A sense of place

Morning travelogue is a curiously compelling record of one man's commute to work as he ditches the Tube in order to walk through some of the lovelier and more interesting parts of downtown London. If only we all had such a short, pedestrian-friendly, and pleasant itinerary. The somewhat accelerated tracking and a peppy, danceable tune help, too.
Via Weekend Stubble.






Fed by Birds has just shared a few photographs paired with ambient soundscapes from a recent trip Cornwall, in Cornish Sounds. The captured ambience of waves and seabirds and breezy forests and tolling churchbells is wonderfully tranquil.





I was reminded of Their Circular Life: An Exploration About Human Behavior, an interesting little flash presentation that allows you to cycle through twenty-four hours of sounds and images captured from stationary observation posts in a variety of urban locations. Go fast and watch the day whizz by your eyes, or slow down to listen to the nuances of the place.









At La grange numérique, the panoramic photography site of Denis Gliksman, you can find a number of beautiful 360° scenes, some with sound and animation, like this set of "Spriteoramas" of rocks and lapping waves on the coast of Brittany.

Timepieces of distinction

Digital timepieces:

Available in digital and analog formats, standard and military time, with and without seconds, in your choice of colors and image sets, The Human Clock is a delightful little timepiece featuring a range of user-submitted photos of people, animals, objects, and numbers indicating the time for every minute of the day. I just love this 9:56 grandma, for instance.




Here's another human clock, this one with acrobatic human figures forming the digits.
Via Le Web...et le reste.




Then there are the Bar Code Clock and Money is Time Clock. The artist's site features a lot of bar code art in addition to the nifty clock.




Clockblock 1.0, an animated clock made out of building blocks. Watch as second-by-second the blocks are stacked, then toppled. Also available as a screensaver.




Analog timepieces:

The Cable Clock, which uses cable physics for that realistic noodly wobble. Screensaver, too.




An attractive Roman numeral clock. Nothing fancy, just a large flash app.




Ditto with this minimalist clock.




Lots of clocks you can add to your webpage at Clocklink. These are just a handful of the analog -- they have a lot of digital designs, too, including a bar code clock, and they've been steadily adding more.




Calendars:

"Cosmos", "Line" and "Umi/Aki", from a series of calendars by designer John Maeda, who has also made a lot of other nifty flash artworks and gadgets. Created "for purely aesthetic reasons" with "no intent to advance the state of the art in digital time management," these calendars "were in fact, designed for you to waste time instead of save time."




I do hope I've helped you waste at least a little time here today.

Eye candy for your fingers

Or, in other words, "More interactive eye candy", as promised.

Castle Arcana isn't a game at all...it's just a delightful, whimsical, hand-drawn castle and grounds full of fun nooks and crannies to explore. Wait, I lied -- there is a hedge maze game. You can even go for a short drive or take home some souvenirs from the gift shop.




AOOA is a very interesting puzzle/game/interactive artwork. You are presented with a phone booth which you are told can take you to other places (not quite like the Matrix). Play around with the various objects in each level to reveal the number to your next destination. There's very little to figure out, so you mostly just get to sit back and look at the nice things.




TheHOUSE looks at first like another haunted house game, but in reality there's nothing to solve -- it's just a click-through spook-fest where you just find the hotspots to keep the shocks coming. With a suitably dark and grim atmosphere, and lots of jump-out-of-your-seat surprises (if you don't handle this sort of thing well, be warned!), this nicely-constructed experience should enjoyably fill a few minutes of your dark and stormy nighttime browsing.




This is a repost, but worth it. La Pâte à Son is a wonderful toy where you can put together pipes and different attachments to construct a music machine. Colorful beans are piped through the system, creating smooth, jazzy music in their various interactions. Apart from actually building the machine, there are plenty of options to play with, like bean number and frequency, and the quality of the notes produced. Great fun.




I'm not sure how to describe Opniyama. Superficially it resembles a platformer game. It's a huge, hand-drawn environment full of strange creatures and doodles, through which you must navigate by walking and jumping with the aid of a sort of grappling gun. Occasionally you will acquire seeds, which you can plant to grow into different kinds of plants. There seems to be no goal aside from the sheer pleasure of encountering odd and lovely things.




