Cures for Late-night Boredom

For some reason, I was very restless last night.

Couldn't go to bed.

So I stayed up a bit later than usual on the Webs.

Way past when all the folks who feed my RSS feed blogs went to bed.

It was quiet.

So I had to get off my usual well-worn paths and strike out.

So I ended up stumbling in and out of the late night Web-bars.

Figures on Stage

Blogger Play - (streaming photo website) - Blogger Play is a very clever website that appeals to the web voyeur in us all.  It is simple. It is pure and it is captivating.  Blogger collects all the images that are being uploaded to their Blogger Blogs and streams them against a zen-like black interface.  No captions, no words.  Just a stream of images.  I never ran into any NSFW images, but I suppose it could be possible.  I assume that Google is doing some filtering using their image-search filter algo's.  

I found that if I set the speed down just a tad, I started making up stories to go along with them. Growing up, dad was a (very good) amateur photographer and captured 90% of his photography work in slide format.  We kids and the parent's social friends would often get treated to the slide-projector carousel's "ca-chunk" for slide-shows that might feature family, nature, or cultural perspectives (pictures of Vietnam taken during dad's tour overseas there).

So with my mind semi-numb from fatigue, I caught myself staring at the random stream of images; here we were at the diner.  There was this cool lizard there.  There was grandma at her party.  That's Marge's favorite fashion bag.  This is the dam we drove over.  Stuff like that.

Dinosaur comics - (webcomic) - No clue how I ended up here.  Oh, yes.  Via rogueclassicism. Anyway.  It appears the format of this six-panel comic strip never changes.  The frames are always the same.  However the content is pretty clever and (at times) filled with biting satire or social commentary.  Sometimes the strip bombs bad. Other times it really strikes a nerve.  Sample strips: unpopular life goals, t-rex: bread, i should get some friggin' groceries!, i will call it, "sherlock holmes and the case of the mummy's curse!"

Created by the mad-genius: Ryan North.

Vera Brosgol's VeraBee - (graphic artist page) - Jumped here from Ryan's link page. According to Vera's bio, she came to the States from Russia and got into the animation and art scene.  Lots of good work here.  I really like the bold retro-feel of her pieces.  Flirty and full of emotion, but never vulgar or trite.  Good stuff!

Jim's FAIL Bar

Jim Thompson's recent blog-post "FAIL." really seems to (sorry about this) really hit it on the head.  Here I am stressed out a bit about this big project I'm leading (but not in control of) and struggling with feelings of inadequacy and failure.  Then he comes along and shows me there are a lot more losers and fail'ers than I have realized.   Puts the whole thing into perspective, in a Good Way™.

Anyway, his post links to the site The FAIL Blog which has great photos of event-failures with cheesy "FAIL" captions.  Kinda like I Can Has Cheezburger? but without as many cats.

That led me to the DOING IT WRONG blog and the Shipment of Fail. Two more sites that show failure on the grand and humorous-scale.

By-far cheaper than a therapist for folks with failure-issues.

YouTube Tavern

YouTube - Mindstorms Autofabrik - Dude(s) built an automated Lego-car factory using the Mindstorms components.  Really slow-paced seven-minute production (will put your cat to sleep) but very cool for Lego fans. At least once.

YouTube - Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion - Dudes use stop-motion to film the building of a Lego Star Wars ship.  Not very clever in-of-itself.  However, catch all the details in how the pieces are handled as the come in for placement on the project.  Lots of little gems make the whole a fun video.

I'm a big fan of the web-comic MegaTokyo.  So imagine my surprise in finding some fan-made animations of the MegaTokyo gang.

YouTube - "Megatokyo: The Animation" Trailer Version 1 - Not a bad summary of what MegaTokyo is all about.

YouTube - Largovision - Fun video animation production of the world from Largo's viewpoint.  Wouldn't have been nearly as good without the l33t soundtrack from Therion.  Got to go get me the album on iTunes if available.

(More on Therion: Therion (band) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Metal, classical themes, and choirs.  What's not to like? Don't get it?  Maybe this will help; they are Sweeds.  Enough said.

The Geek Diner

After checking out the cool Therion tattoo I drew on myself at 2 am, I figured I better start to come down from the site-hopping and drop into the geek diner for some Joe to settle me down.

DemoGirl - DemoGirl is Molly McDonald.  She has figured out the cleverness of using screencasts to "demo" products and techniques related to technology and computing; others have done this already, but she does it pretty well.  Nothing 'earthshattering" but the screencasts are short and concise and do seem to provide a good overview of the topic at hand.  Samples: Tour of Firefox 3 Beta 2, Beautify your Firefox with Personas, Thoof - Cool service, but I don’t get your name.

Au | Geekdad from Wired.com - Neat photo of actual gold atoms.  How cool is that?  I remember being in high-school and seeing some fuzzy nebula-looking pictures that were supposedly the first images from the atomic level.  I thought, "so what?"  Now, I think "How cool is that!"

Related: The Sietch Blog » Wanna See What Gold Atoms Look Like?

At this point of the night, everything seems to be taking on a weird glow.  My eyes are failing me.

Oh!   Never-mind.  I'm on HDRwalls.com  This website has quality High Dynamic Range wallpapers for Macs, Windows, and mobile devices. With almost 500 images, it really introduces you into the beauty of the HDR styled images.  Good stuff.  What's cool is that if you find one you like, you can select the screen size (from mega-monitor down to mobile-phone screen size) and download it.

Repent! The Morning Comes

So now it is Sunday.  I better clean up my late-night wanderings.

Time to go to church: The Brick Testament

Some may find it irreverent, but it does have a message that cannot be overlooked.

I feel better.

Time for bed, little mouse.

--Claus