its how conan started

actually thats not quite right. conan o'brien was a writer for saturday night live first, so this should actually be titled, it's what conan did after snl.

the simpsons, beloved tv favourite of the masses, is doing a little crowdsourcing. they are offering up an opportunity for you, yes you, to create your own simpsons character. go take a look, fill out the form and you will have the chance to be flown to los angeles to put the finishing touches on your creation.

the site says that they plan to air the episode in january 10, 2010 so better get over there.

the new search?

so, wouldn't it be interesting if you could do a search and the engine generated a bulletin-board styled page with clips of articles, video, webpages and text and arranged them on the page according to relevance? and then when you clicked on something, it would enlarge to show you more before taking you to the page?

seems you can. check out spezify.

takes a bit to get used to but definitely has potential.

burn bunny burn

hmm, so bunny carcasses made a decent fuel. who knew?

it turns out that stockholm, sweden is overrun with wild rabbits. to the point that they contract out to companies to cull the herd. six thousand were killed last year and (as of the article) 3,000 this year. and the general public seemed to be ok with it.

but whats now turned some heads, is that the company contracted to perform these cleanups, have decided that the best way to dispose of the bodies is to burn them to fuel a heating plant.

apparently they have the same energy content as normal heating oil.

here is one of the first articles on it (i think), read through the comments with both enlightened and not-so-enlightened opinions.

simulates the warmth of a tauntaun carcass

after a couple emails back and forth between myself and a couple of other star wars geeks (which actually started off as a transformers thread [yes, i really am that geeky]), i was sent a link to a sleeping bag built to resemble a tauntaun carcass.

i want one.

badly

the joy of sketch

spend anytime around me at all and i guarantee, we will have a conversation about the death of creative thought.

many of my hours are spent as a designer. at work, at home, at play, its what i do. so its stands to reason that i spend time thinking about design. a lot of time. and the best way to get any (preferably all) of these ideas down is to sketch them. a sketchbook is of primary importance to me. at any given time, i have one at work, one at home and one available within arms reach. though any paper i can scribble on will do in a pinch. it then simply gets stapled into my current sketchbook for later use.

having said all this, there is a growing number of those in the creative field that reject the notion of sketching. they simply turn on a computer and output ideas from there.

dear god.

anyway, i have long maintained that this is not a good trend, and honestly, i hope its not a growing trend, but, if i have to relent at some level (and i won't), could those who refuse to use paper, maybe take a look at odosketch? it won't replace paper, but at least its imperfect and allows for exploration. and its kind of cool to play around in.

please?

hugh hefner

a really cool article on the founder of playboy.

i was never sold on the hyper-reality that is hugh hefner. it always seemed a little too much. and he seemed like a perv.

how many other guys that age (or any age) could surround himself with beautiful women and have his whole identity so carefully crafted around such women, and not be considered a creepy old guy? well, hugh can.

predicated on the idea that he arranged for their ultimate lifestyle because they took their clothes off for a camera, hugh's life takes on a greater-than-it-should meaning. yeah, he created an empire from it, but if anyone else tried it, they would probably be in jail

i think he did it at the right time, and he (initially) maintained the right image. that era and those girls? perfect. wholesome, cute and active (how many girls are there that like long walks and running on the beach?) in an era where sexual experience was starting to blossom publicly? just good timing really.

this article is half book review for The Complete Centrefolds, a coffee-table book and half history lesson and makes for some great reading. make sure to check it out.

wow, finally, an innovative use of pixels

seriously, just try to not spend hours on this. oh, as a warning, only click on this is you A) have time to waste, B) are not offended easily by ralph bakshi-styled drawings or C) don't mind pulling large metal objects out of a crudely drawn animals ass. seriously.

but its still the most innovative thing i have seen a website used for in a long long time.

enjoy

the vader project

Celebration 187
Originally uploaded by swguru2004.

i really would have loved to been able to go to this.

