"i love this blog. she finds fun stuff on the internet...and her commentary is witty and funny. i've actually lol'ed at some of the things she's written and written about." - Dave from Who Pissed You Off?
"Not always first to the show, but it's less DRM and more 'hey look shiny.'" - Blogebrity
Coming to you all the way from Too-Much-Time-On-Hands Land (actually Japan, where else?), comes the most skillful Tetris player you have, and likely will ever see. The deftness and agility of mind that this player possesses is absolutely mind-boggling. My eyes alone don't even work as quickly as the combination of his eyes, mind and fingers.
Remember that post from a couple of days ago about the guy who was trying to find a girl he saw on the New York subway? Turns out he found her! And only in a mere four days after putting the site up.
Hooray for modern day love stories!
Updated update: Dream girl has been identified as Camille Hayton. I know you needed to know.
I absolutely fell in love with this flash site as soon as I saw it. As part of mobile service provider Orange UK's campaign for their new Speak Easy pay-as-you-go plan, the site Good Things Should Never End is a gorgeous interactive "never-ending" page that offers tons of little nuggets to click on and play with. It's really hard to explain.
The idea is you scroll down this rainbow and interact with the various characters you meet along the way, each offering a different activity. The site was created by a London-based company called Poke. One of the most interesting elements is the use of "share" links throughout the site.
Clicking on these links pops up a window with code that enables you to embed that particular element of the site into your blog, share it on your MySpace page or Facebook profile or post it to del.icio.us or StumbleUpon (with one notable omission: Digg). Behold:
More and more, marketers are becoming savvy to grassroots online marketing, particularly with the popularity of widgets taking off in recent months. They seem to be recognizing blogs and social networking sites as virtually free, far-reaching advertising vehicles - not that they didn't realize the potential before, but I feel like they're becoming significantly more creative in terms of how they tap in to that medium. Peak the bloggers' collective interest with a neat and innovative nugget and you could just make morning blogrounds™, reaching Jebus knows how many (surely lots!) of eyeballs.
P.S. I was too lazy to make it all the way to the end of the page (it's really long and takes forever). If anyone has taken the time to do so, please let us know if there's reward at the end!
Mark Verhaagen is a Dutch illustrator and animator that creates beautifully surreal characters and scenarios with a varied cast of fuzzy wuzzies, cute robots and bipedal rolly pollies. His work is slightly reminiscent of Jeremy Dower's style, whom I previously blogged about here. His Flickr page is also definitely worth a gander. I'd love to get copies of some of his prints if someone can point me in the right direction.
From what I can tell without speaking Dutch, HEMA is an Ikeaesque department store in the Netherlands. This doesn't really matter to me considering I live in Canada however they do have a neat animation on their online shopping page. And if it's entertaining then it's blogworthy.
The romantic part of me wants to help illustrator PatrickMoberg find the Girl Of His Dreams. The blogger in me wants to post this cute picture. He saw her on the subway in New York City on November 4th. He made this flyer and set up a website dedicated to his search. It's like Craigslist's Missed Connections (which, by the way, are a perfect read for a rainy Sunday afternoon) with pictures.
The passage describes a jaunt through a bookstore and lists different categories of books that somehow ring very true (at least to me). I've been meaning to revisit this for a while and, well, here we are:
Books You Haven't Read
Books You Needn't Read
Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading
Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written
Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered
Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback
Books You Can Borrow From Somebody
Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
Books You've Been Planning Top Read For Ages
Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success
Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment
Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case
Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread
Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them
New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You
New Books by Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general)
New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you)
I saw an amazingly magical commercial on television a few months ago and was absolutely smitten by it. The animation was unlike anything I'd seen before, slightly imperfect like a flip book but also refreshing in its simplicity. Unfortunately when I finally sat down to blog about it I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the company! I searched everywhere but couldn't find it. So needless to say I was super happy to come across it again recently. The ad was for Sprint as part of their Sprint Ahead campaign. Have a look here:
According to Jamie Kivisto, one of the artists that worked on the project, "all the animation was done with flashlights...there's about 100 frames for every two seconds of footage." The commercial also features the song "Souvenirs" by Architecture In Helsinki (one of my favorite bands).
The stop-motion animation flashlight technique was also used in a couple of othercommercials in the Spring Ahead campaign as well as the Sprint Ahead flash website. And if you're super interested in these commercials like I am, have a look at the behind the scenes video as well.
Photographer John Huck has taken pictures of people and coupled them up with pictures of what they had for breakfast that morning. And then he posted them on his site. That's it! Not sure exactly what part of that is compelling but I did find it engaging enough to click through every one of them so there's got to be something there. Anyone else find this interesting?
