Woman comes back to life! (read original article)

This is incredibly creepy… perhaps the zombie apocalypse is closer than we thought!

Seriously, though… this is one lucky bitch!!!!  If she had played dead a few seconds longer she would have had her pipes cleaned out in all the wrong ways!  You know when they used to bury people back in the day they would put a string on their finger and attach it to a bell above ground… they did this so that a person mistakenly buried alive could alert the “graveyard shift” (yes, that is where the term came from) workers, people hired specifically to make sure that everybody buried in the graveyard was really dead!

Hearing stories like this makes me wonder if maybe we should re-instate that practice, or maybe we should just make sure that competent doctors get a second opinion when machines declare someone dead!  Do me a favor… if I happen to be pronounced dead at some point in the near future… could somebody please double check for me before the damn autopsy/embalming!?!

Unbelievable.
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RT: 00:01:24

- Miss Sabrina

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a withered old looking piece of faded paper with faded ink, complete with a banner of your name. The purpose of this tutorial is to show how one quick look at something can inspire you to get creative in your own style!

Final Image Preview

Materials needed: Text, Photoshop, Font: Jellyka – Estrya’s Handwriting, Paper (optional)

Difficulty: Easy

Completion time: 10, maybe 15 minutes? Depends on how much you like to tweak

OK, first off, let’s open a document, make it 2048X1200 (this is so you can use it on most bgs fit to size, or your Twitter account).

Click the thumbnail to enlarge and download the following texture. Or, if you prefer to use your own, I would suggest scanning (or creating) and using one that has faded edges, like this one.

Copy and paste it into your document. Rotate it 90 degrees (either direction, doesn’t matter) and scale it to fit the document size.

Next, download the Jellyka font here. (You can see where I got my inspiration   You can see they used unfocused lights as their bg and a more formal version of text that fits within the image borders)

Next thing we want to do is create a text layer above the paper layer. Paste in random scribbles if you’d like, or create something original. I used the text in the “About Me” section of my resume website.

Adjust the dimensions of the text box so the text bleeds over the edges. Set the blending mode to Overlay, and add a layer style of Color Overlay and use black with an opacity of 5%.

Here is where you will want to get creative with the text. Select all of your text in the box and open the Character Window and adjust accordingly. Below you can see the settings I used and what the results look like. I recommend using these, but feel free to use whatever you want. My font size was 229.

Next we are going to add a layer above the background text for our banner text. If you are satisfied with your image at this point, by all means, skip this step and move on to the finalizing steps.

Create some black text. I recommend using something significantly larger than the background text size. I used at least double the original size. I rasterized the layer so I could tweak and adjust the dimensions to my liking, however, this step isn’t totally necessary as you can go in almost any creative direction with the banner text.

In the layer style, you want to enable the following: Bevel and Emboss -> Contour, Pattern Overlay, and Stroke. For the pattern overlay, load the rock and stone patterns. Use the adjustments below. These settings do not have to be exact, but I recommend keeping it in the ballpark. (Contour remained unchanged)

Note the exclusion and overlay changes in the blend modes.

Your image should now look something along the lines of this:

Now for the finishing touches!

Next, we want to add a Gradient Map. (Can be found under Layer > New Adjustment Layer). I used a black and white gradient for mine, but feel free to use what you like. I would recommend sticking to a 2 color gradient, as a third color might make it look a little too unnatural. Set the blending mode to Multiply and this will conclude my input into this tutorial.

Feel free to add or change or tweak whatever you like to it. Also feel free to share your “creative changes” with me should you make any. I think this kind of image could produce several different types of variations that will be interesting to see.

Hans Ruedi Giger: For those of you who are unfamiliar with H.R. Giger, he is one of those artists that if you have not heard of them, you hear the works they did and you say “Oh yeahhhhh, that’s was him? Wow!”

For those of you who have heard of him, did you know that his works extend further than the silver screen? Not only does he do drawings, paintings, and sculptures, but his work has extended to guitars, furniture, and several other mediums.

