A couple made this Mario furniture for their apartment (she’s a mechanical engineer, which probably helped). Look at the Warp Pipe end table, too!

Via neatorama

Uvumi

Album of the Month:
Polka Glocks: Hand Held Accordion Blasters
Polka Glocks is a fun hip-hop collective lead by “Davy Hamburgers,” who provides most of the easy-flow vocals. This album is at times groovy, at times funny, and always interesting. Plus my pal Three Ninjas contributes to a couple of songs (and was made an official, full-fledged member of the group after this album was produced). Take a listen and you’ll see what I mean:

Game of the Month:
Cestos
So, imagine you’re playing billiards against another person. Now imagine that each of you own only two balls each. Then, imagine that the goal of the game is to use your balls to knock your opponent’s balls into the pockets. Imagine also that whenever you strike a ball with your stick, the ball drops a tiny little explosive device that explodes whenever any ball rolls into it and makes that ball careen off in a different direction. And finally imagine that you and your opponent strike your balls at exactly the same time. That’s the gist of Cestos, and immensely fun game that is played 100% against randomly-selected LIVE opponents (you must have a wifi connection to play it). There are several different tables with different hole setups and rules (my favorite is “speedball” with only corner pockets). It is only available on Android phones!

Here I’m going to round-up a big random heaping of things I’ve found interesting recently. Artists, websites, musics, games, whatever. In random order:

Michaela Eaves

I saw her at a studio open house where she had some paintings and prints out for display. I really dug the way her paintings have heavy outlines, and the way the lines break up the colors in such a way that her paintings almost look like stained glass.

She also had an adorable painting of a rocket ship, done in a soft, children’s book style of painting. I dug it, but I can’t find a picture on her website (which is mostly about her graphic design & illustration business):
www.michaelaeaves.com

8-Bit Jesus

I thought this was pretty spectacular. Not only did Doctor Octoroc (sic) make 8-bit chiptune versions of many Christmas songs for his album 8-Bit Jesus, but he also wrote them in the specific styles of various 8-bit video games. My favorites are definitely “Carol of the Belmonts,” “Bubbles We Have Heard on High,” and “8 Days of Master Robots,” which very excellently captures the essence of the Mega Man experience. Also, “Icarus! The Herald Angels Sing” is quite accurate. Check it out:
http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/8BitJesus/

Machinarium

Machinarium is a beautifully done, old-style, point-and-click adventure video game, unbelievably done entirely in Flash. I like it ’cause it’s about robots. But more than that, the world is completely enthralling, and the puzzles all involve robot logic more than real-world logic.

The art style is pretty much spectacular. You can play a demo for free, or buy and download the full version here:
http://machinarium.net/

Kaiju Dance to Thriller

Just what the title says: a bunch of Kaiju dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Wonder Woman Pumps

This woman takes shoes and tastefully collages them with pages from Wonder Woman comic books. She tends to use mostly monochromatic images, so the effect is a little subtler than you might expect.

She has an etsy shop where she makes all kinds of shoes and boots (not just Wonder Woman):
http://www.etsy.com/shop/Pachainkapink

Regurgitated Thanksgiving Dinner Scarf

Taisha McGee sells what she calls “Ugly Scarves.” They’re mostly actually quite pretty, but she nevertheless gives them hilarious names based loosely on their color schemes, names like “Mulched Roses,” “Tidy Bowl,” “Moldy Cheese,” “Mushy Froot Loops,” and my favorite, “Regurgitated Thanksgiving Dinner.” She also has the sense of humor to take photos of the scarves wrapped around a cardboard stand-up of John Wayne. Bravo!

Check them all out at her etsy shop:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/TaishaMcGee

Alexis St.John

An artist whose work I saw in a tea shop in Downtown Tacoma (Mad Hat Tea, 1130 Commerce Street) and I liked the humor and simplicity in it. I also really appreciated how most of the paintings were really small; a lot of ‘em were only like 6″ × 6″, and I don’t think anything of hers gets over 20″ in any direction.

You can buy the actual artwork, of if you’d prefer you can buy frameable prints of it.
http://alexisstjohn.com/Gallery.html

TheSixtyOne

TheSixtyOne.com is a fascinating idea for a democratic music website, where the more people like a song the more popular it becomes, and ANYONE can upload ANY song they’ve created (as long as they’re legally allowed to blah, blah, blah, y’know).

