Citizens of Tomorrow, Be Forewarned

The lighting on the set of Jordan Peele's NOPE.

Okay this, this is going too far. Just stop.

One of the best things that ever happened to me was during my trip to Venice 5 years ago. I had bought an all-inclusive ticket for all museums and exhibitions in the Piazza, and I was going through an exhibition of statuettes when I entered the next wing with paintings. The styles seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t work out what was happening. Thankfully this incredible lady working at the exhibition saw that I was a bit confused and approached me to ask if I knew what this exhibition was. I said no, just that it had seemed interesting.

She explained that the reason why I might be confused is that I had entered the exhibition of Wolfgang Beltracchi from the end rather than the beginning. She then took me to the start and started explaining about him and his history. He has art forgeries in every style from medieval paintings to modern art and his forgery is not copying existing paintings but creating “lost paintings” that the artist might have painted or talked about painting but never did. He perfectly matched the artist style, composition, ideas, colours and medium. His materials were historically accurate and experts couldn’t determine that they were fakes.

And his wife Helene Beltracchi was incredible. She helped “backdate” paintings and provide evidence of their age. One of the things that stuck with me the most is this black and white photo, created with an old-time camera  and medium and the photo itself was aged so carbon-dating couldn’t discover that it was a modern photo. It was of Helene, with her features slightly altered, dressed in an old-time, era appropriate dress with the painting in the background. can you imagine the level of dedication and the immense attention to detail required to so convincingly fake a photo to provide a reliable history of this painting existing for centuries? She helped him create fake history for a lot of his paintings.

I’ll never forget that exhibition. There were so many paintings, all of them in the styles of different artists, most of them verified by experts as genuine until his mistake with the white paint which prompted a much, much deeper examination by experts. I think the lady mentioned that they could still not forensically confirm that some paintings were fakes, but it’s been a while, I might be misremembering. I was just struck with awe at the sheer knowledge they must have of multitude of painters, not just their styles, but their lives and the way their minds worked. He painted scenes “they might have painted” and when you look at them, you could definitely see it. It hits especially hard when you have more than passing familiarity with the artist, their lives and struggles, their choices of mediums and themes. You can look at this painting and think, this is definitely created by []. It makes so much sense, it has that distinct flair and works incredibly well as a parallel to [], their earlier painting. It was indescribable. Can you imagine the skill required to back that knowledge up? To be able to perfectly mimic the styles of so many artists and be able to so accurately forge paints, brushes and canvas that experts verified them as genuine?

And he had his own original paintings as well. One of them struck a chord with me especially. It was a painting of storage rooms, storing thousands and thousands of paintings that the public doesn’t know of, because they’re the unpopular paintings, the paintings that never get exhibited, the forgotten paintings. I thought it was very poignant.

I love these people. They really did do it because they loved art, they loved playing around with art forensics, and they just had a blast. Seeing his gallery brought be such incredible joy and so many interesting things to think about. 10/10, would definitely recommend

x

oh wow I could hurt myself so badly on this

“The words “joke” and “ruin” might not rhyme in English. But, thanks to a new, interactive database of American Sign Language (ASL), called ASL-LEX 2.0, we can now see that these two words do in fact rhyme in ASL.

“In ASL, each word has five linguistic parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signs. Rhymes involve repetition based on one or more of these parameters,” says Michael Higgins, a first-year PhD student in Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development’s Language & Literacy Education program. He is deaf, and has been using the ASL-LEX 2.0 database to investigate the relationship between ASL and English proficiency in deaf children.

Since launching in February 2021, in conjunction with a published paper highlighting the ways the database has expanded, ASL-LEX 2.0—now the largest interactive ASL database in the world—makes learning about the fundamentals of ASL easier and more accessible. “ASL-LEX 2.0 is an invaluable resource. Being able to access linguistic information—including the five parameters on every sign—in one place is enormously helpful,” Higgins says.

“English speakers know cat and hat rhyme in English, and we have all kinds of resources for thinking about the properties of English, French, and many spoken languages, but at the outset we really didn’t know much about the lexicon of ASL,” says Naomi Caselli, a Wheelock assistant professor and researcher of deaf studies who helped create the database, and leads the LexLab. A lexicon is the vocabulary that makes up a language—for ASL, the lexicon describes the language’s entire universe of movements and sign forms.

