rorschmap is pretty awesome:

Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said.

The word “kaleidoscope” is derived from the Ancient Greek καλ(ός) (beauty, beautiful), είδο(ς) (form, shape) and -σκόπιο (tool for examination)—hence “observer of beautiful forms”. It was invented by Sir David Brewster in 1815-17. Brewster was also active in the development of the lighthouse; both things were byproducts of his researches into optics. The light, refracted, serves both beauty and safety, both aesthetics and cartography.

Read more on booktwo.org.

(view on rorschmap.com)

(view on rorschmap.com)

It's fun to put your home address in, look at landmarks, and get lost in the data. I highly recommend checking it out.

Via Daily Meh, here's a frustrating story of a town in Britain trying to get a business owner to remove some graffiti which his was completely okay with.

A piece of street art by an internationally renowned artist could be painted over after a council deemed it a blight on the local environment. ROA, a secretive Belgian street artist who, like Banksy, has showcased his work in east London, painted a 3.5m (12ft) rabbit on the side of a recording studio in Hackney last year.

The building's owners had granted the artist permission to create the piece, but they have been served with a removal notice by Hackney council, warning that unless they "remove or obliterate the graffiti" within 14 days, a council contractor will paint over the wall and charge them for the service.

"It's quite the opposite of what they're saying it is," said Julia Craik, managing director of Premises music studios and cafe. "It's not a blight – it really adds to the local area.

"If it was some horrible graffiti then they'd have a point, but it's a thing of beauty in Hackney Road, which is not the greatest area in the world. Among the bingo halls and shops you've got a really nice artwork, which really adds something."

Here's the piece in question:

Yeah, better take that down right away. UGLY.

Scott McCloud | Journal » Archive » Wrong Question?

If you’re asking if videogames are art, I think you’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.

This all started with Roger Ebert's post stating that "Video games can never be art" -- which, as much as I respect Ebert, is a completely baseless statement.

I haven't had much time to really focus on anything, but I have spent more time playing with Processing. My latest sketch involves repeating patterns of Bezier curves in interesting fashions. I'm trying to make something along the line of Truchet tiles, but I'm a long ways from that.

Just posted my first processing app Gravity Flock. I spent awhile playing around and finally just decided to publish it, but I'll probably have a couple variants up soon.

Processing is pretty awesome. It really simplifies the process of building a Java applet and tosses in some fairly good graphics libraries, and I have really enjoying experimenting with it.