Neat

Quite a while ago, Lynn of A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance pointed me to Locust St., which recently finished a great blog series on the Seven Drinks of Mankind, starting with Beer. Inspired by Tom Standage's book A History of the World in Six Glasses, these lengthy posts are well-illustrated, entertaining, and chock-full of cool history and facts. Perhaps the best way to catch all the posts in order is to start with the November archives and work you way back up to January. Of course, whatever you do, don't miss Tea.

Defective Yeti recently had a flash of inspired brilliance, in the form of this great Infocom-esque text adventure version of Bush's presidency. Here's how it all starts off:

Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure
Revision 88 / Serial number 54892

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal.

> EXAMINE CHAIRS
They are two several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES
You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes.

Hilarious.

I don't recall now where I found it, but Grocerylists.org is a strangely entertaining collection of found grocery lists, many of them featuring amusing combinations of items, odd misspellings, repetitions, curious notations, and other quirks. For example: "Squirt Gun, Hot Peppers, Strawberrys, Bee Trap, Pie Pans". For the best, skip right to the top ten lists.

Here's a neat news story: A caricaturist draws a quick mug of the man who robbed him, leading to his swift capture by police.

Via Cynical-C.

The Daily Grail reposts a Globe and Mail article about a new diet snack-food fad...communion wafers, marketed and sold in grocery stores as "Host Pieces", in godless Quebec.

Is nothing sacred in Quebec any more? The answer may lie on the grocery-store shelves of the province, next to the chips, corn puffs, and salty party pretzels.

That's where shoppers can pick up an increasingly popular snack: communion wafers and sheets of communion bread. These paper-thin morsels made from flour and water hark back to Quebec's churchgoing days and the sacred rite of receiving holy communion.

But in today's secular Quebec, the wafers and bread are packaged like peanuts and popcorn - and sold as a distinctly profane snack.

"They melt in your mouth, and they're not fattening, so it's better than junk food," said Françoise Laporte, a white-haired grandmother of 71 who buys packages of Host Pieces at her local IGA in east-end Montreal. "I'm Catholic. This reminds us of mass."

For older Quebeckers, the snacks offer up a form of nostalgia. Surprisingly, however, they're also finding favour with a younger generation that has rarely, if ever, set foot inside a church.

"My son can eat a whole bag while he's watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He's had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."

I want. Via Michelle's Mental Clutter.

Michelle also has a great post with loads of Simpsons links, including a mildly amusing SimpsonMaker character creator, and a really cool Interactive Map of Springfield. Go see!

Eye candy for your fingers

Or, in other words, "More interactive eye candy", as promised.

Castle Arcana isn't a game at all...it's just a delightful, whimsical, hand-drawn castle and grounds full of fun nooks and crannies to explore. Wait, I lied -- there is a hedge maze game. You can even go for a short drive or take home some souvenirs from the gift shop.




AOOA is a very interesting puzzle/game/interactive artwork. You are presented with a phone booth which you are told can take you to other places (not quite like the Matrix). Play around with the various objects in each level to reveal the number to your next destination. There's very little to figure out, so you mostly just get to sit back and look at the nice things.




TheHOUSE looks at first like another haunted house game, but in reality there's nothing to solve -- it's just a click-through spook-fest where you just find the hotspots to keep the shocks coming. With a suitably dark and grim atmosphere, and lots of jump-out-of-your-seat surprises (if you don't handle this sort of thing well, be warned!), this nicely-constructed experience should enjoyably fill a few minutes of your dark and stormy nighttime browsing.




This is a repost, but worth it. La Pâte à Son is a wonderful toy where you can put together pipes and different attachments to construct a music machine. Colorful beans are piped through the system, creating smooth, jazzy music in their various interactions. Apart from actually building the machine, there are plenty of options to play with, like bean number and frequency, and the quality of the notes produced. Great fun.




I'm not sure how to describe Opniyama. Superficially it resembles a platformer game. It's a huge, hand-drawn environment full of strange creatures and doodles, through which you must navigate by walking and jumping with the aid of a sort of grappling gun. Occasionally you will acquire seeds, which you can plant to grow into different kinds of plants. There seems to be no goal aside from the sheer pleasure of encountering odd and lovely things.




Next time: New Samorost-style games.

Traditional painting

I post links to a fair bit of illustration and digital art, but this time around I'd like to share a sampling of artists who work with good old-fashioned brushes and canvas and paint to create some lovely, and odd, things.

I was introduced today to the work of Colette Calascione, and was immediately taken. I can only describe her paintings as a graceful, eerie blend of surrealism, Northern Renaissance, magic realism, and wry humor. I especially liked those paintings whose spare, clean lines and odd juxtapositions reminded me strongly of Magritte.
Via Thee Temple Ov Psychick Blah.




Will Wilson is a very versatile painter, equally at home painting a traditional fruit-and-jug tabletop still life, or a portrait of an M-16-toting teenage soldier in a pink bra. His subjects range from the mythic to the modern and mundane, but what I especially like are the curiously-piled artifacts that comprise his still lifes, and several of his more surreal figure paintings.
Via All about nothing.