It took BU researchers and their collaborators Zed Sevcikova Sehyr and Karen Emmorey of San Diego State University, and Ariel Cohen-Goldberg of Tufts University, six years of work to create ASL-LEX 2.0, which improves upon an earlier version of the database created by the team, first released in 2016, called ASL-LEX. In 2017, ASL-LEX was awarded the Vizzie’s People’s Choice prize for best interactive visualization. With the help of a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the expanded 2.0 version of the original site is now bolstered with over 2,723 signs and more ways to visualize the ASL lexicon. Computer engineers from BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering played a major role in the project, working in collaboration with the researchers to rebuild the site from the ground up with more sophisticated tools for data visualizations. The database’s collection of “phonology” or sign forms—in ASL, phonology refers to how a sign looks and is formed, whereas in verbal speech it refers to the sounds the speaker produces—is organized based on hand shapes, hand locations, and finger movements. Groups of signs, called “nodes,” are then associated with one another based on whether or not they rhyme, or share patterns in how they are formed. Using colors to visually group similar phonologies together, ASL-LEX 2.0 allows users to navigate between nodes, almost like a map.”

The Black Monarch’s Ghost - Created by Ben Turner

Here is the original box cover, for nostalgia’s sake.

The journey of a blue marble

The I Spy live action adaption looks great

This is pretty cool compared to many rube goldbergs for reasons including: 

- the amount of YEET

- Clever use of magnets and physics

- Re-use of sections that play multiple purposes or have reentrancy. 

Muebles con puerta de ala de gaviota

A mind fuck free with every cabinet openning!

This is awesome. Go LEGO!

this is all screenshots

discussing something designed to help blind and visually impaired kids learn braille

and yes it’s “for everyone” but maybe be considerate of your target audience?

[Start id:

A series of five screenshots from a Design-milk article titled “LEGO Launches Braille Bricks for Children to Learn Braille” By Keshia Badalge. The article was published on 05/15/19.

Image 1/5 contains text and a photo of four LEGO bricks. The bricks are labeled “P” “L” “A1” and “Y”. Each brick has raised bumps to correspond with the Braille character on its label.

The text reads, “At the Sustainable Brands conference in Paris last month, the LEGO Foundation and LEGO Group announced their new project to help blind and visually impaired children learn braille through custom LEGO Braille Bricks.

The idea, first proposed by the Danish Association of the Blind in 2011, was brought up again in 2017 by Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind in Brazil, and later developed in collaboration with blind associations in Denmark, Brazil, the UK, and Norway.”

Image 2/5 contains text and two photos. Both photos are of a young boy playing with the Braille LEGO bricks. In the first photo the boy is holding up a LEGO board with several LEGO Braille bricks stuck onto it, he is running his fingers over the bricks. In the second photo, the boy has layed the LEGO board down onto a table, he is still running his fingers over the bricks.

The text reads, “Why now? Philippe Chazal, Treasurer of the European Blind Union, cites the rise of audio books and computer programs. As a result, he claims “fewer kids are learning to read braille.”

Image 3/5 is all text.

It reads, “We strongly believe LEGO Braille Bricks can help boost the level of interest in learning braille,” he continued. In the United States, only 10% of blind children are learning to read braille, even though according to Chazal,

“Braille users often are more independent, have a higher level of education, and better employment opportunities.”

WHO estimates that 19 million children around the world are vision impaired and 1.4 million of these children have irreversible blindness.

The statistics when they grow up look discouraging: In Europe, around three quarters of adults with vision disability are unemployed, compared to 53% with general disabilities.

The LEGO Braille Bricks will be fully compatible with the LEGO System in Play and use the same number of studs for individual letters and numbers in the braille alphabet.”

Image 4/5 contains text and two photos. The photos are of a young boy using the Braille LEGO bricks. In both photos he is running his fingers over the raised surfaces of the LEGO bricks.

The text reads, “The bricks aren’t just meant for braille learners. For teachers and sighted children, these bricks also feature a printed letter or character, so everyone can join in the fun.

The set contains about 250 Braille Bricks covering the full alphabet, numbers 0-9, and math symbols.”

Image 5/5 contains text and a photo of two children playing with a pile of the LEGO Braille bricks.

The text reads, “The product is currently being tested in various languages too: Danish, Norwegian, English, and Portuguese, with German, Spanish, and French testing to begin in the third quarter of this year.

The final LEGO Braille Bricks kit is expected to launch in 2020 and will be distributed free of charge to institutions in LEGO’s partner networks.”

End id.]

Reblog with the transcript

source

This is how I used to teach a couple of students how to create vehicles or weird creatures when they had trouble coming up with ideas

how the eye moves

.

Me when the tweezers come out: What… Me when the thing: NO! Me when the other thing: [breathless screaming]

Watch How Steel Ribbons Are Shaped into Cookie Cutters

bully the tubes

bully the tubes into conformity

bully the tubes

it’s sort of funny that the current cultural idea of the flapper dates not from the 1920s, but the 1950s when costume designers took the radical, gender-fluid, sexual, sexually liberated ideas and fashions of the 20s and made them sexy.  as in sexual objectifying.

because 1950s and fuck female agency.