Giger, to me, reminds me a lot of Tim Burton. They each have their own distinct style. Although, at times, Burton can be colorful, both artists are primarily dark, each with their own defining characteristics that make them easily recognizable. They are very dark, very mechanical, sometimes reptilian, sometimes scary and sometimes sexual.

For starters, here are some examples of his work as well as a list of his contributions to the big screen:

1967 High and Heimkiller, 1968 Swiss Made, 1969 Early Moming, 1972 Passagen, 1973 Tagtraum, 1975 Giger’s Necronomicon, 1976 Dune (Harkonnen design was not used for the movie),  1977 Giger’s Second Celebration of the Four,  1978 Alien,  1979 Giger’s Alien, 1980 The Tourist (Unrealised), 1981 H.R.Giger’s Dream Quest, 1981 Koo Koo, 1982 A new face of Debbie Harry, 1986 Poltergeist II, 1988 Teito Monogatari, 1990 Alien III, 1991 Alien I-III, 1992 Satanskopf, 1992 Wall to Wall, 1992 Giger’s Passage to the Id, 1992 Omnibus, 1992 Sex, Drugs and Giger, 1993 Brother to Shadows, the Alien World of H.R.Giger, 1995 Species, 1995 Benissimo, 1996 Kondom des Grauens

(cited from hrgiger.com, hrgigermuseum.com)

Art: It’s always quite easy to think of paintings, drawings, scribbles, etc. Of course, we all know that art is not just limited to this. Experimentation and the “why not”’s have lead us to new discoveries and methods never before dreamed of. As time and technology progress, we will always be provided with new mediums and approaches to art forms. Below, I will show you some examples of some artists approaches to new mediums and the different views they use and the reactions they can produce.

Experimental film and video is highly under appreciated. However, it is a lot like science. These aren’t just a bunch of crazy, wild, and irrelevant things thrown into a timeline. These are experiments and studies. Future artists can take the good from these and use them as inspiration and eventually perfect them into an art form.  It’s all progression. Today’s film views are so different from those of the past, and we need to respect the brave artists who went outside the lines and experimented to achieve new visuals, emotions, and installations.

Salvador Dali is commonly known for his surreal paintings and wild creativity, perspective, and unconventional methods. Below is his take on film, which also includes one of film’s most memorable moments (if you have a soft stomach, I recommend skipping the first couple of minutes).

Un Chien Andalou – Parte 1 & 2

Andy Warhol has always been an icon for unconventional and new explorations in art. Surprisingly, aside from his vast collection of physical artworks, he also has a wide variety of video works. The following is a mind expanding video that is composed of very quick cuts of both video and stills, interlaced in different fields (think of them as photoshop layers) with many different lighting effects. The incorporation of music, which also progresses to experimental, meshes quite well.

Andy Warhol – Exploding Plastic Inevitable

The Unfinished Swan is a fantastic video that is actually derived from 1st person video game shooters. Ian Dallas created a program that let’s him shoot ink in a completely white environment that not only defines its space, but can create stunning visual images using the presence of all color, as well as the absence of it.

Ian Dallas – The Unfinished Swan

The Third and the Seventh was actually recently introduced to me by Jeff Havel. What is so fascinating about this video is that is 100% pure cgi with nothing authentic about it. Usually, when we hear cgi video, we can easily think of the progression that film has made over the years with the popular movies Shrek, the Incredibles, Monsters Inc, and the like. All of those films are so visually fascinating that you can just look at it and wonder “wow, how did they do that? That looks so real! How did they manage to include that much detail in motion with just a computer?” Well, this video is almost like a look into the future of cgi. Pure inspiration.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman. (HIGHLY Recommended to watch in full screen)

And then there is my own shameless self plug This was a college video I made in which the experiment I had to do was to use only 10 shots. I didn’t limit it to straight up video shots, I included 1 shot of cgi and 1 still.

