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Geek Crafts and Guest Posts

I'm sure most of you know by now that I'm a huge (as in huge) fan of the videogame culture site Offworld, seeing as I tend to snag a lot of its goods to post here on my own blog. Brandon Boyer (the editor and a good friend of mine) does a tremendous job finding the best gems of gaming culture and providing a guiding hand to finding some great indie games. In fact, the site's so good I actually follow it in my feed reader and view all the posts again on the site itself. That's WEBcore, amirite?

Anyway, turns out Brandon considers me game savvy enough to do a guest post for him here and there, which is pretty neat. Last week after finding out about these incredible Day of the Tentacle amigurumi from one of my commenters, Brandon encouraged me to write a post about them for Offworld. Stunned and flattered, I posted the first of what I hope will be many future contributions to Offworld and it felt pretty damn alright. So start reading Offworld if you haven't already, and keep an eye out for any wild .tiff sightings!

Now to the geek crafts. Not only is there the additional Max of Sam & Max amigurumi to gawk over, but through a pool of geek themed crafts on flickr I also found the lovely Evil Dead crossstich showcased above, as well as a plethora of other geek delights. And techincally, while this Guybrush Threepwood paperdoll to the right isn't a custom made craft, treasure hunting for it through the flickr pools was well worth the find.

Dispatchwork - Sealing the cracks with LEGOs

As part of a group artist project called 20 Eventi, artist Jan Vormann constructs fills of LEGO blocks to repair the cracks of crumbling walls. These colorful wall hacks can be found hidden away in Bocchignano, Italy and Tel Aviv, Isreal, with the project's initiative to manifest "...the hope that art can and does flourish even in small towns and amongst people who don't normally visit museums and art galleries."

Seen on SPLIT END

The Sound of the hour - Auto-Tune the News and Zapp & Roger

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert when it comes to auto-tuning, vocoders, or talk boxes... I'll leave that to the more musically inclined sages of the Internet for now. But while I'm on the topic, there's no denying that T-Pain's signature auto-tune voice and the general accessibility of the auto-tune effect has made it "the sound" to touch many recent popular culture tidbits. I could argue that I've gotten a bit tired of it all, what with the throes of kids imitating Kanye's "Love let down" and that Baby T-Pain video that made the rounds for a while. All in all, I felt like the whole auto-tune thing had just gone stale for me at this point.

Last week I watched two videos that persuaded me otherwise. The first is the much circulated Auto-Tune the News #2 video by The Gregory Brothers from last week. A clever auto-tuned hack of news reports matched with the brothers' lyrical styling, Auto-Tune the News leaves Katie Couric sounding like a R&B pro:

The second is an old recording of a live Zapp & Roger performance of "I Can Make You Dance", brought to my attention by Chico this weekend when I was visiting NYC. Back in the day, Roger mastered the talk box as opposed to any auto-tune devices, but you can tell from the video that that man knew how to funk out with the robot voice like none other. Observe:

Last weekend's drawings (NYC inspired edition!)

It was a treat to escape to New York City this weekend, and  with the combination of good weather and excellent company I left with a solid set of drawings by the end of the trip. While I'm still toying around with those cloud spirit guys from the last update, I've been trying to experiment and rework some of my motifs by creating new characters that exhibit traits of the old. The above animal spirits are, well, kind of like cloud spirits, except they're fluffy, floating animal heads. See where I'm going?

Aside from this work I'm also pretty pleased with my floating eyeball monster. Chico and I did some hardcore brainstorming about how many different kinds of cartooney eyes we could think of, so the drawing is the fruit of our efforts. Then of course there's the hoverboard rainbow party too, but that still needs a bit more work.

All in all, a sturdy set. I'm beginning to think that I should do some paintings, and maybe create some pieces for sale once I get ramped up. But this is all just the beginning so we shall see.

Tiny people doing tiny things

subprime from beeple on Vimeo.

Having returned from a restful mini-vacation in NYC this weekend, today is my Monday, which admittedly is a little rough. But while I plow through my e-mails and get back on task, here are a couplet of neat videos for your Tuesday afternoon. The first is a beautifully animated interpretation of how the American housing market has spiraled out of control. Although it sadly lacks any sort of constructive conclusion, the isometric, satin-polygon aesthetic is truly terrific.

Mardi Gras from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

The second is a neat video by Keith Loutit in which he adds a tilt-shift effect to the filming of the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney this year. Really fascinating how transformed the crowd and the parade's participants turn out, and the video looks stunning in HD. Seen on Laughing Squid.