Next time: New Samorost-style games.

Interactive eye candy

None of these are exactly "games" in the traditional sense. For the most part, there are no explicit goals, no challenges, no way to win or lose. They all certainly have beginnings, and some of them have ends; others are infinite playgrounds for your enjoyment. They are all (with one exception) of the point-n-click genre, which suggests a game, even if some of these are more aptly termed "interactive flash animation." In any event, they are all engrossing, and beautiful.

Vectorpark contains no text, nothing by way of introduction or explanation. You are presented with a black screen containing three images, from which you may choose your "game". Park, the real attraction, is a broad, surreal landscape that changes and evolves with each mouseclick. Levers is a fun balancing game in which you must arrange a series of hooks and variously weighted objects to achieve equilibrium, without anything touching the water below. The unusual weights are dynamic objects; birds come out of the birdhouse to flap around and perch on the various hooks, changing the balance; the water tank can be filled and emptied; the snowman will melt if placed too close to the sun (one of the incredibly heavy objects you will receive in later stages). Finally there is Thomas, a series of non-interactive but very cool animations you may view.







Fly Guy is an incredibly cute little game from talented pixel-artist Trevor Van Meter. You are a bored suburban businessman, waiting at the bus stop, when suddenly you decide to take to the skies. There you will have a number of fascinating and whimsical encounters. Occasionally you will come up against something that will remind you of your mundane life -- like a copier -- and back down to earth you will go. But don't avoid anything in this game. Try it all out and see what happens.





Skyfish is another dreamy, flying-through-the-air game by Syougo Maruyama, creator of the excellent Samorost-style Kao Fu-Sen. You are a flying fish-person, a sort of reverse mermaid, swimming through the skies along with a number of odd creatures/things. When you touch them, the scene changes, and you are suddenly stroking through water, or space, or a nighttime cityscape. I haven't yet discerned if there is some goal, or if this is merely exploratory. Possibly you are meant to progress through a series of scenes without touching one of the creatures that will send you back to an earlier stage. In any case, the rhythmic swimming and wandering music provide a gentle, soothing experience, regardless of your destination.





Moxomoxo is the work of designer Matthieu Gueritte (visit his portfolio for more wonderful art and animation). It is a surreal, Bosch-inspired triptych of interactive animated scenes portraying the Garden of Eden, the Last Judgement, and Hell. With robots. The style reminds me somewhat of the robot subculture of Futurama -- this is what their robots-only version of religious artwork might look like. It's something you simply must see.





Happy Seed is a curious Japanese animated story. Like many Japanese links, it's hard with no context to tell where it came from or why it exists, but it tells the story of a strange square seed that comes down from outer space, and proceeds to transform the world of the little people who have all gathered around in curiosity. It does this by making everything square -- the little round houses become giant skyscrapers, their spherical vehicles are turned into big, modern blocky things, and in the end, the planet itself becomes one big cube. Flight of fancy, cautionary tale, or paean to the relentless forward march of modernization? You be the judge. It's awful cute, though.





I have a number of other links in this category to share, but I'll save it for another post. Up next: Arcade games.

Dream a little dream

This is really neat.

Dreamlines is a cool new toy that will take a few keywords from you and render you a series of vague, amorphous patterns and images in a slow, surreal dream sequence. It's the latest of the recent slew of innovative projects using Google's image search feature to create some amazing things.

Here is an image from my first dream, using the terms "blue tea":



My second dream, "blue wyvern", was a bit more abstract for the most part, but here is one of the more coherent images:



Look familiar? I kept seeing this pattern of framed boxes with cryptic scrawled text reminiscent of children's school drawings, until it finally dawned on me that this particular dream was drawn almost entirely from images of Magic: The Gathering cards.

That killed a little of the magic for me, but it's still pretty cool.

Via Ursi's Blog.

The measure of a blog

Based on AOL's recent purchase of Weblogs Inc. ($25-$40 million), some people are attempting to calculate the worth of any given blog based on Technorati stats.