Dreams and Shadows – Pete Kruvczuk

Napoleon
Involved Parties: Stanley Kubrick

In 1967, with 2001: A Space Odyssey going into post-production, Stanley Kubrick began pre-production on a film which for some time to come would become an obsession for him: a film about the life of Napoleon. Kubrick had large and rather immodest ambitions for the film right from the start, telling a friend, “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.”

Kubrick contended that previous Napoleon biopics had left him dissatisfied, including Abel Gance’s critically acclaimed 1927 silent film.  Kubrick planned a sweeping epic covering all aspects of Napoleon’s life, including the sordid details of his sex life, as well as large scale battles involving 50,000 extras(Kubrick persuaded the Romanian army to lend soldiers for the battle scenes). Kubrick, a notorious packrat, amassed a huge collection of information on Napoleon’s life in doing research for the project, including over 15,000 images and 25,000 index cards detailing the general’s life practically day-by-day.

When asked why he was so passionate about making a film on Napoleon, Kubrick answered, “…he fascinates me. His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler. He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come — in a very concrete sense, our own world is the result of Napoleon, just as the political and geographic map of postwar Europe is the result of World War Two.”

Unfortunately an ambitious project of this magnitude led to ever-increasing costs, and MGM wasn’t willing to risk the money. Kubrick continued to pursue the project in the years to follow, but to no avail.

Who Killed Bambi?
Involved Parties: Russ Meyer, Roger Ebert, The Sex Pistols

In 1977, Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert, who had previously collaborated on the cult movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, teamed up once again to make what was described as a punk rock version of A Hard Day’s Night. With Meyer directing and Ebert writing the screenplay, the film was set to have punk band The Sex Pistols as its stars. Ebert writes at length on his website about some of his experiences making the film, saying the Pistols “affected a total disinterest in the screenplay; their literary contributions were limited to penciling in “f – - -” every three words.”

Unfortunately only a day and a half of shooting was actually completed. When executives at Twentieth Century Fox read the script, they were reportedly so shocked by its content that they immediately pulled funding and the film was never completed.

Jaws 3, People 0
Involved Parties: John Hughes, Matty Simmons, Joe Dante

Around 1979, the producers of the Jaws series, in a stroke of byzantine whimsy, decided they would benefit from going in a slightly different, more humorous direction for the series’ third installment. They decided to bring National Lampoon founder and Animal House producer Matty Simmons, as well as an up-and-coming writer by the name of John Hughes,on board to come up with a script. The film was set to be directed by Pirhana director Joe Dante(who would later go on to direct Gremlins). What they generated was a parody of the series in the vein of Airplane!

The film opens with Peter Benchly, writer of the novel on which Jaws was based, sitting at home working on the screenplay for Jaws 3. After putting the finishing touches on the script’s title page, he decides to take a break and go out for a night swim in his backyard pool. As he preps himself on the diving board, we see several POV shots from just beneath the water’s surface, accompanied by the famous Jaws theme. As Benchly leapss from his diving board, the shark lunges from the water and picks him off in mid-air.

The rest of the film’s plot revolves around the original Jaws creators attempting to film Jaws 3, in which it is revealed the shark is an alien from outer space, only to have the filmmakers and studio executives attacked by an actual blood-thirsty shark in scenes that mirror the original film.

Spielberg’s fictional counterpart is particularly unlucky, having fingers and toes and limbs chewed off as the movie progresses. And apparently Spielberg didn’t take his lampooning in stride according to Matty Simmons, who stated in an interview, “The studio had already spent $2.5 million on pre-production. It was a great script written by John Hughes and Todd Carroll based on a story I had written, it starred Richard Dreyfuss and a young woman named Bo Derek, who would have been fabulous, and Spielberg walked into [Universal chairman Sid] Sheinberg’s office and said ‘you make this movie and I’m walking off the lot,’ because what happened is it made fun of the director. The movie was about making Jaws 3, and the shark kept attacking the director. One day he’d bite off the director’s toe and then his foot. Dick Zanuck and David Brown were executive producers and I was a producer on the movie, and they and I walked from Universal after that happened.”

