View allAll Photos Tagged puzzling
This is an amazing set of tiles that I designed and was produced by a guy named minifigurearchive. Based on the puzzle game in the IJ game
I bought this puzzle in 2012 on our cross country road trip, while we were in either Grand Tetons or Yellowstone. This fall we got one of those roll-up puzzle mats and in January I FINALLY opened the puzzle. We worked on it for a handful of nights over a couple weeks. Feels like it was a cheater puzzle since there is tons of text plus the map aspect, so it was easier to approximate where the pieces would go. Regardless, it was really fun and so satisfying to put it together! Kind of addictive and I stayed up way too late one night because I just kept saying to myself, one more piece! oops, now one more!
This is the puzzle mat that we got, but it really is giant. Way too big for this puzzle. Also, I definitely should have opened it ahead of time to wash and iron it, to get the big fold/wrinkles out.
www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-Giant-Stow-And-Go/dp/B0049ACJ...
And finally, it made me wish that we had a kid-safe space/room where we could store it. Instead, each time we had to bring in the card table from the garage and unroll the mat.
Pieces of a puzzle lying on a thin red plastic plate. Lighted from below by the ordinary lamp. via 500px ift.tt/20saPIs
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It has puzzled me for a long time why so many Japanese superheroes (Ultraman, Kamen Riders, Voltron or Golion, Go-Onger, Gao-ranger, you name ‘em) have bug-eyes, unmoving mouths, or no mouth at all and have a strong connection with mime.
I now have a theory about the connection between Japanese superheroes and mime.
Japanese superheroes make many gestures (see image above), like mime artists. And more, in a sense they also speak. But their mouths are always immovable. Often they do not have mouths at all. And yet they do speak: They mime speech!
Typicaly, a group of young males and one female strike poses, press buttons, or contact someone in heaven on a magical mobile phone, and change ("hensin") into a team of superheroes wearing colour coded wetsuits. Why should then even need to change into a super hero suit? There is no secret made of their identity.
They then do stylised battle, reminiscent of badly choreographed pro-wrestling, with one or more wetsuited monsters, often with a conspicuously mobile jaw, in a car park.
As the superheroes fight they 'speak', or shout, encouraging each other. But where does their speech come from? Their mouths can not move, nor even open. They mime speech. They take out their magic mobile phones and put them to their motionless mouths. All eyes are focused toward the miming speaker.
In the mimicry of speech they are much like masked performers in the Noh Play. The body language of the players mimes speech to perfection, but the face does not move at all.
Nowhere is the mime aspect of Japanese superheroism more apparent than in the shows performed for children at Japanese festivals. Performers in bug-eye, multi-coloured mouthless wetsuits come on stage. Someone presses a button on a ghetto blaster, and off they go, miming their way through an ultra-man epic, never once saying a word, but all the while making it plain who is speaking.
The Japanese boys love it. They imitate the gestures, like the Ultraman laser beam pose above.
So why is miming speech so important?
According to Lacan the human self exists by virtue of two incomplete feedback loops: those provided by voice (or phonetic language) and vision.
We can look at ourselves in the mirror, but we can never see the minds eye. We can speak ourselves, but Lacan argues, the enunciated "I am" of my self speech, never quite coheres with the self that would be saying it.
However, with two ways back, two feedback paths, to the self, we play a shell game, or two card monte, always satisfied that when the word does not hit the mark, we can see ourselves in a mirror. And when the mirror seems empty, we can call ourselves by name.
The problem remains however, in convincing ourselves that our speech comes from the same place as our mouth. But we get used to it. Get used to thinking that sound and vision come from the same place. E.g. The people that we watch on television appear to be speaking the sounds, even though we know, if we think about it, that the sound is coming from the speakers at the side of the box.
Sound and vision never come from the same place, but we get used to thinking that they do, and the scumble that links the two together, that overcomes the contradiction of a picture that is attached to words, is paramount in the production of self.
Japanese boys watch their superheroes mime speech. They know that on the one hand their heroes are not speaking. All the people at the show, everyone knows that Ultraman is dumb, that emperor has no clothes. But the little boys also know that everyone loves the superheroes and assumes that the superheroes are speaking. They learn that if they take up the mime too, then no one will 'out them', no one will ever say "Hey, you are only miming." Superheroes and humans mime speech. It is important that they do so, and get away with it.
But why the bug eyes? For me, the bug-eyes of Japanese superheroes are seen but unseeing eyes. Their eyes are massive. Sometimes the Japanese superheroes face is all eye (Kamen rider Faizu/555). But they have no pupils, no in-eye movement to suggest that they see. Their massive eyes emphasise their visuality, but with their lack of inner eye detail, it is though they can not see at all. These eyes are, I suggest, the eyes that stare at us from out of the mirror. Our eyes as reflected mirrors fascinate us, they draw our gaze, we attempt even to look into them, but we know that they are sightless.
