At first brush, this looks stupid—a 3d-printing solution for a cardboard-and-scotch-tape problem—but watch the video; this is fucking brilliant (given my general skepticism and snarkery about 3D printing, that constitutes high praise indeed):
Tag: OMFG
Man Plays Dope-Ass “Smooth Criminal” on a Barrel Organ in a Wood Pile
Stick with it past; the breakdown around the 3min mark takes this from schtick to rad-as-fuckyeah!
OMFG awesome things are happening in Rustbelt hiphop!!!
- Tunde Olaniran: OMFG, Tunde Olaniran! From the sadly infamous Flint, MI, Tunde Olaniran is superfantastically trans-everything. Go listen to Transgressor and then buy it and then listen to it again and again and again. I seriously absolutely equally love every single track on that album.
- iRAWniq: Another Michigander, she has a fun mixtape, but I’m sorta preferring her more polished EP Black Girls on Skateboards, and the single “Cunt”
- Passalacqua: I’m still exploring these guys, both from Detroit; been loving everything I’ve tried by them. This mixtape is a low-risk place to start, but I’m leaning more toward their albums CHURCH and Passalacqua, and the Banglatown EP.
- Noname: This poet/rapper from Chicago is awesome, the natural inheritor of the crown Lauren Hill dropped after releasing The Miseducation of Lauren Hill. Noname’s Telefono mixtape is absolutely mandatory listening. Go grab it now! Hell, at the very least go right now and listen to track number one (“Yesterday“) and tell me you don’t absolutely love Noname without reservation. GO!
Here’s some poppy Tunde to play us out:
I’m gonna level with you…
… I’ve always love the goddamned Monty Hall Problem, and there’s not a damn thing you can say that’s ever gonna change that.
Wha… What? What *is* this?
South Park was fucking with me in 2007 and none of y’all told me? What the Hell, people?!?
Eli Whitney and the “Mandela Effect”
Listen: I, too, am one of those dumbasses who got it into his head that Eli Whitney was black (although, my hand to God, I swear I saw this on a sign in the African-American History Museum in Detroit when I was a grade schooler–although that itself seems problematic, as it’s highly likely that the time period I’m remembering was when the museum was closed for construction )–and had also dwelled on the irony that the cotton gin (which I believed he invented to ease the labors of enslaved persons) single-handedly invigorated the slave trade by making it massively more profitable. I’m chagrined to admit that I may have even taught this “fact” at some point.
But that’s all trivia; read all the way through this article and meditate on the Mandela Effect, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds—because apparently there was never any Sinbad movie titled Shazaam!
What
the
FUCK‽
A Grab Bag of Human Music Technologies
Girl totally rocks the original “Super Mario” medley (complete with coins and power-ups!) on a sheng, sounds like she totally belongs in the Mos Eisley Catina Band:
A robot plays a pop hit (I love the rhythmic element that the robot’s motors and gears bring to the song):
Props to Arthur Lacomme for pointing me to this one featuring “Mr. Curly” (which is the instrument, not the dude playing it). I love that watering-can clarinet Pollack demos around 1:45!
(Arthur also recommends the open-source Rakarrack software package, which he uses when he rocks his Mr. Curley.)
This one is pretty interesting if you stick with it; what you no doubt initially take to be a precursor to the 8-track is playing cartridges loaded with ribbon-based analog records(!!!). The macro-lens bit at around 5:20 gives you an example of both the sound (pretty damn solid) and the mechanism (OMFG! Wünderbar!) Hilarious remote control, too.
And then there’s this guy:
(FYI, that caption was Wordpress’s suggested—and I love it!!!)
o_O The thing that makes this one, for me, is how the strings are anchored in the eye sockets(!!!) The Met has several of these—from different generous donors and almost certainly different artisans—and they all use the eye sockets and brow ridge as a saddle and bridge. Humans, amiright?
N.B. that, according to current expert opinion, this thing—which is indeed from Central Africa, where it was crafted in the 19th C by a native artisan—was produced for no other purpose than to sell something fantastically “primitive” and “savage” to European tourists/anthropologists (and thus inform European opinions of these nations and, in all likelihood, form the foundation of the moral justifications for brutal colonialism). I invite the reader to meditate on their own how this might mirror our current situation with imported polarizing/fake news, and who the greater savage might be: The supplier who makes the ersatz evidence, or the customer who furnishes the demand and shells out the cash?
FREE FICTION FRIDAY: Part Three of “The Faster Horse” is champing at the bit! @motor1com
Installment three of my alt-reality horses-and-highways serial story for Motor1.com pounding headlong toward destruction! DISASTER TIME!!!
In Part 3 of our alternate reality, everything goes to shit.
Blood on the highway! “The Faster Horse” (part three of four)
Catch Chapter 2 of “The Faster Horse” for FREE on motor1.com!
Installment number two of my latest alt-reality serial story for Motor1.com is now up and ready! Learn what crazy contraption could possibly replace the huge, angry highway horses we all know and love—and how they hell you’d make the damn thing move!
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses!'”
—attributed to Henry Ford
“The Faster Horse” (part two of four)
Quick! Catch “The Faster Horse” (chapter 1) for FREE!
Installment number one of my first serial story forMotor1.com is now up and awaiting your perusal!
If you’ve ever wondered “What if we all had to ride angry mutant horses to work instead of driving cars?”—well, then this is the story for you:
Our alternate reality tale begins with a familiar name, some sharks, and a train wreck.
“The Faster Horse” (part one of four)