Badly as Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar comes off, he is the moral equivalent of a rock star when placed alongside his pitiable son Belshazzar. For all his overweening pride, the pater familias of this dubious tribe at least learned the lesson that ‘the God of the heavens is sovereign over the affairs of men and gives rule and power to whomever he wills’. Thought it took becoming an animal to figure this out, the biblical book of Daniel at least credits the now defunct Nebuchadnezzar for his tuition.

Not so Belshazzar the son, a man who earns that lamentable historical badge of being the last leader of an empire. Belshazzar will learn nothing and will die in the very night his chickens come home to roost.

Now the book’s chronicling of Nebuchadnezzar’s mixed record is full of commands. One might gather the impression that giving commands is all this foolish king knew how to do. Chapters three and four register four times the fact that Nebuchadnezzar gave a te’em, a commandment or decree. It is virtually the royal thing to do, at least in Babylon where—over against the Israelite ideal of monarchy—the king does not listen, read Torah, or consult the politically independent and YHWH-sourced prophet.

Telling people to do things and throwing drunken parties are about the only two activities the text allows to remain in the playbook on the Babylonian king’s bedroom shelf. He also seems to collect hordes of available women, let us not wrest from his hands a third activity.

At any rate, Nebuchadnezzar’s core competence seems to be ‘placing a te’em‘: decreeing things. Not to be too harsh on the man, he is credited with a worldwide following of people who do what he has said they will do. His decrees may be foolish, but they are not impotent.

Enter Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar’s son.

The text that describes this party animal is rich with ironies pertaining to gold and the other raw products of his royal pretense. That much is obvious.

What may be less so is that, a mere two sentences into the man’s appearance, we find him setting the table for his own demise. Significantly, this rump end of imperial dynasty—Cyrus the Mede will soon replace him—does not appear in full imperative stride. Unlike his father, he does not decree. He acts rather under the decree of wine.

King Belshazzar made a great festival for a thousand of his lords, and he was drinking wine in the presence of the thousand. Under the influence of the wine, Belshazzar commanded that they bring in the vessels of gold and silver that his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the vessels of gold and silver that had been taken out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. They drank the wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

A more literal flourish on the part of the translator might have said it like this:

Belshazzar, under the decree of the wine, spoke (ordered) that they bring the vessels of gold and silver …

So is the decline of this feckless imperial dynasty writ small in the party-room of its pathetic scion on the night of his unlamented death.

The Hebrew Bible’s refined sense for irony appears to smirk with an exiled captive’s self-satisfaction at the death spiral of his bombastic, self-absorbed, drunken emperor.

There is more than one way to refuse to bend the knee.

Found objects from the Gower coastline. The tiny Teddy Bear with his red hat was washed up on Rhossili beach – see the picture below for how he looked when I found him. He now lives comfortably dry in the bowl shaped remains of a metal fishing float that I picked up on Whiteford Sands – “La Coquille” is embossed on the outer surface. The corrosion gives a rough weathered textural surface to the float; and inside there is a series of radiating ribs that make an interesting pattern. I used the piece of bright blue and yellow discarded fishing rope to carry the float home.

Poor Teddy!

 © Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

Thanksgiving is past and Black Friday is almost over. I actually hate the consumerism of Black Friday. So today, my mom and I spent the day cleaning out the garage and donating things to Goodwill.

I took a bunch of photographs a few days ago while playing with motion and self portraits. I have been experimenting with textures as well.  I will be posting those in the next few days.  This photograph is of course using textures and I used a slow shutter speed so the photo is extra soft.

We found some old cameras out in the garage today, and I of course kept them.  I love them.

After all that work though, I am utterly exhausted.  Tomorrow we go to get the Christmas tree and decorate the house.  Hopefully I will be able to get some pictures.

Jakob Wiechmann appears on the cover and in a fashion spread for Huge Magazine in Japan. Shot by Satoshi Saikusa literally, I love the styling its practically eveything I could possibly want from mens fashion and in my wardrobe right now, most of all its black!! I Loves it!!

Styling: Tsuyoshi Noguchi

Photography By: Satoshi Saikusa

IMG|SOURCE: TFS

Alright so I want to ask my viewers and those who like my textures. I’m going to use a poll. I don’t put pics in my textures but if you think I should PLEASE answer!!!

Alright now for the main course! Idk if any of you had ever followed my textures from when I first started out on Kitty Corp but I posted a Starp Loader and I had made some changes to it! So yea I have filled this blog with another krazy update ^_^

This is the first part

Second Part

Note that the awesome face part in the lower right hand corner doesn’t appear there but it is on the next screen.

You can download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?vyzy05q3wtz

One should spare a merciful thought for the writer of an acrostic.

