Friday, December 17, 2004
(Original forum unavailable, sorry)*
Friday, December 17, 2004
Someone sent me this photo recently, but I'm 99% sure they didn't take it themselves (and from the filename I think there may be more in the series), and in any case it's not as if they're replying to my email. So I'm posting it here to see if anyone has any more information…
First, where is this picture taken? From the people in the photo, my thought is Yemen; I don't think it's India or Pakistan (since many people may have that as a gut response). My second and bigger question is about the tattoo machine. It's hard to tell but it looks like a manufactured unit. Who makes it, how does it work (rotary, sprint+electromagnets?), and all that?
If anyone has any good links to alternate designs of modern tattoo machines around the world, I'm interested in seeing them as well.
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Thursday, December 16, 2004
[via MeFi] I've talked about the the starving ocean here before, but I just saw a very disturbing story about something that's going on in the central Pacific Ocean. It's a region that not a lot of people travel through, but is unique because it's one of those places that ocean currents swirl… if you drop something in the ocean, the Pacific Gyre is where it eventually ends up.
If plastic — which is not biodegradable — is thrown in the ocean, it breaks down into smaller pieces, but never fully disappears. If you are sailing around the world and take a swim out in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles away from land (the Pacific Gyre is about half way between Hawaii and California), even after a few minutes in the ocean you will emerge covered in small bits of plastic.
Currently these regions contain about five times as much plastic as they do plankton. Conservative estimates suggest that this could go as high as a sixty to one ratio over the next decade, with the rest of the ocean being affected as well. The end result of this is significant damage to the entire ocean ecosystem, which is what the rest of the planet relies on as a buffer.
Drain a man of his blood, and you destroy his flesh.
Watch this video and understand something important.
We can not at present fix this problem. The best we can do right now is stop it from getting worse by cutting down on our pollution… and unfortunately that's just not happening.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
I've just posted the last experience update of the year with about 150 new stories (a total of 9,081 for the year) — although I've taken the leaderboards offline, so unless you grabbed them about five minutes ago before I deleted them, you're going to have to wait a little to find out who are the top contributors and top reviewers for the year. I will tell you though that for this update the top ten reviewers are:
drip (85), Cerra (79), maryofdoom (70), Mandrake (65), der_narr (63), seahorse girl (59), Enid (42), rebekah (39), Ruby (38), and Don (38).
Thank you as always to the writers and the review team, although I'm sort of thinking that I need to add a spellcheck to the comment system… I get some angry retorts when a story is rejected with comments like “I've read better written nostral experience, read some and get idea on how to write a better experience.” Here are some responses from the last few updates:
pretty lame guys, oh well your probably americans, your country was founded on censorship, print what you want.
Fuck you all my story was fine who gives a shit if "I" put i in lowercase everybody knows what it mean oh and fuck your stupid ass 800 word count thats bullshit anyways by the way whoever said that it is unsafe to strech your ears too fast and ill find that out soon enough can eat my nuts cuz my ears are fine and if nothing to a 2g is too fast for you shitheads whats this whole scalping from nothing to a 00g about yeah so what it was done in my bathroom instead at tattoo shop who cares well what i guess i am saying is that it was stupid of yall to denie me for the reasons yall did and i dont realy give a shit so in all fuck off (oh did you notice there was no capital words and it is all a run on sentence) bitches, love always the 17 yr old punk
god its not school.. i spent time writing this and resubmitted it to what they said and it gets turned down.. its not freakin school .. im done
Gosh how far up their own arses are some of your members? They obviously are so blinkered they have no room for normal people. HOW DARE that arsehole slate my grammar, I am dyslexic and struggled to make 800 words and struggled to write the whole damn thing for bugger all. And you (staff) are just as bad allowing narrow minded bigots say what goes and allow personal comments to be made and then worse still get passed on!
Thank you as well to la negra for another wonderful cover shot — photo by Antonio Florez Gutierrez.
Well, I've got some programming to do this afternoon, and if I can squeeze in the time I really, really want to do some video editing (for myself, not work or BME related)… Since that box is being dismantled temporarily, it might be a little while before I can edit video again so if I can do it now I'd like to… but that's a matter of figuring out how to squeeze it into my insane schedule. One of the sad things about having a lot of “real work” projects is that it affords you so little time to just relax and jam.
Oh, and I have to complete the design of the 2004 year-end shirts!
