Oct 31
The long held human dream of inflicting post traumatic stress disorder on ourselves in the comfort of our own homes has come a step closer to fruition. From Singularity Hub The Gadget Show, airing on Channel 5 in the UK, recently embarked on creating the most true to life simulator for first person shooter games ever built. They …
Jul 07
With death comes the peculiar experience of seeing a person’s possessions detached from their owner. They’re like orphans. This sewing machine belonged to Nan and has now been passed down to me. She used it to mend and alter our clothes. Although it’s around a hundred years old, it’s still in working order. A video …
Jul 06
Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks. Japan’s modern day robots can be …
Jun 24
After much debate, it’s recently been revealed that Japanese pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital composite. That is, she’s not human, has never been human and she isn’t even a she but an it. Or, perhaps, some strange combination of the two. Like Dr. Frankenstein plundering graves for spare parts, music producer Yasushi Akimoto, plundered …
Jun 21
Based on Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, this melting clock rests on your shelf and costs $13.49. But, if you’re looking to give your home or office a surrealist look, you might be better off stuffing a peacock into a birdcage and feeding it methamphetamine. It’s interesting to see objects that were once dreams become …
Feb 26
This little device combined three weapons: Knife, knuckleduster and pepperbox pistol. Easily concealed in a pocket, this weapon was for close combat. Pepperbox pistols are only effective at point blank range. Though pepperbox pistols were mainly meant for civilian self-defense, this one was more likely for civilian offence. It was popular with French muggers. It’s …
Nov 27
I only rarely smoke from this pipe and never in public. Being large, ostentatious and fragile, I dislike my pipes to upstage me. Plus I’m not even a Sherlock Holmes fan. Like Jesus, he’s a bit of a know-it-all. A friend picked this up for me in Turkey. I had given him money to buy …
Oct 12
Being written in 1998, David Brin’s The Transparent Society might be a bit dated or maybe it’s more relevant than ever. The basic idea of the book was that people had to accept the death of privacy, which probably never really existed anyway, and decide between a world where everyone and everything was under surveillance or one in which the powers …
Oct 03
Japanese artist Mio I-zawa has created a fleshy umbilical charger for the iPhone. It makes sucking noises, twitches and looks alive. This recalls her other work, like the mechanical tumor (video below) that pulsates with CPU usage. Some people consider this stuff “gross.” But a lot of tech blogging is the expression of infantile feelings about some …
Although Ryan Oakley began his career as a simple rake (drunk) he has since become Toronto’s most renowned flaneur (no car) and notorious dandy (overdresses). A misanthropic composer of psycho-geographical fictions (sci-fi), he is also a server of food, a tender of bar and a washer of dishes. While performing all these functions with efficiency and elegance (disdain and malice), he somehow finds the time to publicly criticize friends, strangers and cultural crap.
