Russian Sledges

dispatchesfromtheconfluence:

Barges on the Mississippi near St. Louis. Missouri.

A Viking funeral. Feats of strength were performed. Toasts of aquavit. Messages of care sent to Valhalla.

Miss you Annie.

	firehose shared this story from io9:
	annie share

---

One section of Hieronymus Bosch's massive triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. Now a musician has transcribed it into modern notation for our asinine listening pleasure.

Read more...

firehose shared this story .

---

firehose shared this story from ryan panos.

---

The Architecture of Madness | León Ferrari | Socks Studio

León Ferrari (1920-2013) was an Argentinian conceptual artist who worked with a series of extremely different medias through the years. Trained as an engineer, he gained notoriety in the 1960s thanks to his polemical works on religion and politics. Exiled in 1976 in Brazil, he started  a series of plans using heliography, the technique traditionally employed by architects,until the advent of the computers, in order to reproduce their drawings. Combining letraset icons to hand sketches, he invented labyrintic worlds which became part of a series called “The architecture of Madness”.

firehose shared this story from A.V. Club.

---

firehose shared this story from The Verge - All Posts.

---

Police issued a missing persons alert for a fashion designer last spotted at a Manhattan nightclub. [ more › ]

WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn. (AP) — A Springfield detective is among 11 men who have been arrested in a Valentine's Day prostitution sting.

Photoset: Valentine's Day Roundup: Otter Edition:

Let’s see how otters at various aquariums celebrated Valentine’s Day yesterday! Georgia Aquarium Oregon Coast Aquarium   Oregon Zoo   Monterey Bay Aquarium

Video Series: Otters Ally and Margaret Mayhem Frolic in the Snow at the Knoxville Zoo:

Submitted by Jeannie!

New York-based sandcastle artist Calvin Seibert (previously) just returned from a 10-day trip to Hawaii where he completed a number of his abstract, geometric sandcastles. For the past 30 years Seibert has worked as a sculptor’s assistant and puts some of his acquired skills in construction and basic carpentry to use while executing these perfect, angular sand structures. You can see more of his recent work here.

Cognitive Science, UC Santa Cruz

"The Minimal Unit in Japanese: Segment or Mora?"

Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Julie Bosman reports (NYT) that book publishers are now “encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace”:

The practice of spacing an author’s books at least one year apart is gradually being discarded as publishers appeal to the same “must-know-now” impulse that drives binge viewing of shows like “House of Cards” and “Breaking Bad.”

Michelle Dean hopes binge-reading isn’t the new binge-watching:

The kind of trance that reading induces is qualitatively different from the experience of sitting down and watching 12 hours of television. This is true even if the television is really good, I think. It just uses a different part of your brain.

I’m aware that in a way I’m just quibbling with a label, with marketing, by saying I don’t think that “binge reading” is silly. But I just really, really don’t think this is a viable business model for imaginative work. Practically speaking, writing a “binge read” would mean writing entire epics on spec, all at once, before selling them. It also means that the slow accumulation of fans that something like Game of Thrones enjoyed would be a thing of the past. I don’t know: there’s just something about this whole idea that strikes me as the product of an industry feeling like the culture is accelerating away from it.

Gracy Olmstead considers the implications for libraries:

This scheme is an interesting study in venues and audiences. While Netflix may inspire the development, a book is different from a TV series, and a library different from an instant-watch website. With the caveat that writers’ style and quality should not suffer (due to the pressure of speed), it’s not a bad thing to release books in quick succession. It seems a wise and marketable scheme. But while all-at-once rollout may foster book buys, it may favor online sales over library or bookstore visits. If you want to buy the next book in your teen vampire series, will you wait for your local library to buy the latest copy—or will you grab the Kindle edition from Amazon? Netflix has drawn audiences away from the traditional television by offering endless hours of entertainment without the hassle. An onslaught of binge-targeted titles may have a similar effect on libraries.