Thus, by some accounts:

My blog is worth $10,161.72.
How much is your blog worth?

Via This Blog Will Be Deleted By Tomorrow.

Alternatively, instead of being turned into dollars, my blog can be rendered as a beautiful plant (click to enlarge):





OrganicHTML offers little in the way of introduction or explanation, but apparently it renders different aspects of a webpage as various plant parts, incorporating the colors of the page design. I wish I knew what some of the things were, like the little spinning flower stalks, but I'm guessing that the abundant flowering branches represent outgoing links, with which this blog is pretty well endowed.

For comparison, my Blurty, which is trying to crawl away:





And my poor little website, which apparently died.





Via scribblingwoman.

Silhouettes at play

Two cute Flash toys:

Arms, oddly entrancing, and




Elastic Enthusiastic, quite fun. It's like some kind of old-time shadow puppet garden party.




Both via Le Web...et le reste.

Fun with words

The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus is an interesting experiment in organizing and associating words. Have you ever brainstormed by drawing webs connecting different terms and ideas? It's a little like that. Unfortunately, the free version is only an evaluation, and you can only play around a little before you'll be prompted to buy. But what're you gonna do.




The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, or OEDILF, is a project to define every word in the dictionary with its own limerick. They're up through the bn's. Wish them luck.

Be you human or canine or camel
Your ameloblasts make enamel;
Thus the teeth in your mouth
Right and left, north and south,
Have some apatite—if you're a mammal.
(S. A. McBurnie)

Color Code, "a full-color portrait of the English language," is a really neat experiment. Words are given a color based on the results of a Yahoo! image search for that particular word; the colors of associated images are averaged together to determine that the word "class," for example, is a soft pastel blue. The words are grouped together in giant maps based on related meanings, in clusters like "furniture," "disease," "happening," or "flower" (shown below); they can also be arranged in one big spectrum according to color. As a synaesthete who does habitually associate color with words, I find this project especially intriguing.
Via Mindful Things.




Color in Motion, "an animated and interactive experience of color communication and color symbolism," is a cute flash animation exploring various associations for different colors. Each color is featured as a stick-figure character in a movie showcasing different aspects of that color. There are also "meet the colors" features which list different words and associations that apply to the them, and finally, at the end, there are some toys you can play with to make your own movies.




The Quack-Project goes around the world collecting recordings of children performing animal noises in many different languages, and shares the results. You can listen to audio files of children quacking, mooing, oinking, crowing, neighing, barking, and ribbitting in Cantonese, Bengali, Italian, Hindi, Somali, and many more. No written animal sounds, unfortunately -- those can be quite interesting, too.

The Eggcorn Database is an amusing and sometimes surprising listing of misheard and commonly-mistaken idioms and turns-of-phrase -- "dog-eat-dog" becomes "doggy-dog," "boisterous" becomes "voiceterous," "cease and desist" becomes "cease and decease," and, providing the project its title, "acorn" becomes "eggcorn." It's interesting what people come up with when they only hear these expressions in speech and never see them written down.

Speak Up has a carefully-considered critique of the alphabet.

B b
This is a very nice pair; whoever did this was really thinking about the relationship between the two. I like the way the capital B can have some variation in the proportions from top to bottom. Obviously designed by a man, the ball and stick of the lowercase b is simple and, appropriately, half of the cap B. Talk about male and female! The buxom, pregnant cap together with the excitable lowercase.

SEW is a short film about a girl diagnosed with OCD who can't stop playing a particular, very demanding word game in her head. Artistic, informative, and touching, the film was made by a student about one of his close friends, who is also a filmmaker. Both of them have made a lot of other films which are well worth checking out (just click on their names on the intro page to see their other work).




The Phrontistry is a great site with obscure word lists and vocabulary resources. Visit the International House of Logorrhea or the Compendium of Lost Words; learn about lipograms, writing omitting a letter of the alphabet; read essays and rants on language; or browse an extensive list of glossaries, from Divination and Fortune Telling to Feeding and Eating, Three-Letter Rare Words, Manias and Obsessions, and Words of Wisdom.

