There was a time when people saw a bad movie, and it ended at that. There would be no long threads on Twitter (or any social media platform) on the reasons why it sucked, and how it could have been better. The discourse on bad movies remains as there is still unused footage and behind the scenes clips that the producers release for the public to consume. Read more on the reasons why we can’t let go of bad movies at Cracked.
image via wikimedia commons
In his Moschino show in Milan, designer Jeremy Scott raised some important issues through fashion. From the show’s elaborative set pieces of antique mirrors and chandeliers, to elaborative and over the top (frankly, ridiculous) clothes made to resemble pastry, Scott created these dresses not to wear, but to make a point. The New York Times has more details:
Backstage before the show, as models milled around poking fake fingernails tinted spun sugar sweet at their phones, Mr. Scott (nursing a broken elbow in a pink sling) was talking strikes in Chile, the gilets jaunes in France, socialism in the United States, “how stretched and tenuous the idea of democracy has become” and how that led, inescapably, to thoughts of the world before the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette, the woman who has become a symbol of all that decadence and blind frivolity.
Fashion is often dismissed as escapism. But sometimes the fantasy and frills are used to dress up a less palatable idea. A skirtful of irony helps the medicine go down.
It’s a complicated proposition using a runway show of expensive party clothes as a treatise on wealth disparity and the obliviousness of the ruling class. After all, the people who buy them are exactly the people being taken to task. As the show notes read, “the confectionery cocktail dresses stand as a sly comment on the denseness of certain people in power.” Mr. Scott elides the issue by turning it into a joke. The question is: at whose expense?
image via The New York Times
Socializing is difficult. It takes time, effort, and patience to go through multitudes of people and try to strike up a conversation with them. It’s more difficult to find someone that you can have a good bond with, or be a friend. Being an adult means that you might pour most of your time into work, education, or family. Sometimes, it’s hard to allot time to try and broaden your social circle. Also, sometimes we’d rather be alone than with others, to take a break from our daily grind. Quartz has some tips on how to make friends, even with the stress of adulting:
Turning someone into a friend clearly requires a personal investment that can come at the expense of other things, like hobbies, work, or even other relationships. Within the first six weeks of meeting someone as an adult, you’re lucky if you see that person more than once or twice, never mind the 80 to 100 hours that science says it takes to turn them into a friend.
In part, that’s why the most effective way of making new friends, says Kumashiro, is to gravitate towards people who share the same interests as you.
“Join a club of some kind,” echoes Dunbar. He pegs choir as ideal—“singing produces this instant sense of belonging; it’s absolute magic”—but says any club will do. “Hiking, jogging, kayaking, church groups, bridge clubs, you name it—as long as there’s opportunity for people to circulate, and therefore talk to and get to know the other members of the group, that works.” Dunbar calls this the “ice-breaker effect.”
This is a space in which technology and social media can actually help. There is a thriving global market for friend-making apps, like Squad, Hey! VINA, or GayBFF, and websites like Meetup also offer opportunities to meet people who are interested in the same things as you.
image via wikimedia commons
Hollywood is the land of dreams, glamour, artistry, and film. A lot of people who dream of being actors, actresses, and filmmakers dare to move to Los Angeles, California to get their shot. However, as time passes by, productions are moving away from the popular city. In 2017, only ten of the top 100 movies were made in California. Jen Maffesanti details the reasons why the film industry is moving away from California:
Around the mid-1990s, other states and countries saw a chance to entice production companies away from California and to bring their cool — and taxable — jobs with them. States like Louisiana and Georgia along with Canada began offering some pretty sweet incentives packages for filmmakers and production companies.
Some places offered subsidies (direct payments), but the lion’s share of pretty much all of the financial incentive packages was tax breaks (a lower tax bill). Though those two kinds of incentives are often conflated, they are not, in fact, the same thing.
And it worked. The state of Georgia, the UK, and Canada all top Californiawhen it comes to the number of films shot and produced there.
Why would production companies leave what has become their ancestral homeland for Georgia or Louisiana? The same reasons they went to California in the first place: to make more money.
