John Farrier's Blog Posts
Megan Lara has created several images of geek icons reminiscent of the style of Art Nouveau illustrator Alphonse Mucha. This piece is part of a triptych also featuring Princess Peach and Samus Aran. In addition, Lara does tattoo designs, a medium that strikes me as quite appropriate for her style.
Artist Website via Fanboy
(Video Link)
Zero Charisma is a film project led by Katie Graham, Andrew Matthews, and Thomas Fernandes. They hope to raise $15,000 to turn the above trailer into a feature-length movie. Here's a synopsis of their story:
Scott Weidemeier spends his time in exactly three ways: working a menial job at a local donut shop, caring for his abusive grandmother, and running The Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Game of All Time. Though overbearing and short-tempered, Scott is a hero to his fellow players--that is, until neo-nerd hipster Miles Butler joins the game, fueling Scott's rampant insecurity and alienating him from his own players. Can Scott overcome his contempt for the mainstreaming of nerdery, or will this clash of the subcultures come to a head?
The best line from the trailer: "I weep for the women of your generation."
Link via Nerd Bastards
Would life make more sense if you suddenly realized that you're actually inside Super Mario Bros.?
Also: turtles can climb fences? If snapping turtles can do this and develop opposable thumbs, we're in trouble.
via Geekosystem | Photo: unknown
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This simple but beautiful video from Harvard University shows fifteen pendulums of increasing length swinging to and fro. Sometimes they appear to be in sync, but at other times, not. Here's why:
The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.
Link via Kottke
The Marquis Los Cabos resort in Mexico now offers a thousand-dollar popsicle. What makes it so pricey? It's made with 24-carat gold flakes and a luxury band of tequila that costs $1500 a bottle.
Link via Born Rich | Photo: Fox News
The icy treat is served poolside on a classic plastic stick and has a little sugar in it to take the edge off, though salt would seem to be more appropriate.
The patrician popsicle joins a world of fantasy foods that includes the $1,000 pizza served at Nino’s Bellisima restaurant in New York and the $1,200 Mai Tai mixed up at the the Merchant Hotel in Belfast, Ireland.
Link via Born Rich | Photo: Fox News
Wellington R. Burt (d. 1919) amassed a vast fortune during his lifetime, but he didn't want it to spoil his children or grandchildren. They needed to make it on their own in the world, so he bequeathed to them comparatively small stipends and ordered that the rest of his fortune -- now measured at $100 million -- be distributed to members of his family only 21 years after the death of his last grandchild. That time has finally arrived:
Link | Photo: Saginaw News/AP
Now that it's 21 years since the death of the last grandchild, the fortune is finally being turned over to Cameron and 11 others, including three great-grandchildren, seven great-great grandchildren and another great-great-great grandchild. The fortune is valued at more than $100 million. (She'll get a little more than $2.6 million, since those further up the family tree get more under a master agreement).
Link | Photo: Saginaw News/AP
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Michelangelo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was noted for his preferences for grotesque pizza toppings, such as chocolate sprinkles with clam sauce. These dedicated fans took up the onerous task of preparing and then eating 29 of Michelangelo's recipies. Let us salute their courage.
Content warning: increasingly foul language through the video (which is perhaps understandable, given what they're consuming).
via blastr
It's like you can't walk through Manhattan without tripping over a superhero. I guess you New Yorkers are pretty lucky that way, though you do end up attracting a lot of supervillains, too.
At the link, you can view more details about the locations of eight of these heroes (not Stan Lee).
Link via Comics Alliance | Image: Owen Parsons
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Have you ever played one of those labyrinth games where you're trying to move a marble around a wooden maze by altering its pitch? This is a giant version which is played with a bowling ball and controlled with a tablet computer. It was on display yesterday at Google's I/O Conference.
Link via Popular Science | Conference Website (auto-sound)
Oh! The garbage chute was a really wonderful idea. What an incredible smell you've discovered! Let's get out of here!
via Walyou | Photo: Unknown
Shove a 1943 Beechcraft body onto a 1979 Jeep Cherokee chassis, and this beauty is the result. The Beech Car was built by Bob A. Pfeiffer in 1984 and is now up for sale. The custom-built interior still looks much like an airplane, especially the driver's seat. It was used, among other promotional purposes, to transport a hockey team's cheerleaders onto the ice.
Link | Photo: Craigslist
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This commercial for an energy drink features a paintball machine with 840 barrels. It fires a single volley with different colors to produce, in just a second, a image through a stencil. The action starts at 0:35.
via This Is Colossal | Previously: Paintball Art
In 2004 in São Paulo, Brazilian artist Jum Nakao held a fashion show exhibiting many amazing dresses composed of delicate sheets of intricately cut paper. In an interview about his work, Nakao wrote about a subsequent and similar exhibition by writing:
In the end, everything was torn up on the catwalk. We used vegetable paper and turned it into something sublime and fantastic with low- and high-relief carving, laces and manual cuts, origami, laser cuts. The idea of the project was to show that it does not matter what clothing is made of. People think that everything must be made in high definition, everything must be made in gold, everything must be made in brass, everything must be made in silk, but it doesn’t matter. It shows people that their values need to be reanalyzed, that materiality doesn’t matter. That is why we destroy everything, to show that there is something more important, something much more lasting than what people see and value at first sight.
http://uponafold.com.au/blog/post/jum-nakao-s-paper-dresses/ via Dude Craft | Photo: Once Upon a Fold | Artist's Website | Interview
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