Cute, humorous, and fun photograpy

Artsy photography, of course. I'm not talking about Fluffy Ducklings or Man Getting Hit By Football here.

Tiny people and food -- that's minimiam. In a series of lush, magazine-quality images, the team of Japanese photographer Akika Ida and French photographer Pierre Javelle shows us what it would be like to climb up a mountain of pastry, hunt slugs in a jungle of lettuce, drill for watermelon seeds, mow a kiwi lawn, or mine for chocolate.
Via Bibi's Box.




David Shrigley's photographs are not so much images as visual mini-stories -- and they're almost all comedies. Most of his works incorporate signs, text, or captions to create meaning in the picture. (Below are "Drink Me" and "Imagine the Green is Red" -- click to enlarge.)




Al Magnus does whimsical, lovely, vivid, dream-inspired photography that depicts the imagined worlds of children. The clouds, sun, moon, and the stars themselves become playthings in the artist's cosmic vision.




Transparent Screens -- a Flickr photoset of transparent computer monitors. Neat.




Fun with Stickers -- another great photoset. Cute!




Abba Richman does a lot of beautiful works of cities, objects, graffiti, and other bits and pieces, with a great use of color. Check out his other galleries, too, but I particularly like his Alphabet in Colour.




It's definitely not cute and it's not really humorous, but I suppose you could say that The Dead Puppet Show is sort of fun. In the wake of a failed film featuring mechanical puppets, the artist digs up the performers' decaying remains and documents them in a short guided tour of the death of machines. That's fun, right?




You can do some great things with a camera, a sunset, and a trampoline.

Urban climbing

Check out this amazing video of a couple of Russian kids who can climb, scale, leap, roll, and move like nobody's business. They literally jump from rooftop to rooftop in this incredible series of stunts as they navigate the urban landscape with seeming ease.





Reminds me of House Gymnastics, an indoor version of a similar, though much lower-key, sort of climbing acrobatics. A couple of guys perform what they describe as a blend of "yoga, breakdancing, climbing and gymnastics", and photograph the poses. It's participatory, with difficulty ratings, step-by-step instructions, and a community forum, but it looks like prime Do Not Try This At Home material to me. Well, maybe some of the easier stuff is pretty safe.

Discoveries

I came today upon two excellent blogs for curiosities, strange tales, history, wonders, relics, and other ephemera: Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society and The Museum of Dust.

In the spirit of "cool dude" Athanasius Kircher, the Society collects and reports on a diverse range of things the prolific seventeenth-century scholar would have appreciated, from The Dreams and Nightmares of African Astronauts to The Voice Flowers of Margaret Watts Hughes to The Eiffel Birdman to The Undying Garden, to pull just a few examples from the front page (even the post titles are evocative. Nor do they disappoint).

The The Museum of Dust is divided into a number of alluring exhibits, such as The Bone Room, Picture Gallery, Wunderkammer, and Oubliette, each exploring a new set of old, forgotten, surprising, marvellous, dusty things. Crossaxe Castle, for example, a seventeenth-century castle/calendar/time-machine. Or intelligent slime that can solve mazes. As if all this weren't enough, there's also an offering of daily dust.

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance and The Athanasius Kircher Society, respectively.

As long as I'm here recommending things, if these appeal to you you might also try Damn Interesting for mini history lessons on odd and unusual things; the nonist for bits of the past and sideways insights; The Huge Entity for culture, philosophy, weird science, and other "excruciatingly large things"; Giornale Nuovo and BibliOdyssey for old books and works of art; and maybe the Curiosa section of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Blah for some ossuaries and cabinets de curiosités.

Good stuff.

Brick by brick

Today we come to a subject I've been wanting to cover for a long time: Legos. Specifically things made out of them. (Later we'll look at movies made out of them, but that's another post altogether.)

First, from TecheBlog, the Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations -- and not just sculptures, but working...things, like a fully functional air conditioner, knitting machine, or harpsichord.




Eric Harshbarger is a very prolific Lego sculptor. From mosiacs to sculptures to puzzle sets, monuments, architecture, portraits, and pop culture icons, he's done it all.




Minifig's Lego photoset has lots of great stuff, from scenes to bands to famous people. Below are two from his famous people series: Socrates and Neil Gaiman.
Via Bibi's Box.




There are many creative things you can do with Legos, like kill yourself. Flickr photoset The Lego Suicides demonstrates.
Via Bibi's Box.




The Little Artists create miniature replicas of modern artworks in Lego. The Walker Art Gallery has an exposition of their work, Art Craziest Nation. It's probably even better if you know about modern art.




