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You know the US presidential election season has really started when Mattel launches their Presidential Barbie line. This year’s models come wearing a pink power suit designed by Chris Benz and somewhat sensible wedge shoes, although Barbie’s feet are still made for high heels. Link -via Buzzfeed
Bald is beautiful! Mattel has announced that they will development a Barbie doll without hair especially for girls dealing with hair loss, whether from chemotherapy or another cause, in themselves or a family member. The dolls should come out in 2013.
Although “Mattel has a policy of not forwarding unsolicited product ideas to our design teams,” it seems like New Jersey resident Jane Bingham with her friend Rebecca Sypin, who launched a Beautiful and Bald Barbie Facebook page last December, sparked the idea. The social media move went viral. Bingham and Sypin reportedly met in a pregnancy chat room. Both Bingham and Sypin’s daughter lost their hair to chemotherapy. So they hoped the doll could be used to help children cope and understand what other family members are facing, like Bingham’s 9-year daughter learning to understand her mother’s condition. And for children battling cancer like Sypin’s 12-year old daughter, it’s a reminder that hair isn’t what makes them special.
Reportedly, it’ not Barbie, but it’s a female friend who will be hairless. The friend will have wigs, hats, scarves and other accessories children can put on the doll. (And what’s a Barbie Doll without accessories?)
The dolls will not go on the market, but will be donated to children’s hospitals and other charity outlets in the US and other countries. Link -via Breakfast Links
The element of surprise is a tremendous advantage in battle. Similarly, taking an opponent by surprise can lead to a quick victory in chess. And what would be a greater surprise than for your pieces to combine into a giant fighting robot that sweeps the board in a single move? Cymon of Thingiverse has designed a chess set that will let you do just that.
Shiro, Japan’s most laid-back cat, has reached a level of fame in which fans can buy their own version of him (but only in Japan). Watch Shiro test the new toy to show how authentic it is. The plushie is almost as patient and tolerant as Shiro is! Link to pictures. Link to video. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: kagonekoshiro)
These pixel art versions of the Masters Of The Universe rogue’s gallery comes to you courtesy of artist Ty Lettau, who was kind enough to convert them all into papercraft figures you can print out and put together for your own amusement.
Who knew Skeletor was such a square? Print them, play with them, and marvel at how little muscle mass these guys have on their blocky bodies!
Link –via Rampaged Reality
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Boston Dynamics is showing off their newest innovation with this video of their Sand Flea Jumping Robot in action. It looks like a flask with wheels, or one of those RC cars that can flip end over end and keep wheeling, but the Sand Flea is so much more:
Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings.
While the Sand Flea is currently in development for use in military applications, I’ll be surprised if RC cars don’t integrate the awesome jumping feature into their own models in the near future.
Comments Off The Dark Knight Rises is almost upon us, and I’m excited by all that I see about this movie-awesome action figures, the confirmed return of Liam Neeson as R’as Al Ghul, and now the trailer gets a LEGO makeover, thanks to Paranick Filmz.
You gotta love how far stop motion LEGO films have come over the last few years, and with the inclusion of visual effects the bar has been set even higher.
–via Comics Alliance
What happens when Pure Evil contaminates the drinking water of pregnant teddy bears? Dr. Allison Lonsdale of the Institute for Dangerous Research decided to find out. These were her procedures:
1. A sample of Pure Evil was obtained from the ruins o f an exploded toaster in the south of England.
2. Pure Evil was administered, via drinking water, to pregnant laboratory teddy bears for the duration of their pregnancy (4 months).
3. Dosage varied from 0 parts per million (ppm) to 1000ppm, titrating upwards by steps of 100pm.
4. Offspring were euthanized and mounted for display.
As you can see from the picture above, Pure Evil has serious teratogenic effects on teddy bears.
Link -via Boing Boing | Lonsdale’s Blog | Photo: Jerry Abuan
Tabletop role playing game enthusiasts will tell you that the fun definitely doesn’t end with Dungeons & Dragons. Settings for RPGs are only limited by the imagination, and the creators often come up with some far out and interesting worlds in which to play.
James Daniels at Topless Robot has put together a list of RPGs with unique settings, and having played a few of the games on the list I must say he has chosen some really classic games.
So, if you’re like me and you enjoy your gaming in a tabletop setting with friends, you might just find your next campaign source on this list of truly unique RPGs.