Whether required to bend his pen to the task or the victim of his own enthusiastic but self-incarcerating ambition, the man or woman who sits down to write a poem wherein each sequence of lines begins with the same letter of the alphabet does not merit our scorn. If his result sounds wooden or inauthentic he deserves, at worst, our pity and, more charitably, the benefit of our aesthetic doubts.

Take the writer of the exceedingly long one hundred and nineteenth psalm, for example. Some ninety-seven verses into his long, parallelistic slog, he wrestles with the glories of YHWH’s revelation, on the one hand, and the letter mem (the Hebrew equivalent of our English letter m) on the other.

His unenviably squeezed state bears comparison with few other rocks and hardly any similar hard places. It is a dilemma all his own.

Now as it happens the letter mem stands in as an abbreviation of classical Hebrew’s most common expression for contrast. The perspiring poet glimpses a way out of his detention:

Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands make me wiser than my enemies,
for they are ever with me.

One might concede the writer a certain skirmish-level victory. At the cost of the malicious other, he has used up one of his mems and underscored the sapiential potency of meditation upon YHWH’s instruction.

Yet, flush with victory, he senses daylight. Now he cannot stop himself:

I have more insight than all my teachers,
for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.

Under the influence of a menacing line-up of middle-of-the-alphabet consonants, a truth has been converted into an absolute. Enraptured by Torah’s glory and the meniality of the acrostic task, the poet flirts with becoming a fool. His private encounter with YHWH’s instruction, we are apparently meant to understood, has lifted him above the wisdom of his community’s sages and mentors. He has exalted himself, under these influences, to a most precarious pinnacle.

Yet if we read sympathetically—in some cases a greater exertion than in others—we may surmise that his encounter with the sweet, persistent orientation of YHWH’s instruction has for this writer been so transforming an experience that he has been moved close enough to take the epistemological risk that has now become his lot. By this reading, he is hardly a fool, even if a noble enthusiasm has momentarily made him sound like one.

If what he says next is true, he may the kind of person with whom we can do business, the sort of man we’d like to see a little more of around here, the type of character to whom we might trustingly commend the minds and hearts of our children.

How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
I gain understanding from your precepts;
therefore I hate every wrong path.

For 364 of the calendar’s pages, those who are becoming wise do best not to say so. On the 365th, under the influence of a pile of mems, one can be forgiven for blurting out a different truth.

Immediately recognisable because of their heavy weight, nodules of iron pyrites commonly weather out of the cliff face rocks along the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, UK. The top photograph shows an arrangement of iron pyrites pebbles from the seashore at Charmouth.

These metal pebbles are composed of a mixture of iron and sulphur. The name pyrites derives from the Greek word meaning fire – because sparks fly when they are struck by another stone or metal.  The smooth rounded shapes are natural and not the result of wear while rolling around on the beach. Inside, they have a crystal structure. Iron pyrites is also found as veins through rock joints; and the replacement of the original organic compounds in fossils such as ammonites.

If you would like to learn more about ‘what is pyrite?’, click here for the website Discovering Fossils – bringing the prehistoric world to life.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar does not come off well in the biblical book of Daniel. It is not difficult to find in the text’s description of his behavior the definition of a neurotic fool.

Yet below the obvious humorous touches in the book’s way of telling a story, a more subtle irony may be detected. Frankly, it is difficult to know whether this kind of thing is really there or whether we read it into the text because we rather like this kind of thing. One such soft-spoken irony is borne along by the Aramaic word gala’ and related forms.

Usefully for the ironist, gala’ means both to exile or to deport and to uncover or to reveal. When Babylon’s royal fool is not erecting a huge statue and spinning out elaborately tedious instructions regarding how his minions are to worship it, he is threatening to exterminate the counselors he so obviously needs unless they can tell him not just the interpretation of his dreams but the story line of the dreams themselves. The man is mad and a mad empire cannot bring itself to lower him from his throne.

The Jewish exile Daniel—a man identified as one of the exiles from Jewish realms, that is, a son of the galut—employs the vocabulary of gala’ to speak with his erstwhile overlord about how the God of the heavens reveals dreams, indeed is the revealer of dreams.

Therefore Daniel went to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon, and said to him, “Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon; bring me in before the king, and I will give the king the interpretation.” Then Arioch quickly brought Daniel before the king and said to him: “I have found among the exiles from Judah a man who can tell the king the interpretation.”

Perhaps it is bare linguistic coincidence that gala’ and galut appear in pregnant proximity in the telling of this tale. In that case, the perceived pregnancy is a false one. It will produce no child. The interpreter ought to leave things alone and mine the more obvious material for his interpretative pay-off. To probe more deeply into the imagined thing merely makes him like Nebuchadnezzar, blind to what is real and important because caught up in imaginings with no bearing on reality.

Or perhaps not.

