Conversational Intrigue by J.C Leyendecker, date unknown.
Japanese Wisteria Tunnel
These photos were taken at the Kawachi Fuji Garden, about a four hour drive from Tokyo, but there are wisteria festivals all over Japan, including at the Kameido-Tenjin Shrine, where tourists in the Edo period often visited the famous wisteria; the Wake Wisteria Park, in Wake-cho, Okayama, and at Ashikaga Flower Park, which has three massive wisteria trellises that extend 3,280 feet squared. (Time Out Tokyo has a list of additional notable wisteria around the city worth visiting.)
It’s a Homestuck giveaway hell yes!
Winners of the Tiny Pokemon Tea Set finally have their prizes sent through the mail so that means you now have the opportunity to have a tiny prize mailed to you, too! Yes, you!
One like and one reblog to each of you, and you only have to hold your breath until Saturday, May 5th to find out if you won yourself a tiny troll figurine! Isn’t that neat? (It is.)
There will be 5 randomly-picked winners, and the first to respond will have first choice of which troll they want.
Oh, right. Have I mentioned how tiny they are? Look at Sollux over there, or Karkat, or Terezi! They are so damn tiny, like, over an inch,maybe.
Enjoy!!! :D
Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer:
Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.
Ingredients of life
Illustrations of Chemical compounds by Avkari Alon
10 Very Rare Cloud Formations
1. Nacreous Clouds
2. Mammatus Clouds
3. Altocumulus Castelanus
4. Noctilucent Clouds
5. Mushroom Clouds
6. Cirrus Kelvin-Helmholtz
7. Lenticular Clouds
8. Roll Clouds
9. Shelf Clouds
10. Stratocumulus Clouds
Hmm, I should keep my eye out for these from now on, they look interesting.
Incredible High-Speed Photographs of Paint
German artist Markus Reugels specializes in high-speed and macro photography, and has taken these beautiful photographs of paint at high speeds. By utilizing the bass-lines from techno tracks, Reugels has been able to create these images.
