wow, simply wow...

for your daily dose of tasteless humor in the global political arena, check out this cover of wprost magazine (polish), as reported by the bbc.

bbc story here

new place

some quick pics of the new place... note the hardwood and gas range... sweet! no art on the walls yet, still trying to figure out where to put things.. two kurodas, a kuniyoshi and two other contemporary japanese prints (i can't remember the artist at the moment), as well as a bunch of my own photographs. still need to stop by the boulder restaurant supply store for a few things and the lumber store for some raw materials... need to build a table (rectangular, long and thin, to go under the chandelier in the living room) and a futon frame (the metal one i have is crap). that chair design in a previous post is still on my mind, but i probably won't get a chance to really get to that for another couple of months... thought about modeling the legs of the table after those of the chair though... maybe?

~t

back in black (and white)

hey all,

i know it's been a week since my last post, and i've been pretty lazy about posting regularly, but hey... it's summer.

so: updates... yesterday it was 99.5F in town here, i finally bought tickets for taiwan, i'm still reviewing comments on my paper from my advisor and still trying to move things over to my new place, bit by bit. the title of the blog is due to the fact that i've been shooting in b&w recently... something i always get away from, but always come back to, since without the distraction of color the true nature of photography comes through, the study of light and texture and form... take the following picture, pretty boring if it was in color, but the simple tones of black and white capture the shades and reflections of light, the shiny surface of the ugly textured walls in my old apartment contrasted against the matte finish of smooth skin, and the bright white of diffuse light vs the shocks of black in hair and shadows. i just like the simplicity of greyshade. hopefully there will be some more b&w pics pretty soon.



chris and cheney in the old place...

~t

chairs

i like chairs. rather, i like well designed chairs that have appreciable aesthetic appeal. i've even made a couple chairs in the past, including things made from interlocking hardwood frames. i've been knocking around a few sketches recently, and today i decided to take the next step, putting together a little scale prototype made out of cardboard. the proportions are still a little off, but the basic design elements are solid, and i think i will try to take this to a full size m.d.f. prototype sometime in the next couple of months, with the ultimate goal of doing this in a wood laminate. my favorite pieces are the cross beams, which are identical in shape, but flipped relative to each other to create the sloping seat. the pics don't really do this 'justice', but hey... it's just a piece of cardboard.




~t

one of those days

fugh. today has sort of been one of those days that makes me wish i had become an architect or graphic designer. academic red-tape bs has been plaguing me for the last couple of days, but today i was dealt the coup de grace, in the form of a cruel twist of fate related to my financial aid from this last year. it's nothing i can't fix by relegating myself to a strict diet of ramen and tofu, and collecting on debts from roommates, but it's still a pain in the ass.

in deference to my graphical urges, i spent the last half an hour meditating on an old still life photograph of mine by tweaking it a bit in photoshop to come up with the image below. i may end up printing this out in large format and using is as decor in my new apartment. hope you like it - "untitled" digital photograph, 2007.



~t

form follows fiction

it never ceases to amaze me how concepts and creations of science fiction frequently end up coming to fruition in the 'real-world'. communication satellites, space travel, cell phones and robotics are all things which we take for granted, but which all were born from people's wild imaginations of the things which might someday be possible, at a time when none of these concepts were anything more than 'science-fiction'. never mind another underlying unifying theme of all of these items, the birth of the practical applications of these gizmos as the public sector offspring of the brainchildren of the military industrial complex cartels.

it's one thing for for a concept like a dick-tracy wrist video communicator to be realized as something like a motorola flip-phone... the concept is similar but the form is constrained by cost and technology... but it's entirely another thing for new robots rolling off production lines to almost perfectly mimic characters out of highly stylized japanese anime series. i'm referring to vecna technologies' new "bear" (battlefield extraction assist robot)... a robot that utilizes dynamic balance behaviour (like the segway personal transports) which allows it to balance upright as well as roll on tracks while supporting the weight of a soldier with a high 'strength' hydraulic upper body, and sports a teddy-bear head to reassure the wounded (seriously). the funny thing here is the fact that this is something that is almost exactly out of shirow masamune's anime, "appleseed". see below, and see for yourself.




~t