Aku Aku

Why I Love The Internets

First there was this Flickr set of some photos found in a flea market album of 80s teens having themselves a cocaine party. Funny.

2131845519_b0f9e50400

Then there was the recreation Flickr pool:

2371822856_813dfdf5a1

Then the photoshopped Flickr set:

2372833254_22a9c5194f

Keep'em coming! Thx.

Masdar: City of the Future?

Speaking of bizarre future cities, this one is actually going to be built apparently. It is creepy and wonderful all at the same time. Zero waste, zero emissions. On the other hand, it looks like Gattaca. Wikipedia currently has little to say about it.

Masdar Initiative - Worlds First 100% Carbon Free Community

27 of 52: Dinner Time

This week it's another photo. I took this near sunset from the balcony of our apartment in Buenos Aires. The blue sky had turned dark with heavy clouds maybe 15 minutes before, and everything was gray when I looked out except for this one warm rectangle of light framed in a mess of geometric shapes of drab. In that rectangle was a shirtless old man ready to eat dinner. It took me about four shots to get one in which the colors were right but wasn't too blurry.

Black Rock City, Mars

This article, Six Earth Cities That Will Provide Blueprints for Martian Settlers, points out six terrestrial cities that may provide seeds for designers of future Martian colonies. Guess which one comes up first? Also includes Dubai, Southwestern US pueblos and some that are a little less ridiculous.

Brc mars

26 of 52: 12 Galaxias Impugnar Peron

Yes, where are 24 and 25? They'll be running late as I've been on vacation with Tesla and Mie and never seem to have time to work on anything ...strange as that may sound. And this week's project didn't really turn out as well as I'd hoped, but hey I tried. And I still like the idea and can try to make it work better when I get back to San Francisco.

I'm a big fan of street art, and Buenos Aires is one of the most amazing street art scenes I've ever known. It has everything: wild style writers, tags and huge amazing pieces (see my flickr set for examples), but what it has more of than anywhere else I've known is stencils. They're everywhere. Last time I was in this city I got a grand tour of the past and present of the BsAs graffiti scene from one of its original practitioners. He told me taking photos of street art was fine, but I should also be creating it.

This time in Buenos Aires I took up the challenge. I wanted to leave a little San Francisco flavor behind, and what (or who) tastes more like San Francisco than Frank Chu? I have several of my own photos of Frank, and even one where I dressed up as Frank at Burning Man, but I started with a photo taken by Scott Beale because he takes better photos. I did some photoshopping and ended up with this image:

I printed this out and used it as a guide to cut out from a piece of cardboard. The letters were really hard to do as they were so small. When I tried to spray paint the stencil held against the wall, the small lettering smudged and the results were unreadable.

I still like this idea though. When I get back to San Francisco I'm going to change the sign to be more like Frank's (dense with lettering) and maybe have him impeach Gavin or Obama instead, but make the overall stencil much bigger and exact using a laser cutter.

I was thinking that really what I'd need to do a good stencil of a detailed piece this small is to use magnets against a metal surface (like a utility box) to keep the stencil very flat against the surface.

Con Los Porteños

Carlos Calvo Escape

We've been having a great time here in the San Telmo area of Buenos Aires. We've stayed at two great apartments, the current one being really wonderful. I've started a CommunityWalk map of San Telmo and other parts of the city that we'll continue to add to (and others can too). Note that google maps knows nothing about the street names in Argentina, but Open Street Maps does.

I've found a pretty good blog about Buenos Aires, The Argentine Post, run by a journalist with good commentary on local politics and things of interest to expats living here, like how to get your electronics fixed when you plug a 110v power supply in to the 220v grid here. My favorite local website though is Scooping Argentina which has short video lessons on how to talk like a porteño (as the locals call themselves). Each lesson has a local person explaining a local slang term. For example berreta, meaning "crappy", or as used in a sentence: "Los forros que reparte el gobierno son berretas", or "the condoms that are distributed by the government are crappy." Someone should produce these for all languages.

Los forros que reparte el gobierno son berratas

23 of 52: Last Tahoe Supper

Each year our friends Alan and Annabelle in New York organize a snow weekend in Lake Tahoe. We rent a big house and spend our days snowboarding or snowshoeing. In the evenings we make big suppers. This week's project is a photo of the last supper of the weekend.