This was fished out from some old teen mag spread (or something). We all have our share of embarrassing photos that we'd gladly burn but this, I believe, is in a league of its own. I ask you to especially take notice of the dreamy stare which must have turned millions of girls into infatuated fans back in the day. I thought that the .com boom was the first time the press actively portrayed tech as being cool and sexy but this proves that they had tried (and some would say failed) long before that.

Processing is a scripting/programming language aimed at making it easier to create interactive visual concepts. Basically, using Processing one can (relatively) quickly create Java-based mini-application which can be quick prototypes to demo aspects within larger projects or simply stand-alone visual toys like this one. Using Processing becomes very exciting when you start thinking of new ways to visualise external data. The freedom a platform like Processing brings when you use it in conjunction with external inputs (data streams, microphone input, camera signals, etc...) is near limitless. The accessibility of Processing (it is free and technically easy to learn) hopefully means that we will increasingly see it used in real-world situations. While still in Alpha phase, it has already gathered a lot of support and already spawned many very interesting (and often mind-blowing) experiments.

Brian Berg really has something to say about stacking cards. Heck he even makes my awesome 7 card stack look bad... Bryan Berg broke the Guinness World Record for card structures in 1992 at the age of seventeen with a tower fourteen feet, six inches tall. His latest record-holding structure is more than twenty-five feet tall. Touring regularly, Berg has stacked cards in virtually every major U.S. city and in Japan, Denmark, and Germany. He must also have the Guiness World Record for the "most draft-less house" and quite possibly "most spare time". Look at what this guy does with cards! Our friend Brian also trained as an architect which might mean his card stacks are structurally sound or possibly that his building would collapse with the first gust of wind... I love finding out about people like this - people so much better at a certain thing than anyone else it just makes the mind boggle. If you feel you can dethrone the cardstacker king you'll need to study his book, train for 10 years in the second most draftless house in the world and finally build something that beats his twenty-five foot behemoth. Good luck!

Hektor is impressive both because of its technical implementation as well as its fantastically simple concept. I want Hektor. Hektor is a Graffiti Output Device. It was realized during two months in Summer 2002 by Jürg Lehni and Uli Franke, an electronics engineer from Zurich, for Lehni's diploma project at the école cantonale d'art de Lausanne (écal). Basically, this is a portable, very large scale, scalable printer. It can be attached to walls and controlled by software to spray shapes, text or anything else you want on any given flat vertical surface (i.e. a wall). I am completely awe struck by how wondefully cool this is.

I personally get a lot of e-mails with optical illusion attachment -- you know, the patterns that look like they're moving, the curves that are actually straight lines, that sort of stuff. I was therefor rather ecstatic to find this little gem of a site by Japanese psychology professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka. If you're up for some mind screwing, eye-crossing, headache inducing graphics this should be right up your alley.

Very lame title indeed but time is of essence and I just needed to tell you about something I stumb... came across. StumbleUpon is neat little toolbar (oh, another toolbar, yay!) that if queried will select and load a (hopefully) cool site more or less according to your profile. A great way to find stuff to browse other than movie reviews or porn... It's also firmly a community powered system as rating and shared favourites are of order here. I'm trying it out now and will report back as soon as I get a bit more out of it. The first site it gave me was Slashdot which, er, wasn't really the cool, obscure, never-heard-of-before site I was expecting. Second query gave me a collection of Hubble photographs. Better, let's see what it comes up with next -- Google Zeitgeist, I already knew it but good choice.

Holy crap! This is a first: my computer actually caught fire yesterday. You read that right, smoke, flames and all. It all started when I tried to plug in an old disk drive (that's diskETTE drive) for a reason which I have no intention of getting into. I plugged everything in, pressed the on button and watched as my RAM counted up. A good 10 seconds must have passed before I noticed the big cloud of white smoke billowing out of my case. The power cable was on fire, its insulation dripping onto other cables and setting them alight! Let me tell you, this crap burns like there's no tomorrow. I managed to turn off the machine which, luckily, made the fire subside. The place stunk but all I cared about was my beautiful new motherboard, my sweet, precious, RAID enabled baby... After some cable pruning and rewiring I pressed the on button and watched my ex-towering inferno boot up with its soothing purr and lovely lovely beep. Pfew. I was pretty much telling everyone already not to bother with diskettes anymore, to forget about buying disks and just to switch to USB keys to transfer data but now, now I have made my mission to banish these hellish beasts from computers everywhere. I mean, being obsolete and unreliable is bad enough but when you start a fire in my MiniATX case you're really asking for trouble. Damn you floppy disk drive! Damn yoooooouuu!