We got Jaws 3-D instead.

A Day At The U.N.
Involved Parties: The Marx Brothers, Billy Wilder

In 1960, academy award-winning writer and director Billy Wilder was staying in a hotel in New York not far from the United Nations. Reflecting upon the current political climate, he decided that the increasing tensions during the Cold War were ripe for satire. And who better to send-up modern politics than the Marx Brothers? The Brothers, who had not made a film together in some 15  years, jumped at the opportunity.

Wilder said of the film, “We want to make a satire on the conditions of the world today, a satire on the deterioration of diplomatic behavior, on brinksmanship, wild jokes about the H-bomb, that type of stuff. It’s all so dramatic that a few jokes put over by the Marx Bros. should alleviate the tension.”

The story was to revolve around a gang leader, played by Groucho, who decides that with the police in New York distracted by having to protect the wave of UN delegates descending upon the city, he and his men could rob Tiffany’s and go relatively unnoticed. Other members of the mob included Chico, the strongman, and Harpo, the safecracker. They end up being mistaken for members of the Latvian delegation and are escorted to the UN, where Harpo delivers a speech using only sound effects and pantomime, with foreign interpreters translating.

Unfortunately before the film could be made, Harpo suffered a heart attack. Though he recovered, this prevented the film’s makers from being able to obtain insurance for the film. Not long after, Chico passed away, which effectively ended any chance the film had of being made.

Megalopolis
Involved Parties: Francis Ford Coppola

Much like Kubrick’s Napoleon, Megalopolis is another example of a great director’s vision burdened by its own ambitious nature. For many years Coppola has tried to bring to life his vision of a story about an architect who tries to create a futuristic utopia through architecture. Coppola has finished the screenplay and some early storyboards were drawn up, but financial issues continue to prevent the film from progressing beyond the pre-production stage.

Coppola says of the film, “The setting is modern New York. It deals… with the idea that the future world we’re going to live in is being negotiated today… It’s kind of a shape-of-things-to-come film in which the characters are concerned with artists, businessmen, proletariat all having a stake in the future but very few of them having a hand in what it’s going to be like. It’s a little bit like an Ayn Rand novel.”

The project seems dead at this point, largely due to the fact that studios are unwilling to commit to Coppola the level of funding needed. Though Coppola himself does not completely rule out the possibility, however slim, of the film eventually being made in the future.

Ok, so I can’t be certain that my home office space is better than yours, but recently my workspace increased from a 2′X2′ little box in the corner to now almost 5x that amount! I’m sure there are a lot of better home office spaces out there, a simple Google image or web search should be able to take care of that.

I guess the only way this could get better is if I got myself a Folsom and brought in my XBox, Wii, and other sources so I could switch to whatever I want and never have to move the screen, let alone even get up. I guess that’d be a little too lazy, though.

If my laptop screen still worked, I’d be able to sport dual screen again, so I guess this should really be 29 reasons why mine is better than yours.

Have an impressive home-office that you would like to share? Find some good ones on the web? Feel free to share!

I have lived since early childhood
Figuring out what’s going on, I,
I know what hurts, I know what’s easy,
When to stand and when to run,
And there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
-Malvina Reynolds, No Hole In My Head

Amanda Feilding, a 27-year old art student, sits dressed in a white robe. Before her a row of operating utensils is laid neatly out on a table. She calmly shaves her hairline, then dons a shower cap to restrain the remaining hair. She injects herself with a local anesthetic, then retrieves a scalpel from the line-up of tools and, with a firm look of determination, begins to excise a patch of skin from her head. Next, she reaches for an electric drill, aims it carefully at the spot on her head and presses down on the foot pedal. The drill screeches to life and begins chewing away at Feilding’s frontal bone. Blood geysers from the hole, roughly three-eighths of an inch wide, splattering her white robe. She grins widely in the mirror as rivers of blood run down her face.

