A Certain Point of View

Neil Gaiman Short Stories

http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories


Four little short stories by Neil Gaiman at his site. They aren't American Gods or Sandman or anything like that, but they are mostly fun.

If '00 Movies Were Made in Other Decades

What if the script for Matrix Reloaded had been greenlit in the 80's? What if Christopher Nolan's The Dark Night had been made near the turn of the century?

Roll your mouse over the actual posters to see what might have been.

Merry X-mas

Is it because this song shows you how much worse the holidays could be?

Is it Shane MacGowan?

Is it Kirsty MacColl's voice, god rest her soul?

Or is this more your style?

Five Secs

You will spend more than five seconds at Five Second Projects.

The Millenium Falcon Bed

If you're not going to be getting laid, then you might as well go out in style.



btw -- the headlights work (I'm referring to the ones on the bed, pervs).

An Explanation to the Unfortunate Waitress Who Had My Table

Is this real? Honestly, I hope not. I fully admit that I've had some crushingly embarrassing experiences in my pursuit of the fairer sex -- including several waitresses, bartenders, and store employees who I simply couldn't think of the best way to approach or talk to outside of the standard customer/service provider relationship -- but nothing like this.

Read on and count yourself lucky that your epic strikeouts didn't end as ..pointedly as this one did.

(click for a larger version)

Serious props to the guy for staying on target till the bloody end.

Eddie Would Go

A legend in the Hawaiian surfing community, Eddie Aikau (1946 - 1978) was the first ever lifeguard at Waimea Bay, home to some of the largest and most dangerous waves in the world.

He gained fame not only by competing in and winning big wave surf competitions on the North Shore, but for also never losing a life while on duty as a lifesaver. He even died in a successful attempt to rescue boaters who were caught in the dangerous waves and tides at Waimea.

In his memory, a surfing contest was organized.

But not just any surf contest -- one that's only held in conditions where the waves reach a minimum of 20 feet in height.

As such, even though the "The Quiksilver In Memory of Eddie Aikau" is an event that's listed on the pro tour schedule annually -- it's only actually been held 8 times in the last 25 years, because the surf wasn't big enough.

This year, weather conditions were right -- providing swells ranging from 30 to 50(!) feet in height, enabling 28 surfers (voted on by the surfing community) a chance to compete for this rare and coveted prize. Californian Greg Long barely edged out pro surfing legends Kelly Slater and Sunny Garcia for the win, but as impressive as that is -- it's the unique sanctity of the event that makes it so special.

In a sport that can always use the publicity on a beach that all the big names would surely come to regardless of the conditions -- event organizers stand firm on their principles to only hold it when it's just right.

Which is just how Eddie would have wanted it.

Google Goggles

Recently I took the plunge and got myself a Droid smartphone, touted as Verizon's answer to the iPhone. It's seriously cool, and has a lot of features that are simply jaw-dropping compared to the regular cel phone I had before, which was anything but "smart."

But of course, the thing that comes up most often when people ask about it is if it's better than the iPhone. Never having owned one, I'm not really able to stack them up fairly, but one of the things you immediately notice when you're working with your Android phone is that while there are all sorts of "apps" available for you to download and use -- the variety is severely lacking.

Or to put it another way, when my iPhone-having friends find out that I have access to apps, they all suggest that I download their favorites for my own use, and in many cases they don't seem to be available.

It's a minor hassle, and one that in time I'm sure will disappear as the android market continues to grow -- but as useful as the Droid clearly is capable of being, the number of applications that help you get use from it for the time being aren't as numerous as it's Apple counterpart.

As such, there's a bit of a "cool factor" gap -- at least when it comes to apps. Or at least there was, before this thing came out.



Maybe I'm easily impressed, but the fact that this thing works (I have it on my phone) is endlessly amazing to me. Take a picture of something, wait a second, and then the system recognizes it and searches for related information on that item.

My phone can literally see things and search for them.

It's not a jetpack. But it's pretty frikkin close.

Ninjas Hijacked My Mother

Panda rape, apple juice, and Rush. We're really not that complicated here.

The Photo Argus

I'm not a photographer.

I really enjoy photography, and have always wanted to take cool pictures, but have found myself frequently frustrated by the fact that I cannot always get the camera equipment I have (read: usually my cel phone) to faithfully reproduce what I see with my eyes. As a result, I've always enjoyed checking out the work of artistic photographers, especially on the web.


The problem though with artistic photography is that just about anybody can do it, including loads of "I want to be deep and creative but I'm really just overly emotional and don't know what to do with it"-types, so as a result you frequently have to wade through a bunch of half blurry black and whites of leaves and garbage on the side of a city street before you really get to something worth seeing.

In other words, it's one thing to take a picture. It's quite another to use photography artistically.

The Internet, and it's myriad rabbitholes has long been in love with picture imagery. Whether it's the storehouses like flickr, the human Pokemon card collection elements of social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Hot or Not, et. al., the squillion bytes of pornography out there, or the artist portfolio sites that you occasionally come across and get lost in -- photographic images are circulatory system that drives interest. Content will always be king, but if your content doesn't have at least one picture included -- a big part of the Internet faithful (for better or for worse) won't come knocking.

As such, on boring work days (like this one) where websurfing is an welcome distraction, tumblr photoblogs and photography websites are welcome draws. But like so many other things out there, the results are largely hit or miss -- depending on your tastes, and your individual patience with attempting to navigate what ALWAYS seems to be convoluted website navigational design when you find a portfolio webpage for someone who considers themselves to be a true artiste.

Dear Internet artists -- I want to look at the pictures. Please tell me where the hell they are so I can stop clicking aimlessly on the leaves of an illustration of a tree hoping they'll reveal themselves in one of the 75 pop up windows that your flash-enabled website insisted upon opening, k?.

All of which goes into why today's choice is not just a Highly Recommended Thing of the Moment, but as a constant bookmark. I don't know about you -- but I have a handful of sites I visit when there's really nothing else happening on the web that interests me. Just places full of neat stuff that I can wander around, like a museum or a gallery -- in search of something to inspire my writing or at least interest my attention for a while.

The Photo Argus is one of those places.

It's true purpose is as a tip, trick, and technique resource for photographers of all levels -- but in showing those tips in action, it's also a really cool picturebook for outsiders like me. This is especially true of a regular feature they have called inspiration -- which collects groups of photos centered around a theme, and places them in a long scroll format that lets you browse through them easily and quickly.

Occasionally I drop by and check them out -- almost always resulting in a new desktop background, email forward, or mixtape cover image, and even sometimes formulates the beginning of an idea in my own mind that becomes a story, blog post, or whatever.


Long story short, there's some really cool stuff here -- and you might like it.

Enjoy!

Steady Hands

Willard Wigan chisels sculptures out of fabric fibers, using diamond chips. He paints the figures using the hair of a dead fly. He works at night so that traffic vibrations won't affect his work.