charged fertility rituals as a signal the Hawaiians’ youngest and loveliest women were both promiscuous and sexually available to anyone who set foot on their beaches. In her 2012 book Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire, historian Adria L. Imada explains how natural hospitality of “aloha” culture—the word used as a greeting that also means “love”—made Hawaiians vulnerable to outside exploitation. To Westerners, the fantasy of a hula girl willingly submitting to the sexual desires of a white man represented the convenient narrative of a people so generous they’d willing give up their land without a fight.
Contrary to this fantasy, the people populating the eight islands of the Hawaiian archipelago weren’t so submissive.
When word about Hawaii got out, everyone wanted to go -including missionaries who went to convert the islanders and instill a proper sense of shame about women's bodies. Read how Westerners made the hula into a permanent and profitable stereotype at Collectors Weekly. The article contains some vintage nudity.
Scientists are able to grow human tissue in a laboratory, but that's far from being able to grow viable organs. One of the biggest problems is that working organs must be fed by a vascular system that carries nutrients through blood vessels, down to tiny capillaries that are hard to design, much less make. But nature may have a workaround in the form of plant cellulose.
One of the defining traits of a leaf is the branching network of thin veins that delivers water and nutrients to its cells. Now, scientists have used plant veins to replicate the way blood moves through human tissue. The work involves modifying a spinach leaf in the lab to remove its plant cells, which leaves behind a frame made of cellulose.
“Cellulose is biocompatible [and] has been used in a wide variety of regenerative medicine applications, such as cartilage tissue engineering, bone tissue engineering, and wound healing,” the authors write in their paper.
Once they had nothing left but the spinach leaf's cellulose framework, they grew living tissue over it and sent artificial blood through the veins. Read about the groundbreaking experiment at National Geographic. The results are promising.
(Image credit: Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
So many of the conventions that ruled how men and women interacted were "unwritten rules" that everyone understood, but were not legally codified. Conformity came from social pressure from the majority of people who just knew that "that's the way it is." Such was the dress code for the U.S. Senate that expected women to wear dresses long after those in other professions were wearing pantsuits, uniform pants, or jeans to work.
As the upper house in the U.S. legislature, the Senate has always been more formal and reserved than the House. Even during the 1980s, pants on women were apparently too much for that august chamber to handle. Individual Senate offices had their own rules, but on the floor, women wearing pants were verboten, which could necessitate quick changes. "We've heard from women staff that in the 1980s, if they came in to work—if they were called in on an emergency basis—they needed to keep a dress to put on quickly or they had to borrow one if they had to appear on the Senate floor," Richard A. Baker, Senate historian from 1975 to 2009, told The Washington Post in 2002.
While the dress code for the Senate was never officially codified, the norms were enforced by Senate doorkeepers, who controlled access to the chamber and served partly as security guards, partly as protocol monitors. Even today, they assess each person seeking entry, making sure they are supposed to be there and are dressed appropriately. The problem is that "dressed appropriately" has historically been up to the discretion of the doorkeeper on duty: Doorkeepers made determinations based on personal opinion or instructions from their boss, the sergeant at arms.
What did it take for the doorkeepers to back down over enforcing that dresses be worn by women senators? It took a critical number of concurrent women senators (six), and one breaking the unwritten rule in order to bring the entire subject up for discussion. Read how that finally happened in 1993 at mental_floss.
In 1885, the mining community of Rock Springs, Wyoming, exploded in anger over Chinese laborers working in the mines. None of the coal miners were getting rich, but the immigrants were paid less and diluted the power of the white miner's union demands.
The fight in the mines broke out around 7 a.m. on September 2, 1885, when about ten white miners approached the Chinese workers in coal pit № 6, claiming they had no right to work in the high-yield mine. A brawl erupted between the men and three Chinese miners. One Chinese worker took the fatal blow of a pickaxe to the skull. The site’s foreman broke up the fight, and the white men took off, setting in motion a conflagration that would last into that night.