These Turkish knockoff Star Wars action figures have actually become a big hit with avid collectors, and I must admit they do have a certain crappy charm about them.
Maybe it’s the colorful renaming of characters (see: Head Man), or maybe it’s the new packaging photos (the Imperial Gunner looks like he’s playing with a giant calculator). Aw heck, it’s the whole darn 99 cent store looking package!
Thanks, Turkey, for showing us just how good our action figures really are, and how nowadays even crappy knockoffs can create a niche in the collector’s market.
Today is National Stuff That Was Popular When You Were a Kid Day! Or at least it is at mental_floss, thanks to readers who suggested made-up holidays. All day long, they’re featuring quizzes about stuff from your childhood. Try out Name That Beanie Baby, or maybe Computer Games That Came on Floppy Disks, or Superman vs. ____? or even Movies Where Russians Were the Bad Guys, among others, and check back for new quizzes to be posted all day long! Link
The Free Universal Construction Kit is an innovative new product that lets you combine pieces of building toys such as LEGO, K’Nex, Tinkertoys, Zoob, Duplo, etc., thereby allowing your creative mind to run free.
Even better than the rock solid design of the adapters is the fact that the Universal Construction Kit is free to download and print via 3d printer. I’m not sure how much 3d printing costs, but the pieces are pretty tiny so it shouldn’t be too expensive, right? *sheepish grin*
Link –via Geekologie
Custom modeler John Harmon was inspired by Malmey Studios’ Darth Vader/Batman Armor crossover costume when he created this custom hybrid action figure. Here’s how the two figures became one:
Darth Knight has been using the body from a Dark Knight Movie Masters Batman figure, and the head, lightsaber, chest plate, and other pieces from a Star Wars Transformers Darth Vader action figure.
I transplanted the ears from the Batman head onto the Darth Vader head, and sculpted over them to blend them in with the sculpt of Vader’s helmet. He features a paint job that really helps him stand out as his own concept, with silver accents, and other various parts painted in flat and gloss black.
He has extra Darth Vader pieces attached to his belt, his chest plate has been implanted into Batman’s torso (and he still retains full ab crunch movement!), and his legs have been sculpted over with rectangular plates. He also features the classic Darth Vader waist cloak made from a sheet of vinyl. He comes with his lightsaber as well (or light baton if you wish for him to be as non-lethal as the real caped crusader).
Does this incarnation of the Caped Crusader still fight crime, or has he embraced the dark side and joined the ranks of Gotham City’s criminal elite?
Link –via Nerd Approved
Comments Off If you’ve ever wondered what a LEGO person looks like when it’s cut in half, then check out this stop motion short “The Duel”, which reveals what toys are up to when we’re not around to stop all the plastic-on-plastic violence. Can’t our toys just get along?
–via Topless Robot
What has 2127 pieces, a retractable third leg, a buzz saw hidden inside, a rotating dome, and can make a geek salivate? The Ultimate Collector Series R2-D2 LEGO Star Wars set, of course! It should be available for $179.99 (higher in Canada) in May. Link -via The Daily What Geek
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These paintings by Aurelie Montfrond are like visualizations of what goes on inside a child’s mind as they play with their LEGO sets, the figures embarking on a grand adventure both simple in scope and brilliantly colored.
Terrain is simplified, elements are distorted, and yet there is a clarity of focus which showcases the figures, and the props they’re interacting with, as the most important part of each scene.
They’re so delightfully minimal that you can’t help but feel like a kid again as you peruse the images, reminiscing about playtimes past.
Link –via DesignTAXI
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Italian designer Davide Bonanni designed a small four-wheel vehicle that can travel on rails or on the ground by pedal power. Called the “O,” it is shaped just like that. The idea is to make it easier for people to explore abandoned railways. Hey, I think this would be fun just to pedal around the neighborhood! Read more about the O at Urban Ghosts. Link
(Image credit: Davide Bonanni)
The only way this LEGO blanket could get any cooler would be if it could actually lock into place with other LEGO crochet projects. But I guess that’s just wishing for a bit too much.