Outside constraints — whether from tyrannical patent trolls like the Edison Trust, micromanaging union guidelines, or well-meaning but poorly-considered legislation — made making movies expensive enough that a reduction in production costs was enough to outweigh the hassle of relocating. It was true in 1909, and it was true in 1997. It remains true today.
image via wikimedia commons
If you’re looking for other ways to peel your hard boiled eggs, the guys at Good Mythical Morning have got you covered. Watch as they try out four different ways of peeling an egg, from rolling to tapping an egg with a spoon. These methods aren’t a guaranteed success when you try them, but at least you know other ways to peel an egg, right?
No, this isn’t about how you can evade a murderer. Dr. Tom Frieden shares how we can avoid heart disease, the number one cause of death in America. Cardiovascular disease is the major source of health care costs in the US. In addition, it also causes disability and related economic loss. CNN has the details:
All of us need to know and control our blood pressure -- the lower the better, down to 120/80. For many of us -- including me -- that means medicine every day for the rest of our lives. People who have had a heart attack or stroke should take a statin. Others at risk are recommended to do so, although there are differing views of the potential population-wide benefit of cholesterol-lowering drugs.
No one should smoke cigarettes or inhale other people's smoke.
We need to walk more -- up stairs, outside, to and from work or school, basically anywhere we enjoy walking or can comfortably walk.
We need to find healthy food we like -- vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, fish -- and eat more of it. And we should consume less salt, and when we do use salt, use low-sodium salt and low-sodium soy sauce (except for people on a potassium-restricted diet).
image via wikimedia commons
Kazuhiro Sekino is the 39-year-old pastor at the Tokyo Lutheran Church, located within walking distance of Kabukicho, Japan’s most notorious red-light district. Sekino is not your typical pastor. With his leather jacket and long hair, Sekino delivers his sermons while grooving on his electric bass. The electric bass is his helpful tool in spreading the good word, as The Japan Times details:
Sekino’s method of delivering God’s message may be unconventional, but he believes it’s a useful tool in reaching more people in a nation where Buddhists far outnumber Christians. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, there were approximately 1.91 million Christians in Japan as of 2016. That’s compared to 87.7 million who considered themselves Buddhists and 84.7 million who affiliated themselves with Shinto.
The casual and unorthodox approach in teaching the Gospel may also be one reason why strangers feel compelled to visit his church.
“People who are struggling or suffering from sickness seem to have a special sensor or a sixth sense that guides them toward me,” says Sekino, who, in October, published “Kami no Shukufuku o Anata ni: Kabukicho no Ura kara Goddoburesu!” (“God Bless You: God bless from the back streets of Kabukicho”) a book about the interesting personalities that found their way to his church. He describes a Filipino hostess who asked Sekino to host a funeral for her dead colleague, an African asylum seeker who came begging for money and a lonely drunk who wandered in during the Christmas season and left a jar of “one-cup” sake as a gift.
image via The Japan Times
Disappearing People is a browser plugin that can make you vanish in your webcam stream. The plugin is created by Google web engineer Jason Mayes. Mayes shared that the plugin attempts to learn over time the background of a video, which enables the user to remove themself from the screen display. Vice has the details:
Disappearing People works by pulling the frames from a webcam, copying them, then scanning the copy for human features. If it sees something it identifies as human, it covers it up with a block of footage of the empty room it pulled from previous frames. Then it serves the humanless stream back to your browser.
It’s not perfect. When playing with it, I’d often see the bricked outline of my body moving across my room. It didn’t remove me from the picture so much as cover me over with glitchy looking copies of my room. But it happens in real time, and that’s still impressive.
image credit: via Vice
Gary DeNoiva has shared his story of dating a ghost named Lisa. The 35-year-old has been dating the ghost for almost three years. They “met” when DeNoiva was eating out alone, with the ghost coming up to him and suggesting the risotto. DeNoiva revealed that they also have a fun ritual on Valentines Day, as Oddee detailed:
We both think that going out on Valentine’s Day is overpriced and overrated. We have a tradition. The night we make popcorn and ice cream sundaes.”