Fun with Words is "a celebration of the English language" with lots of neat features for the logophile: lists of collective nouns for animals, commonly confused words, word oddities, palindromes, pangrams, conflicting proverbs, unusual word forms...oh, so much good stuff.

The sidebar has been updated with a lot of new dictionaries and language sites, too. Happy browsing!

Wisdom of ages

Who were you in your last life? Try the Past Life Analysis to reveal your soul's true history.

My diagnosis:

I don't know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.
You were born somewhere in the territory of modern North Japan around the year 775.
Your profession was that of a sailor or shoemaker. Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Such people are always involved with all new. You have always loved changes, especially in art, music, cooking. The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
Your lesson is to learn discretion and moderation and then to teach others to do the same. Your life will be happier if you help those who lack reasoning. Do you remember now?

The English Proverb of the Day from Mythfolklore.net; or, since I can't post javascript, you can just look at the entire calendar of proverbs.

Try Sage, the oracle at Nick Bantock's official site.

The exact origins of the Sage will probably never be confirmed. However, given the location of the find, it is more than possible that the author or authors were members of the Knatii, a nomadic group of mystics that inhabited the area during that period.

Given the difficulties of translation, and the often obscure and ambiguous tone of the answers, the scroll's contents weren't released until 1977, when they appeared as an academic paper. This paper entitled The Ala-Dagh Sage, was given to a distinguished audience of linguists at the Salzburg Theosophical Symposium.

In 1999 a new (and more poetic) translation of the Sage was commissioned, and the following electronic version is one of the outcomes of that enterprise. When consulting the Sage it is important to remember that its wisdom is only fully revealed when the questioner accepts the sense within nonsense.

Wisdom from the Cool Quotes Collection.

Learn about yourself with the Ultimate Personality Test from thesurrealist.co.uk.

Or try your luck with the Bad Cookie Generator.

Make-Your-Own:

Face. The Ultimate Flash Face allows you to construct a face using a wide variety of types. The results vaguely resemble the work of police sketch artists.




Bayeux Tapestry. The Historic Tale Reconstruction Kit can be used to create panels, strips, or even greeting cards with text and tapestry images. For inspiration, look here at this great example.

Comic strip. This great generator features loads of stylishly drawn, very inspiring characters and objects you can combine to design some very eye-catching strips.
Via Drawn!




City. You can build a modern city, medieval town, or North Pole village from the ground up with the cute pixel-art City Creator.




Shakespearean insult. The Shakespearean Insult Kit is one of those simple text column a-column b-type generators. Thou frothy, elf-skinned flax-wench!

Irish curse. An tInneal Mallachtaí -- The Curse Engine is similar, allowing you to select from three columns of insults, and then rendering the results into Gaelic. Go gcreime scata Fomhórach ólta do chuid fo-éadaigh (May a pack of drunken Fomorians gnaw at your underwear)!

Doll. ELouai has a collection of Doll Makers, from Candybar to Boy to Ragnarok, along with a Doll House Maker and more. Cute time-waster. (Below are two Ragnarok dolls.)




Fat doll. There's the Fat Doll Maker, which I've posted before but which is so appropriate to today's category that I have to repost it. I'll include a picture this time.




Flower. Zefrank has created a nice Flower Maker where you can design and upload your own flowers; then, you can generate a random
Community Garden using the flowers created by other users, or grow a custom garden with the Garden Maker, and send it to a friend.
Via Reflections in d minor.




Anagrams. Brendan's On-Line Anagram Generator will helpfully break down and provide anagrams for any word or phrase you offer it. (BLUE TEA can be reworded as A TUB EEL, and BLUEWYVERN as WE BLUR ENVY. Did you know that?)

Mondrian painting. With the Mondrian Machine, you just click on a portion of the canvas, and it automatically divides and colors for you. Instant art.




Picasso painting. Mr. Picassohead is a creator that lets you combine ears, eyes, noses, mouths and such to create your very own stylized Picasso face.
Both this and the previous one via Michelle's Mental Clutter.




Now go. Go out and make something. Then come back and show me what you've done!