When Praying Manti Attack

Well, this is bad news for people who like cute fluffy things, but good news for people who like weird spikey things with green exoskeletons. This brief article has a couple of pics of a praying mantis that caught and devoured a hummingbird. I'm generally pro-hummingbird, but this rocks.


saw it first at BB

Satellite Mural

Most of the mural
Originally uploaded by atduskgreg.

When I was kid, all I wanted was space wallpaper for my room, the one with a huge pic of Saturn, preferably. This would've ben cool, too, and might have helped me develop some kind of sense of direction; it's a mural based on a satellite photo of the owner's neighbourhood. Clicky the link for more hinkfo.

via Boingboing, natch.

Bjork portrait

Bjork scan
Originally uploaded by Oranguthingy.

This is a painting I did for a friend based on a picture of Bjork I found on the net. I'm actually quite proud of it, which is very rare. I usually manage to be disappointed about some aspect of my work, but I now think that was because I tended to give up too early, out of fear of "ruining it". I worked on this for over a year, off and on. Laziness, fear, and obsession with details being the main culprits. It was a lot of fun.

She said she liked it, but what else is she going to say? =)

Btw, it looks darker on one side because of the way I had to scan it, it's not actually like that. It was too big for my scanner so I did four scans and stitched them together. Tried to even it out as best I could with PS, but my skillz are clearly not 1337 enough.

An Alternative to "Intelligent Design"

I am, of course, speaking of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Dirtiest. Joke. Ever.

Slacktivist. Evangelical Christian. Funny/intelligent as all hell. He has single-handedly changed my mind about religion -- I no longer think it's entirely for chumps. He's proven to me that some deeply religious people can also be entirely reasonable. I have otherwise seen very little evidence of this.

And sometimes he provides posts that make me laugh my ass off. Check out his post on The Dirtiest Joke Ever. Do not disregard his warnings about the South Park link.

I want to talk about it some more, but this cold is making me delusional. To sum up: I think Slacktivist is brilliant and humour is really interesting.

Pretty.

Amazing gallery of high-res photos of snowflakes.

Of Montreal video

Saw this last night while, um, elevated, and it blew my mind. I've just sent a gushing letter to it's creators telling them so, something I've never done before.

As it is with art, I suppose this won't tickle everyone's fancy, but I can't get enough of it. It is vector animation at it's absolute finest, IMHO. It makes me so very happy.

Go to the Kangaroo Alliance site and click on "Work" to see it. The Of Montreal site is here.

Incidentally, I saw this video at the beginning of one of the strangest nights I've had in a while. I'm not sure how to describe it, as it was a lot like a dream -- events happened that clearly defied logic and yet happened anyway. The long and the short of it is that I went to a party that was inhabited entirely by aliens poorly disguised as humans. The one that stands out most in my mind was the spindly gay communist hip-hop evangelist who was telling anyone who would listen that R. Kelly's new album is a masterpeice (he was actually quite convincing on this point, and I plan on investigating his claims). He also mentioned that he had two favourite stories to tell whilst drunk: being threatened by Vincent Gallo and falling out of the back of a pick-up truck (twice). He didn't actually tell these stories, he merely mentioned that they were his top two favourites. Keep in mind that this guy was the only one at the party with whom I could maintain any semblance of a comprehensible conversation. Stonker was there too, perhaps he will post about it as well if he gets some time away from smashing up his new place. (He had a better set of adjectives for the Communist, but they escape me).

All in all, a very good night, although I seem to have contracted some kind of space virus that is making today rather less enjoyable.