Coooool

Distoring someone's face in Photo Booth is fun for pretty much anyone - quite possibly because the photos it creates are just so repulsively ugly. New York artist Matic, has taken the idea of those ugly faces and made it really, really cool by turning the squished photo into a functional mask.

"Using Apple's Photo Booth application as inspiration, the idea was to take the 2D image that it manipulated and create a tangible face in a real environment, then in turn bring it back into a 2D image. Using Photo Booth on the mask itself may create some sort of paradoxal shift where I cease to exist." Matic.

Who the fuck is Justin Bieber?

Clearly I am already way out of touch with what teenage girls find appealing today. According to this morning's news they like baby-faced, fluffy-haired, sixteen year-olds, with particularly feminine singing abilties called Justin Bieber.

This kid was found on Youtube a couple of years ago and now has millions of twitter followers and a no.1 album. What is going on in the world? Things like Youtube and Twitter seem to have made the whole concept of celebrity and fans explode into craziness. It appears Bieber's "Beliebers" (primarily females under the age of fifteen) have too much access to their lover-boy, what with him tweeting all day, every day and billions of photos of him all over the internet - the whole fan thing has been taken to a new, scary level.

Teenage girls with broken knee-caps? What the hell?

We're Sad To Lose You

I found this on the side of the road outside a primary school. It's pretty cute.

Heart of Darkness

I just read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for one of my classes at uni and the more I think about it the more I like it. When I first read it I was a little let down because I was expecting something quite different. The title 'Heart of Darkness' made me think it was going to be a dramatic, gothic novel which, of course, it isn't! It's typical Modernism in the way that the deeper you delve the more there is to discover and I just keep discovering more themes and ideas that it's almost overwhelming.

The thing that really stood out to me though was the narrative framing. It begins with a seaman on a boat with three other people, one of which begins telling a story about an expedition he was a part of on the Congo River in Africa and the majority of the remaining novel is this retelling. Numerous critcs have labelled Conrad as racist for his depiction of the native Africans in the novel, but I think the subjectivity of the story being told far overrides these suggestions. Heart of Darkness is a story about the unknown and the difficulty in ascertaining truth in a world of such vast knowledge that it is impossible to unconver it all.

I suggest you read it. And then read it again.