“images”

I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.

Fascinating, so much more enthralling to me than most museum art. Notice the lobsterish, demonic, shielding, bloody left arm, the snaking, perforating tubes beneath, the right mecha cat-paw, the “fingering” finger within it, the cat-fox-shaped helmet, the nipple patches (that’s one badge you’ll pay attention to), the pubic paleness, the CAUTION - SEX TAPE yellow tape. Such a great image—and it’s not every day you get to make a word like mecha-chimeric.

My mental image of cells is of balloons, stacked, drifting or bumping but always discrete. Now it seems it’s a shifting tendril jungle at the bottom. Staggering!

[In] one of the biggest discoveries in biology of recent times.. using video microscopy [!], they watched adjacent cells reach out to each other with antenna-like projections, establish contact and then build the tubular connections. The connections were not just between pairs of cells. Cells can send out several nanotubes, forming an intricate and transient network of linked cells lasting anything from minutes to hours.

New Scientist, Tunnelling nanotubes: Life’s secret network

I love them visual metaphors. This one right here, from an Economist article on how an American recession might affect Asia is quite remarkable. I salute the anonymous artist (who apparently hails from ShutterStock).

Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism—modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste—nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt—what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess—no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)

Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:

This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.

Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.

Been going to spinning daily for several weeks now (and when I say daily, it’s daily daily, not improv’d daily daily). Lately, however, I’ve gone back to hacker sleep and it has noticeably affected my stamina—meaning I get exhausted just mounting the bike and that it’s only minutes before I start mumbling silent insults to that pregnant teacher/bitch who just bosses you around without tasting her own medicine. The interesting thing is that just near the end of the class, when I’m close to fainting and have to cheat and lower the resistance (and when I’m just about to punch that preggo), we relax for a while and I drink some water, some plain old water. And… it takes better than it has ever, ever, tasted before. It lingers in my mouth for a while, because my breath is too fast and I’m choking, and—at least for the first sips—it has texture, I swear it! It’s probably only my congealed saliva mixing with the fresh water (yummy!) but I have sometimes felt—clearly, intensely—as if I was chewing a rare, delicious steak (a Cambalache one!). Oh, the mirage! It’s probably just my subconscious rebelling against my last months of vegetarianism but, boy, if you could only taste it.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.