Category — Cool Stuff

OA book series from the U of Helsinki:

Yoda Backpack:
Stay on target! Star Wars nerds can add one more scene of the original trilogy to their re-enactment list. Inside this Yoda backpack you can place your lightsaber, your MacBook, and a cellphone to call mom to pick you up when you’re all done. If they’d only make a slave Leia full-sized plushie. – Jason Chen

Plush Yoda Backpack [Thinkgeek via OhGizmo]

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i’d like one of these….

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Batwoman hero returns as lesbian:
The series is set in a world in which established superheroes Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman do not play a part.

Reinvention

The new-look Batwoman is just one of a wave of ethnically and sexually diverse characters entering the DC Comics universe.

Others include Mexican teenager Blue Beetle – who replaces the character’s previous white incarnation – and the Great Ten, a government-sponsored team of Chinese superheroes.

Regular characters Firestorm and The Atom, meanwhile, have been reinvented as black and Asian heroes respectively.

The characters are part of a wider effort to broaden the make-up of comic-book creations in line with society as a whole.

Batwoman, who first appeared in July 1956, has not been seen since September 1979 when she was killed by the League of Assassins and the Bronze Tiger.
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the most popular post ever on this blog was the post on female superheros, which was a cfp. however he post above is actually a post to note that dc, once the purveyor of fairly waspish values, is breaking their mold and having a female, lesbian, superhero. i find this intriguing, but i suspect it is primarily market driven.

Film Your Issue: Vote for your favorite short film – U.S. Life – MSNBC.com:

Orphans in Africa
Tim Leaton,
22
Midlothian, Va.
Virginia Tech

12%
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that’s who i voted for, you should vote too.

hypertemps:
hypertemps
are derived from short gif animations. these animations are then sliced
into hundreds of smaller animations, loaded into an html document and
viewed by you. due to browser inconsistencies and network deficiencies
the pieces of the original image arrive out of sequence and a dynamic
new image is created. i encourage viewers to view these pages with different
browsers and to alter their browsing behavior to uncover the different
image possibilites inherent within this system.

The Morning News – The All Girls School, by Mara Bodis-Wollner:

In Bodis-Wollner’s artist’s statement for her “All Girls School” exhibit (up now at the Jen Bekman gallery), she writes:These photographs stem from my preoccupation with the experience of disappointment amidst celebration. In this series, I focus on issues of trust, intimacy and betrayal in the friendships of women and girls; specifically how deception, unspoken exclusions, and discomfort are manifested in women’s body language and gestures.

I create the critical moment of a semi-unconscious inhibition and I look for where and how the tension just below the surface rests. Sometimes the perfect moment occurs when the gaze has landed onto a place of unselfconscious mistrust and introversion. I explore how gesture and gaze function to create an outsider, and the ways in which these visual clues shift ostracism from one subject to another both inside and outside the photograph.Precisely. But what drew us to her pictures was the storytelling. Each shot has a dozen narratives that pop off the surface if you trace the subjects’ eyes. Admiration, frustration, loneliness, jealousy—it’s your 10-year high school reunion and big family dinner all rolled into a single uncomfortable moment.

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if you’ve been on the other side of these looks, you know the feeling….

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master’s Thesis | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source:
A courageous young notebook computer committed a fatal, self-inflicted execution error late Sunday night, selflessly giving its own life so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich’s 227-page master’s thesis, sources close to the Brandeis University English graduate student reported Monday.

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another example of how heros are found everywhere.

Google Maps Like You’ve Never Seen ‘Em:

According to its creator, “Google Cartography uses the Google Search API to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area.” In other news, our heads just exploded.
· Google Cartography [Richard Jones via Curbed Photo Pool]
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this is an interesting representation of the connectivity of nyc.

Nancy White – It is KEWL and KINKY: Collaboration Software – Full Circle Online Interaction Blog:
a new software release from the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources project (AVOIR), “a sophisticated group-based collaboration system, supporting an unlimited number of groups… where you have complete control over what functionality is installed, as well as what functionality is available on a per group basis.

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in general, i think we need more projects like this. it has groups, it is bloggy and wiki…. it is open, free, and multilingual….