Modcult

A portrait of the Madonna made of 2925 dice by Robert Hodgin:

Create your own by following these steps:

• Step 1: Get drunk on martinis and buy a shit-load of dice from Amazon.
• Step 2: Wait one week. Arrival!
• Step 3: Think of an image you don’t mind spending several hours immortalizing.

Tonke Fieldsleeper Camper.

Archival giclee print from Snowblinded.

The Key to People Havens

The New York Times barks up the people haven tree this weekend with the arrival of the Fall edition of Key, their seasonal real estate/home magazine.

Cave living in southern Spain:

“People thought I was mad,” says Jim Butler, a retired English chauffeur, who has lived in his three-bedroom, one-bath cave in the Spanish province of Granada for around 18 months. “But I tell them, try a cave. It’s fantastic.”

Adult treehouses:

“Although it’s a luxurious kind of nature. It isn’t camping.”

Remote controlled houses:

Will West, the C.E.O. of Control4 and the father of six children, uses his own home-automation system for everything from monitoring the comings and goings of his 18-year-old son (he can program the security system to e-mail or text him with the time his son enters the house at night) to listening to three kinds of music in his bathroom at once (he has 3 zones of audio in his bathroom and 21 zones in other parts of the house).

And an artist collective inhabiting a beach house.

Plus a lovely front cover by Andy Gilmore.

Bailout, Barry and Levon Style

While not as useful as Jeb’s beloved hipster replacement greasemonkey script, this one is a bit more timely. I’m as worried as the next guy about the current financial crisis, but sometimes I just want to put my blinders on when I read the news.

Thus, I present a spoonful of scripting to help that morning New York Times go down a bit easier:

// Based on a script in Mark Pilgram's upcoming "Dive into Greasemonkey",
// based off another script based off that

// ==UserScript== 
// @name          ignorebailout
// @namespace     http://modcult.org/userscripts
// @description   Hide from reality.
// @include       *
// ==/UserScript== 


(function() {
    var replacements, regex, key, textnodes, node, s; 

    replacements = { 
        "bailout": "balls out",
        "Bailout": "Balls out",
        "(\\$[0-9]+ +billion)": "$1 worth of pudding"
    }; 

    regex = {}; 
    for (key in replacements) { 
        regex[key] = new RegExp(key, 'g'); 
    } 

    textnodes = document.evaluate( "//body//text()", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null); 

    for (var i = 0; i < textnodes.snapshotLength; i++) { 
        node = textnodes.snapshotItem(i); 
        s = node.data; 
        for (key in replacements) { 
            s = s.replace(regex[key], replacements[key]); 
        } 
        node.data = s; 
    } 

})();