The gang of men did not retire after the fight; instead they armed themselves with guns, knives, clubs, and hatchets. At 10 o’clock, miners gathered in the Knights of Labor hall, where anger echoed and reverberated. After the meeting they filed into shops and saloons, where barmen soon began to sense the growing hostility and aggression, and at the urging of a Union Pacific official, closed their establishments around 2 p.m. On the move, the mob swelled to some 100 to 150 miners and townspeople, some of them women, armed and looking for what they considered retaliation.
Before the riot was over, 28 people were dead, and the rest of the Chinese were expelled from Rock Springs, set to wander down the tracks. Read the story of the Rock Creek Massacre at Timeline. -via Digg
Do you know what happens when you use a road for hundreds of years without paving it? Foot traffic, horses, and vehicles wear away the soil, sinking the road down into the ground. Europe has many of these holloways, although a casual traveler might not see them because they aren't the well-maintained highways that will get you from here to there in a hurry. Instead, they are attractions in themselves.
Appearing as trenches dredged through the earth or tunnels cleared through forests, these ancient pathways called holloways or sunken lanes are found all across the European countryside. They originally began at the ground level, but over the centuries, under the tread of a million feet and hooves encompassing thousands of journeys, the floor of these roads have worn away and eroded down to the bedrock, creating ditches that lay beneath the level of the surrounding landscape. With high banks on either side, many of these ancient thoroughfare then became temporary waterways during rains, which further deepened and widened the paths making them permanent features of the landscape. Some of these paths are twenty to thirty feet deep, and look more like gorges than roads.
You can see plenty of photographs of the different holloways of Europe at Amusing Planet. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Romain Bréget)
Have you ever heard the term "China Girl" and wondered what it meant? It has nothing to do with race, at least not when used in filmmaking, and it has nothing to do with the David Bowie song.
The China Girl was a model photographed by a filmmaker to help the lab technician calibrate their equipment while processing the film, a reference plate to help the technician get the colors right.
The term China Girl is a reference to the mannequins made of porcelain (china) filmmakers used in this function, and eventually came to refer to the live models who posed for these test shots as well.
And even though the live models weren't always thrilled to pose as China Girls for a filmmaker, they must have liked knowing their photo was seen by audiences before the main feature!
In 2011 the Chicago Film Society began collecting China Girl portraits and sharing them online in their Leader Ladies Project, many of which can be seen in this surreal short by Julie Buck and Karin Segal.
See The Forgotten 'China Girls' Hidden At The Beginning Of Old Films here
It's hard to imagine your vision working completely different than it does, which is why these illustrations helping people with "normal" vision understand what colorblindness looks like are so fascinating.
If you're not colorblind, seeing things without blues, greens and reds can be quite strange and even a bit creepy, but it's a great way to appriciate how things look for those who can't see those colors naturally.
You can see more samples like these at Bright Side.
(Alternate Opening To A New Hope by Morgan Yon)
Alternative facts aren't cool, and they will never replace cold, hard facts, but alternate takes on our favorite pop culture franchises are often cool enough to take on a life of their own.
For instance, these fan art pieces depicting alternate scenes from the original Star Wars trilogy are cool enough to be used as concept art on a project, but the artists didn't create them for use in a film.
(The Final Test by Markus Stadlober)
They were submissions for the ILM ART Department Challenge, hosted by Industrial Light & Magic, Wacom and ArtStation, and each piece tells a compelling tale we'll never get to see on the big screen.
(Image by Matt Rhodes)
These alternate artworks were created within a strict set of guidelines, in order to give the artists a taste of what it would feel like to work for ILM as a concept artist:
The guidelines set by ILM were as follows:
- Think about the story you are trying to tell with the image - it should be cinematic and convey a specific emotion.
- The image must fit within Episodes IV - VI aesthetic.
- Again, everything used must already exist within the world of Star Wars.
