From

There’s hardly anything Australians can’t do. Briliant. It’s like a cross between a bike and a Zorb. And that thing off South Park

Paper Record Player from kellianderson on Vimeo.

Which is pretty cool, although from the look of the little picture of the two people, it’s obviously the same people as this:

Thinking Machine *** Honourable Mention Prix Ars 2008 *** from Masahiro Miwa on Vimeo.

via

Interesting because it’s ternary rather than binary, but is still a Turing-Machine.

Is “makerness” old hat yet? This thing is… from the context of how I felt about this stuff a couple of years ago – amazing… A programmable Rube Goldberg machine that plays music. That is amazing – but it kindof feels like yesterday’s news already. Rube Goldberg Machines are so Ok-Go-Video, nerd-viraly.

You know what the big problem with “maker culture” is? It’s the same problem that geek-culture has always had. There’s no sex in it. The male-female ratio is about 20 to 1. Nerd-culture has been given a mega-boost, because the internet, and then the blogosphere was written by nerds… so stuff that nerds like floats to the top. Stuff that nerds are good at floats to the top. I mean the sub-title of Slashdot (goes off to check it) is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”.

It don’t matter to girls. If you want girls, you’ve got to do art. Or music. Music is even better because the social milleau is so much more engaging. Personally, I’ve found hanging around in bars to be a waste of time as far as that goes – although you do get to be quite drunk, which is fun for a while. Eventually, I’d hoped I’d meet someone at an AA meeting – but that was all blokes as well, so I only went the once. Nice people though. The sorts of people you’d like to have a beer with.

But anyway, don’t take advice from me. Just don’t spend your whole life watching television – now that really is a waste of time.

I’m going to Australia in Feb. That’ll be something to do.

To rekindle the innocent joy of simply doing stuff. Making something.

Someone’s made a mechano centrifuge to see if a lava-lamp will work on Jupiter. Because that’s the sort of thing you do.

And much to everyone’s surprise…

Note use of Android phone to measure G-force. I tell yer – the smartphone is the breakout device for the internet of things. It’s the Intel Outside.

from

(fae)

A proper artist apparently : Walter Wick. Really good art, like really good hallucinations generally, is quite often instantly recogniseable… a distillation of something you already know. Really, really good art annoys the sort of people I hate. The only way to improve it from there is to make it really, really big.

I don’t think this needs that though. It’s hits closer by being made out of actual toys.

We used to do this when we were kids. Make flimsy castles then use other toys to knock them over. And lo, I have become Nickwit, destroyer of worlds.

ok, ok, it might not actually be proper art – it might just be someone taking the piss… but who’s to know?

From James River Branch via Hackaday.

Cheating slightly, but what the hey. It could go with these little house-rings:

From Philippe Tournaire, who has loads of them. This came via not only Notcot.org, but this site : http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com who’s page-height clocks in at a rather impressive 252604px… which on my screen-resolution of 42px a cm, makes it about 60 metres tall.

About 20 stories high in other words… almost exactly the same length as Firefly, off Firefly, according to this http://www.merzo.net/

Someone’s somehow managed to find the time to take classic bits (apparently) of classic movies and edit them down to 3 frames, and then loop them.

This is what modern entertainment’s all about. Something that takes ages to do, but which can be watched and moved-on-from in less time than it takes to say “wahtevah”

The essence of art. Pick out what’s good, amplify it and ditch the rest. Reminds me of Spacemen 3 from back in the day

They’d take MC5 songs, take the bits they liked, and just play those over and over again, until the end of time. Fuckin Art-Rock Rocks. You think Heavy Metal was loud? It was never as loud as Art-Rock.

I was in a band with Debs from the thing above for a while. Too loud for me man. 20 years later and my ears are still ringing.

A handy set of instructables for making your very own Light-Sabre Dildo…

Vegetable Vibrators to cater for every taste…

Vital PC Case-Mods for him and her…

…

It’s all here, from solar-powered vibrators, to DIY frankenstein sex-toys….

….and a special section on how to organise your toys should the whole thing threaten to get out of hand.

You’ll wonder how you ever did without

(fae : fae : fae)

My Dad used to work with this kid who’s “thing” was to tie every single thing in a room to every other thing with long pieces of string. You’d leave him alone, come back and there would be all this string spanning the room… connecting everything and keeping everything in place. If you tried to move any of it he’d have a conniption.

The thing above is a similar sort of thing I think, except done by crazy people.

Ok – not a crazy person. Julie Sherman. Artist. Brilliant.,