The king said to Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, “Are you able to tell me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation?” Daniel answered the king, “No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or diviners can show to the king the mystery that the king is asking, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, he has disclosed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen at the end of days. Your dream and the visions of your head as you lay in bed were these: To you, O king, as you lay in bed, came thoughts of what would be hereafter, and the revealer of mysteries disclosed to you what is to be. But as for me, this mystery has not been revealed to me because of any wisdom that I have more than any other living being, but in order that the interpretation may be known to the king and that you may understand the thoughts of your mind.

It would be very much like the cunning literature that places the Jew in the court of the foreign king—a place where a sophisticated touch for nuance and suggestion is most necessary—to play with the sub-surface meaning of words.

It may well be that the perceptive reader is meant to revel in the quiet suggestion that it is by means of Babylon’s pompous prowess at unrooting, deporting, and exiling peoples that the God of one of those peoples achieves his preserving and redeeming purposes. If Nebuchadnezzar had not exiled these sons of Judah, the joke would have been on him. Bereft of the counselors he’d murdered, he would have been more vain and stupid than the man we encounter in these pages.

Yet YHWH—he is not named as such in this foreign court—saves Nebuchadnezzar from himself, indeed makes history and future in the midst of such self-absorbed folly, by continuing to reveal the secrets of men to an honest exile who against the grain serves Him where such worship might lead to deepest loss.

The text is ironic—arguably so, at the least—because things in such a world, governed by such an enigmatic and persistent deity, are almost never what they seem.

In the holy house, when it is allowed to stand back in Zion and far from deporting monarchs, the response to such truth is often a sung ‘Hallelujah’.

If Babylon’s courts provide no space for such noisy praise, no matter: it can still be spoken between the lines of a little story.

OH YEA!!! Go find some kool-aid because this finally worked! =D
Alright first off I FUCKING LOVE BRAWLBOX!!!! XD
It usually solves all of my texture hacking problems. So now I have my my first stage texture! YAY!!!! It is kinda hard to see the stage in game so I think I’m going to change it up a little bit. But anyway here it is!

This is the basic view except bin2jpeg fucked it up a little bit... X_X

I still think it needs a revamp...

PLEASE download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ejm3jjmmgzu

Ok so now for V2! I made it kinda fast but I think it looks good

Captain Falcon ftw!!! =D

It got fucked up again....

You can get the better version here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ggdw0uhqzzw

The Bench at the Dromcloc House B&B on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, overlooking Bantry Bay, Ireland.

The Bench at Bantry Bay by CJ Kern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Mermaid’s Purses become dry, black and brittle when they dry out on the beach. So they look very different from the fresh ones which are olive brown colour and translucent. The egg and embryo can often be seen within the egg case when it is fresh.

These photographs show the dessicated, black egg case of a Skate or Ray. These are different from the fresh Dogfish egg cases illustrated in the previous posts, Mermaid’s Purses at Fall Bay and Some more Mermaid’s Purses from Gower. Dog fish egg cases are a more elongated rectangle with curling tendrils on each corner that are used to attach the cases to seaweed or other objects. The Skate egg case, in comparison, is squarer in outline and has stiff curving spikes on each corner.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

What on earth is a "

One of the cups can be used from both ends. This fellow looks like some sort of face cream tube. I supposed i could have gave it a test drive to find out ^^;

The hole warming device was interesting. Rolling head cup" Then you stick the warming device in yer cup.

Sweet side" If i remove the plastic sheet, it could possibly pass as a thermal detonator for my stormtrooper gear. Before i continue however, i have to disappoint you by letting you know that this review does not come with a test drive ^^;

You press the metal piece inside and the tube heats up within seconds. When its ready you can then start your eroge or get out the latest issue of megami and go do your thing. Read on to learn more about the product which has contributed to the declining birth rate in japan ^^;

Products. This is a " Bitter side"

^^; ? Unfortunately i had no intention of giving these cups a test drive so the.

And this is the "

So, this is a self-portrait that I happen to really like.

I haven’t uploaded any new photos in a few days. I have not really had the opportunity to take many. It has been so cold and rainy out.

I do however want to start trying some new things in Photoshop with textures and things. I might be re-editing some of my photos just for fun.

My addiction to deviantART has grown fatal.  I spend way too much time on there.  I have realized that I reallyreallyreally want to a pro account.  I also want one for Flickr. However that costs $50 that I do not have.  Next $50 that I get, is going towards those two things.  I love them both oh so much. However I still want to keep my Fotki account because of the great price on prints. Those prices are just amazing.

Well, I have come to the realization that I am a Pro-Am.  This term means professional-amateur. Apparently in the world of art, people use the term to refer to anyone who takes there hobby to the extreme.  That would be me. I am not a professional because I do not turn a profit. However, I take my photography very serious and try to learn to the best of my abilities.

