May the font be with you…
Fonts used include:
“Scala, Halibut condensed, Bordeaux light, balogna bold, Helvetica neue LT std, Gallante wild regular, Cressida, gressida, gardl, agatha, mahoney, eye rhyme, ranegund, adventurer black sf italic, F&H ronish – style, jessica, kunstler script, myriad pro bold cond, agency, street corner hyper extend, minstrella reg, wizard, context black ssk, bordeaux black slant, excess, organa condensed, chinyen normal”
A handy visual guide to game characters – provided you can identify them. From a Flickr user called Lishoffs.
You can buy it as a print here.
This operating system icons as Batman villains design (by Lishoffs) is also pretty clever.
Now, Wikipedia didn’t think Jeremy Wales was suitable subject matter for an article, but they do think that Fart Lighting and Goldfish Swallowing deserve entries. I’m not sure what Jeremy should think about this. He is less newsworthy than flammable flatulence. Though perhaps the problem with my article about him was that it was somewhat embellished.
In case you’re wondering:
Fart lighting, or pyroflatulence, is the practice of igniting the gases produced by human flatulence, often producing a flame of a blue hue. The fact that flatus is flammable, and the actual combustion of it through this practice, gives rise to much humourous derivation. Other colors of flame such as orange and yellow are possible with the color dependent on the mixture of gases formed in the colon.
Although there is little scientific discourse on the combustive properties of flatus, there are many anecdotal accounts of flatus ignition and the activity has increasingly found its way into popular culture with references in comic routines, movies, and television; including cartoons.
You can read more about the science involved at the BBC.
Goldfish swallowing was an American school fad starting in the 1930s, where a live goldfish is swallowed.
It is not clear how it became a fad: various people have made claims. A 1963 letter to the New York Times claimed that the fad began in late 1938 when Lothrop Withington Jr., a Harvard freshman with “[class] presidential aspirations,” was encouraged by his “campaign managers” to do so as a publicity stunt: “Reporters and photographers were inadvertently present in the Harvard Freshman Union when Withington swallowed his live goldfish (with a mashed potato chaser) and started a nationwide fad in the spring of 1939.” The editor replied that “unless the Editor’s memory is deceiving him, the goldfish-swallowing craze among school and college boys had begun at least as early as 1930.”[1] However, a Time magazine noted in a 1939 article, “Harvard Freshman Lothrop Withington Jr., son of a onetime (1910) Harvard football captain, started the fad sweeping U. S. campuses…”
If I was going to get a tattoo it’d be something coffee related, or this, and it would be on my wrist. But I’m not allowed. My wife says no. And I respect her judgment.
The girl behind this tattoo is from Townsville – so Townsville friends should keep an eye out for her. She is now world famous because of Neatorama.
This is taking the whole Getting Things Done thing a little too far, I think. But it is practical.
You’ve always wondered just what magic Batman keeps in his belt right? I know I have.
Now you know, from what I can gather this comes from Dial b for blog but it was originally part of something called DC Who’s Who, which I think is a book, which makes this officialesque…
I love Dinosaur Comics. Do you? I don’t really care. You should. Sample:
Now you can fill in your own awesome T-Rex storylines with this ready made whiteboard.
Buy it here. Now.
I love this little design project from Mirscher’traxler and I’m wondering how hard it would be to copy at home…
The start of this project was a focus on light sources.
Instead of completely designing a newly shaped lamp, ‘Relumine’ plays on the fact that we all have to switch from old light bulbs to new energy saving light sources.Each ‘Relumine’ uses two, discarded lamps, which are disassembled, sanded, newly lacquered and adapted with newer technology, before they are connected by a glass tube which holds a fluorescent tube.
By introducing a different mean of light source to the old lamps, their look and feel changes completely. They become one new unit, each with its own character.
Together these two lamps need less energy than each one in its previous life.
Apparently breast cancer awareness week is a movable feast. It happens whenever somebody decides that Facebook hasn’t had enough “awareness raising”… this time round it’s not quite as innuendo laden as the last few years. Women are being asked to put a vegetable as their status.
