Submitted by Wayne Zebzda:
A funny, yet informative video about how to make prison wine by Andrew Hart. Watch the movie here.
Sizing up your magical practice
(Or, how not to end up in a tinfoil hat.)
by Mordant Carnival
Key64.net
It”s the aim of this article to look at ways of appraising your magical practice, offering a few approaches and techniques to make sure things are on track as far as effectiveness goes and also to avoid some of the more common pitfalls along the way.
It”s not always possible to apply the scientific method per se to this kind of work but the techniques and approaches associated with scientific investigation are applicable in many cases and can be very useful. This doesn”t mean trying to prove that magic works, putting together a study that could find a home in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society laying out evidence that Wednesday”s sigil working was responsible for your getting laid last night. Since magic is such a nebulous beast, an experiential business with unprovables being kicked around all over the shop and subjectivity agogo, it is frequently a logical impossibility to talk in terms of proof and not necessarily desirable anyway. However, this does not mean that we have to give up all notion of a meaningful assessment of the success or otherwise of a working or a practice, an assessment based on discernment, critical thinking, logic and rationalism. “Proving” that magic works, or that a particular spell worked, is not the point. The point is analysing your results and your overall progress in an intelligent and meaningful way. Continue reading “Sizing up your magical practice”
The Anti-Advertising Agency
From the Anti-Advertising Agency Web site:
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“…Through long-term commercial saturation, it has become implicitly understood by the public that advertising has the right to own, occupy and control every inch of available space. The steady normalization of invasive advertising dulls the public”s perception of their surroundings, re-enforcing a general attitude of powerlessness toward creativity and change, thus a cycle develops enabling advertisers to slowly and consistently increase the saturation of advertising with little or no public outcry.
The Anti-Advertising Agency co-opts the tools and structures used by the advertising and public relations industries. Our work calls into question the purpose and effects of advertising in public space. Through constructive parody and gentle humor our Agency”s campaigns will ask passers by to critically consider the role and strategies of today”s marketing media as well as alternatives for the public arena. Our work will de-normalize “out-of-home” advertising and increase awareness of the public”s power to contribute to a more democratically-based outdoor environment…”
As an example, Light Criticism is a collaboration between the Anti-Advertising Agency and the Graffiti Research Lab:
How to Make Disappearing Ink
From About:Chemistry
Disappearing ink is a water-based acid-base indicator (pH indicator) that changes from a colored to a colorless solution upon exposure to air. The most common pH indicators for the ink are thymolphthalein (blue) or phenolphthalein (red or pink). The indicators are mixed into a basic solution that becomes more acidic upon exposure to air, causing the color change. Note that in addition to disappearing ink, you could use different indicators to make color-change inks, too.
To find out how disappearing ink works, what you need to make it, and how to do it, follow this link — Continue reading “How to Make Disappearing Ink”
Look up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane… it’s graffiti!
Graffiti Geeks Strike: Virtual Vandalism Taught at N.Y. College
By Austin Fenner
New York Post
May 12, 2007
It’s new-school graffiti – and it’s being taught in college.
The elite Parsons New School for Design is offering a college course that employs modern, computer-graphic lighting techniques to give a new twist to the ghetto-inspired art form.
But the class has already garnered hardcore foes who gripe that it’s destined to still create vandalism.
The Parsons course is called “Geek Graffiti” and is offered as part of the Master’s program.
To its artists, aerosol cans of spray paint and the subway cars they might have once targeted are so 20th century.
The techniques taught allow them to instead virtually, rather than literally, put their names on Mount Rushmore and on the George Washington Bridge.
One new-graffiti artist’s ultimate dream, for example, was realized when he used computers and neon blue lights to project a towering image of himself, writing his tag “Jeff” and “Jesus Saves,” across the majestic backdrop of the Washington Square Park arch. Continue reading “Look up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane… it’s graffiti!”