Not only that, but it turns listening to music into kind of an RPG. You gain experience (called “reputation”) and rise in levels. There are quests (like “Listen to 7 recently-uploaded songs” or “Listen to the radio stations of 5 other people for 5 minutes each”) that let you earn experience and “hearts,” which you can use to mark a song as a favorite (i.e., you heart the song). And you also earn experience as other people later heart songs that you previously hearted. The more reputation you have, the more likely other people are to listen to your opinions (in theory at least). So you get tangible rewards for finding new, unheard songs that you really like and then getting other people to like them as well, other than the reward of discovering good music.

Also, TheSixtyOne.com is the only place right now where you can hear Taisha’s musc (yes, the same Taisha that makes those scarves). Just go here:
http://www.thesixtyone.com/taisha/

A Very Alan Thickemas

THE Alan Thicke, Leeni, and puppets. Lots and lots of puppets. And Blake Lewis is somehow involved. It exists, I just have no idea of how to see it. Other than these:

That’s about it for now.

One of the most fun things was the re-incorporation of Nathan the Orange Fool into Fools Play Improv after a six-year hiatus. He moved back to Olympia recently and so has re-joined our illustrious cast alongside official newcomer Jamie the Ginger Fool. And with Esa the Periwinkle Fool more-regularly attending as well, that means that Mike & I are going to be faced with two-person shows far less frequently. Good news all around. In fact I took advantage of this by taking off the weekend of my craft show.

Carrie stayed on-site in Bellevue during the weekend of the Bead Festival, leaving me home alone. Well, during the week leading up to the Festival she went shopping for various sundries, and came back with New Super Mario Bros. Wii for me as a surprise early Christmas present because she loves me, or at least that’s the reason she gave. Also so I would have something to occupy my breaks between making crafts for my craft show.

The Tuesday after the Bead Festival was Carrie’s birfday. I had already given her a main present (a new outfit that she wore to the Bead Festival), so on her actual birfday I just gave her a li’l something extra, the holiday album by Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces. We went over to her folks’ place, where we were joined by L&C, which was ve’y fun. We played a lot of bowling on the Wii. Carrie’s mum made “linguine with clam sauce,” which is just like a meal that my mum used to make called “clam sauce spaghetti.” As you can tell, the only real difference between the two meals is the width of the pasta used.

Then two days later we were right back over there for Thanksgiving. With a lot more bowling on the Wii. But less linguine. But more turkey.

But the day before Thanksgiving we went out to the new(ish) place on 6th Ave called “Sax.” It had a very strange atmosphere that I couldn’t put my finger on. Thankfully somebody else did: Sax feels like somebody remodeled their basement into a bar. There are no decorations on the walls, there is a green carpet, and the wood paneling isn’t quite of the highest quality. It is almost as if they set out to make a neighborhood dive bar but then changed their minds halfway through and tried to make it into a classy bar, and so it exists in this weird limbo in between them. But we did share the Slider Trio appetizer, and it was very delicious. They really season the meats well.

The day after Thanksgiving, Carrie had a craft show called Gritty City at a hole-in-the-wall gallery on the very southern edge of downtown T-Town. It was difficult to tell from the outside that the building was anything other than either (a) abandoned or (b) just some old-timey storage/warehouse building. But inside was actually a really awesome space. I would love to get into this show next year because it seems like it would really jibe with my aesthetic.

The next day was the craft show out in Purdy that we do together. I had a couple of new product lines this year: Kawaii necklaces and soldered pendants (which as you can see I am putting up on Thirsty Robots). I didn’t do quite as well as last year, though, and the booth fee was much to high to justify doing it again. So next year I’m going to be looking into doing other, more artsy shows that cater to a younger crowd that would “get” my stuff a little bit better than the upper-middle-aged women who are the primary demographic of the Purdy show.

So now I’m done with craft shows for the year, but Carrie has one more this coming weekend, so she’s still crazybusy. And I’m spending this entire week dealing with the fallout from the show; packing back up my inventory, putting all the new stuff up on Thirsty Robots, etc. Plus I got two special orders that I have to make this week.

And that spins us right on out of November and into December. I’m certain I forgot some stuff that I would have wanted to mention, but such is the nature of the November beast. Ah, well. I leave with with some Baman Piderman:

Tomorrow, time permitting, I shall post my “Of the Month” selections for December ‘09.