(Marauders by Pavel Goloviy)
See Star Wars Fan Art Imagines Alternate Endings here
Alternate Opening To A New Hope by Morgan Yon
hey psst, wanna buy some cubes
Serbian artist Tomislav Jagnjić creates lovely digital artwork of science fiction and fantasy scenes, and then gives them hilariously subversive titles.
yo bro is it safe down there in the woods? yeah man it's cool
You can see more of these at his web gallery. Hovering over an image will give you its title. I think there's an implied permission to use these images from the Facebook comments.
Leo Olten Dunkelberger Tomislav, do you have a site that sells prints or anything? :D
Tomislav Jagnjić no man just download it from artstation and print it who gives a sh*t :D or pm me and say which one u want in hi-res and i'll send it to ya
-via io9
You think you recognize this picture when you really have never seen it before. Redditor vic8760 created it by accident while working with artificial intelligence (or at least he says it was an accident). Sure, it looks like Napoleon Crossing the Alps, except made up of smaller images from other familiar artworks. But it's not. Look closer, and every figure you thought you saw is only a drape of color, somewhat resembling fabric. You can enlarge the image here to see the details. The more you look, the less sense it makes. The program may have been "inspired" by other artworks, but it didn't exactly use them in creating this image.
The image of Superman promoting tolerance and diversity among schoolchildren is authentic. It's a 1949 image by comic book artist Wayne Boring, used in school posters and book covers. It's a relic of a campaign to stamp out racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice in the United States at a time when Europe was undergoing a seismic swell of anti-semitism in the path to World War II.
In 1938, the New York City Board of Education began requiring students to learn about how multiple groups contributed to American history. When World War II erupted one year later, the demand for tolerance education spiked. The New York Times reported in 1939 that "Instances were cited of teachers in New York City and elsewhere being 'ridiculed, harassed and otherwise impeded' by pupils under the influence of, and stimulated by, Nazi doctrine." To nip foreign propaganda in the bud, schools across the country joined the tolerance movement. Military leaders encouraged it, too. They knew that American troops, many of them fresh out of school, would fight their best if they learned to set aside their differences.
Countless non-profit groups, many of them interreligious, led the charge. Burkholder writes that “Religious leaders, educators, and politicians stressed tolerance as a central tenet of democracy." They provided prejudice-fighting materials to schools, from teachers’ manuals to comic books to textbooks.
Outside of school, short pro-tolerance films played at the beginning of movies. People held tolerance rallies. The National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed 10 million “Badge of Tolerance” buttons. Groups such as the Council Against Intolerance in America distributed maps showing the breadth of diversity in America’s cultural landscape. Even Superboy stepped in, telling a bunch of his schoolmates that “No single land, race or nationality can claim this country as its own.” At the end, Superboy and his pals celebrate by eating Swedish meatballs.
That all sounds well and good, but it didn't last. The groups that led the charge for tolerance were eventually accused of being "un-American" themselves! Read what happened at mental_floss.
That one scene we all remember so well from The Empire Strikes Back is now available with an all-cat cast! Pasdidée set up the frame and then had to be very patient for his two cats to get their parts right. Here the human version and cat version are shown side-by-side, or rather, top and bottom, as it were.
In fact, they may have even switched roles in the middle, but it's hard to tell. Even for the director. -via reddit
Reiyukai Shakaden Temple-Tokyo, Japan
In the comics a building owned by a supervillain has a suitably evil-looking exterior so there's no mistaking who the building belongs to, but in the real world buildings aren't built to look evil- or are they?
Polygone Riviera-Cagnes-sur-Mer, France
Perhaps architects who read comics when they're kids have their designs influenced by comic art, or maybe they simply decided dark and foreboding is the best way to make their building stand out.
The Max Planck Research Institute for Experimental Medicine- Berlin, Germany
Take a tour of the world's most sinister looking structures via the subreddit /r/evilbuildings and see what people really mean when they say "chillin' like a villain".
MahaNakhon Tower- Bangkok, Thailand
See The Most Diabolically Evil-Looking Buildings In The World here
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