Outjesting boredom since 2004.
Photoshop Disasters is great fun if you want to see just how warped software can make people (well, women usually) look – think missing limbs, plastic skin and banana-shaped spines – but these images are easy to detect because they’re just obviously wrong. How do you spot the Photoshop work that isn’t a disaster? This post takes a photo from Victoria’s Secret and puts it through a CSI-esque process to find out what’s been fiddled with.
Previously on The Wired Jester: Too Much Photoshop.
[Game] PIXEL!, an Xbox 360 Arcade title, recommended by Jean Snow’s new Game blog:
“The third entry in the ‘Arkedo Series’ of retro inspired games, PIXEL! is a mostly straightforward take on the platforming genre, mixing 8-bit visuals with a current gen sheen. Arkedo still manages to give the game a very modern look, with simple but enjoyable gameplay that harkens back to old-school 2D platformers (with a few little twists). Arkedo is a French independent studio founded by Camille Guermonprez and Aurélien Regard. Releases so far include two other titles in the ‘Arkedo Series’ (the puzzle/platformer JUMP! and the puzzler SWAP!), as well as DS titles Nervous Brickdown and Big Bang Mini.”
Couldn’t find any wrapping paper I liked for Mrs Jester’s presents – something of a dilemma, given that I was shopping in my lunch hour on the 23rd and fully intended to get to the pub after work. The answer came when I gave up and ended up, as is often the case with me, in Foyles bookshop:
A map.
Because maps are paper, too.
Plus, it would be a nice way to refer back to my sabbatical trip in the autumn to China – the Jesteress came with me for the first few days, and then had to return to the UK for work. I bought a large map of China, and wrapped her presents in it, trying to take care to leave some of the locations we’d visited together visible. Worked very well, the paper was easy to fold, and a £6 map covered all the presents.
All that remains is for me to say Happy Christmas, and thanks for reading and for your comments – 2009 has been a successful one for this blog, and I think the distinction between The Wired Jester, and my personal site has been really beneficial. I hope you have a good break!
Hopefully I’ll get to the cinema over the Christmas break – Avatar in 3D looks set to be monumental and I’d like to see Where the Wild Things Are on a big screen, too – but perhaps top of my list is Nowhere Boy, the movie about John Lennon’s teenage years. It’s out on Boxing Day in the UK, and the early word from Kermode – my film oracle – is that it’s pretty good. The Guardian is less keen, but the details sound great:
“Perhaps [Director Sam] Taylor Wood’s wittiest touch is to begin her film with the first, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, which is simply allowed to hang there unresolved in the silence – a weirdly atonal effect, replacing the song’s happy connotations with something more disturbing: a harbinger of something momentous.”
The script, reviewed by the excellent Script Shadow, focusses on Lennon’s relationship with his mother, Julia, and his Aunt, Mimi. It frames Julia as a free spirit who portends the coming of the 60s – with its focus on creativity, self determination and individualism, even at the expense of community, responsibility and sanity, while Mimi as representative of traditional values and structure. As well as being dramatically strong, it’s not a completely inaccurate way to go about the story, and Lennon did come to see his relationship with Julia as embodying something psychically crucial – the song he finally named after her, included on 1968’s The White Album, makes explicit the transference of affection between Julia and Yoko, with its purring reference to the calls of the ‘ocean child’, a play on the literal interpretation of the kanji for Yoko (洋子).
Anyway, the trailer for the film is embedded below. Sadly, the music choices (yes, choices, in a trailer) seem to miss the mark – surely it should be some rock and roll music (any old way you choose it)?
[Book] via io9’s 20 Best Science Fiction Books of the Decade, The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia:
With a face made of porcelain, a wind-up heart, and a talent for alchemy, Mattie is hardly a typical science fictional robot. While most novels about robots focus on how these humanoid machines are stronger and smarter than humans, Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone explores the vulnerability of mechanical beings who depend on humans for repairs and survival.
I love mechanical robots – automatons – and have done ever since reading Tom Standage’s excellent book on the Mechanical Turk. It’s the basis of the story in my magnificent octopus never-quite-finished novel, The Persistence of Vision.
The i09 list is entertaining reading, too – they’ve given the benefit of the doubt to the so-so Pattern Recognition, but Perdido Street Station certainly deserves its mention.
Since I’ve got family nearby, I’ve visited Wakehurst Place in West Sussex a couple of times this year. It’s lovely; it combines an Elizabethan country house with extensive gardens and the Millennium Seedbank, the world’s largest seed conservation project. Earlier in the Autumn, the gardens featured an exhibition of photos from the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. It runs until February, and it features some terrific work, especially the macros of seeds and flowers. The 2010 competition has come up, and I decided to enter two categories: garden views and plant portraits. You could enter four images in each category, so here’s a selection of the ones I went with:
Plant portraits
Stalk of Fire. An old photo that I rescued from a dusty folder on the hard disk to brighten up a dull winter day. Taken an August ago, in the gardens of one of South East London’s best days out, Eltham Palace.
No, this is not a spam post1. Throughout December, you can grab an iPhone app (all games so far) for free, from the wincingly named Appvent Calendar site.
Update: Fixed a wrong link. Thanks, Richard!
1 Although arguably it is Google-bait. Perhaps I should have used an obscure song lyric or pun that Google can’t understand as the headline?
“Eliot’s description of himself as ‘within measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance,” says a review of the new volume of the poet’s letters. Had Eliot had the chance to use Facebook or Twitter, that kind of remark would make a perfect update.
[via terrific book blog, The Second Pass]
Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs is now available as a podcast1. The show is shorter than the radio version as it only includes samples of the chosen songs. Still, it’s often the case that the interview is as interesting as the music so this isn’t too much of a hardship. In fact, in the case of the inaugural podcast, the interview is actually much more interesting than the music.
The guest is Morrissey, who’s introduced by host KirstyYoung as “the outsider’s outsider”, beloved because of his “harsh romanticism.” It’s not a tough set of questions, but all the better for it – relaxed, a little indulgent, but an excellent back-and-forth. I particularly liked Morrissey’s description of his younger self as “constantly waiting for a bus that never came.” Musically, it’s less engaging, being a bunch of 70s art-punk stuff with doomy gothicky overtones:
1) New York Dolls – (There’s Gonna Be Be A) Showdown
2) Marianne Faithful – Come and Stay with Me
3) Ramones – Loudmouth
4) Velvet Underground – The Black Angel’s Death Song
5) Klaus Nomi – Der Nussbaum
6) Nico – I’m Not Saying
7) Iggy and the Stooges – Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell
8 ) Mott the Hoople – Sea Diver
I’ve made a Spotify playlist of Morrissey’s picks; it’s missing numbers 5 and 6.
1 The page design is excellent, making it obvious you can subscribe to the program using a wide variety of software. The BBC even includes a link to a Zune subscription, despite the fact it’s only on sale in the USA.
[Book] Via the indomitable Tyler Cowen’s short but sweet Books of the Year post:
“A very good gift book is Eric Siblin’s new The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. It signals the sophistication of both the giver and receiver and yet it is short and entertaining enough to actually read. Package it with the recent Queyras recording of the Suites, if need be.”
Now that is how you write a book recommendation. I would like to know more about classical music. And of course, one is not averse to signalling one’s own sophistication.
The Wired Jester 