Wow! we just finished watching this movie on DVD last time, and this wins the award for the most non-sensical, poetically convoluted plot for the entire year, and possibly well beyond that point. A Chinese Tall Story is apparently based on a well known chinese legend Journey to the West, featuring the Monkey King, Tang monk Tripitaka, turtle-warrior and pig-warrior. I say apparently because even if it was loosely based on the original story, by the time they were done with the script, I think the name would be the only thing left. That is if there was a script.

Written and directed by Jeff Lau Chun-Wai, who shares with Stephen Chow this love for the Mo Lei Tau style of comedy, which literally translates to Makes No Sense,  a Chinese Tall Story was one of the biggest production of 2005 with a budget of 100 million HK$. This budget bought a lot of CGI effects, amazingly colorful sets, expansive art direction and constume design, and allowe the movie to be filled with famous young Canto-Pop actor/singer/performers with flawless complexion, and a flair for acting like they are, well playing some part in a movie/music video.

It also brought together director Jeff Lau (A Chinese Odyssee, Kung Fu Hustle), action choreographer Cory Yuen (So Close, The Transporter) , music composer Joe Hisaishi (Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away) to create that visual extravaganza.

If you loved Stephen Chows movies like Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, then A Tall Chinese Story will make perfect sense (or not, but that's not the point.) Even the Official Tall Chinese Story website makes absolutely no sense, and I mean this in the best way possible.

So what is the story? well let's just start by saying that it's a chinese myth / romantic comedy / science fiction / action / musical.  Some attempts at explaining what happens to Monk Tripitaka who according to legends brought the sacred teachings of buddha to the west, and attained sainthood after performing 84 sacred tasks. A Chinese Tall Story is a loose attempt at recounting his first tasks, and my own recollections of those events after the break.

The Dutch Tub is a woodfire based hot tub designed by dutch designer Floris Schoonderbeek. The very simple system consists of an injection molded plastic tub, that can be connected to a regular garden hose for filling, and an external heating element which consist of a stainless steel spiral around a fire basket.

The heat from the fire warms the water which uses the same principle as a glass alembic to circulate the hot water in the tub and heat it. Because the outlet is positioned higher than the inlet, it creates a current that circulate the water in the  tub and  keeps it warm. You can control the heat by changing the position of the basket in the spiral.

Unfortunately, the tub is a bit pricey at €4450 per unit.

We Feel Fine is a webbot that scans all posts on the blogosphere for sentences with the word i feel which it then use to get an idea as to what the world is feeling right now, and using the fact that a lot of blogs have a common structure to tag them with a name, age and location. The result is a very surreal composition with snippets of sentences combined with pictures. The We Feel Fine Applet displays the data it finds in various ways, starting with a swarm of recent feelings, then progressing to pictures, then aggregating the data.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

There is also a published API which allows other applications to be made that can use the data.
[via Drawn!]

I just spent the last hour trying to figure out why Nabazoux my Wifi Rabbit has been sick all day and can't seem to connect to the server. At first I tought that it might be a problem on my side, and I tried changing all the wireless setting, and rebooting the little beast a number of times, but nothing works. Nabazoux blinks orange ( not a good sign ) and then stops.

After roaming the web in search of some explanation, I came across this post on one of the Nabaztag website. It looks like the 100 Rabbit concert might have brought down the entire service, because quite a few rabbits are stranded without a connection.

Also the little rabbits no longer tell the time every hour. What's up with that?

UPDATE. It looks like the connection came back sometime during the night, and Nabazoux is happily talking to us again. I wasn't looking forward trying to send her back for repairs from Sydney to Paris.

The Sheep Market is an experiment by Aaron Koblin, who used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 drawing of sheeps. The Mechanical Turk is an interface from Amazon that allows you to divide complex tasks that have to be performed by people, into small chunks and effectively use people "spare cycles" to complete the task. In this case, Aaron paid about 0.02$ per drawing, which cost him about 500$.

Thousands of workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk webservice were paid two cents to "draw a sheep facing to the left." Their sheep drawings were collected and printed on collectable stamps. The stamps, as well as animations of their drawing process, were shown at the "Lost in Border" exhibition in the New Wight Gallery at UCLA.

[via We Make Money Not Art]

There is relatively little hard-science about left-handedness, mainly because most right-handed people don't care, and being left-handed is not only really hard to define, but no-one seems to agree on why there is such a thing as handedness in the first place and why would the majority have a strong bias to the right. But that doesn't stop all kinds of theories from being postulated about left-handedism, which usually end up in books like the following:

A Left Hand Turn Around the World by David Wolman

Written by a left-handed journalist, this book tends to debunk the myth of Left-handedness somehow infusing some kind of superior race abilities, and does without the usual lists of famous historical lefties. It does make an interesting case that the world shouldn't be divided in Lefties and Righties, but between strongly polarized people which can be either left or right handed, and mixed-handed people that don't have a strong preference for one side or another, and might write with the right hand and throw a ball with the left, and a tiny proportion of ambidextrous people that have the same abilities with either hands.

An interesting read, but filled with interesting contradictions, or maybe interesting because of the myriad of somehow conflicting theories and contracting data, and a good mix of both hard and pseudo-science.

Lefties: The Causes and Consequences of Being Left-Handed by Jack Fincher

While I bought the other book recently, I have another one in my bookshelf. This one is a little bit more pro-lefties, and hints at the fact once the taboo around being left-handed are removed (for example I didn't have anyone forcing me to write or eat with my left hand to "fit in", but my mother who is also left-handed had her arm tied behind her back in school) and that in reality the number of left-handed people might be closer to 30% rather than 10% is usual.

