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15 matchs for deviant:
me see Saddam on teevee
he bad man
George Bush good man
kill Saddam dead
everybody happy now
--a typical American
(image from deviantart.com)
Jim Henley:
...the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. Those are the people who are happiest of all about tonight’s execution. Smells like - victory! It’s the pomander they don against the stench.Juan Cole, writing for Salon:
Saddam Hussein was tried under the shadow of a foreign military occupation, by a government full of his personal enemies. The first judge, an ethnic Kurd, resigned because of government interference in the trial; the judge who took his place was also Kurdish and had grievances against the accused. Three of Saddam's defense lawyers were shot down in cold blood. The surviving members of his defense team went on strike to protest the lack of protection afforded them. The court then appointed new lawyers who had no expertise in international law. Most of the witnesses against Saddam gave hearsay evidence. The trial ground slowly but certainly toward the inevitable death verdict.New York Times headline writer: "Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped." Oh, man, you should be, like, a writer. That makes me feel like, I don't know.
Financial Times:
One of the witnesses, Judge Munir Haddad, was quoted by CNN as saying that as the noose was being tightened around Mr Hussein’s neck, one of the hangmen shouted out "Long live Moqtada al-Sadr." "Moqtada al-Sadr," said Mr Hussein mockingly [...] According to the report, those were Mr Hussein’s last words.Glenn Greenwald:
It really is striking, and a potent sign of just how absurd is our ongoing occupation, that the "Iraqi Government" which we are fighting to empower could not even conduct this execution with a pretense of legality or concern for civilized norms -- the executioners were not wearing uniforms but leather jackets and murderers' masks, conducting themselves not as disciplined law enforcement officers but as what they are (death squad members and sectarian street thugs). [...] But as Floyd also correctly observes, Saddam was in U.S. custody until the very last minute, and both the fact and the terms of the execution required the approval of Bush officials, which they gave -- implicitly, if not explicitly, by handing over Saddam for his middle-of-the-night noose fitting. Comparisons to the relatively dignified and orderly Nuremburg executions only serve to highlight how far America has tumbled under this administration, on every level that matters.
a quick surf around the deviantart.com Pixel Art archive--image filenames contain artists and titles
ryan-gfx (skip intro if there is one)
"Groove Show," by wenstrom
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five by wenstrom
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I meant to post this pixel art assortment about a year ago. Many of the .gifs aren't still at the original links.
Fire for Pixel, by pixelthork, enlarged from 47 X 46 pxl original. I am in awe of this picture. (I'm told the pixels are fuzzy on Safari and sharp on IE. I'm about ready to say, you aren't "getting" my page if you browse with Safari. Bill Gates is paying me a lot of money. Actually, Netscape and Mozilla work fine, too.)
Update, 2010: GIF remade at 400 x 391 after all browsers followed the Safari lead and involuntarily fuzzed out enlarged graphics. The original sized version looks like this:
"Pixel Monster - Faier" by pixelthork at 400 X 350 pixels
Below are some Flash claymations (and one cartoon) by Prikedelik. Incredibly crude clay figures act out the artist's raging id in a perfectly ordinary apartment setting. Against background scenery consisting of books, papers, cigarette packs, and computer hardware, these lumpen, miniature superheroes dance, fight, and try their best to survive the blind forces of nature. Much of it's mindless slapstick ("cautious," "repressed," or "anal-retentive" are not words you would use to describe this work) but like the best slapstick it's funny. Turning on the speakers is recommended as the accompanying music--heavy on the electronic club anthems--is choice. Some shorts are interactive, so if you see a command like "Dance" or "Die" be sure to click it. Animations load quickly on broadband; not sure about dialup.
| Death to the Blue King! Destiny (interactive cartoon) |
"Hug" emoticon: deviantART
Design: Chiyoko
(Kind of like John Simon only cuter.)
Cube tower slideup, by artech-x03, 80 times
an html/internet/curatorial/appropriation piece
These are sections of the World's Tallest Virtual Building (if link is busted see my update below), a collaborative pixelist project that should provide hours of astonished amusement. Unfortunately the bubble wall got trimmed on the floor with the homicidal bears, but you get the idea. This is another example of the internet being way ahead of all those seminars about "databases in collaboration" and whatnot, and it may be one of the few "exquisite corpse" ideas that actually works. I love how European it is, inevitable McDonald's "flythrough" notwithstanding. In case you're new to the pixel art craze (), each floor is drawn in the "fat bits" or zoom mode of a simple paint program, so we're talking uncountable hours of plugging in little squares to make this sucker. (hat tip to Cory A.)
UPDATE: I guess this site got too popular because the link is no longer good. If anyone notices it back up or at a new location please let me know. In the meantime, I saved a few of the images. They're not stacked like they're supposed to be. Think of it as an html jigsaw puzzle. UPDATE TO UPDATE: The site's back up! Yay!
Cats vs Dogs: left, Carl D'Alvia, Ratdog, 1996, carved plaster and rope, 40" X 25" X 23"; right, Sigurd Engerström, The Nightmare Cheetah, 2003, pencil drawing.
The images above are pixelist drawings from the deviantART website. (The name "deviantART" rankles, by the way; it's not like there's much sexual or transgressive content on the site. In fact, it's fairly tyPICal in its table-jammed, info-overloaded layout. A lot of the work is great, though.) Although deviantART makes images freely available for the clicking, the administrators guilt-trip you about asking each artist's permission to reproduce them. I mean no discourtesy or larceny towards the artists; my weblog is a labor of love and I just don't have the time or energy to obtain scrupulous copyright permission for everything I put up on it. Hopefully you will cut me some slack and take each reproduction as the compliment it was intended to be. It's not like I'm passing it off as my own work, or selling T-shirts, or anything. (This is my standard, bitchy "fair use" disclaimer and will be linked to in future posts.) Left to right, top to bottom: banxter, wenstrom; wenstrom, beef; astropioneer, robotriot. Each image is linked to its source page.
The two posts previous to this one--drawings titled Starfish Disaster and Melting Appliance--are my first (official) stabs at Pixelist art. I used to enjoy the pixel contests on the sadly-defunct word.com, and was intrigued to find "pixel art" listed as a genre at deviantART, an anyone-can-post visual art site. You draw these things mostly in the "fat bits" or zoom mode of a simple paint program and the finished product is meant to be a low-res understatement. Some works still manage to be over the top: this piece by gunstar-red, Edge Retro Cover, is a tour-de-force crammed with myriad pop-culture references, neatly arranged in a kid's isometric playroom. Other drawings are more concise, sometimes gems of miniaturization:
| wenstrom: | pixelthork: Cute Little Cube (Rubik's) |
| robotriot:
banxter: |
artech-x03: |