My wife caught a powerful sick that lasted the entire week leading up to H’ween, so I was busy taking care of her as well as doing everything around the house that needed to get done. I also had to drive out to me mum’s place a couple of times so that I could borrow her sewing machine, which I needed to create the body portion of my H’ween costume. I’m not a very good tailor, so it took a while, but it came out shockingly well. More details in moments.

The theme I decided on for my H’ween punkins this year was “fossils.” Probably because my friend Three Ninjas is so into them. So about a week and a half before H’ween I carved the first one: an ammonite fossil!

Then the day before H’ween my pal Leiapico had a punkin carving party! It was also a costume party but I didn’t have my costume completely finished yet. Anyhoo, I carved another punkin at the party. You should recognize it pretty easily:

Then during the day on H’ween I carved a trilobite fossil:

Then I had another punkin left over, so I carved a fossilized dinosaur thigh bone into it just for fun.

And here they all are!

Normally Carrie & I make Reuben sandwiches with potato/green bean/sauerkraut soup on H’ween evening and give out full-sized candy bars to the trick-or-treaters, but this was an unusual (and special) year in that Halloween was actually on a Saturday, so we actually performed our Fools Play Halloween format (Fools Play Trick or Treat) on Halloween night! As per usual, all the Fools dressed up in costume, so here’s a run-down of what was what:

Yeah! I designed it so that I could put the jellyfish “hood” down. I also made slits in the long tentacle sleeves about even with my hands. I then sewed strips of velcro on the slits so that I could cleanly close them when I was in full costume, but I could open them and stick my hands out when I was performing or interacting with grab-able things. I also put my purple shirt on over my jellyfish bottom for the duration of the show.

The Fools were not, of course, the only people dressed in costume. A huge percentage of the audience came in costume as well, which is what we want for our Halloween show. Some of my faves were Tia as a Starfleet Medical officer (with a costume she made herself), and her boyfriend James as Master Onion from Parappa the Rapper. There was also a very good Velma from Scooby-Doo.

Anyway, at the end of the show our apprentice Jamie, whose soul we’d manage to free from the influence of dark magic (long story; don’t want to bore you with the details) and who had overcome the brainwashing of Sir Ian McKellen (who wanted us dead for tearing a page out of his copy of the Forbidden Book of Improv Lore (but, again, I don’t want to bore you with the details)), managed to turn his soul completely around and became an official frikkin’ fool: Jamie Pederson the Ginger Fool!

Originally we were going to give him the Orange shirt seeing as how Nathan Geyer the Orange Fool hadn’t performed in about six years. But in a shocking turn of events, Nathan Geyer was actually in the audience that night, and jumped up in protest when we were about to give the Orange shirt to Jamie. He said he was back in town now, and so he was going to reclaim his Orange shirt and start performing again. So we had to scramble to find another shirt for Jamie and the best we could find was a shirt the color of crystallized ginger, so the Ginger Fool he became. So in one night we got a new Fool and saw the return of a long-lost Fool!

So, yeah, that was fun.

But because I was at Fools Play on Halloween, Carrie & I didn’t do our Reuben Sandwich Feast as per usual. We were gonna do it the day before, but she was still having the sick in her (which is why went to Leiapico’s punkin carving par-tay), so we delayed it until the Friday after. I made 12 Reuben Sandwiches. They were good.

Anyway, one of the reasons why this post is so late is that my digital camera broke back in September, so I didn’t have it with me at Fools Play to take pictures of everyone’s costumes! I had to wait for the person who took these pictures to get them off the camera and email them and then have them be sent to me, etc. Took a while. But there they are, baby.

OFFICER KANE

But there they are, baby. There they are.

CAMERA TRUCKS UPWARDS as OFFICER KANE puts his arm around CINDY. They turn and walk away down the alley in SLOW MOTION and are soon lost in the fog as the END CREDITS MUSIC begins playing.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Hmm… I went somewhere weird at the end of this post. Oh, well.

Brizzly

Album of the Month:
Terrapin Productions: Sketches of Perfect Landscapes
40-some minutes of good, dreamy, mellow, spacey, noisy, (mostly) instrumental guitar rock. Much layering and echoing and building of atmospheric walls of sound. I like it. It’s groovy.

Game(s) of the Month:
Bloons Tower Defense
A horrifyingly addictive series of games from Ninja Kiwi, the Bloons Tower Defense games are about various types of monkeys trying to pop balloons (”bloons” as they call them). There are 4 of these games released so far, and they get steadily better and better. If you like Tower Defense games, well, then here you go.

