Unfortunately Named Lawyer
I guess you’d want this woman on your side.
25 years of water effects in games
It’s quite impressive how far we’ve gone in the past 25 years of computer gaming and there’s no better way of demonstrating it than with this show of water effects over time (except maybe faces and hair as the other most obvious hard things to do).
Cooking With Pooh
Oh come on, are you seriously telling me no-one thought to question the wisdom of publishing a book called Cooking With Pooh?
Bazooka vs. Bulletproof Glass
Can a bazooka break through Bulletproof Glass? Yes and no.
What the Google Intranet Looks Like
Figures. Google look like they have the first useful company intranet I’ve seen.
Binoculars Soccer
The sound of Binoculars Soccer is daft enough but it’s nothing compared to watching a bunch of Japanese guys trying to play football with binoculars attached to their eyes. And yes, that is Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano star of not only the awesome Battle Royale (a big favourite of mine), Violent Cop, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Johnny Mnemonic (another underrated Keanu movie IMHO) and the incomparable Takeshi’s Castle.
cheers Kim
Girl got balls
Erin Davies had her car vandalised in April this year for the , shock, horror, wait for it, crime of having a rainbow sticker in the window. Someone had ‘Fag’ sprayed on the drivers door and ‘U R Gay’ on the boot. In a defiant act she decided to keep the graffiti and christen the car fagbug. The next step was to tour the US taking part in Pride marches and confronting people and their attitudes to these hate crimes. Watch the slideshow – it’s both depressing and inspirational. If she’s ever in the UK she’s more than welcome to park it outside my house (to be honest it’d be less embarrassing than my car).
Gnome Parking
I’m guessing that this creative grafitti is at the National Elf Service (joke circa 1970).
The Party
Now that was some party! (some NSFW retro photos).
Hacking Electronic Public Signs
Whilst I’ve seen people hacking public signs plenty of times before, I’ve never seen anyone quite as brazen as this dutch hacker – he does motorway signs, train announcements and even a canal lock! On his site you can even see him control a Porsche remotely and take over the autocue on a news station.
The Worst Studio Session Ever
Country and Death Metal are two genres of music that probably shouldn’t be combined by that’s not going to stop Spence in the The Worst Studio Session Ever.
If that doesn’t appeal to you, how about Chuck E Weiss’
Most Expensive music video ever (for the old farts amongst you, this is the same Chuck E Weiss from Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’)
Both videos exude sheer quality or something.
Eek
Tis the season of goodwill so I feel honour bound to pass on this warning that you shouldn’t do a GIS for holly unless you’re ready for some extremely NSFW and rather unseasonally graphic images. You have been warned. (Obviously you could raise your safesearch settings but honestly, where’s the fun in that?)
cheers Chris
Bum Rush
I’ve heard many, many excuses for arriving in hospital with unusual objects shoved up yer anus (actually any object there should be classed as unusual!) but “a thief put it there” is one of the most unusual.
Dotty Tattoo
Odd tattoo – can’t work out if I like the Connect the Dots Tattoo of a giraffe. I’m also intrigued how the lettering is going to stay sharp over time.
Captcha Cracker
Blimey, Check out this Chinese hackers site where he sells software to decode captcha codes. Interesting to see how Google, Yahoo and Hotmail are all almost impossible whereas eBay will cost you a mere $4,000 (think it’s in dollars, not Yen).
LocateTV
Wow! When I went to check out LocateTV I didn’t realise it would cover other regions than the US – it automatically decided I was in the UK and skewed the results accordingly which is fantastic. LocateTV allows you to plug in the name of a tv series or even just an episode name and it’ll tell you when the next showing you can catch will be with full details. Seems to work very well indeed so far…
We’re All Going to Die at Xmas time
The creator of one of my favourite albums of this year, ex-Arab Strap man Malcom Middleton is being backed by UK’s Radio One djs to get his track ‘We’re All Going to Die‘ to the number one slot at XMas – it’s a cracking track and I’d love to hear it being played on the radio instead of the usual tedious fare so please go and buy it.
I never realised Annie’s Song was so dirty
We posted stuff from the WFMU radio station before but I’ve just found the Bleepity Bleep show – you must check out John Denver’s Annie’s Song which, by judicious use of bleeping, turns out to be a filthy, filthy song. For the video equivalent, check out this best of Jimmy Kimmel’s Unnecessary Censorship.
What do you want for Christmas, Darling?
