Link Latte #2

October 10, 2009

Saturday being the day where I chuck all sorts of random stuff at the screen at the same time, because I can’t possibly keep up etc.

1) Massive Puppet Show in Berlin

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Because a guaranteed way of making great art better, is to make it a LOT bigger.

2) Surveillance as a game.

Basically Mechanical-Turking CCTV watching… with prizes going to people who catch other people committing crimes. I’m betting though, that the rewards would be far greater in terms of attention etc if people just spied on other people with their own cellphones. People profiting from spying on other people is an insidious and inevitable step I think. But what exactly is it that we’re building here?

3) Piano Stairs

4) Crowd-sourced Vitamin Water

vitamins

This is interesting because it has the potential to reverse this trend where everything is outsourced except branding and product-design… with this there’s this potential for customers to design their own product and packaging… cutting out everyone except the manufacturer.

Whether it’s even close to doing that I don’t know… and whether a “MySpace of flavours” is necessarily a good thing debatable, still… at least it’s vitamin water, rather than coke, with it’s 8 tablespoons of sugar etc. If people were left to their own devices would they actually make products that were good for them, rather than just injecting cholesterol straight into their arteries? Hard to say.

5) A sudden rash of 3-wheelers

They (always “they”) have obviously taken my recent rant about electric cars to heart, and have responded by making a whole load more of them… all a bit improbable if you ask me.

Czech Amphibious Electric Assist Vehicle

At least partly because anything Czech is automatically great.

BMW, semi-enclosed motorbike with rollbars etc.
bmw1

An idea fucked up by retarded laws to do with crash-helmets. Fuckem. If we want to take our lives into our own hands, that’s our business. Suicide should NOT be illegal.

Tilty Nissan
nissan

I’m not really sure what it is with these tilty designs… there seem to be a lot of them about at the moment.

Another one from BMW
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Which linked to this cloth car, which isn’t a bad idea:

If you’ll just ignore the corporate bullshit-speak that that guy spouts, as though he really means it. BMW… It’s all about being “intelligent”… it’s all about stretching a neat, seamless skin of “intelligence” over the same old corporate framework.

I don’t believe you.

Anyway… back to the tilty things… or not. There was a recent video on wired or somewhere… of a German variant – looked really fun to drive, but danged if I can find the video now… so here are some tilty bike-car things instead:

6) Speaking of which… Nissan also seems to think these are Concept Cars

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Which they’re obviously doing just to annoy me… because they go beyond looking like teapots and actually look like salt-shakers instead.

7) Ray Guns etc

The Navy obviously having gotten into an arms-race with itself in its own mind… fighting other people who also have ray guns. Mars perhaps…

… Well the moon didn’t exactly fight back recently did it? It would have been hilarious if Nasa bombing the moon had blown off a bit of moon rock – that had gone zooming all the way back to earth and landed on the bonnet of Obama’s car. That would teach him for getting a Nobel Prize when he hasn’t actually done anything yet. None of the stuff that I voted for him to do anyway. Not that I voted mind… but I did, in my way, campaign for him.

8 ) Tube Amp

tubeamp

I do actually genuinely want one of these… and I’m not the sort of person who generally wants stuff.

I don’t want one that looks like this though… it has to be portable… something that looks like an alien sex-toy that you can put in your pocket… goes between our iPod and your ears to make MP3s sound like proper music instead of the crushed, compressed, grating crap they are at the moment. I want Vinyl back basically.

9) A fantastic museum of futuristic cars from yesteryear
lambro