The pale, empty dreamscapes of Michael Parkes are populated by lithe, winged angels gliding about in fluttering robes and in the nude, fantastical creatures, swans, plump dwarves in ornate coats, and tall gentlemen in dark suits. The bio page speaks of his art as a place where "metaphysical and spiritual elements are joined into reality. His work evokes a mysterious atmosphere, which can often only be deciphered with the help of ancient mythology and eastern philosophy. In the fantasy world of Parkes the laws of earthly reality are abolished, and space and time enter into their own motionless communion." But mostly it is about the nude angels.




I can't do better than Phantasmaphile at describing the paintings of Cristina Vergano, which are "like wandering through the Museum of Natural History during Victorian times. On acid."

End the torturous farce

Kids hate visiting Santa.

See? (Via It's A Good Thing I'm Book Smart)

Urban exploration and modern ruins

(Previously on Blue Tea: Abandoned places, More abandoned places, Cities of the dead, and recently, photos of the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital in Random of interest.)

I don't know what is is about Ohio. Either there's a lot of abandoned, falling-down stuff there, or a lot of people eager to crawl around in it with cameras, but Ohio seems to have more than its share of sites devoted to urban exploration. There's Dead Ohio (covering the northeast), Illicit Ohio (central), Ohio Trespassers (statewide, apparently), and The Ohio Exploration Society (bringing everyone together) -- and if that's not enough, you can find more on the Ohio Exploration Webring, which boasts twenty-one members. The pictures below are taken from Dead Ohio, Illicit Ohio, Ohio Trespassers, and The Ohio Exploration society, respectively.





Abanded: Exploring the Forgotten started as an Ohio-based project, and has since expanded its horizons. It features data sheets, guides, and comments along with photographs of a wide variety of locations, all filed into categories such as hospitals, businesses, locks and dams, or cities.




Mustard Gas Party is a collection of photographic essays documenting numerous old, abandoned, or deteriorating sites. The photography is skillful and wonderfully composed, and the locations fascinating.




Dark Passage is "A New York-based organization providing blind archaeologists with the finest quality flashlights." It's a well-designed site with interesting, poetic narratives accompaning good photographs of copious explorations.





I was going to post all of my links, but I have so many I'd better save the rest for later. Besides, you all get upset at me if I give you too much at once.

Excellent webcomics: sagas and series

I don't link to nearly enough webcomics, though I enjoy them very much and have a sizeable collection of links. So it's time to start putting them up, starting with long-running series. These are mostly graphic-novel type comics, all of them worth your time.

(A ways back I did do "Comics to blow your mind", which I really recommend seeing if you haven't yet.)

First is Demian5, a fantastic artist I only just discovered today. Most of his work requires a subscription to view (a measly $3, which I will have no problem shelling out one day when I have the time), but available for free is the wonderful medium-length series "When I Am King", a stylized hypercomic in an innovative sidescrolling format, using animation, 3-d rendering, and other sophisticated effects. With only visuals and no text, the comic follows the adventures of the king of a sunny, Egyptianesque country, an amorous giraffe-dragon, two quirky guards, a pair of sultry village women, a gaggle of children, and some bees. A large portion of the narrative involves the king's quest for his loincloth or a suitable replacement. There is quite a bit of nudity, sex, and scatological humor, but it's all so charming and abstract that only the most dour of Puritans could manage to be offended. Well, maybe some of the moderately dour ones, too.




Faith Erin Hicks's Demonology 101 was one of the first webcomics I ever read, and it's still one of my favorites. An adopted demon girl named Raven copes with high school, friends, and an epic struggle between a resistance group called the Network and the dark Powers that Be. Very nice artwork and a well-executed, engaging story mixing dark themes with humor make this one a winner -- plus, as Faith points out in her intro, it's the longest completed story-based online comic out there. So there you go.




The Green Crow promises to be a fantastic webcomic someday. It's an epic reworking of Peter Pan, with an impressive admixture of literary and mythical allusions and historical tidbits. Unfortunately, there's not very much of it -- just Part One of Book I, with Book I on a two-year hiatus, and Books II and III slated for 2009 and 2015(!), respectively. Now that's some planning ahead. But go and enjoy what there is, with some professional-quality art, terrific character design, and skilled storytelling. If only there were more!




Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl is a beautifully drawn, very moving story about a troubled young woman named Jamie and how she tries to make sense of her life. Everything about the comic is impeccable -- great characters, wonderful art, flawless design. Highly recommended.




NYC2123 is a striking, two-tone graphic novel designed for the PSP. It's about a grim, future, technopunk Manhattan and the lawless barge cities outside it, ruled respectively by martial law and organized crime. A good, solid sci-fi story with some nice worldbuilding, not to mention some very stylish artwork.




Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox is a new discovery for me. I was at first taken with the skillful, detailed artwork, and quickly drawn in by the futuristic world and interesting cast of unusual characters. The series also incorporates an element of mysticism and symbolism that adds some spice. I'm still reading, and you should, too.




Indigo Kelleigh's The Circle Weave is another new one for me, but after one chapter, I'm hooked. It's a long medieval-fantasy epic with some smashing artwork and great storytelling. What more do you need to know?