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

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.

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.

We stayed at a cabin near Tahuya. You know where Tahuya is, dontcha? C’mon, everybody knows where Tahuya is!

We stayed at a cute little place called Maggie Lake Cabin, which is near Lake Maggie of all places. The cabin was really nice. Small, but it was just the two of us so it was just fine. It had a nice kitchen, and a futon and a super-comfy recliner, and an enormous deck that looked off down a hill towards a little pond (it was dry, but it’s been a dry summer). The most notable thing about the cabin was that it had a loft bedroom that had a ladder leading up to it instead of stairs. Well, we took Suki with us, and at first she wasn’t having any of that ladder. We had to put her on the ladder, then move her front paws up a rung, then move her bottom paws up a rung, etc., all the way up the ladder one rung at a time.

To get her back down we had to put her front paws on our shoulder and carry her down like a big baby.

Eventually she figured out how to climb up in, and then she decided to climb down it. Bad idea! She made it about halfway before getting all tumbly and twisty and is kinda lucky she didn’t hurt herself. We carried her down every time after that.

One of the days we drove all the way around to the other side of Hood Canal and went to Hoodsport Winery, where we loaded up on berry and fruit wines—blackberry, raspberry, rhubarb, apple, pear, & cranberry. Don’t know if you know this about me, but I loves me the candy wines.

Since we were in the neighborhood already, we continued up the Olympic Mountains to Lake Cushman, which is frikkin’ gorgeous. It was a Monday in September, so there were basically no other people anywhere to be seen. We walked along the shoreline and I took many photos:

In one part there was a really nice tidepool type of pond, and there was a rock in it that for some reason fascinated Suki. She tried to bite it a couple of times:

Suki had a great time at the lake. She did a couple of things that we’d never been able to get her to do before: fetch a stick (she’s only ever gone after tennis balls before) and swim on purpose (she’s had to swim a couple of times when she fell off logs, but she’d never done it willingly before). I got ‘em both on video:

We (mostly Carrie) cooked a ton of great food during the vacation. We had enormous burgers stuffed with gorgonzola. We had fettuccini Alfredo with langostino. We had scallops wrapped with bacon accompanied by cheesy grits. We had li’l smokies wrapped in crescent rolls. We had cinnamon rolls with orange frosting. It was all good, but it was quite a lot of cholesterol.

We got home in time for Carrie to take Lawrence to his driver’s license test, which he passed (finally). And then that evening she played in her kickball league and they only lost by 1 point—and she scored a run!

I went back to work on Thursday, but Carrie had the rest of the week off. In fact, right now she’s at the Puyallup fair going to a James Taylor concert! Gotta love Sweet Baby James. I’m getting ready for Fools Play &Mdash; we’re doing Robot Repair Shop tonight, which is rather exciting because we haven’t done it in a couple of years. I should probably review it. Yeah, I’ll do that now.

This place is AWEXOME!

They have two courses, a “Water Course” and an “Obstacle Course.” The water course is by far the more fun of the two, so if you only have time or money for one then I recommend that one.

This place is a real miniature golf course. They even have a frikkin’ windmill for Christmas sake. They also have coolest single hole I’ve ever seen in a miniature golf course. It’s on the water side. You’ll know it when you get to it.

Putting Zoo is almost as awexome as Magic Carpet Golf in Tucson, AZ. It is in a bit better condition than Magic Carpet was. Putting Zoo was also being slightly remodeled and touched up here and there, which I think might be a mostly-permanent condition. But it didn’t detract from the ambience, and neither did being right next to the freeway—you hardly even noticed!

Plus there were about a dozen adorable little cats running all over the place, and the most spectacular thing happened. There is a course where you hit the ball and it goes up this little ramp and is very likely to catch some air. Well, my brother’s girlfriend sent the ball up this ramp and as it flew into the air one of the cats darted out of the shrubbery next to the course and intercepted the ball! It was astonishing.

My younger sister got married in front of the Vashon Island lighthouse yesterday, so I was kind of busy with that instead of updating my “Of the Month” stuff for August. Don’t worry, I’ll get to that tomorrow. In the meantime, please to enjoying the many of photos that I photographed of the wedding!

I’d actually made a 40-cent version of one of those really expensive “light boxes.” I took a cardboard box, flipped it on its side so that the open flaps were now the front of the box. Then I cut out the roof and the two sides, leaving the back. I taped white tissue paper to the cut-out parts and then taped a piece of plain white wrapping paper to the back and floor.

Problem was, the etchings were way too subtle to show up on the plain white background. Like taking a picture of a snowball in a blizzard. I discovered they work much better with natural lighting and a darker background, like, say, my backyard:

See? Clear as can be!

So I posted about half a dozen glasses on the Etsy store and am going to post many more as the week goes on. I also added a little widget to my blog here. Look at the bottom of the right-hand column there →

See? It shows a couple of things from our Etsy site! Well, I think it’s pretty neat at any rate. Now I just have to sit Carrie down and have her post more than the one necklace she has up there, and we’ll be cooking with gas.

Anyhoo, go check out the newly improved:

ThirstyRobots.com

I really like the little Android logo robot, so I was sure to include him (click for a full-sized version):

And here it is “in action” as the kids like to say these-a-days:

It’s kinda blurry, but as you can see I don’t put any icons in the 2nd row, so the little android guy shows through. That’s why he’s not dead-center in the image. I use this empty 2nd row as the place where I swipe my finger when I’m switching between Android’s three screens.

(I really like Android.)

For the second year in a row my job at the Bead Festival was to drive people back and forth from the Hotel Murano to the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center in my “Courtesy Cart.” We didn’t like the people we rented the golf cart from last year, so this year we went with a different company, though I couldn’t tell you the names of either company because that information has flown right out of my head.

Anyway, this year the cart was much smaller, only a four-seater (including me, though sometimes three people could squeeze in the backseat) instead of the stretch six-seater. Here she is:

This one was so much easier to drive than the beast I had last year. It also ran much, much better, with the fantastic feature of turning completely off when it wasn’t moving, only to spring instantly to life the moment the accelerator was touched. It was much more maneauverable as well; I could easily go up and down sidewalks and dart around sandwich boards and street signs as if I were playing Mario Kart. Which I wasn’t.

Also, perhaps coolest of all, it came with its own little golf pencil strapped right to the steering wheel:

Sure, I never actually needed to use the golf pencil, but it was very considerate of them to put one in like that! Also, as you can see the instructions for how to operate the vehicle were very clearly laid out for you on the steering wheel as well, except for the letters “press br” in the words “depress brake,” which had been obliterated by a neat little hole at some point in the past.

So anyway, it was a lot of fun running back and forth in that little thing. I didn’t get as many tips as last year, though, but ah well.