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Or as the site, Garfield Minus Garfield, puts it:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
shot by _Kriebel_
By Lenka Clayton and James Price
(via swissmiss)
If I wasn’t planning on attending the Original Music Showcase in Raleigh this Sunday, there’s no doubt I’d be shopping for free at The Hive.
You gotta love the anarchists.
Continuing to experiment with everything Ruby related, I decided to tinker with Gosu, a 2D game development library for Ruby.
Knowing how slow Ruby tends to be I was thinking that Gosu would be interesting to experiment with, but would probably have performance issues making it impractical for real-world game development. There’s no way you can write fast performance games with a language like Ruby, right?
Wrong.
I was amazed. I ran the example code included with the download (which by the way is as simple as installing any Ruby gem: “gem install gosu”), and the performance was lightening fast without the hiccups that usually come with game development in higher level languages.
While I don’t have much interest in game development, I am always looking for new ways to create high performance graphical experiences, and it appears that Gosu is a prime candidate for further experimentation.
Tag your flickr picture with “hopeactchange” and join the party.
Fun stuff, but I’m patiently waiting for the McCain version of this 2.0 remix — the directions will probably be to tag your flickr pictures with “noyoucant.”
(via Joho)
Andy just posted the first episode of The Corporate Assassin with Molly cast in the lead role.
I’ve watched Andy progress as a filmmaker since his award-winning work on Greensboro’s Child, but the execution of this series is reaching a level far beyond my expectations. It’s not that I didn’t think he had this degree of talent for writing, casting, directing, editing, etc., but to see his vision come together so succinctly? Wow.
Unfortunately, I can’t watch it again. Molly plays an annoying, coked-up bitch too convincingly — I’m still getting flashbacks when I see her in person.
The deeper I get into Greensboro’s music scene, the more I hear musicians complaining about the propensity of support for cover bands over original acts. And while it’s true that some local bands enjoy a steady following — The Mantras, Old Stone Revue, The Urban Sophisticates, to name a few — it’s a fact that most venues can’t consistently draw a crowd to check out (read: pay a cover) original bands, unless they’re retreads from the eighties like Pat Benetar or Van Halen.
And at that point, that’s kinda like listening to a cover band, you know?
There’s no silver bullet out there that will radically increase Greensboro’s patronage of original music to reflect, say, a Chapel Hill or Asheville, but I do believe in the power of cross-promoting community — from artists collaborating on projects to jamming together at shows to showing up as a band to listen to and support other acts, bringing new fans with them.
More can be done; I’m sure of it.
As an anti-war song with a funky baseline and classic delivery of poignant lyrics, Everlast’s latest drop stands on its own. But there’s so much more going on in the subtext of this video:
Pray for me, pray for my soul, ma
…the video transitions to classic Christian imagery with similar poses in the graveyard before cutting back to Everlast singing…
Pray for me and all my sins
…he’s now in a classic Muslim prayer pose, with palms exposed to the sky.
Everlast first took Shahada back in the mid-90’s and has been an evolving, practicing Muslim ever since. I dug up this interview from the late-nineties where he describes the second time he took Shahada, but for the first time in earnest:
[…] So finally I’m sittin’ there taking Shahada again. From that point on I’ve made a commitment where I’m going to try my best. I’m gonna do my best to make my prayers, let’s start there. Let’s not beat ourselves up because we went out last night and had a drink. Let’s make our prayers and pray for the strength to stop doing one thing at a time. That’s what I’m still dealing with.
You know, once you get over the big things, it becomes very subtle. It can be as subtle as looking [at] a man, and not even speaking bad about him, but back-biting him in your mind. The easy ones to beat — well I shouldn’t say easy — the big ones are easy to notice. It’s the subtle psychological stuff that helps you get into who really you are. You gotta be able to face the truth of who you are. If you are not able to face that truth of who you are, you’re gonna crumble, man. […]
Too often we think of the “sides” of both war and life in such simplistic, digestible, juxtapositions — Muslims vs. Christians or Good vs. Evil — that we miss out on understanding what leads up to humans behaving as we do. I mean, can you even begin to imagine what it must feel like for a once Christian, Irish-American white male who has professed Shahada to stare long and hard at the drivers of us going to war in the middle-east?
(via Navaho Gunleg)
Brilliant parody. Man, I hope Obama wins…
(via lessig)