Face front and buckle up, True Believers, Project: Rooftop is back!
But don’t call it a comeback. Or a reboot. Or a relaunch. Or a rebirth. Because, just like a dormant mutant gene waiting for just the right moment to reveal itself and remake the life of some troubled teen, Project: Rooftop was inside of us all along.
We’ve been scouring the Internet and posting some of our favorite recent redesigns, waiting for the right moment, the right team-up, and the right idea to launch our next costume contest. That moment is now! We have the team, we have the theme, TO ME, MY X-ARTISTS!!
The X-Men were first imagined in 1963 by the recently departed Stan Lee and the brilliant creative force of Jack Kirby. The original line-up was Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel and Iceman. They were mutants, young men and women born different, who chose to be incredible. The series was revived in the 1970’s by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum who introduced us to fan favorites like Colossus, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Storm, among others.
Like the X-Men of the original stories, the series continued to evolve. Simple stories of mutants deciding to be heroes have adapted to the times, addressing modern dilemmas and social issues relevant to the growing cadre of X-Fans. And with the likes of Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Lee, Joss Whedon, John Cassady, Grant Morrison, Frank Quietly, Jason Aaron, Nick Bradshaw, Chris Bachalo (and so many, many, others), our favorite team of heroes sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them have remained in good hands.
And to celebrate the X-Men’s 55th birthday, we’re teaming up with Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, the definitive podcast of X-Greatness to give the X-Men a new look!
THE RULES:
Pick 2-5 of your favorite X-Men. They can be the team you’ve always wanted to see, your favorite line-up of the past, or just your favorite X-Folks to draw.
Design a core uniform. For this challenge, we’re inviting you to redesign the base team look, the cohesive uniform that says they’re a team, but as is often the case with a team of varied powers, abilities, and personal motifs, feel free to show individual members in personalized versions of that core uniform.
Send submissions to projectrooftop@gmail.com by January 14th, 2019, winners, runners-up, and judges notes to be posted in February.
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of November 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Step-wells were used as a way to access water, which could fluctuate wildly between almost nothing in the dry season, to overflowing right to the top of the stairwells even, during the monsoon season.
Constant pumping however, has dropped the water table, so most of these structures are no longer in use and are being used as rubbish dumps or just left to decay. Victoria Lautman (in 2015 at the time the article was written) has been going around India trying to photograph all of these structures before they disappear.
the sexiest pieces of Western European armor, the Savoyard helms.
a type of closed burgonet in use in the XVIIth century, it was also called the death’s head helmet in German and the Tête de cul in French {{citation needed}}
The concept of the Potemkin Village can be traced back to Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, a Russian field marshal and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. Anxious to spare her the grim face of the recently annexed Crimea when she toured it in 1787, he allegedly ordered to create entire “villages” consisting of nothing more than gaily painted façades to be erected all along her route. The curious architectural phenomena in the haunting images shown here, Gregor Sailer’s latest project after Closed Cities, are focused on political, military, and economic features: field exercise centers in the USA and Europe, the allure of European city replicas in China, and urban vehicle testing tracks in Sweden. Not surprisingly, the country of the term’s origin, Russia, still fakes whole streets in disguise when high-ranking political celebrities are visiting from abroad. Sailer’s images provide access to the world of fakes, copies, and artificial fronts. By exposing them to the eye of the beholder, he puts the value of these often absurd aberrations of today’s society to an acid test.
