Really cool paintings Masakatsu Sashie! Like little colored Deathstars.
Part futuristic and nostalgic, part triumphant and tragic, part pop art and architectural Masakatsu Sashie’s tremendous paintings are depictions of decaying civilizations punctuated–and possibly being observed by–giant, self-contained, floating spheres. His work, besides being visually strong, conjures up many a question: is this time after civilization, is this an entirely pessimistic view of our current state (after all, video game machines can’t be that bad), and, most of all, why is a dystopian future so hard to look away from?
People having fun. This is what summer and being human are all about. I want to take part really bad. Columbus, Ohio lets get it on. I have the perfect helmet to make for it.
Via Wikipedia:
The CTFL was started by Robert Easley in Seattle, Washington. Robert had childhood memories of hitting friends and family with cardboard tubes in mock sword fights. He came up with the idea of starting regular tournaments around the act of cardboard tube fighting. This idea comes from three core beliefs:
People need more ways to play and take themselves less seriously.
Events can be fun without alcohol.
Cardboard sword fighting is fun.
The CTFL hosts tournaments and battles where cardboard tube fighters go head-to-head in an attempt to break their opponents tube without breaking their own. The events also focus on cardboard costumes and theatrics. These events are often held at public parks throughout the summer, are open to everyone ages 5 and up, and emphasize fun over competition. Cardboard tubes are provided and all events are free for participants.
Via the San Francisco chapter:
“The CTFL was created out of a desperate need to better train and arm citizens with cardboard tubes. While many speculate that our fore fathers, when drafting the constitution, originally intended the fourth amendment to refer to fire arms, there is now a small group of non-academics who believe that they were more likely referring to elite militias of card board tube wielding ninjas. While this training often takes place during childhood, it is discarded by adults who remain uneducated about the importance of such practices. The goal of the CTFL is to provide organized cardboard tube based events that help spread cardboard awareness.”
Cardboard Tube Fighting League in Philadelphia – Battle Royal!
There are rules:
1) Don’t break your tube. In a duel, the last person with an unbroken tube is the winner. In the event that both participants break their tubes at the same time, both duelists are considered losers. A tube is considered broken when it is held horizontal and the tip drops to an angle greater than 45 degrees or it is completely detached from the rest of the tube.
2) No swinging arms. No body slamming.
3) No stabbing. Lunges involving tubes are not allowed under any circumstances. Participants who exhibit this behavior will be ejected from the event.
4) Do not attack the opponent’s face. Hitting the face is heavily frowned upon and can force ejection from the event.
5) Once a tube is broken, fighting must cease.
6) Only official CTFL tubes are allowed. These tubes are provided at the events.
7) No blocking of opponent’s tube other than with your own tube.
8 ) Tubes must always be held near the end. Participants may switch ends as they see fit. Holding tubes in the middle is illegal.
… as long as there are people with the passion and skills of this man. Go ahead and laugh at this slightly overweight Street-Fighter wanna-be, but I promise you that you’ll want him on your side one day.
I feel safer knowing there are others out there who will help protect us against the eventual robot monkey apocalypse.
A man lives alone in a small apartment. The little contact he had with other people has dropped to zero since the rabbit appeared. Every attempt to get the rabbit out of his apartment has failed and since he is not sure whether or not pets are allowed in the building, he does not let anybody enter his apartment.
When you start living with a secret, it begins to be harder and harder to “live”. No social life, no love life, no family life. But if you look deeper and deeper you’ll find out that everybody has a secret, even your neighbour. An awesome animation film in 3D made by Egmont Mayer. Check out his blog.
The only really interesting one to me seems to be the rectangular one, below ground, and green. Who care about the stadiums really, Brasils fans are the real attraction. How fun.
Complete Guide features complete coverage of the 25 major moustache groups, enabling you to instantly identify any moustache you spot without even putting down your ukulele.
This is a really great set of sketches done by Chuck Dillon, categorizing the different types of students he’s had in the past 10 years of teaching art at the Hussian School of Art in Philidelphia. I think I fit into the Average Student more than any of the others. Yay average!
Please check out his blog, and specifically his post about the 20 types of art students. Very funny funny.
Here is a cool house with an option you dont see very often (unfortunately).
It is a perfect blend of skate ramps and house, neither one nor the other, but both. So cool.
I love the fireplace in the middle of the room.
Built in Athens, Greece as a rooftop addition to an existing building, Ramp House is a new take on the idea of home:
“Basic house elements such as the fireplace and storage units are hidden inside the ramp forms. I also tried to combine the street aesthetics of the skate scene using concrete and the cozy atmosphere of a house using wood. So concrete walls mold into the floor and then concrete turns into wood to create a ramp partition with the kitchen. In that way, the whole space is in actual motion and somebody can flow from one space to the other, skating or walking.”
If you’re interested, there are a ton of pictures of the space on the Archivirus site.
I love this collection of beauties. Star Wars references, either subtly or running wild and untamed, have been added to some of the classic images of the fine arts world. Bravo to SomethingAwful.com for gathering this fine collection. A few below, and many many many more too!
Baha’i Youth Animators, amongst other things, are usually young adults who help the youth and jr-youth of a community devise and implement plans of community service as well as look to their spiritual, intellectual, and creative development. This is the stuff folks. There is much more that goes on, but alas I am not experienced as of late.
Check out the supa-dupa fly video below. Some friends of mine are in it, and I am immensely proud of them, and equally as ashamed that I’m not doing more. Dang Yo! Really really amazing. Keep it up.
