First off, it was this post about a popsicle maker that lets you put cute faces on your popsicles!

TOO CUTE! AAAIGH! KAWAII!

The device is called the Zoku Duo Quick Pop Maker. SOMEONE BUY IT FOR ME RIGHT AWAY!

Then on Thursday it was this post about an etsy artist who makes felt food.

  

Too cute. Too, too cute.

Via Host-It Notes.

ASTEROIDS!!!

I went as the ship from Asteroids. It was fun! I went to Home Depot and bought one of those swivel joints that you’d use to make a lazy Susan. Then I made the ship out of black foam board. The outline of the ship is just a couple of layers of masking tape. I mounted the ship to the lazy Susan joint (with three layers of foam board padding to push it farther away from my body for easier swiveling) with some screws and hot glue. And I attached the other side of the lazy Susan joint to another three layers of foam board that I attached to my body with two belts (one above the joint and one below).

I also made an asteroid outta foam board and masking tape, with two smaller asteroids. I glued some velcro to the backs so that the little ones could attach to the big one out of sight. I also got a handful of ping-pong balls to use as the ship’s bullets! I had a friend slowly attack me with the larger asteroid while I threw ping-pong balls at it. When I hit it, he disengaged the smaller asteroids and dropped the big one. Just like in the game!

My punkins were carved to match:

And just for fun I also threw in the UFO:

Pretty much everybody agreed that it was the best of the Fools’ costumes at this year’s Fools Play Trick or Treat. But the competition wasn’t really that stiff…

That’s Jamie the Ginger Fool as “Batman,” me, Geoff the Yellow Fool as “Harry Potter” (really), and Mike the Blue Fool as Zordon from Power Rangers.

James won the best costume in the audience competition as a red knight from Castle Crashers. It was very good, though I didn’t get a picture of it. Tia went as a 1960s-style alien space babe, with a beehive hairdo and fantastic boots and silver ray guns and everything. Pretty awexome.

Hween night was spent in the traditional way: Wii Bowling and making a metric tonne of Reuben sammitches and eating my wife’s Russian potato soup with sauerkraut. But I don’t have to tell you about that myself. Our good friend the Unintentional Housewife was there, and she blogged all about it! So go read her posts about my Reuben process and about my wife’s dee-licious soup. Also, Marvel’s X-Men’s “X-23″ was there, and she brought some apple crisp, which was also delicious. Saves me the trouble of having to write about it myself!

OCTOCAM

If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq.

It is for some reason very enjoyable and relaxing to watch Deriq meander around in his tank.

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME-TRAVELERS

Artist Alex Varanese has imagined what it would look like if someone from today went back in time and re-created today’s modern electronics—cell phone, laptop, hand-held video game system, mp3 player—using the design aesthetics of 1977.

The results are absolutely fan-frikkin’-tastic.

I was born in 1977, so I completely remember this style of design. Y’all have no idea how much I miss high technology that had a faux-woodgrain finish. Glorious.

EDWARD CULLEN TAMPON CASE

Etsy crafter and all-around awexome human being Taisha McGee made the one piece of merchandise that no Twilight fan should be without.

The product description speaks for itself:

Bella’s most useful accessory. Case is 5.5″ by 2″ and holds two average sized tampons. Edward’s face is sparkly. Tampons not included.

RIVER TAM AND THE FIREFLIES

Holy eff but that is so freakin’ adorable. This is an actual album sleeve that artist Joebot made for a gallery show (happens on July 9th).

But the really cool thing is that you can purchase a print of this picture at his Etsy shop as a gift to send to me! Joebot has some other really cool prints as well, like ones of the Nintendo princesses (and Samus).

AT-AT DAY AFTERNOON

An absolutely adorable short film with seamless special effects animation. Very well done.

THE WORLD’S ONLY NEWSPAPER

This is a fascinating collection of still frames and clips of people reading newspapers in dozens of films and television shows. The exact same newspaper each time. Going back decades. It looks like this:

It’s actually kind of astonishing how wide-spread this newspaper really is.

AQUATIC VIDEOS

Here are a couple of videos of aquatic awesomeness:

WATERMELON TURTLE

This extravagantly cute melon bowl is from my link-of-the month, Host-It Notes.

There are all sorts of other darling little foodstuffs at Host-It Notes, like sheep cupcakes, mushroom radishes, and frosting bees!

That’s about it for now.

I saw this yag at southeast corner of 6th Ave & Alder (at the former location of the ABC Chinese restaurant). “Imagine the infinite possibilities that each day holds.”

The artist was thoughtful enough to sign the back of the yag:

So her name is “LaLa.” I think that this is a spectacularly awexome form of street art because

1. Pretty!
2. Unobtrusive: if you didn’t know it was there you might just miss it.
3. Easily removable: if someone really doesn’t like it, all they need is a pair of scissors or a knife and they can cut that sucka down (or if someone wants to own an original LaLa piece).
4. Pretty!

The Feed Tacoma blog also found a yag! I’m not sure where this one is, but it looks like it’s on a stop sign:

I say, “Good job, LaLa! Keep it up, and add some prettiness to Tacoma!”

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.

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.

He’ll be available (along with some other kawaii stuff) some time next week. Hooray!

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.

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.