New Orleans, Louisiana, 12 pm

The secret vocabulary of New York’s finest drinking establishments.

Via Public Domain Review: "The Open Country of Woman’s Heart, Exhibiting its internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein” (1830s), by D.W. Kellog.

stalinwasabasicbitch:

rusija:

orientallyyours:

Inspired by model operas, Vogue China created the military themed editorial “A Fashion Revolution” for the April 2010 issue, with photographer Quentin Shih (Shi Xiao Fan), fashion editor Ling Wu, and model Du Juan in Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and Hermès.

Photo source: Quentin Shih’s website

via Asian Models Blog, Fashion Gone Rogue

filed under: things that don’t need to exist

psst i actually think this is kind of cool from a historical perspective

Copied costumes/poses almost exactly! 

This strikes me as something alex-v-hernandez would like

bfsd:

(via STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN)

faeriviera:

silvershrike:

This is a photo of Idris freakin’ Elba in a goddamn Viking helmet wearing a shirt that has the Oscar Wilde quote “I have nothing to declare but my genius”.

This is a glorious fucking photo.

"There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?" he told TV Times. "Hang about, Thor’s mythical, right? Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. That’s OK, but the colour of my skin is wrong?"

I also love how he sums up why “historical accuracy” purists (aka racists) are full of shit. ^_^

This is most absurd thing to happen to Pokémon since it was invented.

Young women in college need to smarten up and start husband-hunting.

Here’s another problem. Nagel’s teleological biology is heavily human-centric or at least animal-centric. Organisms, it seems, are in the business of secreting sentience, reason, and values. Real biology looks little like this and, from the outset, must face the staggering facts of organismal diversity. There are millions of species of fungi and bacteria and nearly 300,000 species of flowering plants. None of these groups is sentient and each is spectacularly successful. Indeed mindless species outnumber we sentient ones by any sensible measure (biomass, number of individuals, or number of species; there are only about 5,500 species of mammals). More fundamentally, each of these species is every bit as much the end product of evolution as we are. The point is that, if nature has goals, it certainly seems to have many and consciousness would appear to be fairly far down on the list.

Speaking at a Time to THRIVE benefit for LGBTQ  youth in Las Vegas last night, actress Ellen Page gave an emotional and revealing speech in which she came out as gay, the Hollywood Reporter writes:

“I’m here today because I am gay,” Page, 26, told the audience  ”And because maybe I can make a difference. To help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility.”

“I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission,” Page proudly and defiantly declared. “I suffered for years because I was scared to be out. My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered and my relationships suffered. And I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of all that pain.”

“This world would be a whole lot better if we just made an effort to be less horrible to one another,” she said.

Watch the video of her speech below.

Designed by Georgia-based industrial design student Nicholas Baker, the Prism Nightlight is a minimalist, battery-powered nightlight that turns on and off by tilting it like a seesaw. The nightlight is just a prototype but you can learn more about it on his website. (via JVNK)

The Root interviewed Henry Louis Gates Jr. about his recent PBS series African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross:

The Root: What about the series will be most surprising to viewers?

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: I think the most surprising thing to many viewers will be that [the first] African Americans did not arrive in 1619, when … 20 Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, and were transported to Jamestown. Rather, it was a century before that, in Florida, when the first black man whose name we actually knew arrived, in 1513.

Juan Garrido was a free black man, not a slave. He was a conquistador, and like the others, he was looking for the fountain of youth. He went to Baja California, Mexico, looking for the black Amazons. We even have a petition he filed to [the] king of Spain asking for a pension. He claims he was the first person ever to sow wheat in the New World. [In the series] we trace the arc of black history from Juan Garrido’s riveting story to, half a millennium later, another black man who happens to be president of the United States.

Lorelei's first commercially released album is now available! Featuring the music of Steve Reich, David Lang, Alfred Schnittke, Maggi Payne, and Mary Montgomery Koppel.

Why do Syrian civilians in a Turkish camp live in relative luxury?

[Full Story]