“Then we watch our favorite movie, which ironically is Ghost. I know… we’re so corny. We can’t help it. Afterward, we make love on a bed of roses. The roses stay on the bed when we go to sleep, so we wake up to the smell of flowers. This year we’re getting kinky. We’re going to have our first threesome. Lisa has recently befriended a female spirit and I thought it would be fun to bring her over and spice things up. I’ve never had one before. Not even with two living women. I’m a little nervous, so needless to say there will be a lot of wine involved to loosen me up. Her only rule is she doesn’t want me kissing her friend Sadie, which I am totally okay with.”
DeNoiva also told Daily Star Online about things he does for her during the day. “I make her breakfast in bed. French toast is her favorite. I also leave notes hidden throughout our apartment for her to find while I’m at work. Romantic things, inside jokes, naughty talk. Basically, anything that will make her smile.”
image via Oddee
Nigel Hill found a glass bottle on the beach that contained a letter dated Sept. 5, 1938. Hill was walking his dog when he found the bottle that had been drifting in water for nearly 82 years! Hill found an address and a name on the letter, and aims to reach out to the family of the person who signed the letter, as UPI detailed:
The letter, which was signed John Stapleford, included an address in Hertfordshire, England, and asked that the person who finds the bottle get into contact with its author.
Hill said he managed to get into contact with the current resident of the listed address, but they were not related to the former resident and didn't know how to contact his family.
Hill said he thinks it's unlikely that Stapleford is still alive, but he would like to find the man's family and present them with the message in a bottle.
image via wikimedia commons
The cat obviously can’t pass through its designated door. Watch as the cat tries to get through, but with the dog’s head clearly blocking the door, it’s time for the cat to move to another place. Maybe there’s another cat door somewhere in the house that isn’t blocked by a dog.
(Via Digg)
image screenshot via Digg
Bas Timmer is a 29-year old fashion designer from the Netherlands who created the Sheltersuit, a warm, water and windproof jacket for homeless people. The Sheltersuit also doubles as a sleeping bag, and can be easily carried around. Timmer is now in America to convince the fashion industry to donate to homeless people, as Mashable details:
For the past three weeks, Timmer has been in America in an effort to expand his organization (called Sheltersuit Foundation in the Netherlands) here. He wants the fashion industry to take notice and intentionally handed out suits in New York City to homeless people during New York's Fashion Week from Feb. 6 to 13. Timmer hopes this will push clothing companies to donate their materials waste to Sheltersuit and other like-minded organizations, given that about 30 percent of clothes are never sold and end up in landfills.
Since Sheltersuit started in 2014, companies have been donating Timmer materials, like sleeping bags and tent fabrics that would have been thrown away because of production mistakes like a misplaced logo. Some companies reached out to Sheltersuit after seeing the organization in the media. The suit is made entirely out of these upcycled materials, from the belts that act as the backpack's straps to the large hood that can block out glaring lights homeless people often have to contend with while sleeping on the street.
image via Mashable
Yossi Lugasi spent over four decades creating mosaic portraits of famous people by smashing ceramics and placing it all over his home. He was able to complete over 1,090 mosaics in his lifetime. Lugasi never studied art formally, and created his mosaics with a technique that he developed himself. From portraits of political leaders to television icons, Lugasi poured his time and passion into creating the delicate pieces that now adorn all corners of his home. Atlas Obscura has the details:
He created the mosaics with a technique he developed himself: he made pencil drawings on an insect protection net covered with a special substance. He then glued on the mosaic stones, which were actually bits of tiles, ceramics, and construction waste that he collected and smashed to pieces.
“He would walk on foot from Jaffa to Tel Aviv and stand for hours in front of an art supplies store just to ‘fill up’,” with inspiration, Yaffa says. When he turned 13, as a bar mitzvah present, he went to visit his friends from the absorption camp back in the 1950s. The friends had moved to the poor ‘“development town” of Beit She’an. The camp was razed, and beneath it were found the remains of the grand Roman and Byzantine city Scythopolis and its many mosaics. As an adult, when he couldn’t find a place to store drawings that were vulnerable to the rain and sun, Lugasi chose as his medium the eternal mosaic, which, like in Scythopolis, never peels or fades.
