http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20vDLw2pp0
Donald F. Glut is a writer, director, etc. of films, comics, TV, etc. He also made a bunch of amateur films in his teens and twenties, including one based on Spider-Man in 1969.
This is how I’m reading newspapers from now on.
A band I’ve never heard of before, the Australian jazz fusion group Pyramid, performed at the 1983 Montreux Jazz Festival. This video of them performing “The Odyssey” was introduced to me on IRC in the following way:
< lunar> hey here’s a video that contains moustaches, beards, mullets, aviators and a lot of synth brass
This description is highly accurate.
Really good op ed in The New York Times by Stephanie Coontz on gender equality and how we’re not there yet:
Scroll through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.
How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?
This reactive response to progressing gender equality in this country as having exalted women over men is pretty much hogwash, and Coontz has loads of numbers to back that up:
… the median wages of female managers are just 73 percent of what male managers earn.
… the percentage of female electrical engineers doubled in each decade in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But in the two decades since 1990 it has increased by only a single percentage point, leaving women at just 10 percent of the total.
… a 2010 Catalyst survey found that female M.B.A.’s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless.
And there’s a lot more, including a bit on the “masculine mystique” and how gender expectations harm men as well as women. Feminism is for everyone.
A must-read.
This is New Zealand hip hop group Organized Rhyme. (Unrelated to the early 90s Tom Green project.) I found this on YouTube while browsing around for, of all things, New Zealand rap. (Hey, I was just curious.)
This track, “We Bak”, is actually pretty good. The production is really cheesy but I enjoy their flows a lot, and man that hook is great. They have a couple of other videos and they’re worth checking out but I think this one is probably the strongest.
Josh Dixon of Cultso has collected a bunch of pieces of art by Bryan Lewis Saunders. One of Saunders’s projects is taking a drug and drawing a self-portrait under its effects. He has taken some really nasty drugs and been hospitalized as a direct result of this project.
The picture accompanying this post was drawn while he was under the influence of cocaine. Click it to view the rest.
Iran’s News Agency Reruns The Onion as Real News:
This is… simply astounding.
It’s Friday, so that means it’s time to learn about combinatorial explosion and the tragic future loneliness of robot teachers with anime!
The first part of it is a little boring, but please stick with it to the end. Everything that happens after the five and a half minute mark makes it worth it.
SIGGRAPH always has some amazing stuff. For example, if for some reason you were simulating cloth in 3D and needed to generate sound effects for the cloth’s movement, now you can do that, thanks to some folks at Cornell University.
Cul de Sac comic ends as homage to ‘dying yet mighty art form’
Philip Potempa for The Times of Northwest Indiana:
Last month Universal, the syndication company for [Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac], announced the newspaper feature, which they described as “one of the most celebrated comics of this generation,” would begin what was termed “an indefinite hiatus after Sunday, Sept. 23.”
The comic, acknowledged by talents such as Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and iconic editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, is “closing its curtains,” according to the Universal press contact, due to Thompson’s battle with Parkinson’s disease.
I heard that Cul de Sac was ending a few days before it ended, but for some reason I never posted anything here about it. Now’s as good a time as any.
Cul de Sac was, quite simply, my favorite comic strip that was still updating. Parkinson’s is an awful, terrible thing, and I wish him all the best.
The strip’s suspension was announced through a Q&A with Thompson by an exec of his syndicate, and you should probably read it.
This is a MIDI written by video game composer Yousuke Yasui in 1999 titled “Que Cela Cela.”
I’m linking this mostly because of the amazing MIDI visualizations. First the PARALLAX SCROLLING OF MIDI CHANNELS happening in the first half because they’re apparently being rendered in 3D space, and then later the endless staircase of keyboards. Astounding.
