Ridiculously bad ad

Ridiculously bad ad, originally uploaded by sangsara.

In Tokyo? Otaku march tomorrow!

Are you ready for the Akihabara Liberation Demonstration June 30th? - JapanSugoi This is truly amazing. A coalition of Otakus from 3 hilariously named groups will be marching through Akiba tomorrow (1.5km) to reclaim the territory that is rightfully theirs. All walls between the disparate disciplines of cosplay, manga, computer geekery, and flat-out weirdness will be torn down for this historic event. Check out the pictures!

WOTID: Penguins

And thus begins a new, and possibly-shortlived chapter of this blog. A new daily post entitled, Word on the Internet of the Day (Wotid). It lends itself very well to funny Cockney accents. Without further ado, Wotid is today is Penguins.

Afro Samurai DVD

Afro Samurai DVD, originally uploaded by sangsara.

Pirated DVD with blurb for another movie, Ghost in the Shell:Innocence.

Makes fantastic claims of "Final Fighting!!!" and implies entertainment AND resonance, unlike Innocence.

Charlie Brooker at Glastonbury

'Oh good, it's raining again' | Glastonbury 2007 | Guardian Unlimited Music

Here's an entirely random list of things I hate. Mud. Rain. Inconvenience. Any form of discomfort whatsoever. Loud noises. People. People's friends. People standing next to other people, with yet more people in between. Drunks bumping into you and being sick down your leg. Poorly maintained public toilets. Camping.You'll find all these things and more at the Glastonbury festival, which is why it has always struck me as heck on earth.

A man after my own heart! If you think it sounds like fun, then the next paragraph should discourage you from ever trying to get me to go someday after we save up enough money, maybe next year, maybe just before we get married and have kids - the answer now and forever, is NO.

On top of that, I'd heard my share of off-putting Glastonbury myths. Tents bobbing in a mud-slide. Widespread trench foot. A man on ketamine eating his own hand. One of my friends swore blind she knew a man who'd been sitting in a Portaloo when some passing japester decided to tip it over, door side down, leaving him trapped inside a coffin full of foaming crap for 15 horrifying minutes; it went in his eyes and mouth. He got dysentery.

Charlie Brooker on Facebook

The Guardian's funniest columnist has joined Facebook, despite being bad with people and small talk. I think just about every major news outlet now (The Straits Times included, oh my) has covered Facebook in a major feature section.

Afterwards my friend asked how the party had gone. I complained that the key to small talk had merely opened a door on a world of tedium. "Well, duh," they said. "No one really cares what anyone else is getting up to. Why do you think it's called small talk? It's just shit you say to make things less awkward." What, just a pointless noise you make with your mouth? "Precisely," they said. "Cows moo. People small-talk." And I thought: I hate this world. This stinking, unbearable world.

Link

Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: Coin-Op Aerobics

Any article with "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" in it, you can be sure I'll link. Wired has a photo and mini-story on the new konbini fitness fad. Which is taking the ubiquitous locations of convenience stores and adding them to the ADD bursts of videogame arcades for a new kind of urban gym. Users pay ¥500 (SGD$6.20) to exercise for 10 minutes on a new kind of balance-challenge workout machine that lets you do aerobic activity without breaking a sweat. Awesome. Link

Start planning your Geek Vacations

Wired: The Best Geek Vacations Most of these, I can get behind. Tokyo at #1, with the Sega Joypolis and Ghibli Museum. Chernobyl, ehhh.... I'll pass.

Would you?

Slashdot | When Does Technolust Become An Addiction? Would you give up the use of a mobile phone (for life), for £1 million? Apparently 1 in 3 young Britons wouldn't. Wow. I think I grossly underestimated the technophilia of the English. When I was there, people were happy to live without the internet for weeks on end. Some *gasp* didn't even have email addresses. This was around the same time that the Koreans declared "email is for old people." Surprisingly, I think I'd take up that offer, depending on what the definition of mobile telephone was. Would an internet tablet count?

DS to be in 89% of Jap homes

Handheld console market maturing A report from Screen Digest projects 89% penetration of Nintendo's DS portable console system by 2011. By comparison. the Game Boy Advance (probably the most popular handheld ever) maxed out at 56%. Japanese people of all ages have stopped seeing the DS as a game machine, removing barriers to adoption. Right now, it's an electronic cookbook, a web browser, a brain stimulator, a pet, an English teacher, and so on. Come on, Nintendo, make us a phone already.

Macs getting GameTap Lite

Apple GameTap 'Lite' launches June 28, Intel Macs only - Joystiq Get ready to tap your Mac's ass, because GameTap's free ad-supported games are coming June 28th! Premium paid version to follow later this year.

Fancy a long meandering post about food?

