Could the design of these Cyndi Lauper stickers be more ’80s? Check out those wacky shapes! Check out those neon colors!
These remind me of the style of another great ’80s product, the neon sunblock for under the eyes and on the nose that made everyone look like a psychedelic tribal beach warrior. It was called Zinka, and it’s been re-released recently complete with the same way-80′s logo.
[via BrandedInthe80s]
Coming soon to a million commercials near you: a Basement Jaxx song from their forthcoming album. I’m thinking Sprite or Dasani maybe? Cynicsm aside, I do love me some Basement Jaxx.
You’re welcome in advance for the nightmares.
A new app by Smule lets you blow into the iPhone mic to play an Ocarina, with chording of notes with your fingers like a real ocarina. The don’t-you-dare-play-it-in-guitar-stores promo video is excellent.
I’m well on my way to reclaiming rainbows with Rainbow Glitter, so how about I share the Space-Mountain-future-is-here-now iPhone wallpapers I make with the world?
I’m going for the retro-90′s pre-gradient web design vibe, check it out–
Joshua Heineman has animated some stereoscopic images from the New York Public library such as this 1883 Central Park hippo to excellent effect. Instead of old-timey metal glasses with the image on a track that moves closer and farther from the eyes for focus, the quick flipping between images in these animated GIFs lets you sense depth on a monitor.
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” -Buddha
Recently saw a post about Rational Triggers for the Emotoself:
I use short phrases to combat stagnation and anxiety. The problem is that inspirational phrases too often have short shelf lives. “Celebrate Life” seemed to have an impact on me one night while I lay in bed thinking about how my life is like a washing machine drum, spinning but not moving. I repeated those two words like a mantra for a couple months until they were just two words again. Then “Respect The Time You Are Given” gave me a push. That lasted for about as long as it took me to jot it down. For the moment I am hooked on “What Would The Hero You Do?”. When I start to feel lazy or trapped I think of a perfect version of myself and try to imagine what he would be doing right then and there. I don’t always emulate him (my pecs aren’t big enough), but it serves me well…for now.
Everyone reading this has a password or several. Further, for security, hopefully it is long and includes uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols and no dictionary words. Also, it should change regularly.
Tough to do, right?
I’ve found that I can both inspire myself to get things done and solve the password dilemma with one task. How? Find a phrase that you find motivational, and turn it into a password. Then, you’ll be forced to sound it out to yourself in order to fill in your password, reinforcing whatever thought it is many times a day.
So, instead of thinking InswhbdIoswr2bd twenty times a day, think–
“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.”
Since it is difficult to remember the seemingly arbitrary numbers and letters, you will be forced to speak it internally whenever you type in a password, reinforcing the notion.
Need new inspiration? Choose a new quote, and change your password–great for new inspiration and security purposes.
Technically, Double Dribble was the first NES game to use digitzed voice. It wasn’t Ramones-cool like this one though.
I like ambient information devices–particularly ones that give you information at a glance in a clever way. If you’re stuck inside on a Windows machine, check out Kaze to Desktop. Kaze–’wind’ in English–moves your windows around based on the speed of the wind at your location.
Also, take a look at Drop Clock from the same group–it’s a gorgeus screensaver clock with both Windows and Mac versions.
Oh man, I really like the new visualizer for iTunes. It’s like a black hole disco ball.
It’s based on a beta from last year from the Barbarian Group–the clever folks who also made wacky things like the Subservient Chicken.
For those new to Magnetosphere, a quick tip–you can change a lot of the visualization options by pressing the ? button. I’m sure Apple buried this somewhere in the documentation, but this non-obvious trick gives you some neat variation.
I followed a short method to make a pencil in Photoshop and added a few flourishes:
Pencil Tutorial via BB
My 4 year old nephew drew my picture and gave it to me. I love it! Apparently I have CRAZY SCRIBBLE MOUTH. It kinda looks like a ghost from Pac-Man, am I right? Imagine these things following you around the maze–
Monkey: Journey to the West is a Cirque de so gay-style opera designed by the brains behind Gorillaz and featuring a full 70+ piece Chinese orchestra along with the squiggly synths and bumpin’ beats you’d expect.
The score was the most compelling part of the multisensory treat of a Monkey show I saw during Spoleto here in Charleston in May which featured not just great music but acrobatics, projected animation, and eye-bending sets. So far it’s played in London, Berlin and Paris, and will undoubtedly be back to the states eventually. In the meanwhile, the soundtrack is coming out on September 23rd.
