Ffffound invitation WHICH I DO NOT HAVE AND THEREFORE CAN NOT GIVE YOU

EDIT: NOTE TO EVERYONE. I DO NOT HAVE A FFFFOUND INVITATION. I WANT A FFFFOUND INVITATION. I CAN NOT GIVE YOU A FFFFOUND INVITATION.

I am writing this edit in March of 2009 and I still don't have a Ffffound invitation. So please actually read this post and stop asking me for an invitation!
============

I want a ffffound invitation. [AND DO NOT HAVE ONE TO GIVE TO YOU.]

Really, really, really bad. I love that site so much.

I am an Artist so it will be of great use to me.

Please? Anyone? Any leads? I will write you ekphrastic poetry about images of your choice. :)

Muppets and Murder

There are a great number of youtube videos of people destroying Elmo.

This one is kind of arty. It has an immolated chicken-dance elmo.

There are videos of people dousing Elmo in lighter fluid and setting him aflame, while he laughs, decapitating him with fireworks stuffed down his throat, exploding him at a shooting range (a canister of tannerite stuffed in his body), etc.

I would also like to draw your attention to this fine work:



When I saw this, I laughed until I cried.

This is not all. I present to you the story of Jesus' crucifixion, retold with Muppets:






If anyone knows the artists for these, the original sources, etc., please let me know, so I can credit them.

Also, can anyone tell me how to put shit behind a cut?

I originally had a script that did that, but it made it so that every post had a link at the end of it, instructing readers to click to see the whole post, even when that was the whole post. And that was really annoying, and I don't want that; I have some longish posts, and I'd also like to post more images. Advice?

Hmm, yes *fights the man, then returns to Pottery Barn to buy some accent rugs*

Although, yeah, that shit is pretty annoying, and I wonder how effective things like, say, glancing at someone's long-ass Costco receipt, are at deterring theft, vs., say, the store layout after the checking aisles, which seem quite enough.

According to actual studies, Coke douches are an ineffective form of contraception. You are likely not surprised at this.

However, bitter lemon (a soft drink with quinine and lemon) is a fairly effective contraceptive douche. (Look near the bottom of the page, for an excerpt of the study, and the citation.)

(Uh, obviously don't rely on this or anything. Spermacidal post-coital douching isn't going to be incredibly effective anyway, because there are already going to be thousands of sperm in your uterus by that point.)

I just printed out the 2nd draft of my thesis, which is 54 pages (including toc and crap) and all stuff that wasn't in the first. It is warm. I put it under my sweater. It feels good, like clothes fresh out of the dryer.

Flowers of bad

This looks pretty rad.

(I RHYMED)

magnetic liquid sculptures, bolivia bugs

Amazing art installation: magnetic liquid. I wonder how they manipulate it.

Also bolivia bugs own and i want them. I want them the size of puppies.

Also, haha: walking table. I don't know what all these videos have in common (they are all showing up as related) but I am digging it.

Also so awesome: magical table. I could watch this forever. I want one too. I have a vague mental list of stuff I would get if I was really really rich (I assume the table is expensive).

OH MY GOD, I want this too!

Magical chair. But can you sit on it? Yes, yes you can. SOMEONE FIND OUT HOW MUCH THEY ARE. They are made out of cardboard.

Aaaaaah.

I'm cataloguing stuff I've written. I seem to have a short-term memory about that--a list I compiled, a few years ago, filled w/ all these poems I've forgotten.

Oh my god I can hardly bring myself to read them. They're so bad. Or actually they're probably not that bad, I just can hardly stand reading them anyway. They make me writhe. Arrrrrgh.

I kind of want to show them to a trusted person and just get their assessment of it. So that I don't have to look at it. My eyes just want to slide off. laskjdflkasjf

Oh my god nasty.

Nicotini

And apparently it's as disgusting as it sounds.

Chameleons own, and not even because of the color change thing, I am not even talking about that. Their swivelly eyes and their fiddleback fern curled up tail and their 2-prong sideways feet! And their fast and sticky tongues.

dreamachine

Gonna do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

http://www.netliberty.net/dreamachine.html

Also want to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

and those sensory deprivation floaty tanks.

wtf

Pink google search engine for ~*~*~*~*~girls~*~*~*~*~

I wish I was fucking joking.

What the fuck is it, where people think that making something ~*~*~*~*~pink~*~*~*~*~ automatically makes it interesting and relevant to women? Maybe if we were talking about a small percentage of five-year-olds.

Note the "shopping" link up there too.

This makes me want to barf. Please tell me it's an early april fools joke.