Feilding then washes the blood from her face with a cloth and wraps her head in bandages. She changes out of the blood-stained robe and begins getting dressed, donning a gold headdress to disguise the bandages. Finally, waving goodbye to the camera, she heads off to a fancy dinner party.

The film you have just watched is a 1970 short documentary entitled Heartbeat In The Brain. It was filmed by Amanda Feilding and her partner Joe Mellon, both followers of a man named Bart Hughes, known as the father of the modern trepanation movement. The film is quite difficult to find now. The pair showed it at lectures they gave on trepanation across Europe and America, including one event where several viewers were said to have passed out, “dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums.”

The film has since become part of the pantheon of cinematic curiosities, much sought after for their depiction of the bizarre and unusual by those whose curiosity is sufficiently morbid.

“Clean up all your bad vibrations. Letting the spirits out of the hole, that was the Greek version of it. . . . Eight orifices in your head now. Get you responding to undiscovered electromagnetic fields. . . . Your brain’s got an erection.”
-Heathcote Williams, AC/DC

The motivation behind all this? Proponents of trepanation reason that over time both gravity and the hardening of the skull bone serve to decrease the pulsation of blood through the brain. Boring a hole in one’s head, they say, allows for increased blood volume, thereby enhancing one’s level of consciousness.

As for what happened immediately after the film ends and Feilding goes off to her dinner party, she states that she felt, “a lifting upwards, like the tide coming in, and at the same time a feeling of relaxation and silence in the head, a peace, a stopping of that voice in the head.” Somehow drilling a hole in her own head seemed like a natural move for Feilding.  “I was trained as a sculptor,” she said, “so I thought, ‘I spend all my time making holes in objects, I might as well make one in my own head.’ “

Have you ever used your consumer level camera or phone camera and when you are excited to take a picture you are disappointed to find it has been blurred or streaked? There is that brief one second pause the camera makes and any camera motion can ruin a shot. Well, I’m here to turn that 2 second capture period of anger and disappointment into art. I know, you’re saying to yourself  “But Pete, if you do this in your camera settings you’ll be off scott-free lol.” Yes, I know there is a way to fix this, but, hey, we’re being creative here!

I’m sure there is some name or term for this camera phenomena, but I don’t know what it’s called. All I know so far is that I can make some pretty interesting things and do endless experiments.

Sure, I know this seems goofy, and yes, it is. But I’m kinda serious about this. It started off as fun and games, and turned into creativity.

So far, I’ve been using a Nikon Coolpix and my Samsung Access. I’m discovering different patterns in different situations and techniques, such as lighting, contrast of light, , environment change, as well as throw technique and speed.

Aside from a standard lob, there are some throwing techniques I’ve been using. (You are more than welcome to try this, but keep in mind, you are THROWING YOUR CAMERA, which if you do not catch or provide a soft landing for, can cost you big time.)

Above is the Helicopter / Ninja Star technique. Can be thrown either vertically or horizontally on either the X or Y axis.

The flip / tumbler. Head over heels. Can be thrown on the X or Y axis. Pretty self explanatory. This technique is interesting because depending on your environment, you can catch different depths.

The spiral / drill method. This is by far the most dangerous of all the throws I’ve discovered (so far). This one might take some practice. I’ve also found that this is one of the best ways to gain your maximum speed.

Now, I’m not trying to go super crazy with this, well, ok, maybe I am. But I’m going to avoid redundancy with varying speed, heights, settings, camera models, and techniques.

I know that what you are going to see below is very “streaky” but the images to come in the future may not always be limited to that style. Who knows, I may just try to launch my camera as high as I can just to see the kind of shot I could never imagine getting.

