abduzeedo.com is a great website that shows of a great mix of graphic design work, and every so often he hits some great bonus point for bringing up the kid of art I’m into. Todays its Metal album covers:
Check out his collection of Deadpool art too:
You can follow his updates on Twitter
One of the great things about kids is that they remind you of all the interests you had yourself in your youth. When I was 12 I did I was totally engrossed in physics and chemistry, but most especially electronics. I gave up on it all by 15, having read the basics on Newton and his laws of motion etc 3 years earlier. I’m not saying I was a genius, I was just interested. Funnily enough it wasn’t just sport and girls that distracted me from all this, but more the news that I was God awful at maths. Bar simple arithmetic I struggled to understand anything involving “abstract maths”, so much so that I only got an A in ordinarly level maths for the Leaving Cert because it was basically a revision of honours maths for the Junior Cert which I think I failed. So my love of physics and it’s connected dream of becoming a mechanic for the Ford Rally team was left behind. As teenage life slowly continued in the very limiting environments of boarding school where all I really learned was about Death Metal, drinking, doing a variety of drugs and sleeping with girls 4 years my senior (all of which was fun) I left behind many other interests and dreams, facile as they may seem now. These as follows are things I wanted to do:
Play basketball professionally
Dread my hair
Play in a Death Metal band called Malignant Defecation (I did write some songs)
Learn to surf
Learn to ride a motorbike
Find enough Potassium to put in the school pond (I thought I’d done this once and got a purple die instead of an explosion – I think I used Zinc)
Learn about electronics properly
Write a book
Learn photography
Join the Anti-Nazi League (almost got to so that, but my nistory teacher talked me out of it – in a nice way)
Know what to say to women (tbh I didn’t have to worry about that in the end)
Write my own comic book
Learn to drive trucks
Become a communist
So really there was plenty. There’s a few things on that list that I’m not really bothered about anymore. I’d still love to find enough Potassium to blow something up, but it’s my son who has with his ability to absorb knowledge without fully understanding it and be amazed at any scientific experiment he witnesses that has reminded me that there’s still a massive amount out there to learn, and that maybe we filter too much, and spend too much time looking at time consuming crap like “2 girls, 1 cup” which does nothing to educate us about ourselves or others (beyond what we already know and wish to confirm) and maybe the modern age with so much information available to us so quickly we all have the opportunity to become “renaissance men/women”.
Apologies for the hella long sentence. Here are two links to make up for it.
A great interview with Clay Shirky about the importance of the Internet, the pointless cries of “vulgarity” and how we must learn to filter efficiently:
The other is simply a photo illustrating one of the reasons I love sea swimming and still want to learn to surf:
Taken from Less than Dot
Ever since I was a kid I’ve tried to create things, but was never very good at it. Pieces of music I wrote sounded disappointingly similar to pieces I already knew, photos were never 100% what I wanted them to be, but book ideas were the worst. After a few days of pondering book ideas I either realised they were crap or existed already (down to a book of photos taken of toilets from all around the world). Now they get shifted pretty quickly to the back of my mind, not wanting to interrupt my keep-it-together mundane life. I imagine the back of my mind looks like this:
Taken from a great collection of abandoned buildings and inaccessible areas of Ireland at www.barelythereireland.com
I like this video. Partially because it’s Irish and is good, lame reason, but there you go. Some touching moments amid the weirdness.
It’s weird to find something new you really like and then discover thousands of people around the world already love it and have been following it from day one. “Red Meat” is the first web comic I ever followed as recommended to me many years ago by someone with better taste than I.
Link is in the image
Plenty of photography forums run a Photo-a-Day thread, but this guy really went all out. 21 years of a polaroid-a-day:
They’re not all significantly artistic, but they are extremely interesting.
Anybody who wants to have a look at Polaroid photography in the age of digital should check out www.polapremium.com/ for both cameras and film, though eBay really is a great source for both Polaroid and Holga cameras.
I’ve been reading Questionable Content now for 2 days straight. Last night it made me regret I have no piece of hardware with which to read the web in bed. Today it fills me with joy, like some kind of “indie” soap opera filled with empathy and insight.
Written by J. Jacques it really is a wonderful piece of writing. Every character in it is complete, well-developed and endearing and humour is top class. Start at the beginning:
Link back to comic is in image.
Many thanks to Twistedlilkitty on Twitter for pointing this one out.
Really the best way to do it is by making it your own. To cover is not to copy. Here are my favourites as an example:
Original: Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath:
Cover: Cardigans – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath:
then the other extreme:
Original: Bjork – Isobel
Cover: Carcass – Isobel (requested by the lady herself)
Great stuff. However, some may be more extreme again. Only certain ears may find this enjoyable:
Gorefest – Autobahn
I know people have build Lego sculptures and spent an age working at them, but this is pure genius:
Taken from this great flickr page
Sign that the world is going down the tube:
Sign that there’s hope yet exists in all those people who take the leap of posting some amazing stuff on Flickr and FFFFound:
