11 Strings seems somewhat excessive. But musical excess and Super Mario Bros are two of my core themes in these parts. So here you go…
Category: Culture
A new excuse for cheating at stupid games
There’s an adage amongst those who know my siblings and I, its almost axiomatic. When it comes to party games, and some board games (excluding Scrabble and Take Two which we generally take fairly seriously), we’re horrible cheaters.
I’ve never known why. I put it down to having a limited attention span and not believing most games are worth playing unless you win.
Turns out we’re just creative. So there. Stop oppressing us with your desire for boring conformity and let us think outside the box.
“The same enterprising mind that allows creative people to consider new possibilities, generate original ideas, and resolve conflicts innovatively may be what also helps them justify their own dishonest behavior, said the authors of the new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Ethical dilemmas often require people to weigh two opposing forces: the desire to maximize self-interest and the desire to maintain a positive view of oneself,” wrote business professors Francesca Gino, at Harvard, and Dan Ariely, at Duke University. “Recent research has suggested that individuals tend to resolve this tension through self-serving rationalizations: They behave dishonestly enough to profit from their unethical behavior but honestly enough to maintain a positive self-concept as honest human beings.”
Turns out I’m also “ethically flexible”… who knew.
Na na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na, Snuggie…
Brilliant. Be comfortable. Be warm. And fight crime. All at the same time.
Available for purchase on Amazon
Forging disciples and Japanese sword making
Sword making fascinates me. Proper sword making. Not those novelty blades you buy at cheap markets and in trinket shops. It’s so tactile. There’s something romantic about a forge and the hammering of red hot metal. But its archaic at the same time. And pointless (pun intended). Nobody runs around with swords any more. Except ninjas.
Korehira Watanabe makes Japanese swords. He’s trying to recreate a legendary blade by feel, without instructions.
Handmade Portraits: The Sword Maker from Etsy on Vimeo.
From the Etsy Blog:
Korehira Watanabe is one of the last remaining Japanese swordsmiths. He has spent 40 years honing his craft in an attempt to recreate Koto, a type of sword that dates back to the Heian and Kamakura periods (794-1333 AD). No documents remain to provide context for Watanabe’s quest, but he believes he has come close to creating a replica of this mythical samurai sword.
He’s motivated by handing down a tradition. And he says this cool thing about his disciple.
“I want my disciple to surpass me as a swordmaker. It is my duty to build up a disciple who is better than me. Otherwise the tradition will wear thin with time.”
That’s a nice difference between being in business for yourself, and being in business because you love what you do, or because you feel vocationally called to preserve a tradition or truth.
Tumblrweed: Future Drama
Looking backwards at what people saw when they looked forwards is always an interesting exercise. Does anybody remember the TV show Beyond 2000? Future Drama looks at old product announcements and advertisements that made predictions about the future, and throws in some recent predictions for good measure.
Love it.
Fleet Foxes’ awesome stop motion video complements awesome song
I’m going to see the Fleet Foxes in about a month. That’s pretty exciting.
This film clip is apparently a stop motion number using cutout animation. Love it.
Bowsabers: Starwars theme as a cello duel
The Piano Guys strike back…
This one’s been doing the rounds – so shout out to those people who clogged up my Facebook feed with it.
It also has a nice little Darth Vader accordion cameo.
Tumblrweed: Yelping with Cormac McCarthy
Yelp is an online review/recommendation/gripe service which has recently launched in Australia. Cormac McCarthy is a southern gothic novelist, famous for such works as The Road.
Allegedly, if Cormac McCarthy were to Yelp, it would look like this:
Urban Outfitters
Union Square – San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their clothes preworn in some tropical factory and they shop and they hunt with dullbrown eyes through that cavalcade of false trinkets and those shrinkwrapped mockeries laying there in silent indictment and they reach out to touch those trite things and their faces are slack but in their gullets a scream lies stillborn for they are the kings and the queens reigning over the death of their people and the world is not theirs and never was and the suffering and the horrors are not their doing but the work of their bankrupt forbears and before them stretches an abyss beyond man’s imagining and within their lifetime the promise of a coming reckoning measured in blood and in pestilence and they shuffle through that store near paralytic and finally they take a metal thing with a feather on it and they buy that thing.
If only YouTube comments and other feedback 2.0 looked read like this, the internet would be a more bearable place.
Money Talks: A visual guide to the global cashflow
Sometimes XKCD pulls off something amazing.
Like this incredibly detailed picture of the global cashflow…
Click it for a big and impressively detailed version.
When the juxtaposition of “Schoolies” and “viral” is a good thing…
So. Schoolies week, for international readers and old people (lets face it – both of you are a minority in terms of the readership here) is a week where young school leavers traditionally do stupid stuff with alcohol. Scripture Union do a pretty awesome job of running camps for people who want to remember the week. I went. Back when I was a schoolie. Some people reading this were on the camp with me.
Anyways. This year SU Schoolies has gone viral with one of their nightly entertainment products (they have a variety show each night) – a parody of Party Rock Anthem – getting abundant media coverage (see Sunrise and ACA) and over 200,000 hits so far.
It’s a bit bizarre – my Facebook feed is filled with it. Which is to be expected given several of my Facebook friends were involved with the camp, are involved with SU, or made the video… but equally bizarre is that former colleagues and people I know who work in local government are posting it too. That’s the anatomy of a viral success.
So congrats to SU and the guys behind the video. They are, I think, the most famous YouTubers I know.
iPhone Lens Kit is impractical and expensive
This bad boy will cost you $250. It comes with three different lenses.
“three optical-quality coated glass lenses: Wide Angle, Fisheye, and Telephoto. All wrapped up in a slim aircraft-grade aluminum jacket equipped with two tripod mounts (for portrait or landscape shots).”
Clever.
From photojojo.
Camera washes up on beach: A modern day message in a bottle
Cool story. This camera. A Canon EOS was underwater for over a year. Somebody with a little bit of tech knowledge found it, while diving, and managed to salvage some of the photos. The camera is obviously a write off. The photos were from August 2010, which meant it spent quite some time in the ocean and exposed to the elements.
The cool part of the story is that the guy who found the story managed to crowd source the contact details of the owner, reuniting photographer with photographs…
“The photographs, having spent 440 days on the ocean floor, have been reunited with the photographer and the family. I am very happy to have facilitated the journey back to where the photographs belong! I certainly didn’t anticipate the attention this created, any photographer finding my camera would do the same, right? Thanks again for the great help that came from all of you – the Google+ community. I received an email from the recipient of your help this morning:
“Again thank you so much!!! Seeing the pictures brings tears as we really had forgotten what we were missing by not having them.”
And in a nice little PR twist, perhaps predictably, Canon is replacing the camera for free. It is perhaps a better endorsement for the memory cards than for the camera maker – and San Disk are sending some free goodies to both the finder, and the photographer. Good news all round…
Tumblrweed: Kidcasting – children who play the child version of famous actors
Finding the right kid for a back story scene must be some sort of art form. So I appreciate that this tumblog exists to appreciate those who put effort into that obscure art.
And two from my favourite TV show (at the moment, anyway)… I wish they’d hurry up and put season 3 on air in Australia, and also that the stupid network in the US would guarantee its future on account of people who have taste thinking it is better than Two and a Half Men.
Super Mario theme played by Accordion Trio
Yeah. This is a real thing.
Also, while we’re on the subject of impressive Mario related feats – here’s a stop motion of level 1-1 created in 500 hours of painstaking Mine Craft Play.