…for your surgery when the “nurse” turns around, revealing their full backpiece. I got a big kick out of this photo (admittedly it's Freakgarcia's place in Brasil though, not a doctor's office). Thanks to Biscoito for the picture, the full set will be in one of the next image updates.
A few entries back I posted about pro-cyclist David Clinger's facial tattoo. Thanks to a tip from John about this posting on VeloNews which includes the first photo of David's tattoo. If more professional athletes were willing to do this the world would be a much better place… I know for me, wearing “my signature” on my face has been a liberating experience.
(c/o mal) Many of you have already seen CT and Goddam's infamous and much-distributed “penis plugs” picture. Well, apparently so has Finish modern “artist” Jukka Korkeila who's just painted a copy of it and signed his own name on it, titling the painting “Red shift” and presumably trying to sell it for some typically enormous amount of money.
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Luckily, Korkeila does not quote or appropriate. His semi-fictional paintings "are neither parallel, nor, consequently, autonomous from, the actual world. In fact they militate against such autonomy, precisely quoting the way Baroque art militated for an enfolded, entrapped relationship with the real world.
As you can see from the above animation, Jukka Korkeila does not only quote and appropriate, but pretty directly rips off other people's artwork. Jukka, if you're going to steal other people's ideas, there's nothing wrong with that — in fact much of art's history is built around it — but at least have the courage and strength of character to admit when you're doing it so blatantly. Yes, I know that it's also written that you “borrow” and “out of this diverse assortment of signs [you] meticulously build a whole, defamiliarising the content”, but there's a world of difference between inserting a fragment of an idea into your art, and wholesale copying of an entire piece.
Update: I've just been shown even more artwork that Jukka Korkeila appears to have stolen from BME and is claiming as his own. What a loser. If you're going to do this, I'm sure people would be flattered if you just asked… But just doing it without asking and then taking credit for other people's creativity is really lame:
Update #2: Hello boing boing readers (thanks Cory).
So I was reading a truly laughable article in WIRED that suggests that we're leaving the information age and entering the “empathic age” or something similarly contrived, suggesting that there will be more value placed on artistry than technical skill. What a load of crap. First of all, anyone can be a great artist. All you have to do is lighten up and take the stick out of your ass. That's all there is to it. Technical mastery is ultimately what makes someone valuable in terms of achieving independent success. The only people I know that have been able to become independently successful are masters of both halves of their brain. Don't believe these lies.
It's not hard to do these things. The average person is a lazy moron… I got a surprising number of congratulatory messages from people about plugging in Google's mapping system to iam.pro2. I'd like to quote briefly from one.
If I want to add this kind of functionality to projects I work on, it is like pulling teeth. Costs so much, takes so long, no one knows how to do it... it takes huge teams.
Want to know how many lines of code it took to add that functionality?
Two lines.
Here is the code, in its entirety that was required to add that functionality.
glink = "https://maps.google.com/maps?q=" & toPut(studioaddress1) & ",+" & toPut(studiocity) & ",+" & toPut(studiostate) & ",+" & toPut(studiozip)frm = frm & "(<a href=""" & glink & """>SHOW ME A GOOGLE MAP</a>)"
That's so simple that I assume anyone, including non-programmers can understand it. The first line builds the link to the Google mapping system by simply stringing together the address elements from the database. The second line inserts the relevant HTML into the current form. There is no excuse whatsoever for any programmer spending more than a few seconds implementing this.
For those of you who worry, “but how will I get a job if I tattoo my face?” I'll repeat the obvious — the tattoo on your face is irrelevant if you're better than your competition. The sad, pathetic truth of the matter is that the above, which I'm pretty sure every person reading this can understand, is above the heads of most workers in most technical jobs.
Some of you may not yet have seen what President Bush had to say about American workers. Even though civilized countries like France have a 35 hour work week, here's what Bush had to tell a woman who told Bush she had to work three jobs just to stay afloat:
PRESIDENT BUSH: You work three jobs?MARY MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)
No, it's not “fantastic.” It's terrible. It shows you everything that's gone wrong in America as it has systematically — and by design — destroyed its education system over the last hundred years. I'd like to remind you of what William Torrey, the US Commissioner of Education had to say about the purpose of the education system:
"Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
John Dewey, considered one of the fathers of the modern education system wrote,
"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
Finally, I'd also like to quote former President Woodrow Wilson on education.
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
It is very important that people understand that this fate that has befallen America and the world is not bad luck. All of this was carefully planned by the ruling class in early America in order to make it nearly impossible for the masses to rise up and seize power. That said, this entry isn't about telling you about fascism in America and what makes it tick. Earlier today on boing boing I saw the following picture of an oarfish that had washed up in Australia.
But seriously, what's alarming is not so much the fact that these creatures exist, but that they're washing up in increasing numbers. The fear is that the ocean is dying and can't protect us much longer. Now, the planet will survive if the ocean starts to put off CO2 rather than absorbing it. However, it will mean the death of almost all life on land, including humans, because our atmosphere will be converted in a period of less than a hundred years into something unbreathable by current domestic lifeforms.
An awful lot of me wants to point out that strange sounds have been coming from the depths and lead you on an Ickian spiele about how Reptilian invaders have taken over the government — after all, the far more sane Seymour Hersch claims that less than ten men currently control the totality of the US government:
...there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is.
I'd almost prefer it to be an alien invasion where they're trying to force our own industries to pollute our atmosphere to the point where they can breathe it and we can not… At least that was funny in the movies. Sadly though I think it's just a combination of greed and incompetence. Now, I'm quite likely speaking a little strongly when I talk about an ocean flip killing all the land-based life on the planet. I think a more “reasonable” person would say, 99.99% of all land-based animals on the planet will be killed.
I personally believe that a small number of humans could survive, perhaps a few million of them. With that in mind, China is arming itself to the teeth with immense new purchases of Russian weapons and delivery systems capable of delivering nuclear bombs to US and European cities. Russia as well has been test firing its big iron ICBMs, America has been potentially violating nuclear test bans developing a whole new slew of nukes, and of course France keeps chugging along as a weapon building nation… to say nothing of the rapid deployment of space based weapons. Don't get distracted by Vietnam re-runs… bigger things are afoot (but you can bet that China is going to keep selling missiles to Iran purely to financially decimate the US prior to world war).
As they say, if you want to know the truth, follow the money.
Real money all around the world is being poured into preparing for a final showdown. Two hundred countries enter, one country survives. I don't believe that politics alone will set it into motion, but as we kill the air and the sea and destroy the habitability of the rest of our world, we leave precious few resources for us to fight for and produce our food with. To take it back to the start of this entry, there are two kinds of people who will survive this environmental apocalypse if it comes — the wealthy, and the talented. Don't be the 99% that they turn into slaves, because the slaves will not survive when the shit hits the fan, especially if the robot slaves are developed first.
Learn to do everything you can and learn to do it well. Educate yourselves. God won't save you.
Yeah, I know right now you're having a Tigerland moment.
PS. Go out in style, get a shirt. Non-IAM members, click here if you want one.
…I'm going to publish an entry made up of nothing but screencaps of AIM and other IM conversations that happen to be in the background of photos that people send me. Sometimes I think it's included on purpose, other times it's obvious that it's not.
Oops!