The Vader Project - a reimagining of the iconic Darth Vader helmet by some of today's hottest underground and pop surrealist painters, artists and designers

here is the website and here is a flickr set

go ahead, cuss a blue streak in front of the kids

great article about the significance that kids attach to swear words when they are exposed to them as compared to not hearing them until their older. read it here, then go swear at a child. they'll thank you when they grow up.

if taglines were honest

this was done a couple years back (2007) but its still hilarious. i always appreciate truth in advertising so its good to see someone step up and gives a few ideas of what some corporations should be saying about their products.

my favourite?
Taco Bell: You're drunk and we're still open.

See the whole list here

noodling

ever hear of catfish noodling?

the video below will bring you up to date. cribbed from boing boing

jesse ventura on dick cheney

no, not like that.

i love jesse. do i agree with everything he says? no. but let's be honest, i don't think i agree with most people on most things. but this larry king interview gave us some great quotes.

George Bush is the worst president in my lifetime.

I have no respect for Dick Cheney.

...you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

beautiful.

dinosaurs and robots

i found this site just now, through a post on boing boing i believe, and they will now be on my included on my links list to the right.

dinosaurs and robots has a very historic bent to it. gorgeous old packaging, a self-camouflaging tree-house and an entire miniature city built from sugar. egads.

i am positive that hours will be spent on this site.

i guess it makes sense that crotch crescent is just south of titty ho?

heh, butt hole road. thats funny.

i remember working for a home builder and sitting down one day to name all the roads in a new subdivision, something i normally did not get to sit in on. i don't know if they were just feeling giddy that day or what, but we had a blast going through all the town names in england, ireland and scotland and mapping out the whole subdivision with names like the one in the above article. too funny.

our world may be a giant hologram

i am not a bright lad. so explaining this article is a bit of a struggle for me. so i will steal a quote out of it to go with the headline.

Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

hmmm. read the article here

get your giant map here

the entire earth at 84,000 pixels tall and 168,000 pixels across. thats what you get when you download the large version of a map of the earth from unearthed outdoors. they have made this free 32-tile map available under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license. each square is 21,000 pixels square and available as a png or geotif. they have smaller images available but who needs them when you have a 600dpi map of the earth thats 24 feet long?

via boing boing

short history of video games

saw this on core77. it brought back a ton of memories. it specifically mentions the et game from atari and its effect on the industry. i remember the game sucking out loud but did not realize to what extent but if you want to know what extent, read the wikipedia page. interesting. anyways, a cool watch.

A Short Visual History of Videogames from Kyle Downes on Vimeo.

water-based glasses

this could be the beginning of something huge. Josh Silver, an inventor and former professor of physics at Oxford University, has created a set of glasses capable of being mass produced that can be altered to fit a custom prescription easily. how? by adjusting the amount of water the lenses hold. this could completely overhaul eye care and as a by-product, literacy in developing countries. read about it here

via core77

The flag of equal marriage

Anyone interested in supporting equal marriage, here's the protest flag, and the backstory to its creation.

etch a sketch master

man, i loved playing with my etch a sketch (not a euphemism). but i was never as good as this guy.

great story

the 1958 university of buffalo football team received an invite to attend the tangerine bowl. to date, the schools only bowl invite in 102 years. they turned it down. the game was being played in orlando and the orlando high school athletic association would not allow black players to play in the same game as white players (in 1958!!!) so two of the players on the buffalo team would not be allowed to play. so the team told them to go to hell. read the story here

god's facebook status

ever sit around and wonder, "what if god had a facebook page? i wonder what his status updates would be?"

wonder no more.

is graphic design art?

so? what do you think?

al jaffee - master of the fold-in

you've read mad magazine, i know you have. and as you read it while standing at the magazine rack in that crappy little store, you glanced at the back, saw the illustration, so wonderfully hand-drawn, took a quick look around the store and then folded the pages over to see what the hidden image was. then you had a chuckle and put the magazine back on the rack, careful to hide the folded up back page.

well, al jaffee was the guy who drew that image (and every hidden image mad magazine has every printed, since 1964) and the new york times did an article on him.

photos of hiroshima

imagine walking down the street one night and seeing an old suitcase someone has put out for garbage pickup. being a collector of found-objects, you pick up the suitcase, pop it open and find photos of hiroshima one month after the bomb dropped. fascinating story, found here