Moe-ing the lawn

This makes me want a garden:

It looks as though it needs quite a bit of refinement: the "baaa" is fun, the "squeeeeksqueeeek" would drive you crazy. And although it has a blade in its mouth to cut grass, it doesn't seem to be doing so particularly well. But it's still cute!

There's more about this over at BotJunkie.

Credit: Avatar

A self portrait in flash

Whenever I come across sites that allow you to build an avatar or face from a choice of parts, I have a compulsion to try and make a "me" that's as close to the real me as possible. So I have a lego me from Reasonbly Clever and a South Park me from South Park Studio and even a Simpons me automatically generated from a photo by simpsonizeme.com

Ultimate Flash Face is rather more realistic, and is remarkably flexible. I think my self-portrait here is pretty close.



The choice of parts could do with being expanded, I couldn't find any suitable short, curly, female-looking hair... and the mouths tended to be far to serious for me. But overall, I thought this was a fun one to play with.

Especially the bit where I could make my face thinner... and all without giving up chocolate!

xkcd revisited

I think it's about time for another visit to xkcd. I was tempted to talk about the latest strip - reading it was one of those "exactly!" moments. My dreams are often so vivid and detailed, and yet dissipate so fast...

But a friend reminded me of this one:


And it seems I'm not the only one who thought "now I'd love to do that in real life".

Credit: Splarka
xkcd is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Your face, our balls

This is one where the video has to speak for itself...

There is more on this at faceball.org.

My only question now is who in the office do I most want to smack in the face with a beach ball?

Credit: Doug

Use the force

A light saber that lights up when you concentrate on it?

All I can say about this is, "I want one!"

Credit: Splarka

Going down?

Here's another great illusion, from Hemmy.net:


I think I would have to close my eyes to be able to use that elevator, the painting looks amazingly realistic.

A superhero in purple

I had a go at creating my own superhero today:


I used the Hero Machine on UGO, which has an amazing number of options. It also has an overly handy blank-all button - which I managed to hit twice. But other than that little annoyance, it's a nice little toy.

Now all I need is a name for her...

Credit: slif3rjam on #uncyclopedia

Cornflour tentacle monster

I've played with cornflour (corn starch) a few times, mostly when I was supposed to be mixing it up for cooking. It's strange stuff.

Here it's taken a few steps further (or tentacles further?) with cornflour vibrated at 80Hz.

There are a lot of these games with cornflour on YouTube, culminating in a swimming pool of the stuff, allowing people to actually run over the top of it. I think I'd like to try that.

The geek's lunch box

Here's a nice idea for recycling:


A toasted bagel and avocado in a CD spindle. Such a clever idea!

Although, as the comments point out, they probably don't make CD spindles out of food-safe plastic.

Photo by Flickr user pwka. Licenced under the Creative
Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.0

The unharmonous sannse

I'm trying out StumbleUpon at the moment. The second page I got was a rather cute little noisemaker.

Of course, I tried writing my name on it, but the tune was not pretty. Funnily enough, it seems my birth name is more harmonious than "sann".

(p.s. Oops, I forgot to post this last night. So I'm cheating and backdating. Baaad)

Pooh of Borg

What do you give a friend who is a fanatic about both Star Trek, and Winnie the Pooh?

A borg-assimilated Pooh of course!

Now do I love this? Or am I horrified?

Credit: Bp of #memory-alpha

I Robot

cyborg.namedecoder.com

"Nocturnal Sabotage" eh? Sounds fun...

Beauty and vandals

Drawball is amazing. At first sight it looks like a confusing mess, but zoom in and there are some real gems. Faces seem popular, especially women's faces, but the variety is wide.

Since I last looked at this, they have added a year's playback, which is quite hypnotic.

But I think my favourite part, is watching a single image being created from scratch. This wonderful sea scene is built up, tweaked and improved, into a great piece of work. And yet in the process, others scrawl across it, trying to ruin the work in progess.

Near the end, the already beautiful and almost finished image suddenly has a large blue penis right the way over it. And yet the artist simply goes back to fix it up, and finish his art.

So why draw here? What makes this talented person choose to draw where his art is not only drawn over while in progress, but also has no chance of surviving (at least on the ball itself) once he's finished it? It can't be the medium, drawing is not easy in this format (especially with the amount of ink they give you). And there are plenty of places to showcase your work online without the risk of vandalism.

I guess it's about being part of something larger. The feeling of adding to and improving a work that others are working on at the same time as you. Cooperation, collaboration and sharing - some of the same motivations for those of us addicted to wikis I think.

What motivates the blue penis guy, that I can't say.