Today, impossible meetings occur on Lugasi’s roof, under the strong Jaffa sun: Ben Gurion is watching Clinton and Elvis is staring at Itzhak Rabin. One could expect Lugasi to reject those people, the representatives of an establishment that marginalized him. Avi says his father did the exact opposite: He built a shrine to them, and so reclaimed power. “His creation,” Avi says, “complements his life story.”
image via Atlas Obscura
There is an abandoned oil storage vessel five miles off the coast of Yemen. The FSO Safer has been there unattended for half a decade. The vessel is packed with more than a million barrels of oil, and if Safer doesn’t get to leak volumes of oil into the sea, it may explode. The barrels of oil in the ship mix easily with water. If the oil in Safer leaks to the sea, it will not settle at the top or sink at the bottom; instead it will mix with the sea and endanger marine life. OpenDemocracy has the details:
“They consider it as a hostage and they want to keep it because they can threaten the coalition forces in the Red Sea,” says Yemeni economic researcher Abdulwahed Al-Obaly.
Al-Obaly is an employee of the Safer company. He says that the FSO Safer was due to be replaced by a land-based storage facility years ago but the project was never completed. By 2015, millions of dollars a year were being spent on maintenance costs racked up by the vessel, says Al-Obaly. He explains how the explosive gases that build up in the Safer’s storage tanks over time would periodically have to be vacuumed off. Since civil war broke out, little or no maintenance has been carried out.
“Any kind of ship that sits in the sea or moves around in the sea has to be regularly maintained,” says Laleh Khalili, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University London.
In the absence of constant sanding and painting of the hull, the Safer has essentially been left to rot. And while Prof Khalili notes that tankers caught in the midst of past conflicts in the region have been known to leak oil before, the volume of crude on the Safer puts it into a league of its own.
“That makes it a lot more of a concern,” she says.
The Houthi strategy of using the Safer as a bargaining chip is potentially disastrous. If gases on board were to ignite, experts fear they could cause a gigantic explosion deadly to any individuals or shipping in the vicinity at the time. Plus, the Red Sea is a particularly salty body of water, meaning that the Safer’s hull is corroding faster than it would elsewhere in the world.
image via OpenDemocracy
Mt. Ijen is a dormant volcano near Java, Indonesia. The volcano is famous for its electric-blue fire and toxic yellow smoke. It is also one of the most dangerous mining locations to work in, and workers mine the yellow stalactites found in the caldera floor. The miners chip off chunks from the stalactites to obtain sulfur. Wired’s Michael Hardy shared photographer Larry Louie’s experience in the mine:
They started climbing Mt. Ijen in the middle of the night and reached the summit just before dawn in order to see the blue flames. As the sun rose, they descended into the vast volcanic caldera, which emits billowing clouds of sulfur from hundreds of cracks in the earth. Ceramic pipes placed by miners in the caldera floor direct some of the smoke toward collection points, where the superheated gas instantly turns into a solid, forming dripping yellow stalactites.
These stalactites are what the workers mine. Using picks, they chip off chunks of sulfur, place them in reed baskets, and carry them up to the top of the crater, where they are loaded into wheelbarrows for the trip down the mountain. (Sulfur is used in cosmetics, explosives, and agricultural products.) Louie learned from his guide that workers spend 12-hour shifts dodging plumes of poisonous smoke (with many protected only by rags tied around their mouths) while carrying up to 180 pounds of sulfur on their backs. With temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a pervasive smell of rotten eggs, it’s one of the most dangerous and unpleasant jobs on earth—but pays $12 a day, a relatively high salary for that part of Indonesia.
Louie’s guide provided him and his wife with gas masks, but they were too clogged to be useful. This became a problem when Louie insisted on getting as close as possible to his subjects. After three hours of shooting, he nearly passed out from all the toxic smoke. “I got a little dizzy and was losing my eyesight a little bit,” he says. “Fortunately my wife saw me and she yelled to the guide to get me out of there.” They eventually made the decision to end the expedition early and descend the mountain. Louie had hoped to return the next day to shoot more photographs, but felt too sick to make another climb.
Louie has photographed people working in some of the world’s most extreme environments, including a Bangledeshi garbage dump, an Indian jute mill, and a Moroccan tannery. But few workers labor under conditions as difficult as the sulfur miners on Mt. Ijen. “I’ve always been interested in highlighting the strength of people and the struggles of workers around the world,” he says.
image via Wired
