In a compilation of 64 videos all shown on the same page, one man recreates Thriller -- the beats, the howling, the singing -- all by himself. This is pretty awesome, like Christian Marclay on speed. (thx, christopher)
For his Fabric of Brooklyn project, Tom Mason took photos of scenes in Brooklyn and combined them to depict super-bustling neighborhoods. Reminded me of this wonderful composite image of a busy airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.
Filip Dujardin samples photos of buildings to create new photographs of improbable, impossible, or fantastical buildings.
These are great.
A real life version of the Photoshop desktop. I love the little color swatches box. (thx, mark)
Two covers of Tom Waits' Way Down in the Hole, the title song for The Wire: Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet and MIA and Blaqstarr. (thx, brandon)
From a review of A Christmas Tale, a movie by French director Arnaud Desplechin:
Artists who believe in the mystique of originality are often reluctant to reveal their inspirations. But the magpielike Mr. Desplechin revels in what the writer Jonathan Lethem has called the ecstasy of influence. "I didn't invent anything," he said. "Being a director is not such a grand thing. My job is just to show the audience what I love."
The funny thing about the "ecstasy of influence" quote is that it was used by Lethem in a well-known Harpers article about plagiarism that was itself, in Lethem's words, "stole, warped, and cobbled together" from a variety of other sources, which sources he lists at the conclusion to the article.
The phrase "the ecstasy of influence," which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
The ecstasy of influence would make a good name for this here blog. (via snarkmarket, another ecstatic influence fan)
Love Lockdown + Reckoner. Kanye mashed up with Radiohead, I pretty much gotta post it. (via delicious ghost)
I don't know if this has been linked around everywhere or not, but this surprisingly realistic video of a dance-off between Barack Obama and John McCain tickled every last bone in my body. I watched it at least four times.
Here's how to use the RJDJ iPhone app. You install the app, plug your headphones in, launch it, and press "Now Playing". A song plays, the app starts to sample the sounds in your environment, and those sounds are remixed in real time and played back to you. It might be the coolest thing ever. Check out this video and this other video for a quick look at how RJDJ works. The first video shows some songs that use the iPhone's accelerometer to modify and scratch the beat. (via waxy)
PS. It might only be the coolest app in theory...it's also flaky as hell. It was working fine for me and then crapped out...there's no music now, only sound sampling and it's really quiet. Maybe you need to use the Apple headphones with the mic?
Truthful TV title cards. Heroes becomes No One Dies Ever, Mad Men is Drink Smoke Fuck, and Lost is Winging It.
Angelina Jolie, powers of a ten. By Eamesfiddle.
Read in the right way, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writersInexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of newvocabulariesabstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of theirsocietyindustry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
By substituting "independent video game" for "short story" in The Ambition of the Short Story, (mashedmarket) turned the essay into a manifesto of sorts for indie game developers.
The Triple-A game is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the Triple-A game, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The independent video game by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the independent video game can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the Triple-A game -- after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that's left.
The literal video version of A Ha's Take On Me...that is, the words of the song are changed to reflect what actually happens in the video.
Band montage! Pipe wrench fight!
This. Is. Brilliant. (via andre)
Update: Here's a slight twist on the theme...a meta song with lyrics about the lyrics. I like the built-in laugh track. (thx, elsa)
Update: And here's the literal version of Tears for Fears' Head Over Heels.
Anytime is a good time for a well-cut movie trailer mashup: here's The Dark Knight version of the Toy Story 2 trailer. (via buzzfeed)
Map of the market: here be dragons
While following the market yesterday, I updated my Twitter account after a particularly precipitous mid-afternoon drop in the DJIA:
The DJIA trend line just kinda disappeared off the bottom of the chart there into Here Be Monsters territory about 30 minutes ago.
I meant "here be dragons" but you get the idea. Anyway, a reader sent in this chart that captures what many were feeling after the market closed.
The Sea of Dread, indeed. (thx, margaret)
A supercut of every utterance of the phrase "what are you doing here?" on Doctor Who, including dozens of variations. Wow.
This year's harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)
IHOP meets House of Leaves. This will only be funny if you've read the book.
A collection of photos of custom and counterfeit Louis Vuitton products. Big omission: David LaChapelle's photo of an LV'd Lil' Kim. (via quips)
My yearbook photos
If I travelled through time for the purpose of attending high school, here's what my yearbook photos would look like:
Make your own at Yearbook Yourself. The 1988 photo approximates what I looked like in high school. (via merlin)
For his Faces of Evil project, Hans Weishäupl made composite photographs of the world's worst dictators by photographing hundreds of people in each dictator's country and stitching them together. The results are a bit disturbing, particularly when viewing very large, clear, vibrant color photos of long-dead monsters like Stalin or Hitler. (via conscientious)
Many early 20th century hackers found the Ford Model T a perfect platform on which to build all manner of different mobile machines.