Savini, an artist from Rome, has created these playful sculptures from bubble gum. The human subjects are more dark alley than uncanny valley; the animals, particularly the bear and crocodile, hit the mark. The gallery says:
“Also for those born in the sixties as Maurizio Savini and I, chewing-gum reaches in the mind‘s meanders at a tie with childhood and adolescence, and a light pressure of a future still to be built and dreamt and the slaughterhouse of personal and collective memories of the past which is gone, no one knows where when and with whom.“
I wasn’t around for the evidently LSD-laced chewing gum they had 60′s, but I still like these.
A few more of his pieces follow. Continue reading »
This rugged and crafty wooden phone rework from Berlin-based Ariel Schlesinger is lovely.
The Adventures of Mark Twain–a 1985 claymation film by Will Vinton of California Raisins fame–has an alien nightclub sequence in which the following appeared (yes, the alien wearing the shirt has 4 boobs and 3 heads). I took a photograph of the DVD
The t-shirt junkie in me had to make a reasonable facsimile on Spreadshirt.
Some days you want to puzzle over JG Ballard while sipping on a nicely hand-pressed espresso from Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans. This is not one of those days.
West Texas Plant – Photo Credit
I’m a pretty big music geek, so I rarely come upon an older album I haven’t heard already that really hits it out of the park for me. Those times you listen to something and it punches a new hole into your idea of what music can be comes slower and slower as you get older–the swiss cheese of how I hear music becomes easier to see through but there’s less left to punch off.
I came across this list of Tom Wait’s favorite albums, many of which are terrific selections that would be near tops on a list I’d make too.
The feeling that I call punching a hole –Waits describes it when listening to the Nessun Dorma aria from the opera Turandot as:
I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I’ve never had spaghetti and meatballs – ‘Oh My God, Oh My God!’ – and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.
There were two albums I hadn’t heard on the list–one was an eponymous album by Houndog.
Punched a hole! My adjectives won’t suffice here, so I’ll leave it to Waits again:
Now that’s a good record to listen to when you drive through Texas. … Those guys are so wild, and they’ve gotten so cubist. They’ve become like Picasso. They’ve gone from being purely ethnic and classical, to this strange, indescribable item that they are now. They’re worthwhile to listen to under any circumstances. But the sound he got on Houndog, on the electric violin … the whole record is a dusty road. Dark and burnished and mostly unfurnished. Superb texture and reverb. Lo fi and its highest level. Songs of depth and atmosphere. It ain’t nothin’ but a…
The 7th track “All Fired Up, All Shook Down” just slams. I couldn’t find any legal full song links, but Amazon (and iTunes, if you’re into the DRM) has 30-second samples that give a decent idea.
A pet peeve: the fact that rainbows are considered gay.
I love rainbows in design, and rainbows in general–they’re the second most beautiful thing to me, next to space/the stars. Rainbows are used sparingly nowadays in design because of the connotations they evoke.
Anyways, I’ve decided to show my love for “old-fashioned” rainbows, with a silly new site, where I’ll post a picture of a rainbow with a related poem/writing excerpt from an author I like. Think of it as a Unicorn Chaser with rainbows instead of unicorns.
It doesn’t get more gay than this. And by gay, I mean happy.
So, 30-40 years after the severe psychedelic patterns and colors of mod went out of style, and 30 years after the dense shag carpets and wood paneling of the 70′s, I’ve seen some great stuff that combines the feel of the two recently. Damien Hirst from 2007:
If you can’t tell, those are (real) butterflies. Onto the less sadistic, macramé from 2008:
As I mentioned about gradients recently, I like that dense patterns/textures are around. It’d be pointless for these higher resolution screens to exist if there wasn’t more information-per-square-inch to have them display. Speaking of high resolution displays….this is what 10 million pixels looks like:
Coming to a living room near you in about 10 years.
A big thing in Charleston–and to some degree the rest of the state–is shirts and bumper stickers with the state flag’s palmetto tree and crescent moon.
It’s a nice symbol to me, growing up here. A while back I noticed it showed up in a pretty wild place–the local Band of Horses used an abstractly hidden version on the cover of “Cease to Begin”–
I don’t really care for the typical blue & white/Clemson orange/USC burgundy versions available, so I made my own, inspired by the fantastic pattern from this photograph of Calvin Harris:
And thus arose my design, starring on a brown shirt near me soon:
Doesn’t it look like dude is about to punch you in the face with flavor?
Link to gallery at Sun Sentinel.
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