Praise the Lord!


I’ve been watching the HBO series, Carnivàle. First aired (streamed?) in 2003 so nearly 20 years old but holds up well. The scene above is a great example of what I call the “after thought” shooting. A staple in action movies but not so much back then.

According to Fashion Stylist Rebekah Roy: “It cost $4 million US per episode; it was one of the most expensive shows to produce. There were an estimated 5,000 people costumed in the show’s first season!” The costumes were designed by Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko.

BBQ Gun

(Urban Dictionary) “An old term from the Southwest that refers to a gun that is not worn daily. It won’t have the scratches, wear marks, etc a daily wear gun would have. These guns were not something that were never used or “useless.” In the time the term came about they were functional guns (sometimes, heavily modified for better accuracy/reliability/etc) that might have some custom engraving, polishing, or custom grips. They didn’t make many guns purely for show – they made guns to use and users modified them for show. They were normally worn in tooled leather holsters as opposed to daily wear holsters – which were plain.”

“In the revolver days (before semi-auto pistols) a church gun was a normal firearm as described above. After the semi-auto pistols arrived on scene this term applied to mostly Colt 1911’s. Current times this can apply to any firearm that has custom work designed to enhance mainly appearance and, much of the time – functionality.”

“However, this should not be confused with a (today’s term) “bling gun” – which can imply that the gun is more for show than effectiveness. Or that the user is not proficient in its use because it is only worn on special occasions.”

Bureaucracy


Couldn’t find the artist’s name but he goes by lordampersand online. The medium (?) is ink and watercolor. From his Mastodon feed:

“Research for this piece has provided a name for an aesthetic I’ve always been fascinated by: “Liminal Spaces”, the depictions of places in-between.”

You can see his sketches as this piece progressed here. From his website:

“i’m a self-tought artist from switzerland. my drawings and paintings are usually analogue (ink, watercolor). i’m fascinated by the interaction between organic and technological processes, the things that grow and the things that are built.”

More art here »

Chiropractic: Essay by H.L. Mencken

The following is an excerpt from a 1924 essay by H. L. Mencken. It seems relevant in light of the stupid quackery that’s killing hundreds of thousands.

Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

“Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.”

Drone Romance


“Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in relation to their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. In this near future city drones form both agents of state surveillance but also become co-opted as the aerial vehicles through which two teens fall in love.”