Muppet Mashups
notebook
Stuff that caught my eye.
Jul 04
Jul 03
You are not alone
Jun 26
Matisse meets Megaton in James Barnett’s ‘Fauxvism’ landscapes
I get a kind of perverse thrill out of using old, old art styles to depict these very modern things. The Fauves came after the Impressionists and just went bonkers with slabs of paint and these crazy colors and cartoony outlines; as videogames get closer and closer to reality, I thought it’d be fun to jump back and paint them like that.
May 20
“ Degree classifications (first, upper second, lower second, third, fail) mean rather little when you consider the mark range typically used to define them: first, anything from 70% upwards; upper second, from 60% to 69%; lower second, 50% to 59%; third, 40% to 49%; fail, anything below 40%. That’s just 30 marks to sort the sheep from the goats. Examiners are often resolutely reluctant to give much more than 70%, notwithstanding requests from university managements to ‘use the whole mark range at your disposal’. So the interpretation of these grades tends to go like this: First - excellent, outstanding, might one day go on to do research and become one of us; upper second - above average, maybe even just below outstanding; lower second – was there and completed the course without major mishap; third - was usually there but struggled, or did quite well when he/she was actually there, which wasn’t often; fail - well, either sadly or pathetically or even proudly hopeless.
May 16
Touched by the hand of Mod: Dear Esther
Written by RPS
“I love my Marios and what-have-you as much as the next person, but I still feel games have an incredible untapped potential for negative emotions. Some have tried - Braid stands out for having a bloody good go - but we’re still a little too comfortable with enjoying everything we play. Any stretches of sadness in this medium tend to be restricted to self-indulgence or vapid tearjerker fare, and even they invariably make way for happy endings and bunny fluff.
Dear Esther rejects pretty much every notion of what videogames should do, and instead presents a profound look at what they /could/ be doing. They could be telling stories that, while unforgiving and upsetting, exist within a format that no novel or film could ever reproduce.”
May 06
May 05
Diem Chau carves crayola crayons
May 03
“ Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft’s many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities — over time, without a plan
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The dumbing-down of programming
REBELLING AGAINST MICROSOFT, “MY COMPUTER” AND EASY-TO-USE WIZARDS, AN ENGINEER REDISCOVERS THE JOYS OF DIFFICULT COMPUTING.
“ Researchers at the University of Melbourne confirmed this little truism in a new study. Their research found that, on average, employees who use the Internet during work hours for personal reasons are 9% more productive than those who don’t.
May 01
Apr 30
Apr 10
3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix
ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) — This story is, literally, stone age meets digital age: University of Washington researchers are combining the ancient art of ceramics and the new technology of 3-D printing. Along the way, they are making 3-D printing dramatically cheaper.
About five years ago, Mark Ganter, a UW mechanical engineering professor and longtime practitioner of 3-D printing, became frustrated with the high cost of commercial materials and began experimenting with his own formulas. He and his students gradually developed a home-brew approach, replacing a proprietary mix with artists’ ceramic powder blended with sugar and maltodextrin, a nutritional supplement. The results are printed in a recent issue of Ceramics Monthly.