I will be uploading one image per week, giving a total of 52 for the year (duh). Since I didn’t start this project in week 1, I’m catching up with multiple pics in this post

My coworker came up to me before our show today and asked me what I was doing, and I said “making some light streaks”, showed him this picture, and he was impressed! The following images setting is here.

Ninja Star style, mildly fast.

Mild spiral, tossed about 10 feet up to 4 leko lights. If you pay attention, you can see my face.

Spiral, next to my China Hutch indoors, extremely fast.

Ninja Star, again, very fast, indoors in front of my TV.

Lobbed onto my living room couch (lighted room) from my dining room (dark).

Feel free to post your own or comment and/or criticize!

“Hello, friends and lovers!”
-Thu Tran, host of Food Party

On rare occasion, I venture to turn on my television only to be bombarded by an unceasing volley of political and corporatist propaganda and artistically bankrupt sitcoms sandwiched between vile advertisements that try way too hard to reach a form of “humor” only someone with a severe case of terminal stupidity would laugh at. The ordeal often leaves me huddled in a corner, a quivering mess, weeping as I sink deeper into an inescapable despair.

However, also on rare occasion, I stumble upon something that dispenses with any pretenses and embraces fully a free-spirited creativity with reckless abandon. This thing is Food Party.

A surreal food-themed Pee Wee’s Playhouse for adults, drenched in colorful absurdity, Food Party began its life as a homemade puppet show created by a group of Cleveland art school students. Episodes of about twenty to thirty minutes in length appeared sporadically on YouTube, often several months apart. With its combination of colorful, limitless imagination and homemade, rough-around-the-edges charm, Food Party quickly garnered a cult following.

Episodes of Food Party generally focus on the goings on occurring in Thu Tran’s kitchen, where food is both an edible treat and a work of art. Lacking professional acting skills, Thu Tran hosts the show with an infectious playfulness and cheer reminiscent of a child making a show in their basement with their parent’s camcorder. By contrast, her frequent co-star Peter Van Hyning displays an incredible knack for playing various colorful characters, both puppet and human, of all sorts of eccentric persuasions.

In 2009 Food Party was picked up by IFC, where the show has only continued to get better. While it is now shot in HD and with a far greater budget, the show has retained the homemade charm that gives it its character and makes it such a joy to watch. Episodes have been reduced to 10 minutes, but Food Party manages to pack more imagination and creativity into those brief 10 minutes than most shows do in an entire season. This is what TV should be.

Food Party has finished airing its first season and at the time of this writing it is unknown if IFC is planning on picking it up for a second. Here’s hoping they do.

UPDATE: Thu Tran has announced on her Facebook that new Food Party episodes will begin airing April 27th at 10pm on IFC!

The original YouTube episodes can be found on Thu Tran’s YouTube page or on FoodParty.tv.

Food Party official website on IFC.

Seeing this article got me thinking… I do think that political correctness will ultimately annihilate the tradition of the American side show. Is it exploitative? Probably for some… but a lot of side show folks love the life that comes along with being on stage and let’s face it, their statures, girth, talents, or unusual features were a ticket to profitable careers in show business that would otherwise have been lost to them. Would it be better for them to get vanilla jobs like the rest of us, bagging groceries, ringing up customers, for crappy wages while being stared and jeered at anyway? You may disagree, but I think not!!!

Consequently, I base my observations not only on personal opinion, but also from a discussion I had with the man in the picture with Mr. Snowden, the fire-eating, Mr. Pete “Poobah” Terhurne : )  I met him at a side show that traveled through the Penn State Fair a few years ago.  He told me that he had been in the movie and side show business his whole life (He was even cast as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz!) and he lives comfortably on the money he takes in doing what he loves: traveling and entertaining and amazing people with his unusual talents. Sounds good to me : )

Any thoughts?

- Miss Sabrina

The original article appears here.

Images resourced to http://sideshowworld.com/Tribute-Bruce-Snowden.html and http://o.aolcdn.com/photo-hub/news_gallery/6/4/647168/1264718754028.JPEG