Hrm-grumble... I've been messing about with a new design for this thing for hours and I must admit that I've been facing quite a few problems including a space between the top bar and sub-title in Firefox which only appears when the site is rendered. For once the mark-up works in IE the way it should and not in Firefox -- great eh? (Update: it now doesn't work in either browser but I'm tired so I shall check it later.) (Update part 2: it works, woohoo! Don't look at the code it's messy.) I hope to add more characters as time goes bye. Most of these are sketches for my constantly delayed Creeptown project. They were drawn with a mouse straight into Photoshop which was bloody frustrating as my optical mouse sporadically jumps. Anyway, hope you like the creeps and let's see if this work summons up some inspiration... Bah.

I love the Prince of Persia series (except maybe for the prince's first foray into 3D which, to be honest, everyone is trying to cast out of their minds.) The fantastic Sands of Time stand serves as one of the strongest examples of how to transport an old game mechanic into a new dimension but that's not why I hold it in such high esteem. Firstly, it completely redefined (in my mind anyway) how storytelling could be integrated into gameplay. The game drew you in and swept you away -- it was gorgeous, sure but everything was so well told you started to take for granted how every single part of the game blended so well into each other. You weren't playing a game, the prince was retelling a story, making mistakes (game over) and starting over (save games.) Everything was drenched in gold and greens, punctuated by splashes of exotic music and effects that helped the transition from the serene to the mesmerisingly exciting -- it was a simply magical experience. With so much passion for the Sands of Time you'd think that I would love its new sequel the Warrior Within, that I would be positively enchanted in its new combat moves and enhanced graphics. I wish it were that simple, I wish the magic was still there, I wish marketing types hadn't come in and spoiled everything. You see, the Warrior Within has been "overhauled": somebody must have sat all the designers down and given them a crash-course in "dumbing down". Let me give you an example: the first minutes of Warrior Within sees a logo drenched in blood, the prince running away from a dark ancient evil, a dog being torn apart by this dark ancient evil, the prince showing off your new husky voice and then fighting a large breasted woman in a metal thong. The prince has changed from hapless hero to moaning dickhead. "Raaaaah!", "I have no time for this!", "Grrraaah!" -- he grunts and one-lines his way through the levels. Someone needs to get laid. I know what happened, I really do... This thirty something guy with a masters and a fancy pin-stripe suit gathered all the game developers together, ordered some sandwiches and coffee and went on to crush their spirit. He took the big list of "things that are wonderful in Sands of Time", a big red pen and stratched out everything. He then projected a PowerPoint presentation which went something like this:

• More T & A
• Nu metal soundtrack
• More blood
• MTV style transitions
• Darker look
• Stubble on prince
• One-liners and grunts

He then finished his cup of coffee, put his feet up and ordered the group of depressed developers to go work and do something that's "really kick ass!" -- Ca-tching! So I hate it, right? Yes, but it's not awful: it's still quite a bit better than most games and it can still be breathtaking at times -- It's just not what it should have been, and mostly it's just depressing to see something with such great heritage regress into what is just another pre-digested, focus grouped and mostly bland experience. Sigh.

Wahey! I must say that my blog is ripening at a steady pace. I've only be doing this for a few days but I've already got the basics covered. What basics you ask? Well, let's see:

1. Blog name that's trying desperately to be cool? Check!
2. Brag about some new gadget I possess? Check!
3. Misspellled words? Check!
4. Post about pet project that wouldn't mean shit to anyone but myself? Check!
5. Pictures of friends uploaded via phone? Check!
6. Failed attempts at humour? Check!
7. Bad-mouthing of a film director? Check!
8. Link to some pointless Flash game? Check!
9. "This is the best thing ever!" type post? Check!
10. Post making fun of other bloggers? Check!

See? All I need now is to have an argument with someone in the comments and possibly a little paragraph about some crap service I got at some shop (and how I was like, all cool and told the guy to go shove it or something) and I'll be up there with the greats...