socks - studio
media art architecture design technology boredom is in the eye of the non-beholder

“Katamari Damacy is the title of an extremely strange, quirky game made exclusively for the PlayStation 2.
The game begins with the King of The Cosmos accidentally destroying all the stars in the sky. Obviously this cannot stand. He orders you (his one-inch-tall son) to go to Earth and roll around katamaris (some weird rubber balls with adhesives) to amass enough objects to create new stars. So the object of each level is to roll the ball around, picking up enough objects to make the ball a certain diameter within the time limit. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well it is, in theory. But this isn’t some austere environment you’re working in here. This is Earth. You’ve got mice and toy cars and spiders and people and all manner of things running around”. (Text extract from www.everything2.org/title/Katamari%2520Damacy).

Compare Katamari to Tunng video “Bullets”

Sorry for the looong hiatus…

Through this, i found this: Chicken wars part1, part2, part3 (with italian subs)
Too bad i cannot embed them!
Feel free to comment.

Inspired by a recent post by my friend PLF, here’s some of the best ever comedian sketches on god, faith and all things religious. I wait your suggestions.

Lenny Bruce


Bill Hicks

(Here a subtitled version)

Ricky Gervais


Kevin Smith

George Carlin

George Carlin (+)

Daniele Luttazzi

Lenny Bruce

A selection of boot shaking electro, pop and rock tunes
Listen to the playlist I recently made on Deezer.com with the embedded player.

Yes, I love Acqua e Sapone. So what?

Level 7, then I’ve given up… Extremely painful game.
Don’t shoot the fuck*n puppy.

Photoshop adbusting in Berlin:
1)Target some boring poster ads with heavy female characters (Britney Spears, of course)
2)Overlay the image with stickers from Adobe Photoshop’s interface panels.
(Credits: ftw crew)

Related: the Bubble Project, Dove Evolution, and its spoof…

Every Image has a sound
Intelligent ad campaign for Saxsofunny, a sound production company from Brazil. (Old fashioned, i guess)

Someone put Agoraphobia, by Deerhunter…
… over the images of a 1995 spanish movie called “Flamenco” by Carlos Saura. The film narrates the history of this dance, through the performances of the best dancers. Good move, but it lacks the creepy meaning of the lyrics in its entirety. This is the Ytube clip.

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution
Wonderful illustrations gently provided by Bre Pettis, a guy who MAKEs things
(photo above)
Links Via: Puppiesandflowers

The real concrete island
What we talk about when we talk about Ballard’s novel. On Ballardian, of course.
Via: Thingsmagazine

Sheeps get their grooves on
A primitive but addicting online sequencer, even though not quite the look of Ableton Live.
Try my sets:

Related: the amazing (better than that, actually) Hobnox AudioTool

Here’s the first episode of a (hopefully) regular column, collecting a variable amount of **lovely links**.

The Game Developer Archives: ‘Monsters From the Id: The Making of Doom’
Behind the scene of the ID factory back in 1994. Have a look at their simple but efficient cad levels editor.

An examination of gravity in the Super Mario Bros series.
Gravity in Mario gets apparently closer to reality as game hardware increases. Does one learn physics playing Mario? If so Steven B. Johnson would look even smarter… (Via: Kottke and Inkiostro)

Peter Saville on Porn and Fashion
Yes, this is slighlty NSFW, but your boss is in the washroom… Via: Constant Siege

Scarred landscapes
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky documents the impact of humanity’s expanding footprint on his TED talk.

Cold War Kids - Hang me out to dry live at Later with… Jools Holland,
I can’t help listening and listening to this song, thanks to Valentina Tanni facebook’s note…

Photography and literary fiction. Amy Stein interviews Graham Miller (above photo)
“You’ve stated that your images are imagined and constructed in ways that are very similar to literary fiction and you have cited Raymond Carver as a primary influence on your work. Carver was famous for his portrayal of the quiet desperation of the working class, but he was also famous for his brevity. (…)
“What struck me about his writing then (and now) was how he conveys so much emotional weight by sketching out the bare outlines of a story with telling details and simple dialogue”. Via: White Noise of Everyday Life

Here: the Bombo’s Lumper on FFFFound!
(Jumping onto the winner’s chariot, as we use to say in Italy… )

How comes that one day everyone knows everything about you and your life is completely public? That’s because you showed to everyone your whole fucking life!
Read Le Tigre article (french), read on La Repubblica (italian)

A thrilling tale for dummies.

Via: Thingsmagazine

Makes better-than-original movie poster remakes.

.

BTW at the age of 21 he seems to be good at everything.

An ordinary christmas day for Bjork who talks and gets off her own CRT tv set.

Peter Sellers delivering “A Hard Day’s Night” in the manner of Olivier’s Richard III.

Via: Alex Ross : the rest is noise

I recently discovered the existence of an an open source, crowdsourcing hardware and software project for designing, building and marketing a lowcost Web tablet computer from the guys of the Techcrunch blog.

I rather agree with their original point of view: iPhone is nice but too small, most laptops are over-powered for the task” and (this is mine): netbooks are just underpowered, tiny toys almost unusable even for the web, so why don’t create a light weight, multitouch, low cost screen to surf the internets? A tablet which would be open source from top to bottom, converting or adapting minimal Linux or BSD distros, and including cost limited hardware open source multitouch display.

I’m however actually skeptical on the ultimame feasability of the operation, considering that are still no known financial resources, no market target studies, uncertain design lines (including a Macbook Air tablet mockup) just lots of comments and a huge utopia from top to bottom.

I will copy&paste one comment from the reader Chris Sears on the techcrunch page to explain the ardous possibility for this thing to see the light:

- No open source hardware project has really taken off
- Crowdsourcing doesn’t work that well
- Major companies have no doubt considered making such a product and haven’t for some probably good reason
- There’s a lot more to delivering a product to market than just getting it spec’d out and manufactured
- Once Mike has one, what reason do you have to continue with the project?
- You’re effectively taking on the iPhone, the EeePC, Nokia tablets, OLPC, and the UMPCs for hardware and OpenMoko, Android, Palm OS and others on software
- You’re a blog

“You’re a blog” is in fact strikingly ironic, summing up the distrust one can have for people who use to write about rather than realize things…

I’m curious to see if this project will go through all this. In the best of all possible worlds I’m probably buying it, unless if they will call it the “iTablet”.