Category: Featured

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy

Rooftopping: Acrophobics Need Not Apply

It’s a “thrill-seeking photography craze” as described by the Mail Online. This craze is called rooftopping and you’ll be relieved to know that it’s not just another word for planking that just so happens to be done on rooftops.

Rooftopping has photographers around the world taking photos from the dizzying heights of tall buildings any skyscrapers. The more daring photos usually show the feet of the photographer as they dangle precariously from the edge of the building. Have a look at some vertigo-inducing rooftopping photos after the jump.

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Featured Game Reviews

We Review: Alice: Madness Returns

The time has come, the reviewer said
To speak of many things:
Of knives and pots, and evil eyes
And creepy doll-faced beings.
Of hidden paths and sidequests,
And pig-snouts sporting wings.
All this and more, after the jump.

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Entertainment Featured Music

Rammstein’s “Du Hast” in a Cappella

Earlier on we posted about Mike Tompkins doing a beatboxed cover of Rolling in the Deep and Matt Mulholland shooting his mouth off in The Matrix lobby scene. Good things comes in threes supposedly, and we think we may have found it.

Witness the Viva Vox Choir from Belgrade, Serbia as they perform an a cappella version of the only Rammstein song I know, “Du Hast”. It’s possibly be the best thing I’ve heard today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfGxU1HqFN4

If this video were to be removed, have look at the mirror on College Humor.

[via Burgerboxxx on Twitter]

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Arty Awesomeness Featured

You Won’t Believe They’re Oil Paintings

Artists do photo-realism with strokes of a brush. Swedish artist Linnea Strid considers the photo-realistic style as her medium of expression and it certainly shows. In this post we take a look at her fascination with water and its, erm, watery qualities. But it’s not all skin-deep as Strids mentions in an interview with My Modern Metropolis:

Art can be viewed in different ways, and one person can look at a piece that I’ve made and just think “oh, that’s a pretty picture, it’s very well done”. I don’t judge people who can’t spot anything more in my work than that, and it’s ok. But after a first glance you can also come to the conclusion that a painting like “Rinse and exhale” can tell you some sort of alternative story, like why is she taking a shower with her clothes on? And the water running on her face, is it only water or are they tears? I don’t want to be too obvious when I make a painting, I want the viewer to decide what it means and what the painting is telling them.

Find some of Strid’s impressive photo-realistic oil paintings after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Gaming News

Video Games as Vintage Book Covers

Illustrator A.J. Hateley from the United Kingdom has embarked on a fantastic voyage. In the Thirty Days of Videogames, she aims to create vintage book covers based on popular video games. The covers are complete with relevant publisher information, wonderful artwork, and apt titles. The series is currently in day 16, and Hateley has created many a cover including one for a scientific study into the lives of vicious headcrabs, one for a safety guide on dealing with unhinged operating systems, and another for a harrowing adventure in the land of giants.

Have a look at The Secret Life of Headcrabs, The Wonderful End of the World, The Forbidden Land, and other  wonderful video game book covers after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy Video Clips

Glorious Starry Night Time-Lapse

Thanks to the light pollution, we city folk rarely get to see such beautiful scenes as Randy Halverson does. The photographer who runs on a farm in South Dakota, spent the month of May capturing the sky he sees every night.

Summer is reportedly the best time for North American residents to view the Milky Way, but Halverson had to fight off the cold weather and strong Dakota winds to snap the starry views and his favourite shot – the Milky Way rising up from behind the old home where his father grew up. He compiled hundreds of the best photos into a glorious 3-minute video, where one second of footage is about 14 minutes in real time. The musical accompaniment is wonderful too, experience Halverson’s Plains Milky Way below.

See more of Halverson’s photography on his website, Dakotalapse.

[via Mail Online]

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy Video Clips

Beautiful “Ocean Sky” Time-Lapse

Australian photographer and part-time astronomer Alex Cherney loves the ocean and the night sky. He captured his first long exposure of the night sky in 2009 and since then he has been captivated by that form of photography.

In this beautiful compilation video, Cherney stitches together time-lapse sequences of the dark night skies as seen over the Southern Ocean. It took him 1.5 years and 31 hours of footage to create Ocean Sky, and his efforts were rewarded at the STARMUS astrophotography competition where he was made the overall winner.

In this compilation see our Galaxy, rising and setting over the turbulent Southern Ocean, connecting the distant stars to that other fascinating interface, the ocean shore. In between the action comes from the scudding clouds and the only evidence of life, coastal shipping and the occasional aircraft darting through the night. Beyond our galaxy, its nearest galactic neighbours, the Magellanic clouds, rise high in the sky, while moonrise suddenly reveals the remarkable landscape of Australia’s south coast. All the sections of the competition are represented in this series of carefully composed images.

For more things astronomical, head over to Cherney’s website, Terroastro.

[via io9]

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Arty Awesomeness Entertainment Featured Music Video Clips

What Does Tau Sound Like?

Someone somewhere in the world has been quoted as saying that maths is music to their ears. If that person is you, then you’ll be pleased as pi to know that musician and YouTube user Michael Blake has composed a melody involving Tau.

Tau is approximately 6.28, so twice as large as pi, and Blake created his amazing music video in praise of it. He applies the numbers one through nine to all the notes in the major scale, and then applies the major, minor, and diminished chords that correspond to those notes — whatever that means, musical maths isn’t my strong point. The video explains it much better and sounds absolutely wonderful. In What Tau Sounds Like, Blake plays the piano, xylophone, guitar, banjo, violin, accordion, and other instruments to create a musical interpretation of Tau to 126 decimal places. Check it out below.

[via Nick de Bruyne on Twitter]

Categories
Featured Game Reviews

We Review: White Knight Chronicles 2

Level 5 has released the latest game in their White Knight Chronicles JRPG series, and Level 5’s well-paid marketing department have sat many long, coffee-laden hours to bestow upon it the creative name of White Knight Chronicles 2. I have always been a fan of JRPG games, because the driver behind the game is the story, not the character. Because WKC2 is a direct sequel to WKC1 (unlike some JRPG games **cough** Final Fantasy **cough**), Level 5 thought it a good idea to also include WKC1 on the same disc. In the same breath, they addressed many of the issues that fans had with the first game, so you can almost call the version that ships on-disc White Knight Chronicles 1: Remastered. Is it worth playing, however? Let me answer that question for you, after the jump.

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Animal Kingdom Arty Awesomeness Featured Science & Technology

New World Transparent Specimens

Fisherman and artist Iori Tomita turns the process of preserving animals into an art form. Tomita, who studied ichthyology at university, uses a interesting staining method to bring colour to animal carcasses. This is his process as explained by Wired:

Tomita first removes the scales and skin of fish that have been preserved in formaldehyde. Next he soaks the creatures in a stain that dyes the cartilage blue. Tomita uses a digestive enzyme called trypsin, along with a host of other chemicals, to break down the proteins and muscles, halting the process just at the moment they become transparent but before they lose their form. The bones are then stained with red dye, and the brilliant beast is preserved in a jar of glycerin.

The staining process for each creature can take anywhere from five months to a year to be complete. The results are absolutely striking, have a look at some of the see-through creatures in his New World Transparent Specimens series after the jump.

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