This one is pretty dumb, so it hasn’t caught on with the same gusto that the others have…
But, in case you’re wondering, this is what they mean.
Blueberry: I’m single
Pineapple its complicated
Raspberry: Im a touch and go woman
Apple: Engaged
Cherry: In a relationship
Cucumber: I just had sex!
Banana: Im married
Avocado: Im the “other one”
Strawberry: Cant find the right one
Lemon: Wish i was single
Grape: wants to get married.
How this relates to breast cancer is just completely beyond me. I think people just want to launch a meme, so they tack a popular cause onto it, say “this is a secret, don’t tell any men” and then release it into the wild.
I’ve made my opinion on this kind of “awareness raising” pretty clear previously, at least this one is relatively free of gutter level innuendo, but please. Just stop. It was funny (almost) once, it was hackneyed the second time, and now it’s just ridiculous. Why don’t we try just talking openly and honestly about breast cancer rather than copy and pasting for a cause or engaging in this “lets not talk about the elephant in the room” style of drumming up awareness for your cause.
Gary posted this the other day, it also goes nicely with my rant the other day about annoying status updates.
Nuclear power. Two words, that when combined, are guaranteed to polarise. Especially now. I’m ambivalent on the issue. It seems like a good idea, until things go wrong. But the other day Seth Godin posted this little visualisation of some real data that is effective in its ability to frame the debate.
He puts the dissonance between opinion and reality down to the influence of coal marketers. Which opens up an interesting can of worms in the energy debate. I’m nonplussed about the debate, I’m more interested in the simplicity of turning data into a visual and the persuasive power that has.
Here’s what Godin says is the underlying reason this visual has the impact it has:
“I think that any time reality doesn’t match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved. Perhaps it was advertising, or perhaps deliberate story telling by an industry. Or perhaps it was just the stories we tell one another in our daily lives. It’s sort of amazing, even to me, how much marketing colors the way we see the world–our reaction (either way) to this chart is proof of it.”
There’s truth in that, but there’s also truth in the idea that the simplicity of a graphic like this one is a much more powerful manner of persuasion than the complication of talking about figures and research. That has always been the case, but the way the Internet works (this visualisation has gone, and will continue to go, all over the internet) means that a simple picture like this cuts through in a way that numbers don’t.
Over on thebeanstalker.com I’ve posted a bunch of vintage coffee ads and a link to a gallery of 300 that I pulled from all over the internet.
To get you in the mood, here’s a video advertisement for coffee – the drink of winners.
Do you like movies with twists?
I like nothing better than spoiling those movies because somebody once spoiled the Sixth Sense for me (he’s dead).
Here is a montage of movie endings (with a language and violence warning).
Oh yeah, and Donnie is dead.
You might also like the Spoiler shirt, one of my favourites.
Keeping Christmas wrapping paper lying around the house all year is a recipe for disaster come the July birthday season. Not everybody likes getting birthday presents wrapped in santa wrapping paper. Trust me. As a Christmas baby I know this to be true.
So get a batch of this all purpose stuff.
The Wire, polarising TV classic, pretentious and damaging art, or Victorian period piece stolen and passed off as modern… It doesn’t matter what you think of it (be you a West Wing fan, or Baltimore’s Chief of Police), The Wire raised some bars for television production in a manner that suggests it will be one of the lasting cultural texts of our generation, much like Dickens was for his…
You should read this – and read the particularly hilarious (but f-bomb ridden) retelling of a piece of the Wire’s dialogue, which, in the show, consisted simply of the said f-bomb being used in all its adjectival forms.
Check out this essay that treats The Wire as a Dickensian piece of culture that our current cultural milieu can’t stomach properly.
“In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black. We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is. If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.”
I’m in a bit of a bind. I’m starting to think “this song is great, but it needs more banjo” and I’m worried that means I’m turning into some sort of yokel.
First it was Gomez (embedding is disabled on this one)…
Then Mumford and Sons…
Then Boy and Bear…
Now it’s Fleet Foxes.
Am I broken?
Set to a nice 8 Bit rendition of the song Mad World.
Via BoingBoing.