Among the 800 vintage automobiles brought by collectors were ones that had been converted to snowmobiles, racing coups and tow trucks. That was only a glimmer of the many innovative changes made by Model T owners, for uses Henry Ford never had in mind. They transformed the cars into tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel.
Check out the slideshow for several examples, including the goat sidecar.
Inappropriate movie soundtracks
YouTubers are adding innappropriate new soundtracks to movie scenes, thereby ruining them. I stumbled across the Richie suicide scene from The Royal Tenenbaums set to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird (instead of Needle in the Hay) and then found a bunch more:
Terminator 2
The Matrix ruined
Star Wars, under pressure
2001
This Monsters Inc. one is actually fantastic.
Starship Troopers
A Clockwork Orange
Reservoir Dogs
Contact
Several of these originated on Something Awful.
In an attempt to make Billy Bob Thornton jealous, artist Jillian McDonald pasted herself into movie scenes kissing several well-known actors, including Thornton's former wife, Angelina Jolie.
Will videos that bleep out ordinary words to make them seem profane always be funny? I hope so. Jimmy Kimmel's Unnecessary Censorship was the first one that I saw...here are some others I've run across recently: Sesame Street's The Count sings about how he loves to BLEEP, Barney the dinosaur talks dirty, Spongebob BLEEPing Squarepants, censored cartoons, more censored cartoons, and Cookie Monster BLEEPs the BLEEP.
Update: This commercial for Knorr is pretty good as well. (thx, oscar)
CandyKaraoke, a bunch of album covers reimagined by Irish artists. (via ffffound)
Garfield is the current go-to media for parody and remix. Nothing Garfield, Garfield Minus Garfield, Garkov (Garfield with random dialogue), Garfield as a real cat, Lasagna Cat, Garfield Randomizer, Silent Garfield, what if Conan the Barbarian was Garfield's owner?, The Death of Garfield, Garfield Loses His Lunch, Garfield Variations.
The "american gothic" tag on Flickr is quite interesting; I like the ketchup and mustard one myself.
Moving Mario: imagine Super Mario Bros as created by Michel Gondry. Check out the video to get the gist.
An inventive cover version of Radiohead's Nude played by the following instruments: Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, Epson dot matrix printer, HP Scanjet scanner, and an array of hard drives. Skip ahead to 1:08 if you can't wait through the opening. This isn't the correct technological time period to be steampunk. Bitpunk anyone? (via waxy)
The music video for my song 'Alice', an electronic piece of which 90% is composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film 'Alice In Wonderland'.
Said video. Said song download. (thx, sam)
The b3ta folk explore what happens just outside the border of some well-known album covers. The Simon and Garfunkel and Pink Floyd/Kool-Aid ones are pretty good.
A sad Kermit the Frog sings Elliot Smith's Needle in the Hay (complete with The Royal Tenenbaums parody), NIN's Hurt, and Radiohead's Creep (in which Kermit says "fucking"). (via buzzfeed)
Jezebel's 2008 Harper's/Harper's Bazaar mashup, I'd like you to meet Andrew Hearst's 2005 Harper's/US Weekly mashup.
Austin Kleon makes Newspaper Blackout Poems by blacking out all but a few choice words of newspaper articles.
A Woman's bust is the host of Romance, so Don't deplore my fondness for It
YouTube user barringer82 has posted several mini-compilations of films of different eras and directors. For instance: the 1980s, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino, and the 1970s.
The Wire, Simpsons style
A few drawings of characters from The Wire drawn in the style of The Simpsons. Here's a scene from season one; D'Angelo tries to teach chess to Wallace and Bodie:
This might be my new favorite thing on the web. (thx, andy)
A suggestion from the inbox: watch the fascinatingly disturbing eagle vs. goats video with a soundtrack of Juan Diego Flórez's encore-inducing tenor solo. Two great links that taste great together. (thx, andrew & rueben)
Update: The mash-up is now on YouTube...no separate soundtrack needed. (thx, james)
Recreations of childhood photos. This pair are my favorites. (via waxy)
This page generates names by combining the first and last names from the 1990 US Census, creating names that may or may not actually exist. If you're tired of perusing gravestones for the names of your next novel's characters, this looks like a good alternative.
Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple commercial = drunk Jeff Goldblum. "Internet? I'd say Internet." Great stuff, indeed. (via cynical-c)
There Will Be Vader, a mashup of There Will Be Blood and Star Wars, with Daniel Plainview playing the part of Vader.
(via house next door)
Some bootleg scans of these were linked around the web last week, but here's the real thing: photos of current Hollywood celebrities photographed in scenes from Hitchcock films. Click on the photos to see the originals.
Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull redone in the style of a circa-1980s movie trailer.
If adventure has a name, it must be: Indiana Jones.
Interview with Michel Gondry on his new movie, Be Kind Rewind.
I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don't like cynical people. I don't like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to fight for it.
Gondry also did a hilarious remake of the film's original trailer.
Update: Maybe Gondry got the premise for the movie from an old Nickelodeon show called Amanda, Please! Or not.
This portrait of Homer Simpson painted in the style of Rembrandt is strangely mesmerizing. Can't look away from those giant eyes.
Periodic table of rejected elements, including Belgium, Antipathy, Visine, and Antigone. (via del.icio.us via kottke.org 8 years ago (it's the time of year for recycled links, I guess))
In a map of the Republik van Nieuw Nederland, Paul Burgess imagines that the Dutch never gave up their New World possessions and a republic formed centered around New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam never gave way to New York. The Dutch kept the whole of their North American colony out of the hands of the perfidious English, in fact. New Netherland today constitutes a thriving Republic stretching from the Atlantic coast to Quebec, dividing New England from the rest of the United States.
See also Melissa Gould's map of Neu York, which imagines Manhattan as a post-WWII Nazi possession.
Rebecca Mead on young composer Nico Muhly in the New Yorker.
When Muhly composes, the last thing he thinks about is the actual notes that musicians will play. He begins with books and documents, YouTube videos and illuminated manuscripts. He meditates on this material, digesting its ironies and appreciating its aesthetics. Meanwhile, he devises an emotional scheme for the piece-the journey on which he intends to lead his listener. Muhly believes that some composers of new music rely too heavily on program notes to give their work a coherence that it might lack in the actual listening. "This stupid conceptual stuff where it's, like, 'I was really inspired by, like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis,'" he says.
A sampling (no pun intended) of Muhly's music is available on the New Yorker site and on his personal site (which seems to be in a similar vein to The Believer and McSweeney's Store, design-wise).
Guitar Zero is a band that has repurposed the Guitar Hero game controllers to make real music with them. Even better: they've posted the instructions so you can make your own. (thx, nick)
The last part of this video featuring Conan O'Brien singing The Beastie Boys' Sabotage as Edith Bunker from All in the Family makes me laugh over and over and over.
David Lynch does an iPhone commercial, not really. (via andre)
Cherry Blossoms is a project by Alyssa Wright:
Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death.
Video compilation of the brightest frame from 1500 different movie explosions. Turn up the sound for this one.
Video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles A Hard Day's Night in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare's Richard III. Got all that? (via cyn-c)
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song 'everyday' for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn't need permission? I don't find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they're really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
Yasumasa Morimura takes photos of himself recreating iconic photos like Lee Harvey Oswald's murder and Che Guevara. A bit of Cindy Sherman + these photos + maybe even a little Be Kind Rewind. At Luhring Augustine in NYC until Dec 22. (thx, tony)
Tobias Wong has made a slick all-black iPhone called the ccPhone. It comes preloaded with videos, photos, music, and the company address book of Citizen:Citizen, the company selling it. Available as a limited edition of 50, each phone is $2000. Another of Wong's projects that I really like is the Tiffany diamond solitaire engagement ring with the diamond turned upside down so the point sticks out (possibly for slashing attackers). A nice play on the marital security that an engagement ring offers the wearer. (via core77)
A plot of Japan's Phillips curve ("a historical inverse relation and tradeoff between the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation in an economy") looks like Japan itself.
Joel pointed to these iconic photographs of the 20th century duplicated with the elderly as the subjects last week. See also: iconic photographs recreated with Legos. I remember another set of photo recreations that I can't seem to find...famous historical events as if they happened in a video game. Anyone recall seeing something like that?
Update: Screenshots is what I was looking for. (thx, rumsey)
3x3 video mashup call and response old commercial row row row your boat. Oh, just go watch it, it's cool, especially if you like The Clapper and Christian Marclay. (via waxy, from whom I'm detecting signs of life re: his blog)
The fake subtitles for this movie clip make it seem as though Adolf Hitler is banned from playing iSketch, an online drawing game like Pictionary.
