This is a stop motion video I made to document my process of crocheting one of my larger than life portraits in yarn from start to finish. In my work I use a traditional basic crochet technique taught to me at an early age by my Gran. I work one knot at a time, from the inside out, row by row. In making the crochet portraits I always begin in the middle with the eyes and work out from there until the piece is completed. I work directly from photographs, using no sketches, graphs or computer imaging. Each piece is handmade, labour-intensive, instinctively composed. Nothing is planned ahead; I make it up as I go along. I spend a lot of time simply looking, unraveling, and reworking until I get it right. To make this video I photographed the work after each new yarn colour or two was added, and edited the photos into a sequence. This 30 second sequence contains over 300 photos of the work in progress. The portrait is of my dear friend Arthur Cheesman, who is sadly no longer with us. Music by Aikamusic/Goldcard.
Abzde set a slinky upon an inclined treadmill and the brave spring proceeded to slink its way down that machine for 3 heart-pounding minutes and 20 unbeatable seconds. Watch as the slinky moves from side to side, nearly -- but not quite -- going over the edge time and again, tempting fate and laughing at danger with its brave non-hands planted upon its heroic non-hips. Oh, slinky.
In this cellphone video, NYPD sergeant Lesly Charles threatens a group of men with his gun and threatens to rape them, while simultaneously condoning their criminal behavior of "hustling." The New York Postfirst published this video, recorded and shared by one of the young men and shared under anonymity.
“I have the long d--k. You don’t,” the cop bragged.
“Your pretty face — I like it very much. My d--k will go in your mouth and come out your ear. Don’t f--k with me. All right?”
After the target of his tirade insisted, “I didn’t do anything,” Charles retorted, “Listen to me. When you see me, you look the other way. Tell your boys, I don’t f--k around. All right?”
“I’ll take my gun and put it up your a-- and then I’ll call your mother afterwards. You understand that?”
For good measure, the sergeant added: “And I’ll put your s--t in your own mouth.”
Charles added, “I’m here every f--king day. I don’t go home. I have no life. No kids. I do what I do.’’
The Post spoke to the sergeant at his home via phone, and asked him about the video. “I’m just doing God’s work," he replied to a reporter. "You know I can’t comment... Have a blessed day.”
Legendary hardware hacker Jeri Ellsworth (world's most awesome C64 hacker and all round happy mutant), entertained attendees at the Maker Faire with her brilliant Commodore 64 bass keytar, which she played while wearing rollerskates.
Ellsworth noted via Twitter that it uses the SID chip and is based on an FPGA - a re-implementation of the Commodore-64 computer using reconfigurable logic chips. See the video below for an overview of the instrument from Ellsworth.
What’s not obvious from the photo above is that Ellsworth wears a portable amp and rocks the C64 Bass Guitar on roller skates. <3
The Village presents a video design fiction (?) for "Parking Douche," an app that lets you photograph the number plates of crappily parked cars in your neighborhood (in Russia) and submit them to a database. The app then buys hyper-geo-targeted ads that block the text on the websites being read by people in the same neighbourhood as the badly parked cars. The ads can't be dismissed until you share them on social media. Basically: if you park like a dick, then everyone who lives or works nearby will not be able to read the Web until they've seen and shared a picture of your dickishness.
Boing Boing reader Cory Poole is a 33-year-old math and science teacher at University Preparatory School in Redding, CA. He sends in this beautiful video of yesterday's annular solar eclipse, and says:
This is a 60 second time-lapse video made from 700 individual frames through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stacked Hydrogen Alpha Solar Telescope. The pictures were shot in Redding, CA, which was directly in the annular eclipse path. The filter on the telescope allows you to see the chromosphere which is a layer that contains solar prominences. The filter only allows light that is created when hydrogen atoms go from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state.
UPDATE, 4pm PT: Reports from Chicago of police attacking protesters and journalists, chemical weapons being readied for use, and possibile imminent "weaponized" use of LRAD.
Matthew Epler's Grand Old Party project takes the approval-rating curves of GOP presidential hopefuls and turns them into 3D solids, then turns those into buttplugs.
Grand Old Party demonstrates that as a people united, our opinion
has real volume. When we approve of a candidate, they swell with
power. When we deem them unworthy, they are diminished and left
hanging in the wind. We guard the gate! It opens and closes at our
will. How wide is up to us.
In an age of information, we rely on hard facts. Each of the shapes
you see here come directly from poll data collected by Gallup. This
data reflects approval ratings for each GOP candidate among registered
Republican voters from December 10, 2011 to April 1, 2012.
Each shape’s girth is a reflection of popularity while their height is a
reflection of time.
The contours of these delightful shapes conjure up the waves of
amber grain and those lapping at the rim of our great nation spanning
from sea to shining sea. As the battle for the Presidency rails
on, we must remember that Americans may may have achieved
freedom through war, but they are also a people of love. After all, in
the end all we have is each other.
Tomek sends us his claustrophobic short film "The View From the Closet" ("A disturbed, paranoid
individual enters his apartment to find himself being watched by
something hiding in the closet"), which is an official selection at Los Angeles Short
Film Festival.
From Joe Sabia and the CDZA project, a new musical video experiment (they're doing one new video every other Tuesday): "Opus No. 3 - ZUCKERBERG: The Musical," described as "A trip down memory lane for the life and times of Mark Zuckerberg."
Here's science fiction grand master Jack Williamson ruminating on what the future once meant, when he started working in the field, including a reading of an early essay on the future he wrote in the 1920s or 1930s:
Spectacular graphics open a show about how the future was created. SF Grandmaster Jack Williamson tells the space-age dreams of a boy in Portales, New Mexico in the 1930's.
This is also the first part of a larger tribute to Science Fiction's Grand Masters presented at the 2000 SFWA Nebula banquet at the installation of Brian Aldiss. Languishing on my shelves for almost ten years, this video has been patiently waiting to give you pleasure. There are fully 20 Grand Masters, 1 author Emeritus and five future Grand Masters (?) featured in the second part of this program.
Amara, the free/open subtitling/dubbing project that used to be called Universal Subtitles, has just landed $1,000,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Amara is run by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a charitable nonprofit that produces technologies to increase and deepen the average person's ability to participate in the online world. Amara is a technology that lets people bridge linguistic barriers in the world of video. Here's TheNextWeb's Anna Heim on the announcement:
In other words, it is a great example of what crowdsourcing can achieve. According to its parent non-profit, Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the platform’s users have translated over 170,000 videos since its founding in 2010, including popular videos such as President Obama’s message to Sudan and KONY 2012.
However, it could expand into other territories, such as dubbing – hence its rebranding with a broader name, which may also help it capture the sense of community it is trying to create. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Mozilla was interested in supporting the platform, its executive director Mark Surman explains:
“Mozilla’s global translation and localization communities have always been at the heart of who we are. For the first time, Amara lets us extend our community translation work to include video,” said Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla. “We are proud to support Amara as they build a crucial part of the open web.”
Grand Old Party demonstrates that as a people united, our opinion
has real volume. When we approve of a candidate, they swell with
power. When we deem them unworthy, they are diminished and left
hanging in the wind. We guard the gate! It opens and closes at our
will. How wide is up to us.
