Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXCII

[northernladuk]

Guy Sucks At Photoshop, Spends 10 Years Mastering Microsoft Paint To Illustrate His Book - "Turns out, sometimes our resistance to learn something new and master a new skill can lead to something pretty amazing. Pat Hines, who couldn’t be bothered to learn Photoshop and illustrated his ebook using good old Microsoft Paint, is the proof." You can find his gallery at Deviant Art for more of his work

Always find the artwork done in paint pretty amazing. Got hooked after seeing a site called Jim'll paint it where he takes wacky requests and does a scene in Paint.

Jim'll Paint It

He's got a video of him doing it as well which I found a good watch. Just a mouse and a keyboard. Pretty clever.

https://www.facebook.com/JimllPaintI...type=2&theater

[NickFitz]

This should have been the final week of the current gig, but they extended for up to three months, so I have to continue wasting three days a week not reading stuff like this

• How to Obfuscate - Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum explore techniques for burying signals in noise, both online and in real life. ”Many forms of obfuscation work best as time-buying ‘throw-away’ moves. They can get you only a few minutes, but sometimes a few minutes is all the time you need.”
  
  
• Wikipedia: The Text Adventure - This game by Kevan Davis uses the Wikipedia API to allow you to choose a starting point, either one of the randomly-chosen ones offered or one of your own choice, then move around geographically after the manner of an old school text adventure.
  
  
• Capital Sharp S – Germany’s new character and The Capital Sharp S in now part of the official German orthography - As of last month, Germany officially has a new letter: the uppercase ß. ”When the German lowercase letter ß (“sharp s”) was standardized and added to all German typefaces around 1900, the addition of a capital version was planned as well. But the introduction was postponed, because the committee couldn’t agree on a design in time. In the end it took over 100 years to get the ball rolling again.”
  
  
• Hacking the Nazis: The secret story of the women who broke Hitler's codes - "Of the 10,000-plus staff at the Government Code and Cypher School during World War II, two-thirds were female. Three veteran servicewomen explain what life was like as part of the code-breaking operation during World War II."
  
  
• Short Film Composed from Thousands of Apollo Mission Photographs - A film depicting the Apollo astronauts’ journey to the moon, put together from original NASA still photographs over eighteen months by Christian Stangl and his brother Wolfgang.
  
  
  
  
  
• Who Cracked the Case Of Kuru? - ”The story of kuru is a classic one in anthropology and medicine. Called the "laughing death" in the Australian newspapers, the disease swept over the Fore population of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands over the course of the 20th century, peaking in the late '50s and early '60s.” Genese Sodikoff on the anthropologists who tracked down the evidence that the disease, similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and BSE, was transmitted by cannibalism.
  
  
• How to Make Sense of a Mass Grave - "In 2011, in the German province of Saxony-Anhalt, archaeologists were surveying a battlefield from a long-ago war when they detected the edge of a pit. As they probed the area further, they found that they had discovered a mass grave." And to study it, rather than excavating it in situ, they lifted the entire thing up in two pieces.
  
  
• The Great Uprising: How a Powder Revolutionized Baking - An interesting history of baking powder, without which cake as we know it would not exist: ”In the 18th century and earlier, most baking was dictated by the delicate whims of respiring yeast… your hard-earned rising agent could still be killed or weakened by temperatures that were too hot or too cold, or contamination from bacteria. (Many early recipes recommend obtaining the help of a manservant.)”
  
  
• The bloodstained leveller - Walter Scheidel on the way plagues and wars have historically led to greater social equality: ”Every time the gap between rich and poor shrank substantially, it did so because of traumatic, often extremely violent shocks to the established order. Catastrophic plagues, the collapse of states and, more recently, mass-mobilisation war and transformative revolution, are the only forces that ever levelled on a grand scale.”
  
  
• Guy Sucks At Photoshop, Spends 10 Years Mastering Microsoft Paint To Illustrate His Book - "Turns out, sometimes our resistance to learn something new and master a new skill can lead to something pretty amazing. Pat Hines, who couldn’t be bothered to learn Photoshop and illustrated his ebook using good old Microsoft Paint, is the proof." You can find his gallery at Deviant Art for more of his work
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!