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Category: Resources
Vector Magic is an online service that converts bitmap images (like jpegs and GIFs) to vector graphics (like postscript and SVG). It’s not free, but it lets you convert one image for free when you register. I tried it out on the image I use on my about page, and got this.
Now, how do I make that into a T-shirt(*)? Suitable ideas for appropriate text (such as “yes, I am *that* vain!”) also appreciated.
* – Going through my closet yesterday, I discovered I’ve got a total of 91 T-shirts, ranging in age from a couple of weeks to almost 20 years, and in condition from unworn (what weakness possessed me to buy white T-shirts?) to tatters (alas, Elektra: Assassin).
Via Rob Macdougall, a link to a Livejournal community of historical interest called Were they hot or not?, which could become the go-to place for finding good-looking dead people.
One of the entries there is for the actor Conrad Veidt, who played the title role in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs. Based on a Victor Hugo melodrama, Roger Ebert described it as “so steeped in Expressionist gloom that it plays like a horror film”. The film was the inspiration for the Batman villain the Joker, and frankly, doesn’t this guy look scarier than Jack Nicholson with prosthetic cheeks?
From a report in The New Yorker on Bonobos, which contrasts these apes’ public image with how little is actually known about them:
A fact not emphasized in wildlife films is that ape identification is frequently done by zoomed-in inspection of genitals. A lot of the conversation at Lui Kotal’s dinner table dealt with scrotal shading or the shape of a female bonobo’s pink sexual swelling. (“This one is like chewing gum spit out,” Caroline Deimel, the Austrian, once said of a female.)
- Gadgets:
- Compressed Air Knife (for blowing up hostile marine life!) via Rob Donoghue and
Thought-controlled microphone (cyber telepathy!), via Warren Ellis. - Penny Psychology:
- From a commentary on an unworthy news story “revealing” that people play characters of the opposite gender:
The standard male response is: “if I’m going to look at an avatar’s butt the whole time I play, I’d rather it was one I found attractive”. This turns any covert slights against their sexuality on their heads: hey, look, I’m so masculine I play female characters! The standard female response, in contrast, is that they get hit on so often when playing as a female that they have to play as a male to escape it: hey, look, I’m so feminine I play male characters!
Neither of these excuses stands up to scrutiny, of course.[also via Rob Donoghue, ibid].
- Traileration:
- Speed Racer trailer via Chad Underkoffler, and new Hulk trailer (Beware – streaming piece-of-shit) via Yair Raveh.
- Genius
- Chris Sims gives us Archie Andrews covering Jarvis Cocker.