And dear god, could they have picked a more obnoxious shade of pink, too? How can anyone even look at it?

I sent them some "feedback."

general butt naked

Uhh.

General Butt Naked.

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots [hence the name], Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

god damn.

I am making a list of all the stuff I have written. A lot of it is like chunks of stuff I haven't developed yet but so far the doc is 139 lines long (one item to a line) and I have not even gotten to the stuff I wrote before the program. Yay. I just want to write and that is all.

misc

The symptoms of Frey's syndrome are redness and sweating on the cheek area adjacent to the ear. They can appear when the affected person eats, sees, thinks about or talks about certain kinds of food which produce strong salivation. Observing sweating in the region after eating a lemon wedge may be diagnostic.

The Bai Ze was encountered by the Yellow Emperor while he was on patrol in the east. The Bai Ze dictated to Huang Di a guide to the forms and habits of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures in the world, and how to overcome their hauntings and attacks. The emperor had this information written down in a book called the Bai Ze Tu (白澤圖). This book no longer exists, but many fragments of it survive in other texts.

I want that book. Check out the cool picture of it.

Oh, apparently Ren and Stimpy are gay. I'm not sure if they're actually a couple, though.

poop and related accoutrements

Toilet paper was invented in 6th century AD in medieval China.

Before the invention of the perforated roll of paper we know and love, in the 1800s, "wealthy people used wool, lace or hemp for their ablutions, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and cob of the corn depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. In Ancient Rome, a sponge on a stick was commonly used, and, after usage, placed back in a bucket of saltwater."

In Japan in the 700s they used these long pieces of wood that looked like paint sticks.

Sand. That seems like it would just make it so that you had sand-covered shit lodged in your asscrack, and I don't know how much of an improvement that would be. Maybe if you used multiple handfuls of sand you could pretty much get it off.

1942: first two-ply toilet paper from St. Andrew's Paper Mill in England; toilet paper becomes softer and more pliable. For most of the rest of the twentieth century, both "hard" and "soft" paper was common. Hard was cheaper, and was shiny on one side. Sometimes it had messages like "GOVERNMENT PROPERTY", "IZAL MEDICATED" or "NOW WASH YOUR HANDS PLEASE" written on each sheet near the perforation.

December 19, 1973: comedian Johnny Carson causes a three week toilet paper shortage in the USA after a joke scares consumers into stockpiling supplies.

Hahaha.

Toilet paper is sometimes made from recycled paper; however, large amounts of virgin tree pulp is still used.

Wiping our ass on the environment!

From the wikipedia article on "anal cleansing":

Some health faucets are metal sets attached to the bowl of the water closet, with the opening strategically pointed at the target anus.

Haha. As opposed to one of the other anuses that you weren't aiming at.

Toilets in Japan. I want to use one of the high-tech ones but I am also scared of something going wrong.

In Japanese culture, there is a tendency to separate areas into clean and unclean, and the contact between these areas is minimized. For example, the inside of the house is considered a clean area, whereas the outside of the house is considered unclean. To keep the two areas separated, shoes are taken off before entering the house so that the unclean shoes do not touch the clean area inside of the house. Historically, toilets were located outside of the house, and shoes were worn for a trip to the toilet. Nowadays, the toilet is almost always inside the home and hygienic conditions have improved significantly, but the toilet is still considered an unclean area, even though other places are much more likely to have higher bacterial contamination.

In Japan, being clean is very important, and some Japanese words for 'clean' can be used to describe beauty.

Haha: In England, there was historically much fascination with the act of going to the toilet, with royals appointing lesser mortals to assist with the removal of faeces and cleansing of the body parts using towels.

Apparently Louis XIV had bowel problems, and because, you know, L'etat c'est lui, this was a matter of public discussion and newspapers and such would publish updates.

Several non-profit organizations have launched a "Stop Flying Toilets" campaign, using a winged logo and sponsoring races with famous Kenyan marathon runners.

Though it is lower in energy than the food it came from, feces may still contain a large amount of energy, often 50% of that of the original food.[2] This means that of all food eaten, a significant amount of energy remains for the decomposers of ecosystems.

Feces are also an important as a signal. Kestrels for instance are able to detect the feces of their prey (which reflect ultraviolet), allowing them to identify areas where there are large numbers of voles, for example.

Ultraviolet shit! I wonder if most/all shit reflects ultraviolet, or if there's something in particular about vole shit.

To maintain nutrients in soil it is therefore important that feces return to the area from which they came, which is not always the case in human society where food may be transported from rural areas to urban populations and then feces disposed of into a river or sea.

