3d illusion arts: Oddity Central

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Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience – The Perfect Warm-Up for Halloween
Clever Experiment Proves We Do Judge Books by Their Covers
Sonic Art – German Audio-Visual Artist Makes Pictures from Sound Waves

Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience – The Perfect Warm-Up for Halloween

Posted: 04 Oct 2012 06:24 AM PDT

With the Halloween season fast approaching, there’s probably no better way to get into the holiday spirit than hunting a werewolf in the a pitch black forest of Droitwitch, near Birmingham, along with seven terrified friends.

In the last year or so, zombies have dominated the monster charts, but for this year’s Halloween, the folks at Chillisauce.co.uk have decided to give the all but forgotten werewolf a chance to strike fear into the hearts of men, in their Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience. If you were watching movies like Underworld, and wondered what it would be like to hunt one of these furry creatures on their on turf, wonder no more, because now you ca experience it first hand, just by heading over to Droitwitch, England, for a real-life overnight event. Here’s the background story for the big night: “Deep in the heart of the countryside, near Birmingham, Farmers have reported unusual losses of livestock, and missing person reports are flooding the local papers. Rumors surfaced of a Special Ops team disappearing 24 months ago – the only clues left were a garbled radio message, and a mangled corpse.” It’s up to you and your teammates to succeed where other have failed – take on the cunning and fierce werewolf and try to outwit him.

You’ll arrive at the Overnight Werewolf Experience site at 2000hrs. You’ll get a warm soup and a sandwich to regain your strength after the long trip there, then it’s time for a short safety briefing and getting geared up. Before you’re pitted against the deadly monster, you and your other seven terrified friends will receive a crash course in basic military training – procedures and weapons training that will hopefully save your life. You’ll learn how to use automatic weapons, handguns and pump-action shotguns, lay out explosive booby traps, utilizing pressure pads and trip wires, and various other tools to help you live through the night. After you’ve completed your training it’s time to head into the night and look for the werewolf.

If you survive the initial scouring part of the hunt, you’ll be faced with the biggest challenge of your mission – werewolves attack your fortified position and you have to hold out long enough to secure the silver bullets needed to take them out permanently. Chances of survival are slim, but if you use what you were taught during the training you have a shot. The Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience will end at about 2.00 am, and you can get back to your accommodation to get some sleep, or you can stay up and discuss the mission, have a drink and watch a movie. A full English breakfast is included the next day, before you leave.

This kind of monster experiences are becoming increasingly popular. An Australian company will be hosting a real-life zombie RPG in Melbourne, and in the past we’ve featured the Zombie Shopping Mall Experience and the Zombie Boot Camp. I bet something vampire-themed is next.

Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience – The Perfect Warm-Up for Halloween was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

Clever Experiment Proves We Do Judge Books by Their Covers

Posted: 04 Oct 2012 04:43 AM PDT

Brian Brushwood and Justin Young, hosts of the NSFW Podcast, managed to push their $0.99 e-book to the #4 position on iTunes, without having to write a single word. How did they do it? Easy, they included lots and lots of sex.

You’ve probably heard of Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel that took the world by storm a few months back. At one point it was all everyone was talking about, although not all critics were impressed with the quality of writing. Still, it became a bestseller and managed to drag other erotic literature to the top with it, whether it was good or bad. Brian Brushwood, one of the hosts of the NSFW Podcast noticed this trend while he was trying to push his book on magic tricks, Scam School Book 2: Fire. Looking at the iTunes chart he discovered the top 10 was all erotic fiction. Even established contemporary writers couldn’t break into the top 10 because of all the erotic books that were capitalizing on the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. He thought “hey, we could do that”, and that’s how their clever experiment began.

With the help of his colleague Justin Young, they set out to create their own erotic novel. But they new nothing about writing this kind of stuff, so they asked their podcast listeners to send them chapters for the book, featuring a main character and lots of badly-written sex scenes. Then they put the chapters together, created a cover that looked a lot like that of Fifty Shades of Grey, attributed it to a fictional writer (Patricia Harkins-Bradley), and posted it on iTunes. They asked their readers to buy it and push it up the charts a little, and then waited. Entitled “The Diamond Club“, the book was completely written by the Internet, it was a “rambling incoherent mess”, but it did have three things going for it:

A Fifty Shade of Grey-inspired cover
characters with trendy jobs (cupcake artist, blogger, etc.)
lots and lots of sex

Are these things enough to turn a book into a best-seller? Yes, they are. The Diamond Club managed to climb to #4 on the iTunes chart, despite all the 1-star reviews from people who actually read it, just because it resembled every other book on there. Truth be told, they did get a lot of help from their readers who bought the book and helped it crack the top 10, but momentum took over from there, and people started to buy it because other people were buying it. Reportedly, Brushwood and Young have already earned over $20,000 from their crappy novel.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 1969, 24 journalists put together Naked Came the Stranger, a novel full of sex, an incoherent plot, bad writing, meaningless dialogue and more sex, just to prove how low the American literary culture had sunk. It also became a best-seller.

via Museum of Hoaxes

Clever Experiment Proves We Do Judge Books by Their Covers was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

Sonic Art – German Audio-Visual Artist Makes Pictures from Sound Waves

Posted: 04 Oct 2012 03:22 AM PDT

Ever wondered what the sound of an airplane propeller looks like? Rainer Tautenhahn, a curious audio-visual artist from Germany can transform any sound into a colorful optic signal.

“The ears are the only ears we have that never switch off”, Tautenhahn told Deutsche Welle. “Ears never lie, in contrast to our eyes that sometimes deceive us”. He wanted to find out what a penetrating tone actually looked like, what’s the secret to a soprano’s voice that allows him to sing like that, and decided he could only reveal the magic of sound by turning it into light waves. He begins the artistic process by recording sounds with an ultra-sensitive microphone, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds. In order to get the right pictures, the 47-year-old waits until he gets the right levels. When he’s done, a computer software helps process noise into images, and although the final images look computer-generated, he never alters them in any way.

Like a fingerprint, every noise is unique, shaped by its tone, length and rhythm. After hundreds of experiments, the artist says he has come to realize lower tones are blue, while higher ones tend to be reddish, but he never knows what his images will look like just by listening to the sounds. There are several other things to take into account, like the mood in someone’s voice. For example, an aggressive voice looks different from a friendly one, penetrating voices have sharp edges while soft voices are more like waves.

Rainer Tautenhahn’s sonic artworks can fetch up to €7,500 ($9,700) and they are especially popular with big companies around Europe. They record the sounds in their workplace and print them on glass or steel panels up to 3.20-long. His most recent works are even more impressive, as viewers can even listen to the images thanks to a pair of headphones attached to the artwork.