I just got my new Wacom! I have the stylus right here! This tablet has more than 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity!
My Fuhrer, iSketch doesn't support pressure sensitivity!
FUCK YOU! It does if I say so!!
Hilarious. (via conscientious)
Update: There are quite a few different Hitler/subtitle mashups on YouTube. This one about him being banned from XBox Live is the most popular one but this one about his car being stolen predates it. The iSketch one is still the best one, I think. (thx, everyone)
These half-n-half celebrity face mashups are unsettling. "The right half of a face has to be from one celebrity and the left half from another." The Bill/Hillary and the Cruise/Holmes ones are especially good.
This is brilliant: the weird video of Dick Cheney lurking in the bushes during a press conference at the White House with Radiohead's Creep playing over it. "I want you to notice when I'm not around...." (via cyn-c)
Rollercoaster version of the graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation...you basically ride the curve of the graph. Brilliant...I want to ride all the graphs I come across! (via is it real or is it magnetbox)
Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, "the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy". TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)
Museumr lets you insert one of your Flickr photos into a museum (sort of). I gave my beer bottle-shaped sausage photo the Museumr treatment. (thx, chuck)
The best animated gif ever created, I reckon. A tour de force. (thx, alaina)
Beatboxing flautist + Super Mario theme song = YouTube gold.
Ikea Hacker is a site that highlights using Ikea furniture and products in creative ways.
Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York neighborhoods. For instance, North Beach --> Little Italy, Hayes Valley --> Chelsea, and Mission --> Wiliamsburg.
Nasty Nets used CSS positioning to "embed" one YouTube video into another. "Be sure to hit 'play' on both YouTubes." Reminds me of the animated GIF mashups (more).
2007 trend maps
A pair of trend maps for 2007, both based on subway maps. The top one depicts the top online companies/brands & how they're connected while the bottom one deals with ideas (with the River of Consciousness standing in for the Thames).
Both maps were found in this article about internet predictions in 2007. I don't know about you, but I find these types of maps fun to look at, but completely inscrutable informationally speaking. Surely there's a more enlightening way to present this information than in Tube map form.
Odd games
Over the holidays, Mike Monteiro discovered there was a Nacho Libre game for the Nintendo DS. Thinking that an arbitrary choice for a movie tie-in game, he started the DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play group on Flickr to showcase other possible odd media tie-ins for the DS. Some of my favorite submissions so far include: The Passion of the Christ, Birth of a Nation, Empire, Remains of the Day, My Dinner with Andre (Bon Mot controller sold separately), Super Mario Bros, Learning GNU Emacs, Requiem for a Dream, The Cremaster Cycle, and Getting Things Done.
Here's a couple of ones that I've done: Dancer in the Dark and The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment (with noncompulsory coöperative mode), pictured below.
If you join the group, there's a Photoshop kit you can download to join in the fun.
The WSJ has some background on Lasse Gjertsen's excellent Amateur video.
It's fun Fotoshop Friday! (Phun Photoshop Phriday?) Anyway, here's a bunch of pictures of celebrities Photoshopped to look like Star Wars characters. I'm surprised there weren't more celebrities frozen in carbonite. (via fandumb)
Human beatbox Lasse Gjertsen has taken his skills to the next level. His new video, Amateur, is a clever bit of video sampling: Gjertsen builds an entire song out of tiny video soundbytes of him playing the drums and piano. It's hard to explain, just watch the damn thing. Cameron says the video "feels like what DJ Shadow would produce if he made videos".
Grand Theft Mario = Super Mario Bros + Grand Theft Auto.
Photographs of postcards and miniature souvenirs held in place of actual landmarks and tourist attractions. (via gulfstream)
Turtle with a wheel! A turtle with one missing back leg has been fitted with a wheel to help get around...a turtle/RC car mashup.
77 Million Paintings, a generative artwork by Brian Eno. "Work that continues to create itself in your absence."
Steven Reich to Brian Eno to Cory Arcangel
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:
1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.
I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.
Ben Folds cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service using found percussion instruments (like a champagne glass and a plastic mail bin). (thx, james)
This is old news, but I missed it while I was gone, so apologies if you've seen this. Banksy replaced copies of Paris Hilton's new CD in stores around the UK with his own copies containing doctored album art and a 40-minute song by Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse. Banksy made a video of himself pulling off the stunt. Copies of the CD are on eBay for $180-1,300. An mp3 of the song contained on the doctored CD is available.