Fafi, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite grafitti artist, will be presenting at the Semi-Permanent conference in Sydney. I found this out on her website, so I don't really know much about Semi-Permanent, except that it seems to be a very eclectic collection of speakers covering the entire creative spectrum, from grafitti artists, to musicians, to filmmakers and graphic designers.

Semi-Permanent is a bunch of different projects all joined together, but our main focus is the conference. It consists of two days of presentations from highly talented creatives from all around the world. They come from all areas of 'design', including graphic design, film making, visual effects, motion graphics, animation, street art, illustration, photography, fine art and much much more. The presentations are educational and highly inspirational.

There is also a number of sideshows around the main conference, an exhibition with both local and international artists, and a party named "Semi-Intoxicated" which sounds very promising. One of the exhibition called Curvy 2006 and headed by Fafi, showcases a number of female artists. Information is slowly appearing on the main Semi-Permanent website.

I'm not in Paris, so my little Nabazoux will not be performing at the Nabaz'mob, a concert for 100 Nabaztag Lapin Communicants, composed by Antoine Schmitt and Jean-Jacques Birge for the Web Flash Festival 2006 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Jean-Jacques explains the constraints of using the Nabaztag on his blog. Because each rabbit can take up to 10 seconds to receive the signal to play a given note or soundfile, there is a natural chorus that gets created, and the composition takes advantage of that.

Répondant à l'appel de la société Violet, 100 lapins Nabaztag apportés par leurs propriétaires respectifs se donnent rendez-vous, dans l'esprit des flashmobs, sur la scène du Centre Pompidou pour interpréter, tous ensemble, un opéra spécialement composé pour l'occasion par Antoine Schmitt et Jean-Jacques Birgé. Convoquant John Cage, Steve Reich et Conlon Nancarrow, cette partition musicale et chorégraphique ouverte en trois mouvements, transmise par wifi, joue sur la tension entre communion de l'ensemble et comportement individuel pour créer une oeuvre à la fois forte et engagée.

The first movement is about the ordinary nabaztag, and uses the default sounds, a little bit like a glockenspiel. The second movement involves longer notes, and uses the fact that each rabbit can pick a different midi file to play, to introduce more randomness, and uses periods of silence with flashing of the lights and ear motions. The third and final movement of the concert uses short excerps from famous classical composers that each rabbit downloads and plays as a mp3 file.

Nabaz'mob Opera pour 100 Lapins Communicants
Soiree d'ouverture du Salon Flash Festival
27 Mai 2006 a 20h00
Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris)

The Eurovision Song contest has, over the 51 years since its inception, been the last bastion of the all-too-sweet made for TV euro-pop, although some would argue that when you've been doing the same thing since 1955, that Eurovision actually defined euro-pop and not the other way around. So who would have thought that prosthetics-laden, heavy metal monsters from Finland Lordi would opset the natural order and win this years contest.

Originally hailing from Arctic Lapland, Lordi became a phenomenon in Finland with the Platinum-selling debut album Get Heavy in 2002. Since then, the band has scored Finnish hits with the albums The Monsterican Dream (2004) and The Arockalypse (2006). The compilation album The Monster Show has also been released in more than 20 countries. "We have the same aesthetic as horror films. The scarier the film, the more fun it is. And rock music should be all about fun!" says frontman Mr Lordi.

You can see Lordi's Eurovision performance on YouTube.

Mojizu is a character design community. Like the famous t-shirt design website Threadless, the Mojizu allows  members to post their original character designs for peer reviews, and then the best characters are choosen in a multi-round elimination contest called MujiWar.

Mojizu is for the people who create characters and people who just love them, from experienced artists to casual doodlers. If you draw characters for a living – it’s a place to showcase them and expose your talent to a wide audience around the world. If you draw characters as a hobby, it’s a place to improve your skills and get feedback from a large community of character lovers.

Their business model, like the one at Threadless, is that by submitting a character to their site, you are releasing some of your copyright that allows them to create merchandising based on that character. Apparently they will change their license to make that more obvious, and allow artists to pick an opt-out clause, should they want to retain all merchandising rights. On one end this usually allows relatively unknown artists to get easy access to an audience, but the risk is that you can loose control of a wildly successful design.

You can also download a Mojicon dispenser, which allows you to use thousand of little Moji characters as icons for your IM or Email or Web page.

[via Drawn!]

I have no idea why they called it "PoissonMobile" but the idea for this transportable rollup lounge chair is fantastic. This and other furniture concepts can be found on the german design collective Confused Direction. Using paper folding principles from Origami, the matt can be rolled out, and folded along the demarcation lines into a curved chair. Very nice!

[via Sensory Impact]

The top image is the softimage pod, which I co-designed with Los Angeles design firm Krab Design in 1995. We were looking for something different from the average work cubicle, that would allow us to re-partition an open space based on our needs, and had enough room for 2 large monitors and all the computers that a 3D animator would need. I wanted to have something that would give us some privacy but would not cut the natural light coming into the office, but to diffuse it. The solution was to stretch a translucent fabric on a ribbed coccoon, inspired by the early airplane wings.

We manufactured 15 of these pods, which made the Softimage office in Santa Monica rather unique, and I happily worked at one of them for many years.

The bottom image is from the ORIDJIN Office concept, from Design Journey Industrial. Is it me or there is more than a passing resemblance between the two models? Except for some minor details, I find that both are strangely identical. What's up with that DJI?