March 4, 2011
Mass games or mass gymnastics are a form of performing arts in which large numbers of performers take part in a highly regimented performance that emphasizes group dynamics rather than individual prowess. The effect of displaying huge images is achieved by a having large number of individuals each being dressed in a particular color or holding a colored hard paper above their heads.
Because of the vast scale of the performance, with often tens of thousands of performers, mass games are performed in stadiums, often accompanied by a background of card-turners occupying the seats on the opposite side from the viewers. The rapid change of images was achieved by changing a card with another in swift and synchronized movement. The synchronization is achieved after several hours-long rehearsals and employs much choreography.
read more »
Posted in Art, Politics, World |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
eBoy (‘Godfathers of Pixel’) is a pixel art group founded in 1997 by Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital. Their work makes intense use of popular culture and commercial icons, and their style is presented in three-dimensional isometric illustrations filled with robots, cars, guns and girls.
‘If we don’t work on other projects at the same time it takes about six to eight weeks to finish a very detailed cityscape, three eBoy’s working on it, nearly full time. But, if we have to do it in our spare time, which happens often, it could take years to finish a picture since we can’t spend so much time on it.’
Posted in Art, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
Pixels is a short film created and directed by French film-maker Patrick Jean. It’s about the invasion of New York by a classic 8-bit video games, such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Tetris, Arkanoid, and others. Pixels was picked up by Adam Sandler’s production company to be developed into a feature film.
Posted in Art, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
Pixel art is a form of digital art, created through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. Graphics in most old (or relatively limited) computer and video games, graphing calculator games, and many mobile phone games are mostly pixel art. The term pixel art was first published by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1982. The concept, however, goes back about 10 years before that, for example in Richard Shoup’s SuperPaint system in 1972, also at Xerox PARC.
Some traditional art forms, such as counted-thread embroidery (including cross-stitch) and some kinds of mosaic and beadwork, are very similar to pixel art. These art forms construct pictures out of small colored units similar to the pixels of modern digital computing. Image filters (such as blurring or alpha-blending) or tools with automatic anti-aliasing are considered not valid tools for pixel art, as such tools calculate new pixel values automatically, contrasting with the precise manual arrangement of pixels associated with pixel art.
Posted in Art, Technology |
2 Comments »
March 4, 2011
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed (falsified) sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against him, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.
The name ‘joe job’ originated from such a spam attack on Joe Doll, webmaster of Joe’s Cyberpost. One user’s joes.com account was removed due to advertising through spam. In retaliation, the user sent another spam with the ‘reply-to’ headers forged to make it appear to be from Joe Doll. Besides prompting angry replies, it also caused joes.com to fall prey to denial-of-service attacks that temporarily took the web site down.
Posted in Language, Money, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.
The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and can be used in peace-time.
Posted in Language, Politics, War |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself.
read more »
Posted in Humor, Language, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
Eating Animals is the third book by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2009. It is a work of non-fiction exploring the topics of factory farming and commercial fisheries. He examines topics such as by-catch (fish caught unintentionally in a fishery while intending to catch other fish) and slaughterhouse conditions, learning that Indonesian shrimp trawlers kill 58 pounds of sea creatures for every 1 pound of shrimp, and that in American slaughterhouses, cows are consistently ‘bled, dismembered, and skinned while conscious.’
He also explores the health risks which pervade American factory farming, for example that H1N1 originated in a North Carolina factory farm, and that according to Consumer Reports, 98 percent of American chicken is infected with campylobacter or salmonella at the time of consumption. Foer also examines the cultural meaning of food, beginning with the experience of his own grandmother, who survived the holocaust, with a lifelong obsession over food. He builds on and ultimately criticizes the work of Michael Pollan on our relationship to the food we eat.
Posted in Art, Food, Health |
Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011
Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth, Western Australia. His work consists of recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music, a method of sampling first made popular by House music producer and UK Garage influence Todd Edwards in the 1990s.
His track Alice is a composition of sounds from the Disney film Alice in Wonderland. Pogo took part in a project hosted by Disney/Pixar to produce a track based on their film, Up. He has later since produced two more mixes, ‘Toyz Noize’ and ‘Buzzwing,’ based on the movie Toy Story. Pogo has since produced tracks using samples from films such as Mary Poppins, Snow White, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Sword in the Stone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Hook, Toy Story, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Posted in Art, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
The Daily Omnivore 