Combine LEGO, Transformers, and Game Boy, and you’ve got a toy geek’s dream creation. Julius von Brunk built a Transformer (named Domaster) out of LEGO bricks that changes from a classic Nintendo Game Boy to a robot! Domaster’s blaster weapons are double-A batteries (made of LEGO pieces) that fit inside his thighs for storage. Domaster has a sidekick, too, a robot bird named Tetrawing that transforms into a Tetris game cartridge -that fits in Domaster’s Game Boy slot! Read more about this project and see plenty of pictures at MOCpages. Link -via The Daily What Geek
Update: Check out von Brunk’s website!
GE Healthcare wanted LEGO artist Eric Harshbarger to create this model. He resisted the idea and insisted on having a real one in his studio to use as a model. GE didn’t hesitate and delivered one to his door.
Admit it: his work is so good that if you weren’t told otherwise, you’d assume that this was a picture of a real anesthesia machine.
From the darkest bowels of the twisted imagination of Stacey Rader comes Artoo Peetoo, a ghastly experiment gone wrong. Rader takes action figures and dolls, then performs cruel surgeries to combine them. In her Etsy shop, you can find similar monstrosities inspired by Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel Comics, DC Comics and more.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
Can a plastic orb connect you to the spirit world and life the future’s filmy veil? OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. Can it at least give good advice? REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN. Can a toy company make money selling it? SIGNS POINT TO YES!
A SEEKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Wartime has long been a boom time for spiritualists, mostly because people long for any news about loved ones a the battlefront. In the 1940s, a woman named “Madame” Mary Carter was capitalizing on that opportunity, plying her trade as a professional clairvoyant in Cincinnati. Her best seance stunt was one she called the Psycho-Slate, consisting of a chalkboard inside a box, with a lid covering it. When a client asked a question, Carter would close the lid, and after a short interval of muffled chalkboard scratching, she would dramatically flip open the lid to reveal the spirit world’s answer, written with chalk in a ghostly scrawl. (How she did it remains a mystery.)
TELL A FORTUNE, MAKE A FORTUNE?
Mary Carter had a son named Albert who had little use for any spirits that couldn’t be drunk straight from the bottle. When sober, however, he fancied himself an inventor, and seeing the success of his mother’s Psycho-Slate, Albert Carter came up with his best idea ever: a portable fortune-telling device that any spiritual seeker could use at any time or place.
It took some time for Carter to work out the details. It had to look mysterious, it had to offer a variety of answers and, because he had no capital to work with, it had to be cheap to build. He went to work using what he knew best -murky liquids in cans and bottles- and developed what he called the Syco-Seer Miracle Home Fortune Teller -a seven inch can-shaped device with a glass window on each end. The inside of the can was divided in two; each half contained a six-side die floating in the dark, viscous liquid (according to some accounts, molasses from his mother’s kitchen) and each of the die’s six sides was inscribed with a short answer. His reasoning for having two compartments isn’t clear, but perhaps it was for efficiency: You could get an answer from one end, then turn it over and get the next answer with little lag time. In 1944 Carter filed for a patent, made a prototype, and began showing it around Cincinnati’s toy and hobby shops.
YOU WILL MEET A HELPFUL STRANGER
One of the storekeepers, Max Levinson, not only wanted to stock Syco-Seers, he was very interested in helping Carter produce and market them. Levinson brought in his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, an engineer from the Ohio Mechanical Institute, who suggested improvements to Carter’s design -adding ridges inside the chamber to make the die spin and better randomize the answers. He also hired a designer to give the Syco-Seer’s outer label a mystical appeal.
In 1946 the three men formed a partnership, which -in a nod to his two creative partners’ first names- Levinson called the Alabe Crafts Corporation. Bookman arranged for a manufacturer and planned for the retail release of the Syco-Seer in 1947. At just about the same time, Albert Carter’s alcoholism and self-neglect had finally caught up with him and he died. “While he was sober, he was a genius,” Bookman recalled to a Cincinnati Post reporter a few years later. “He stayed in flophouses and was always broke. But I bought every idea he ever had, and that gave him enough to keep going.”
I SEE A PATENT IN YOUR FUTURE
Carter’s patent came through the following year, and luckily for Bookman and Levinson, he had signed rights over to the partnership before he died. Given new creative freedom to experiment with the design, Bookman began making changes that Carter had resisted.
more …
Totally awesome or totally horrifying? The Swarm, a new roller coaster at Thorpe Park in Chertsey, UK is tearing up crash test dummies:
The self-described “flight through apocalyptic devastation on Europe’s tallest winged rollercoaster” propels up to 28 riders at a time with their arms and legs dangling freely at 62 miles per hour and includes trips through an inverted 127-foot drop and several close encounters with walled structures that are designed to make passengers feel like they are about to crash.
