We're very excited to announce a new collaboration with Boing Boing, one of the largest and neatest blogs in the world and an on-going source of inspiration for Neatorama. Boing Boing, which started as a zine in 1988 by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair, became a blog in 2000. Since then, three more regular authors joined the team: Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. From its beginning, Boing Boing has chronicled all sorts of strange, beautiful, and interesting things on the Web. It's an honor to cover our pal Boing Boing and feature a weekly digest of the interesting posts from the world's best blog. So, without further ado, here are some of the "neatest" posts on Boing Boing for the last 7 days (Note: Link in bolded title are to Boing Boing's posts):
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Doo Sung Yoo's Robotic Cow Tongues Artist Doo Sung Yoo's artwork, titled "lie," involves putting together some cybernetic cow tongues that flail about aimlessly. Link (click on the picture to see the .m4v video) If you think that's strange, he also made a robotic pig stomach, titled "indigestion." Link |
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Ceramic "Replacement" Head for the Decapitated At a dig in La Tiza, Peru, archaeologists found decapitated skeleton with a ceramic jar in lieu of a head! The archaeologist also noted that the head jar is painted with the reversible image of a human face that can be seen right-side up or upside down, suggesting that the jar might have been meant as a substitute for the victim's missing head. "The La Tiza head jar was a rather literal replacement and reflects the Nasca belief that a person needed to have a head when he entered the afterlife," Conlee said.
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(Photo:Alexander Zaitchik) |
Lost Arcade Games of the Soviet Union Four students at the Moscow State Technical University started a labor of love: restoring old and forgotten arcade games of the Soviet Union. From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of "entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities."
Wired has the story: Link |
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Steam Trek: Steampunk Star Trek (with lots of steampunk links referenced in the post) Here's a fantastic steampunk Star Trek parody, called "Steam Trek," made in 1994 by the Ad Hoc Film Society and directed by Dennis Sisterson. Link [YouTube]| The "making of" blog: Link |
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Yarr! Depp Not Photogenic in Pirate Cookie First it was Tweety and Bugs Bunny popsicles that don't look like their characters, now the mavericks at Boing Boing are crusading against ... bad cookies! Like this one: a Pirate cookie that doesn't look like Johnny Depp. Link |
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Do The Right Thing with Sesame Street Toys This is what the Internet is for: a parody of Do The Right Thing [wiki], Spike Lee's 1989 movie, made with Fisher-Price Sesame Street toys. Link [YouTube] |
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Goatse London 2012 Olympics Logo After people were shocked by the horrible, universally panned, and even epilepsy-inducing London 2012 Olympics logo was revealed, BBC held a contest where users can submit their own creation. Someone snuck this one in, a (hence yanked) goatse-inspired London 2012 Olympics Logo: Link |
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Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Not about Censorship Everything you've learned in high school about Fahrenheit 451 was wrong, according to its author Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship. Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
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Creepy Toddler Robot This creepy robot, called CB2 (Child-Robot with Biometric Body), is designed to emulate the physical abilities of a 2-year-old toddler. A really, really creepy toddler. If you guess "Japan" - you'd be right! Link (with YouTube video goodness) |
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How to Kiss Passionately Here's a step by step guide on how to kiss someone passionately, courtesy of VideoJug. Like how to French Kiss: Step 5, Advanced Techniques: French Kissing. This style of kissing is not invented by the French, although they're probably quite good at it. [...] It's perhaps best described by what you should not do: You should try to avoid swirling your tongue aggressively like an electric eel caught in a fishing net. But equally you shouldn't let your entire tongue go completely limp ...
Sadly, many of you geeks probably won't have the chance to put it into practice. Link [VideoJug] |
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DIY Aliens Pulse Rifle No girlfriend? No one to kiss? Then maybe you can hunt one down by making your very own M41-A Pulse Rifle like in the movie Aliens. Anyhow, You'll probably have the time to make one: Link |
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Speed Racer's Mach 5 Car They're making a live-action version of Japanese anime Speed Racer (by the Wachowski bros. of the Matrix-fame), and USA Today has got a pic of the car. Link |
| 3-Year-Old Kid Solves Rubik's Cube in <2 Min! This Chinese girl is just 3 years old, and she can already kick my butt in solving a Rubik's cube! This video shows her solving the darned thing in under 2 minutes. Link [YouTube] |
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Eccentric Genius Artwork Kaden Harris of Eccentric Genius creates "unconventional contrivances for the home and office." Like, for example, a desktop catapult, trebuchet, guillotine. Some are so strange they're indescribable. Like this thing shown on the left, called "The P'gaackan Discombobulator." What is it? Who knows! It's fantastic nonetheless. Link |
For more of the web's best links, definitely check out the world's best blog: Boing Boing. |
While they have some overlap, they have very different feels.
As a loyal reader, I'd like to throw my vote in for keeping the two sites separate.
In regards to duplicate content raised by Jack Hynes and Ashley: I read Boing Boing daily (their website, not RSS). There's actually very little overlap between the two blogs on a daily basis, but that's a tangent. Anyway, when I did this post, I realized that there were a lot of good posts that I missed!
The Boing Boing gang do a great job of posting a wide variety of subjects, and it's easy to skip noteworthy posts simply due to the sheer amount of volume. This is a chance to catch up on some of the lighter side of Boing Boing.
In response to Greg: A large amount of Neatorama's posts are derived from via sources and suggestions - technically, this post is no different. It's a collection of links via Boing Boing.
I like doing collaborations - for example, Neatorama has a long-standing collaboration with mental_floss and a newer one with Bathroom Reader. In both of these collaborations, Neatorama feature articles that had already been published by these two companies. So, they're duplicative in nature - but our readers seem to like them very much.
Certainly no one is forcing you to read any of these blogs - and if you don't like the post, you certainly are welcome to skip it (or complain about it, I suppose.)
About RSS reader (aside): I don't know how you guys do it - I tried reading blogs from an RSS reader, but got overwhelmed by the process. Maybe I'm old school, but I like to bookmark a lot of blogs (and organize 'em according to topics). To visit these blogs, I "tab" open ten, twenty of them at once in Firefox.
Finally, I'd like to thank Neatorama's loyal readers for reading the blog - you guys rock!
SIDE NOTE: I am a different Jason then 7