The Andrew Johnson creation below, needless to say it fits all my criteria: awesomeness, check: Star Wars reference, check: people working for unity, check. This is a great picture, and I would go see the film.
Welcome! You found me! One thing is for certain… folks everywhere, they love LOVE! For me to cover printing and shipping costs, I humbly come forth and ask for your help. For just $5 you can help spread incredible joy, and feel awesome at the same time! Bonus! We are all in this together, make it happen, show your support… go team!
If you need a foreign language or special order card… email me!
The Columbus Crew is getting ready to start their defense of their impressive 2008 MLS Cup winning season soon, and doing duty as a good fan, I present you the 2009 schedule.
Below you’ll find links to popular calendar formats. Click the XML button to add the feed of the calendar to an RSS reader type program/live bookmarks/etc, the iCal button for your calendar program like Apple iCal or Google Calendar, and the HTML button will simply show you a browser version. You can now sync your Google calendar with your iPhone, sweet!
This is really genius. These are the type of things where creativity really pays, because you never know who that one person is who will really go for something, regardless of the price. I think trapeze lessons with members of Nine Inch Nails would be cool. Anyone have a spare $75K?
Over the past year or so, we’ve chronicled multiple different musicians adopting a “tiered” approach to selling things. It makes a lot of sense: give people different options, and added value for paying more, and they’ll often take you up on it. Two of the more impressive examples of this were Jill Sobule and Trent Reznor (two very different artists, obviously). Now it appears that Josh Freese, who has played drums for Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails in the past (as well as spending time in Devo, Guns N Roses, the Vandals, and backing a bunch of others… including Sting, Katy Perry, Clay Aitken and various others), is releasing his latest new album with a rather hilarious (if hopefully tongue in cheek) take on the tiers (thanks Brian).
The tiers start out normally enough, though, there doesn’t seem to be a free tier (boo!) and the prices even seem slightly higher than Reznor’s successful tiers. But then, he starts adding a ton of higher end tiers with various (often extremely funny) options — all involving access to him or other musicians he’s played with (access is a scarce good, of course). It starts at the $50 level, where you can get:
“Thank you” phone call from Josh for buying Since 1972. You can tell him what you like about the record that you purchased, or what you thought sucked. Ask whatever you want, like “Is Maynard really THAT weird?” or “Which one of Sting’s mansions has the comfiest beds?” or “Are Devo really suburban robots that monitor reality or just a bunch of dads from Ohio?” or “Why don’t the Vandals play more stuff off the first record?” It’s your 5 minutes to yack it up. Talk about whatever you want. And then gets more involved (“lunch date with Josh to PF Changs or The Cheesecake Factory (whatever you’re into)”) the more you pay. At $1,000, there’s: “Get drunk and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on YouTube, of course).” And, of course, all the way up at $75,000 you get the following:
$75,000 (limited edition of 1)
Signed CD/DVD and digital download
T-shirt
Go on tour with Josh for a few days
Have Josh write, record and release a 5-song EP about you and your life story
Take home any of his drum sets (only one, but you can choose which one)
Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from Tool’s Lamborghini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while
Josh will join your band for a month … play shows, record, party with groupies, etc.
If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4-day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a U.S. resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks
Take a flying trapeze lesson with Josh and Robin from NIN, go back to Robins place afterwards and his wife will make you raw lasagna
He may just be mocking the concept, but it’s pretty amusing, and I’m sure plenty of fans will take him up on the lower level offerings, at least. Though, he may want to watch out. As Jill Sobule learned, even if she thought no one would take her up on the $10,000 option, someone did. For Josh, at $10,000, that would mean that someone gets to spend some time at Disneyland with Josh — and then get to keep his Volvo station wagon (yup, that’s what it says).
I posted last year about the mega building being built in Dubai, UAE, the Burj Dubai. It reminded me of the buildings I saw in the Star Wars movies from the city-planet of Coruscant. What could be better than that? As it turns out, the Burj Dubai is much cooler than that. It is a pimp bonafide hustler in the area of attracting lightning.
Another entry for you from the “future is on its way” department:
Wii balance board/Google Earth mashup.
Germany’s Research Center for Artificial Intelligence has hacked together a Wii balance board with Google Earth to go surfing, as kottke says, “like the Silver Surfer.”
It actually looks pretty lame, but it really made my imagination run. I can see this really going places. I need to eat better and workout more. I want to live long enough to see all the really cool things the future has in store for me. No more of this.
Ah! Fire, Fire!
I’ve done a fewposts on these buildings, and it came as a shock to me today, 8 days after it happened, that there had been a huge fire, and one of the buildings in the complex, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, completely burned out!
This wiki page explains everything better than me, but see below anyway!
Images and video instantly got out thanks to individuals using Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc…, but if you were in China the next day looking for news online or over the airwaves, you were outta luck. The LA Times had a good article about it.
The fire started when fireworks somehow lit the building on fire. Fireworks are illegal in Beijing except during special festivals, such as that night, the final night of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year celebrations.
The CCTV (China Central Television) is THE state run television service in China, and has long been seen as a large agent in spreading the Chinese government propaganda. This is the reason you see comments like the one below:
“As long as there aren’t any injuries, let it burn. They don’t need so many buildings [in]the first place,” wrote one typical anonymous poster at the popular news portal Sohu.com. “CCTV enjoys too much luxury already. They will always have enough buildings, even though this building is down.”
Only one person, a firefighter, lost their life in this catastrophe. They are holding 8 men who arranged the fireworks display, without obtaining a permit first. Ouch!
There was a rumor that the fancy metal exterior of the building, a zinc and titanium alloy, could be to blame as well.
No adult size. …Yet!