Breakfast of the Gods

Album of the Month:
Chubby Mummy: Extremely Hallowen: An Alblum
How can one describe this, perhaps the most quintessential Hallowen alblum ever recorded? This isn’t just Hallowen, after all; this is EXTREMELY HALLOWEEN. Hot Bokkin’ Harris and Stusan Willsing are at their most spooky and fright-inducing here. Just look at the titles of the tracks and try not to get freaked out of your gourd. YOU WILL FAIL AT NOT GETTING FREAKED OUT OF YOUR GOURD. Plus, and this’ll blow your mind just thinking about it, this alblum includes not only regular songs, but album songs as well!

DVD of the Month:
Lifeforce
This is absolutely the horror movie that has everything you could ever want: sci-fi monsters, vampires, body-possessing demons, frenzied zombies, and a lot of nudity. And that’s all just one character! This is a wonderfully schizophrenic mid-80s classic from Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist) that seems to shift genres ever 15 minutes or so. First it’s an Alien-style sci-fi spookfest. Then it’s a (naked) vampire movie. Then it’s about trying to track down an evil that’s hopping from body to body. Then it’s about a zombie/vampire outbreak in London. And then… it’s completely crazy and absolutely wonderful, and features a really fun small role by Patrick Stewart.

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty

Album of the Month:
tangentbot: Cyclops’ Lament
Hey, I know this guy! This is actually a re-mastered re-release of his album of several years ago, but with a couple of changes. These newly-mixed versions are delightfully more crisp and deep, and there’s a very good remix of “8-bit Misfit.” Hey guys: listen up. This is good IDM. Good. Okay? Okay. Take a wissen with this handy MP3 player here:

DVD of the Month:
Avatar: The Last Airbender
I never watched this show when it was on because the commercials made it look like a lame rip-off of Dragon Ball Z and/or One Piece. But I was mistaken. Unlike those shows, this one is actually good. One thing I greatly appreciated was its sense of deadline: pretty early on in the series the characters learn that they have to accomplish the series goal by a set date that is rather disturbingly soon. It really gives the series a sense of urgency as well as the feeling that it is actually building towards a real ending. And, indeed, the show lasted for three seasons (or “books” as the show calls them) and told one full story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that happened when it was supposed to happen, not because they ran out of stories or the show got canceled. Also, the characters grow and change slowly but surely, and there is never a single mention of “power levels” or “powering up.”
Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Complete Book 1 Collection
Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Complete Book 2 Collection
Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Complete Book 3 Collection

Seeing as how this is the 21st century, the “information age,” the weather forecasts leading into the week were kinda hard to miss. I knew it was going to be hot. I don’t do terribly well in the heat; I tend to get overheated rather easily. So I did a very sensible thing. I went to Home Depot.

They had several boxlike air conditioners in stock. I of course looked for the cheapest one, which was $100. But they didn’t have any in boxes, just a couple of display ones. So I bought a display-model air conditioner for $75 dollars.

I set it up and the bedroom, and during the hot week my wife and I spent the majority of our time (time we were home at any rate) comfy in our nice, air-conditioned living room.

That was all well and good for the bedroom, but there were times when I needed to work in the office, which, due to being on the southwest corner of the house, is often the hottest room in the house. The cold air from the air-conditioned bedroom couldn’t be stretched out enough to reach the office. The air conditioner only cost $75 after all, so no use expecting such miracles from it. Instead I went and bought a $3 styrofoam cooler and constructed my own air conditioner much like this one. It worked not nearly as well as the actual air conditioner, but the air that came out of it was much cooler than the air in the office.

So the extreme heat wasn’t actually too bad for me for the long stretches. Every once in a while I’d get too hot, but I’d get in range of the air conditioner when that happened.

The funniest thing about the week for me, though, is another side-effect of living in the 21st century. The social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) became basically a week-long bitch-fest about the heat. I swear 75% of all posts last week were somehow commenting on (usually complaining about) the heatwave. Sometimes the same people would complain every day, sometimes even several times a day.

I thought the sheer volume of it was kind of amusing. Is complaining about the weather really going to make it change? I never posted a single thing about the heat (until right now, of course), and instead of complaining, which would not have made me feel any less hot, I took steps to ensure that I had nothing really to complain about.