On another note, I want to start making icons. I have no idea what they will be used for, but I want to make them. It will be fun.

The Tower & The Moon

Letiscrap has some CU textures for you in store. Add a touch of shiny bling bling to your pages and kits !

Letiscrap a des textures CU pour vous en boutique. Rajoutez une note scintillante à vos pages ou kits.

Go to DigiscrapMania

Go to DigiscrapMania

]]> http://weeboopiper.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/foc-textures-rigging-5/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:43:38 +0000 weeboopiper http://weeboopiper.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/foc-textures-rigging-5/

These pebbles were all photographed within a few metres of each other on the beach at Whiteford Point, Gower. A relatively small selection showing a wide  variety of shape, colour, texture, pattern and composition. There are limestones, sandstones, conglomerates, and fossils. Ovals, triangles, rectangles and boot-shapes! Red, yellow, orange, brown, buff, grey and blue-grey. Rusty patterns made by the inclusion of iron minerals within the stone. Patterns made by an assortment of rock types of different sizes cemented together. Designs formed by the inclusion of fossil corals. Patterns made by quartz veins in the mother rock. Pebbles derived from local rocks like Old Red Devonian sandstone, Carboniferous limestone, Millstone Grit and Coal Measures. Pebbles delivered to the Point from much further afield courtesy of an ice sheet.  

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

The photographs in this post show a small piece of water-logged driftwood about 30 cm long and riddled with holes and tunnels caused by two different types of wood-boring sea creatures. The larger borings are about 1 cm in diameter and many are lined with a smooth calcareous material that has become stained through burial in the beach sediments. These larger borings may be familiar to beachcombers as being made by Shipworms, Teredo navalis Linnaeus. I have talked about these worms – which are not really worms but bivalved molluscs - in an earlier post. You can find it by clicking here.

Less familiar, are the much smaller holes and burrows in this piece of soft wood. These have been made by Gribbles, Limnoria lignorum (Rathke). Gribbles are very small marine isopod crustaceans. Crustacea is the major grouping  that includes the crabs, prawns, and sandhopper types of animal. Isopods are a bit like the terrestrial woodlice that you see in gardens – they have an ‘armoured’ body with lots of limbs and joints; and their body is flattened from top to bottom – compared with amphipods such as sandhoppers in which the body is flattened from side to side. Gribbles are very small and their length rarely exceeds 3.5mm.

Shipworms can burrow into hard wood but Gribbles prefer wet, cool and soft wood, like the bases of exposed pilings on piers and jetties. The pictures here show the infestation damage caused by both Gribbles and Shipworms that leads to the destruction and disintegration of the timber.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

• Mixed Media
• Pigmented Ink Pens + Photoshop + Textures

The abstract patterns of bark on trees are delightful. So many designs, colours and textures. Here are some more tree bark patterns to add to the Bark patterns on Plane trees that were posted previously.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

After working a while on a project that I need some textures, I remembered how important it is to have good resourcers at hand. I went looking for some paper textures, and it took me some time, so I thought it would be a good idea to make a selection of the best I found. It’s amazing, but some of the greatest textures site also here.

We parents watch attentively for the return on our investment.

Parenting is not a catch-and-release endeavor nor a spectator sport. To the contrary, our identity is wrapped up in the results. To some degree, they define us.

Those who keep the law are wise children,
but companions of gluttons shame their parents.

We have tools, with our modern discourse of individualism and our casual approach to rectitude, for letting ourselves off the hook quite quickly when our grown child runs amock. Indeed, we may have needed to react against the rigid assumptions that wrote off a parent for another adult’s deeds.

Yet the communitarian deep structure of biblical wisdom notices—even if it does not prescribe—the profound embarrassment of the father or mother whose grown child walks a different path. Such a parent forsakes the blessing of a wise child and bears the shame of an errant one.

Curiously, it is the companionship of gluttons that stands over against filial wisdom in the antithetical architecture of the saying. Wisdom, in this light, is seen as balanced restraint rather than any other of its attractive profiles.

Some children learn how to say ‘no’ in adequate proportions. Others become addicted to ‘yes!’, no matter how perverse or excessive the offer.

Parents stand by watchfully, a modest smile of satisfaction curving the lip of the most fortunate. Others—aghast—stare at the ground, pondering what went wrong, how long ago, and whether on my watch.

Just a small piece of smooth driftwood with a rather attractive shape from the strandline. It has a diagonal, cross-wise pattern of parallel lines of harder, narrower, dark wood grain. This is interspersed with broader bands of lighter-coloured soft pulpy wood. Round and oval knots in the water-worn, decaying fragment contrast in colour and shape. On the reverse side, shown below, there seems to be some sort of animal burrow like the sort made by burrowing bivalved molluscs.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

Another part of the Napier windlass.