If you would like, I would love to hear more about this. What, exactly, happened, and what was the true 1920s aesthetic, untainted by 50s views?

hokay.  so it’s the 1950s and it’s the heyday of the studio system and writers and movie makers (and audiences) want rom coms and frolicking films and lighthearted fun, but there’s just one problem.

WWII

but that was the 1940s! you say

you’re right.

but in order to set a film in the 1950s, writers and film makers have to establish what the male lead character did during the war or risk it coming across like he didn’t, well, serve.  can’t have a shirker or a coward and rejected for medical reasons really doesn’t fly in the 1950s.  and there’s only so many times you can write about soldiers and sailors and airmen and the occasional spy before it starts to become stale.  and it doesn’t terribly fit with the fluffy writing because, well, war and death and tens of millions of people dead.  contemporary films more fall in the line of what we now call film noir.  men and women who have been damaged by war, but that’s another topic.

sooooo, you do period pieces.  no one wants to do the 1930s because that’s the great depression.  so 1920s.  frolicking and gay and fabulous!

(Great War, what Great War?)

but the thing is, the 1920s, especially in Paris and Berlin, were a massively transgressive, reversal, and experimental time period in art, fashion, society, and all over.  but only a little bit in america because honestly we were barely touched by wwi so it’s not like we’re partying to forget an entire generation of young men killed off and entire towns wiped off the face of the earth using weapons the likes of which had never been seen before.  the us as a whole mostly heard about sarin gas, not see it poison entire landscapes and men and animals dropped to the ground and die in truly horrific ways.

the europe that emerged from wwi was massively shell shocked, angry, and living in a surreal dream of everything being upwards and backwards and live now because tomorrow you may die and it’s all nonsense anyway.  it’s a world in which surrealism and dadaism and german expressionism make sense because fuck it all.

you get repudiation of the old, experimentation, deliberate reversals, transgressive behavior, and if there’s an envelope to push, you tear it open.  France calls the 1920s “Années folles”, the crazy years.

the things we’re doing now, with fluidity and experimentation and exploration of gender and sexuality and presentation?  the 1920s did that already.  it’s drag and androgyny and blatant homosexuality.  it’s extramarital affairs and sex before or without marriage, it’s rejection of marriage as an idea and an institution, it’s playing with gender and gender roles and working women and unrestrained art and

it’s everything the 1950s hated.  or more accurately: absolutely terrified of.  

the flappers of the 1920s went to college and cut their hair to repudiate a century of a woman’s hair being her crowning glory.  they wore obvious makeup and makeup in ways that are not terribly appealing now and weren’t terribly appealing then, but they signaled you were part of the tribe.

they were women who wanted independence and personal fulfillment.

“She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.“

so the 1950s didn’t want that.  they wanted films with dancing and chorus lines and pretty girls to be looked at.  they wanted spaghetti straps and fringed dresses that moved pretty when the chorus girls danced.

1920s fringe doesn’t.  1920s fringe is made of silk, incredibly dense, incredibly heavy, sewn on individually by hand, and rather delicate.  the all-over fringe dress didn’t exist until the 1950s invention of nylon and continuous loops that could be sewn on in costume workshops by the mile on machines.

(this is before “vintage” exists.  to the 1950s, the 1920s (or earlier) wasn’t vintage, it was old-fashioned.  démodé.  out of style.  last last last last last season.)

1950s 1920s-set movies have clothes that are the 1950s take on it.  the dresses have a dropped waist, but they’re form-fitting, figure-revealing.  the actresses are pretty clearly wearing bras and 50s girdles under them a lot of the time.  they’re not

the woman on the far left is basically wearing a man’s suit with a skirt.  la garçonne.  some women went full-out and wore pants.  you could be arrested for that.  they were.  still wore pants.  and pyjama ensembles in silk and loud prints.

or class photo of ‘25

or even

not that 1920s dresses could be sexy or sexual; they often were.  i’ve seen 20s dresses that were basically sideless and held together with straps.  but it’s sort of like how the mini skirt went from being a thing of sexual liberation to an item of sexual objectification.

it’s ownership and it’s agency and it’s hard to put a name or finger on it, but you just know.  sex goddess versus sex icon.

My Grandmother used to have to bind her chest to get the silhouette fashionably androgynous.

Like the Victorian period, the 1950s can be blamed for a great many of the problems in 21st century America.

@funereal-disease made me think of you

I have some disagreements with the distinction between sexual liberation and sexual objectification (it often, as it did above, boils down to “you just know”, which is a cop-out 99% of the time), but this is an excellent historical resource and an excellent reminder that social norms are fluid.