Whoa, that never occurred to me, but it totally makes sense.

Shit is brown because of a combo of bile, which is yellow, and dead red blood cells!

Ok, I just thought of something. Black shit is caused by digested blood, and indicates you've got medical problems. But what if you have eaten blood, like with blood pudding, or, I don't know, vampirism?

Mirror neurons

Ok, this might help to explain something for me. Awesome.

Mirror neurons

"A mirror neuron is a premotor[1] neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting."

"For example, a mirror neuron which fires when the monkey rips a piece of paper would also fire when the monkey sees a person rip paper, or hears paper ripping (without visual cues). These properties have led researchers to believe that mirror neurons encode abstract concepts of actions like 'ripping paper', whether the action is performed by the monkey or another animal."

"It is not normally possible to study single neurons in the human brain, so scientists can not be certain that humans have mirror neurons."

By "possible" I assume they mean ethical. I was wondering how they did those experiments where they isolated the activity of one neuron.

"Mirror neurons have been linked to empathy, because certain brain regions (in particular the anterior insula and inferior frontal cortex) are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain etc) and when they see another person experience an emotion. However, these brain regions are not quite the same as the ones which mirror hand actions, and mirror neurons for emotional states or empathy have not yet been described in monkeys. More recently, Keysers and colleagues have shown that people that are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotions providing more direct support to the idea that the mirror system is linked to empathy."

None of the implications mentioned had to do with body self-perception, but it seems like it's on a similar track.

Oh my god best thing today:

Colors

Under "Cosmic latte" (a shade of white):

In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in "The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: constraints on cosmic star-formation history from the cosmic spectrum", published in 2002. In this paper, they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beige white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The hexadecimal RGB value for Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7.

and

What the study revealed is that the overwhelming majority of stars formed about 5 billion years ago. Because these stars would have been "brighter" in the past, the color of the universe changes over time shifting from blue to red as more blue stars change to yellow and eventually red giants.

omgggggg, this rules.

I am making lots of stuff, I rule.

random wikipedia pages

There is a page on wikipedia about Adolph Hitler's sexuality.

I wonder how many [famous person's] sexuality pages there are, actually.

I was going to make this post about more weird-sounding wikipedia pages but I couldn't find enough good ones in a short span of time. But some other random shit I found:

Lists of ambiguous human names

Mr. Floppy's Flophouse

"Mr. Floppy himself was said to be an elusive archeologist from Finland who while not excavating an inverted pyramid that is thought to house the knowledge of all mankind, was hosting late night events in the bowels of one of Oakland's most notorious districts."

"At dawn it was not uncommon for George, the owner of the property to appear in a wizard cape serving shrimp cup of noodle soups from behind his piano."

Mr. Floppy owns.

Myco-heterotrophs

Symbiosis

Like I said, fungi kind of freak me out and I should learn more about them.

Now I think I am going to go home and sleep.

Primate vision, experiments w/ trichromacy

Chinese vs. American visual perception habits

It would be cool, on a related note (it has probably been done, actually) to examine the different perceptions of people who read a r-l language, a l-r language, up-down or multiple directions, when it comes to scanning and analyzing stuff besides words (e.g. just the daily surroundings), and how non l-r readers envision timelines, the past and future, etc.

MIND BLOWN

omg

As to what I have done as a poet... I take no pride in it... but that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.

(Goethe)

Physics-based musical classification schemes.

I especially like the plasmaphones and the quintephones, wtf :D

snow is ALIVE

omfg, wtf

omg, apparently the presence of bacteria facilitates snow formation at higher temperatures.

way fucked!

One of the authors of the study, Prof. David Sands, postulates that forming rain or snow is part of the bacterial life cycle; "We think if (the bacteria) couldn't cause ice to form, they couldn't get back down to the ground," Sands said. "As long as it rains, the bacteria grow."

Sands suggests that changing bacterial populations may affect rainfall; for example, overgrazing during a summer could reduce the bacterial population, resulting in lower raindrop formation, although more work would need to be done to firm up this theory. Regardless, it is an interesting glimpse into the world of the snowflake.

This is totally fucked up :D

some links

Dumping some links here.

This woman wrote a memoir about how she was raised by wolves after becoming a Holocaust orphan. Now, after the book has made millions of dollars, been translated into 18 languages, and become a feature film, it turns out it was kind of not exactly true. Who could have imagined?

That still sounds like a rad story and I totally want to read that book.

Mel's Hole.

Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.

Frogs sealed in stone.

There we go.