Even former fighter pilots find the coaster a bit much:
The ride’s designers ran some test runs with crash test dummies, leaving many shocked when the dummies returned from the experience missing arms and legs. A team of former British fighter pilots were then brought in as the coaster’s preparation neared completion. Mark Cutmore, team leader of the Blades, a stunt pilot organization, told the Metro: “I am a self-confessed adrenaline junkie, but even as a pilot used to G-force there were some gut-wrenching moments, and I have to admit the near miss element is eye-watering — you really do feel as if you are going to crash into the structures.”
Link -via The Agitator | Official Website | Photo: Rod Kirkpatrick
Leave it to the Japanese to invent a gadget that is both useful and fun, all in a cute little package! The Gurefuru Chuchu is an innovative device that allows you to convert fruit into juice right inside the peel, without any squeezing, cutting or mess.
It’s obviously marketed towards children, but I could see the Chuchu catching on big time with all juice lovers, especially those who enjoy a novelty factor with their fruit juicy goodness. Gurefuru Chuchu go forth and juice it good!
–via TDW
Building the Space Station in LEGO? Well, lots of people can do that ... but building the Space Station in LEGO while on the Space Station? That's Neatorama-worthy!
Link - via CraftIt took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS). Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours — and he did it all while aboard the orbiting outpost itself.
It helped that his space station was made out of LEGO.
"It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station," Furukawa, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) flight engineer, told collectSPACE.com in an interview after he returned to Earth. "I enjoyed building it."
Techno Viking, the character from a 12-year-old video, is a meme that just won’t quit. Now he’s an action figure! There’s no verifiable information, but I gather that this is one of those custom-made action figures that can look like anyone if you pay the premium price. But I don’t know who it belongs to. Link
Anyone who grew up with older siblings, especially older brothers, might already be familiar with the concept behind this series of photographs by Samuel Coendet and Lea Gerber of the design group Atelier Volvox-stuffed animals look weird, completely different, disturbing even, when they’re cut open and turned inside out.
I am an older brother, and I will admit to some Barbie decapitations and other doll oriented mishaps, but I never had the heart to cut open my kid sister’s beloved plushy pets. To her, these things were like a pet that didn’t make noise and needed very little care, and yet somehow she loved them like they were living creatures, at least until middle school.
I think that’s what intrigues me about this series, the fact that some people will have a visceral reaction to seeing plushies treated this way, coupled with the fact that it will evoke childhood memories from the same and others, makes this series a study in surreal nostalgia, which is how I felt when I was a kid. How about you?
In an exercise to prove how easy it is to build a camera, photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath has built a twin-lens reflex camera out of LEGO bricks and a pair of binoculars. Here’s how it was done:
While the body is made up of LEGO bricks, the camera’s lens came from an old pair of binoculars.
For the viewfinder, Salicath has used a mirror and a matte ground glass and as for the shutter and aperture, he built plates (single technic-pieces).
Lastly, Salicath employed brackets and rods from a technic kit to build the film chamber that also has a rewind mechanism.
Salicath has included instructions on how to build one for yourself (LINK), you know, in case Ebay is down and you need a twin-lens reflex camera for a photo shoot that afternoon.
This is perfect for a post-apocalyptic photographer who is stuck with a box of LEGO bricks, some binoculars, and a ton of 120 film. For the rest of us, it’s probably cheaper and easier to just pick up an old used reflex camera at this point, but if you’re the type that enjoys LEGO AND a challenge, then have fun building and let us know how it turns out!
Link –via DesignTAXI
redditor techagent spotted this scene at his/her university today. The owner is prudent. Lock up your ride so you don’t end up having to walk all the way back to the dorm.
Want to show the Pokemon obsessed love of your life how you feel? Then play them this video by YouTuber HelloIamDanica and watch them swoon. Or, better yet, memorize this song for yourself (lyrics posted at YouTube link), serenade them like a good little Jigglypuff and they’ll be yours forever. Human sized Pokeball not included.
–via Dorkly
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