Here's a great video of old school arcade games represented using household items...here's a Frogger screenshot. The rest of the photos and videos are worth a look as well; Roof Sex is reminiscent of Furniture Porn (nsfw). (via waxy)
Pictures of celebrities photoshopped to look like senior citizens. Some of them are amazing.
Here's a video of Snoop Dogg listening to and singing along with a country-style cover of Gin and Juice by The Gourds.
If you're reading kottke.org at work and shouldn't be, you might want to read the site as if it looked like Microsoft Word. Make other sites Work Friendly here.
Richard Donner is re-editing Superman II for a November 2006 DVD release. "Unlike many 'special edition' and 'director's cut' movies released over the years, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut will essentially be a completely new film." (thx, dj)
Stop-motion human Space Invaders. The must-see video game and stop-motion video related link of the day. (thx, janelle)
Update: This looks like the official site.
Photographic recreation of George Seraut's painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (see it larger). Seurat is one of my favorite painters, and it was a treat to see this painting in Chicago recently.
Great Russian illustrations of movies. I like the Star Wars one and The Terminator.
Sarah Trigg's work combines geographic maps with biological forms. "The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells." More here. (via moon river)
Awesome must-read article about people who have implanted magnets in the tips of their fingers, effectively giving themselves a sixth sense, a sense of magnetism. A very simple human/machine hybrid...or a mutant like the X-Men's Magneto.
New project from Cory Arcangel: Kurt Cobain's suicide letter with Google AdSense ads (which are automatically generated based on the content of the page). Current ads include ones for free ringtones, techniques to end anxiety, and public speaking training.
So many New Yorkers retire to Florida, it makes sense to see what Manhattan looks like next to Miami. See also my Manhattan Elsewhere project, a map mashup featuring the island of Manhattan visiting Chicago, Boston, San Franciso, etc.
myDaVinci takes your photo and pastes your face onto the Mona Lisa. Not a fan of Leonardo? Try being the Girl with a Pearl Earring or American Gothic. (via ais)
My friend Maciej found this map of NYC divided into sections that contain the same populations as other American cities. The page containing the image says it's from an unknown "City of New York publication". Anyone know where it's from or where to get a better copy? Email me.
Names of books + band names. Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory, Motley Crusoe, The Natalie Merchant of Venice, and J-Lolita...you get the idea.
Artist Jeremiah Palecek has recently been painting pieces inspired by video games, including Super Mario Bros.
Browsing recent interestingness on Flickr, I ran across these photos of women photoshopped to include glass eyes, prostheses, eyepatches, and to look like amputees. This is a practice of devotees of amputee fetishism called Electronic Surgery. More examples here, here, and here. Probably a bit NSFW.
Update: Flickr has removed the users who posted those photos. Sorry.
Designer Michael Bierut confesses: "I am a plagiarist". "...my mind is stuffed full of graphic design, graphic design done by other people. How can I be sure that any idea that comes out of that same mind is absolutely my own?"
I can't tell if this is a joke on TBS's part or not, but this is an actual promo of theirs for The Lord of the Rings movies done in the style of alternate trailers like The Shining and Brokeback to the Future. "It sucks to be Frodo."
Update: Looks like they're having a bit of fun over at TBS...check out their other promos.
Representation of the London Tube map if the stations were sponsored by products or companies. I love the Pizza Hutney, Upministry of Sound, and iPoddington stops. Rather DFWesque. (via bb)
Presenting the Bible's Book of Genesis in rap songs. For instance, the song for Genesis 21 -- which tells the story of Isaac and Ishmael -- is Big Poppa by Notorious B.I.G.
Mashup sport: chessboxing. "The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the no.1 thinking sport and the no.1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors - both mentally and physically. In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on." More from the LA Times and the Guardian.
De-Touch lets you step through how photos of models are retouched for publication. Announcement here. Made with Processing, source code is available.
Scott Nelson produces a "tribute brand" called MIKE that's an homage to Michael Jordan, Nike branding, and shoes. After looking at his products (photos and interviews here and here), I'm amazed Nike hasn't sued him back to the Stone Age. Nelson's site is mike23.com.
Averaging Gradius is a movie of 15 simultaneous games of Gradius layered on top of each other. Robin says: "So what you see, instead of a single ship going at it, is a fuzzy cloud of ships -- bright where strategies overlap, faint where someone does something especially daring (or dumb)." Very cool; reminds me of Jason Salavon's amalgamation of Playboy centerfolds.
In the spirit of the reimagined trailer for The Shining, here's Brokeback Top Gun and Sleepless in Seattle.