Oooh, I’d just love a sledge shaped like a d1ld0, a God robot, a cuddly herpes virus and a clown syringe please! A plethora of disturbing Xmas present ideas. A significant number of these presents are from (a) from Japan and (b) involve p00p. LSFW due to doll w1lli3s and other such oddness.
DM of the Rings
Anyone who has had the misfortune to attempt to play a D&D; type game will most likely groan at the horrible familiarity of DM of the Rings. It’s a highly amusing tale, in comic format, of the failings of running a Dungeon and Dragons roleplaying game based on Lord of the Rings. Leggo my Ass indeed.
Multiplayer Asteroids
Now this is what the internets were created for! Multiplayer Asteroids sounds great but I can’t tell you if it actually is since it’s refusing to load behind my corporate firewall so I can’t tell you exactly how great it is.
Anyone care to comment for me?
Ooh – just managed to find a way to play it and it’s cool as expected – there’s no actual asteroids, just the ships and you’re pitted against other players but it’s simple and addictive.
Bond Villians Take Note
If you’re a budding supervillian then you’ve already missed your opportunity to nick a nuclear bomb from Britain easily. It turns out that our nukes were only protected by bike locks although knowing our bureaucracy, there was probably a long series of paperwork that had to be completed in triplicate to stump SMERSH agents. Actually thinking about it, this is probably far safer than any other method employed by other countries – if they ever got past the paperwork, teh nukes would be out of date and would you steal something that looked like it was only protected by a simple chain or would you be much more cautious looking for more hidden security?
Best First Dance at a Wedding Ever
This does rate up there as one of the Best First Dance at a Wedding – for the truly impatient, skip forward to about 30 secs.
My New Hero
I’m very easy to please as you can tell by my new hero. A ball pit and the best web comic online. I must try harder.
Men who look like old lesbians
Does the site ‘men who look like old lesbians‘ really need any further description?
cheers Chris
Procrastination FlowChart
I was going to make a FlowChart of Procrastination a while back but never got round to it. (yes, that is my coat, why do you ask?).
Freaky Optical Illusion
A series of straight black and white lines looks simple enough but can you see the hidden face (before you get suspicious – it’s just a jpeg so nothing’s going to jump out at you).
Back with the Negative Numbers
This is actually quite genius.
Monitor Cleaner
One handy browser shortcut that not everyone knows about is that you can press F11 to make the browser fullscreen without toolbars – try it before going to the Monitors Cleaning site.
BarCampLeeds
It’s a nice, sunny Saturday here in Leeds and Popcorn and I are at the, so far, superb BarCampLeeds ‘unconference’. I’m very impressed so far with the setup and the success in the way it’s working – no talks are planned or scheduled in advance – at the beginning of the day there’s a scramble at the whiteboard for post-it notes and people volunteering to do a talk in one of the 4 rooms. So far I’ve been to a talk by an old friend Mark Sailes on TV 3.0, a catch up and talk by Tim from Openstreetmap (a genius site and one which everyone should get involved in). I’ve also seen Victor discussing his locative media ideas which were very much along the lines of William Gibsons latest book, Spook Country.
It’s after lunch now and we’ve been having some tech issues with our live link with Canada and the BarCampOttawa so it’s on to a talk by Manoj on his new edocr interactive document discussion and hosting site.
As I said, I’ve been very impressed with the setup and flexibility of the BarCamp and one especially funky feature has been the availability of sign-language translators for some of the attendees – it’s interesting to see how they cope with the more technical terms people use.
Full marks to the sponsors for the freebies and food – I’m very keen to get a sneak preview of the next Rockstar games Wii game which I saw peeking out of one of the attendee’s bags earlier – it has apparently been ‘borrowed’ from their QA dept so this really will be a first peek.
More later….
Flickr posts here.
Wiki here.
Fun fact of the day – Tom Scott, one of the multi-talented organisers (and leader of the UK Talk Like a Pirate Day) is currently trying to remove his fingerprints by bathing his hands in pineapple juice.
Now in a Q&A; session with Rockstar which is as informal as their games but we’re not allowed to ask about GTA4 or Manhunt – spoilsports!
Then onto an SEO clinic with Dom from stickyeyes – there was one other presenter from a rival SEO firm whose name I didn’t catch which made for an odd talk since they didn’t agree on many things which does confirm many of my opinions on SEO although to be fair to Dom, he made a lot of sense and I agreed with most of his hints.
Tom Smith‘s a very interesting bloke – very engaging and humourous, his talk wasn’t particularly technical but very thought-provoking, he has lots of good ideas about design patterns and I hope to catch up with him at a later date.
