Behind F1's Velvet Curtain- Kate Wagner

Fun read in the vein of good old Hunter S. Thompson, “Behind F1's Velvet Curtain by Kate Wagner”. I guess the magazine pulled it and now it’s blowing up on the interwebs of course. I found VIA Metafilter. My abusive pull quotes as always.

“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.

...

I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.

...

If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing. Like Lewis Hamilton? You can eat steaks that cost the same as your electricity bill and meet him again. You, too, can bask in the balding aura of Prince Harry and the fake glow of Instagram models. Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform.”

Random Tumblr reblog because it refuses to die.

Rebloged from Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr.

“J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman are such a funny contrast to me, like

Rowling: Oh, and by the way, I put gay characters in my books.
People: Is there anything… showing that?
Rowling: No. Also trans women don’t deserve respect
People: wtf

Gaiman: Here are some immortals that transcend all human concepts of gender and attraction who use a variety of pronouns, and also some clearly canon human queers.
People: Are the immortals queer?
Gaiman: That is an entirely valid way to view them.
Other people: Ugh, pushing a modern woke agenda. It used to be-
Gaiman: Fuck you”

Tumblr is the platform that no corporation can kill. I have been going there for over a decade and never even made an account. It’s like the last vestige of something the internet was supposed to be.

Deeeeeeeeeep dive into games and WoW culture in particular.

If you wanna get deep inside the culture of World of Warcraft this is a crazy detailed video on it. This is from a paper they cite for example.

“Play from a theorycrafting perspective is about the correct input and output of numbers, challenging the narrative of play as something free and frivolous. Seeking to understand how play and knowledge relate to each other, the article discusses how theorycrafting’s seemingly abstract, objective, and neutral information about the game is also embedded with values, ideas, and norms.”

'Artists, Weirdos, Hellriders And Homies:' Thrasher Magazine Turns 40

OK, I can put “Thrasher Mag having a part on NPR” on my list of things I would not have thought I would see.

“Playboy.

Glamour.

O.

Teen Vogue.

All these magazines have something in common.

They're no longer in print.

While these — and many other — publications have shifted to digital only in recent years, there's a print magazine bucking the trends and still going strong: Thrasher magazine. Created by skateboarders for skateboarders, Thrasher celebrates its 40th anniversary this month.

Founded in 1981 by Eric Swenson and Fausto Vitello, the San Francisco based publication has been busting out new issues every month for decades. Thrasher captures the gnarly antics of skaters as they shred pools, bomb hills and hurl themselves down rails and staircases.”

Horror books and Illustrations

Pretty interesting short video talking about the design of horror book covers and how they changed over the years. Basically, while they look better overall, you no longer can tell what the hell they are about. Kinda a good reminder that your illustrations and design should always reflect the content and not just exist for design sake.

Plus, you know, cool as shit old horror illustrations.

Morning

Just getting my get up and go on here so I thought I’d post away here. why not right? Anyways, this is pretty amazing feat.

“five keen amateur astrophotographers challenged themselves and decided to capture a picture of 1060 hours of total exposure time, which can be considered as a world record (professional astronomy excluded). “

Pretty cool image.

You can download the full high rez file as well. Some interesting wallpapers could be made from that for sure.

When I first sat down, I thought my saved tabs told an interesting story as well. Gee, can you tell where my focus is now-a-days?

Loops and Learning

Starting in May we took on a big CG project where we were doing all the finishing on product renders.  They would send us the raw renders and we would clean up and UV glitches and work up light passes to get the renders to a super clean hero look. This gave me the chance to pick the brain of the CG lead over there about what he was using in his workflow to get his results. They centered on C4d and Octane and the results were really good.  I never tested C4d because most of the rabble on the internet seem to slam it as only being good for making spheres look cool on instagram. But after this conversation, I picked up the Demo at the start of June and now can not stand to open Modo. Anything more than converting a file to FBX and I want to tear my head out. With Cinema 4D I find making animations super easy and rewarding. Plus, this also has opened up using DaVinci Resolve to do my post on the renderings which is a very powerful tool as well. Here is a before and after of my latest animation that shows what DaVinci can bring.

Before and After DaVinci

You can see more of the animations on my instagram page which is where I primarily post these things. So far I mostly just use the Physical Render in C4d and have not hit any major snags but I am running some tests with Corona which is really interesting.  Corona was also just bought out by The Chaos Group who make V-Ray which is really interesting to me as I really liked the results of V-Ray in Modo. Anyways, just some rambling on what I have been doing for fun, enjoy!

Repo Man: Yeah. Let's go get sushi and not pay.

How a major studio allowed such a vehemently odd movie to exist really is a mystery. Its outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful. This is a film that expands a singular style of humor into an entire worldview, a physics as vast as the Force in Star Wars. But part of the mystery is also that Cox could gather so much talent in one place. Granted full autonomy in his casting, he somehow assembled a flawless ensemble. Emilio Estevez’s Otto is a pitch-perfect mix of blank ambition and obliviousness. Matching this is the world-weary exhaustion—dubbed “the Old West/cadaver look” by a friend of Cox’s—of Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud. Otto is a baby-faced punker initiated into a secretive trade by Bud, who listens to obsolete music, dresses square, and dreams small. Their worldviews collide in the new terrain of early eighties America, an era of subtle but rapid change from the Me Decade to the Greed Decade.

 

“The more you drive, the dumber you get.”
“I don’t want no commies in my car. No christians either.”
“There’s fuckin’ room to move as a fry cook. I could be manager in two years. King. God.”

Best movie ever, I simply had to post this.  No way around it.  And yes, we do have a screen printed movie poster of it on our wall, thanks for asking.  More Quotes here.

​Now for some reason I wanna watch Akira?

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Source: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/273...

Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive

Between 1948 and 1986, during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3,000 drawings of tattoos. They were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives, status and traditions of the convicts that wore them. Baldaev made comprehensive notes about each tattoo, which he then carefully reproduced in his tiny St. Petersburg flat. The resulting exquisitely detailed ink drawings are accompanied with his handwritten notes and signature on the reverse, the paper is yellowed with age, and carries Baldaev’s stamp, giving the drawings a visceral temporality – almost like skin

 

Various cat tattoos. The cat is one of the oldest symbols of criminal world. They are the personification of the thieves’ fortune, prudence, patience, the speed of their actions, their ruthlessness and rage. At the same time they represent the expectations of their victims. The abbreviation KOT (tomcat), which is found in tattoos, is the language of thieves, it means: Korennoy Obitatel Tyurmy (Native prison inhabitant).

Top right: Text reads ‘NVOVDO’.

This is a rare acronym, understandable only to the initiated: NVOVDO – ‘Do not touch the thief, he will always make you surrender!’ 1950s.

Bottom left: The symbols on the hat worn by the cat signify the bearer of the tattoo is otritsaly – a thief who refuses to submit to, and is a malicious infringer of the prison rules.

Bottom right: Text reads 'All power to the godfathers!’.1980s.

Photoshop illustration of Contra

This is pretty awesome to watch and it's pretty much what I do all day, lol!​

Each frame in this video represents 10 seconds of work. The image spans across 3 PSD files with over 500 layers at a resolution of 9600x5400 pixels. The project took 25 hours to complete over the course of 6 days.