As I have argued elsewhere, the Japanese are permanently in "the mirror stage" in that, by virtue of their training in and ability to take multiple visual perspectives upon themselves, they continue to identify with self as reflected. Growing up in an world of uninterrupted and loving gazes, mirror identification presents little problem for the Japanese. But in order to develope a self they must also integrate the voice, attach those vocal symbols to this reflection, and hence all this heroic speech-miming.
Something similar should be going on in the West: there should be some attempt to link phoneme and imago being made. But in the West it is the identification with speech that is less fraught. So someone Western, admirable, and heroic should be 'speaking mime' rather than miming speech. I guess that this has something to do with the secret identities of Western Superheros, but for the time being, I don't know what "speaking mime" is.
Addendum. please see the next photo in my photostream. I think that "speaking mime" (the Western equivalent to the mimed speech we see Japanese superheros perform) is all the thought bubbles that we are able to see in Western superhero comics, and all the "hard boiled," coming-from-no-where, narrative that accompanies Western detective movies especially. In the West, the narrative pervades, it is the centre, the truth of the secret identity.
I think, therefore I am Batman.
I haven't vanished, just been busy getting ready for spring. And I have been working hard on outfitting my puzzle studio and have re-finished the first three of 12 giant flat-file cabinets I bought via Craigslist. I found three locally from an architect getting ready to retire and downsize, and for the other 9, I had to rent a U-haul trailer and drive to northern New Jersey, which made for a busy day, but it's rare to find so many of the same size in the same place. (Price was a motivator too - I paid about the same for all 12 as I would have paid for one brand new cabinet, which probably wouldn't have been as well made as these.).
Pictured above are three from the Jersey haul: old steel cabinets from a now defunct Newark, NJ company called Stacor. These were made circa 1960s - 70s, and the guy I bought them from pulled them out of an old engineering firm. They are seriously heavy - about 250 lbs. each with the drawers.
I completely refinished the cabinets and painted them white. It may seem like I am a "white-on-white" type person for my decor. In fact I do like rich colors too, but because of the modest amount of natural light in this space it makes sense to keep everything as light as possible so light will bounce around.
I could have built some shelving from scratch, I suppose - but lumber, and time, have become very expensive lately. I also like the idea of repurposing something instead of using new materials. It didn't take too long to remove the handles, sand the cabinets and then prime and paint them with some tough oil-based enamels. But moving everything up to the second floor of the barn was a lot of effort.
These large Stacor flat file cabinets will make a wonderful storage space for my completed puzzles. In each drawer, I can fit either 10-12 puzzles in the 1000 piece size, or 5-6 puzzles in the 2000 piece size, very comfortably. This particular set of cabinets has a nice feature, this curtain-like material that is fused to a weighted tab that protects from dust and keeps documents from curling up and getting stuck inside the shelves. So, just the three cabinets seen here are enough to hold approximately ninety 2000 piece puzzles, or 180 in the 1000 piece size. I'd better get puzzling!
The next batch of 3 should be ready this weekend.
Geduldspiele aus Holz
Geduld ist nicht die Fähigkeit zu warten, sondern die Fähigkeit, beim Warten gut gelaunt zu bleiben
Joyce Meyer
Copy paper and pigmento en masa paper.
5x5 cm(pigmento en masa) and 6x6 cm(copy paper) squares.
PDF diagrams available for free download here:
This vintage mid century wood puzzle features fantastical beasts in the Nativity and put a modern spin on Christmas decoration.
This type of puzzle toy was inspired by the work of designer Enzo Mari.
Vintage Alarm Clock from UGears - Front view
UGEARS is a 2014 Ukrainian startup, offering over 100 self-assembly 3D puzzles for adults and children, with no glue or chemicals required.
UGears (Ukrainian Gears): ugearsmodels.com/
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”
―(Lewis Carroll , Alice in Wonderland)―
“Why should things be easy to understand?”
―(Thomas Pynchon)―
About to begin a puzzle, the pieces poured out onto the table, a thousand tiny individual mysteries waiting to be solved.
Bella Puzzles cut our names into the puzzle. Guests wrote messages on the back of each piece. The one from our pastor (my friend Adam) says "May the rocks in your path be made of gold... not crack"
Tribe member Kisså: offbeatbride.ning.com/profile/Kissaa
Photo by Alex Kaplan: twoweddingphotographers.com/
The sky pieces are always the hardest, but edge pieces are easy to place. So it is natural that it is this one that has got lost.
A puzzle advertisement we created for our photography and design business. I was looking for a puzzle texture but had trouble finding a good one.
The ad was for a free session promotion.