A new favorite blog of mine: Vignette Bricks. Each post features a new mini scene in Lego, by a variety of artists. Lots of movie scenes and the like, particularly Star Wars.
Via pootling.




The Brothers Brick is another nice Lego minifig blog, with lots of models of science-fiction tv icons.
Also via pootling.




The Art of the Brick is the gallery of talented brick artist Nathan Sawaya. He does large-scale mosaics, scenes, and replicas of objects in addition to tabletop scultpures and other works. One of his most impressive works is his Han Solo encased in carbonite (Lego artists have a thing about Star Wars). But since you've probably already seen that in the TecheBlog article, I'll show you this big pencil instead. And Oscar.

How to talk right

I came across this great little resource at PBS recently: Beastly Mispronunciations, 100 excerpts from The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide For The Careful Speaker by Charles Harrington Elster, which sets the record straight on the beastly and acceptable pronunciations of common words. Loads of these were questions that had been plaguing me for a long time (Alumnae, Chamois, Machination, Niche, Often, Route, Yarmulke), and with the firm, well-supported cases made for the author's favored pronunciations, I can now consider the matter settled.

Via Bits & Pieces.

Fun without pictures

I've been dragging my feet on this one, but it's finally time for the next installement in my free online adventure games series: text adventures and interactive fiction.

Most lamentably, Hamlet: The Text Adventure, one of my main reasons for this post, seems to have been taken off the internet for exceeding its allotted bandwidth, a victim of its own success. It doesn't appear to have resurfaced anywhere, but I'll put this link up to mark its existence, in the hopes it will be back someday. It was a beautiful thing, I assure you.

UPDATE: Wonderful news! Creator Robin Johnson has contacted me to inform me that the game now exists at a new address: http://www.versificator.co.uk/hamlet. Go and play!

So, on to things that actually still exist. The Adventures of Criz the Bard is a fun, quick little jaunt. You must explore the town of Highmoon to find a cure for the ailing High Priest. Controlled by buttons rather than typing, the range of action in the game is fairly minimal; there is no conversation or manipulation, only movement and exchange of items you receive. Dialog is automatic, and the "quests" are of the basic errand-running variety. Here's a sample room:

You have entered the Tower of Rhauntides, Sage of Deepingdale.
Rhauntides looks up.
'Danali poisoned ?! Quickly, take this card and bring the Book of Cures from the Library in the Leaves of Learning.'

I think this is what they refer to as a "time waster". Oh, and the game begins in the Bard College, which certain people will surely get a kick out of.

BRAD: The Game is short, primitive, wacky, irreverent, off-color, and mildly amusing. It's an html-based choose-your-own-adventure-type game. Sample:

Sleep comes naturally. But just as you drift into dream, you hear a knock at the basement door.

"Brad! Hey, Brad, are you down there?"

Wow, that's Katie's voice!

Too good to be true. Pinch own ass and wake up now.

"Enter the lair of Brad, young Kaitlin..."

Quick! Pants!

If, like me, you think there's something particularly humorous about pants, it works even better.

Say, I also just noticed that this is a game by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith, the brain behind The Brick Testament. Cool.

The Crystal Skull is an illustrated html-based text game set in the Aztec Empire. In addition to the game itself, there is an "info" feature which will provide historical background and educational asides, with maps, diagrams, and photographs. Entertaining and informative!


You stand in a small garden in the zoo of the Aztec Emperor Motecuhzoma. There is a clay pot on the ground in front of you. The garden is your responsibility, for you are a humble gardener. Your name is Quetzal.

Exit to Aviary

Look in Pot


Of course, none of these are the real thing -- classic interactive fiction, text parsers and all. For that, visit iFiction. It's a nice big collection of all kinds of IF titles you can play in your browser, from modern offerings to the old greats, like Infocom's Zork series.

For some suggestions on what to try, or an introduction to IF in general, try Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive (the archive itself can be explored at www.ifarchive.org), or read this very nifty article at Brass Lantern: "Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century", originally published at 1UP.com. Included in the article are interviews with IF authors, and lots of recommendations. It's a great place to start. The Xyzzy Award winners are also probably a good bet.

Excellent news! You can now play the Infocom classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy online, at the ever-wonderful BBC website, where they're offering a special souped-up anniversary edition with a pretty graphical interface. (In fact, they're offering two.)



You can also play it in its more or less original form (but without the option to save, alas) at the official Douglas Adams site. Whichever you choose, do not miss the opportunity to experience this great title.

Now, go play. If I only had time to play more of these myself...