Fancy a Chindian?* [guardian.co.uk] Imagine a parallel universe where everybody drives Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis. Although this sounds like the set up for a bad Mercedes-Benz ad, what car do they upgrade to when they finally arrive in the world? Or a nation of people who use Macintosh computers exclusively. Everyone uses a Mac. Everyone dresses in jeans and loose winter-toned fabrics. Just imagine. Wow, excuse me a minute while I change my underwear. Yes, so everyone there uses a Mac. Who should be cast in the ads when Macs are finally surpassed by a new type of computer? What does this hero look like? How much more self-important and pretentious can an actor be? The reason for that long preamble was to prepare you for the mindblowing concept that follows. Somewhere in this world, there is a country where the people eat a certain kind of inferior food, day-in and day-out. Friends, the majority of us are already living in the equivalents of FerrariTown and MacVille. Consider that for a moment. We are quite blessed, compared to this land of people who consume the culinary cousins of Skodas, Yugos, Hyundais, Dells, and generic beige box computers running Windows ME. This country is England. And occasionally its poor inhabitants dine upon foreign foods that have been soaked in the mire of traditional British cooking, removing them far from the original designs. I present to you an article from a British newspaper, written from the point of view of someone laughably titled a "Food Critic". It explores what people in utopian countries such as China and India (seriously though, there's a joke if ever I heard one) eat when they want something exotic. * "Yes, please. Preferably young and attractive," is not an appropriate answer.

Yahoo! Go beta imminent

Yahoo! Go. The Internet to go. I rarely get excited about Yahoo! products, but this Friday will see the release of a new Yahoo! Go beta, including a version localized for Singapore. One has to admit that Yahoo! seems a great deal more committed to localization here than Google. Their movie times service is one example, and I'm not sure, but I think their Maps are far more usable than Google Maps in a local context. Hopefully, Friday's version will be the long awaited Java MIDP2 version, compatible with most modern phones including my Sony Ericsson K800. See the demo at the website linked above. Very promising. Location Awareness means you can get listings of businesses and services in your city, as well as advanced access to Flickr, news, weather services, etc. all in one custom app. I currently use their Mobile site when I need these things, but nothing beats a fast local client. Geek out.

Opera Mini Dimension

The long-awaited beta of Opera Mini 4 (aka Dimension) has finally been released. It's fantastic, and the best reason to get a data plan (until next Friday, if you live in the US near AT&T coverage). Here are some points that stand out, because reading my site is so much better than checking out the official one: • Full-screen view with zoom. This is similar to what the Nokia Webkit browsers (N series) do, and what Opera Mobile does on Symbian/PocketPC. The difference is that you get the awesome speed of Mini's server-side compression/optimization. Effect: Extremely fast web browsing with spacious views. No more single-column claustrophobia. This is what the iPhone will feel and look like, only without the touchscreen. But you can have it today. • Better scrolling/movement. Something Opera Mini has needed for ages! Like many Sony Ericsson phones, mine has a joystick that get clogged with dust and fails to respond correctly most of the time. Putting heavy-duty actions like scrolling onto hardware buttons is a wise move. It also locks all content into invisible columns so that zooming in and scrolling produces nicely aligned text/images. It's invisible genius magic. Effect: A great mobile browsing experience like no built-in software can provide. • Rewritten code base, from the ground up. The whole damned thing is 91kb and feels more buttery than the latest Firefox/Safari builds. When devs have time to code eye candy, you know the underlying product is solid. Unless said devs work for Microsoft.

Bad 7-11 ad

Bad 7-11 ad, originally uploaded by Freebusman.

This cannot be a mistake.

At Play!

At Play!, originally uploaded by sangsara.

What's Up Tiger Lily

I've mentioned this early Woody Allen movie before, here and here, but not in great detail. As I am short of time now, I won't do it here either. But here's the wikipedia entry for this great film.

What's Up, Tiger Lily? is the first film directed by Woody Allen. He also wrote and appeared in this 1966 comedy, which utilized clips from Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (literal English title: International Secret Police: Key of Keys, 1965, [1]), a Japanese spy film. Instead of translating the film, Allen added completely original dialogue that had nothing to do with the plot of the original Japanese film. By putting in new scenes and rearranging the order of existing scenes, he completely changed the tone of the film from a James Bond clone into a comedy about a secret egg salad recipe.

Here are some related egg salad recipes. If anyone would like to see this movie, there's a link on my FaceBook. =D

Fordmodels.tv

Lauren's sexy bikinis: Ford Models has started a website/YouTube channel. If the above is any indication of what they'll produce, I'm subscribing to every feed they've got. And there's something for everyone! Here, a hairstylist tells you sisters how to update your ponytail for the 07. Chckt! How to: Make a simple ponytail modern:

Adventure gaming shall be reborn on DS/Wii

Adventure game Secret Files: Tunguska coming to Wii, DS - Joystiq The latest adventure game to hit 2/3 of Nintendo's Pillars of Power is the strangely named Secret Files: Tunguska. It looks plenty awesome though. There's a PC version out now, but I think I'll wait. Screenshots

I just find this comment very funny.

Other Leopard Features

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Accessibility Lost in all the hoopla, are a couple of other important new features that will be in Leopard. Above, is a link to experiencing a very nice one. A new Text-to-Speech voice named Alex, that sounds very natural. Another is that Photo Booth can now record video and do all the cool backdrop effects seen in iChat. The DVD Player now has full-screen controls, and a time slider at long last. Front Row works and looks like Apple TV. One 'feature' I'm not happy about though, is the non-inclusion of a new blue Aqua wallpaper image. You don't fuck with tradition. The green grass used during the keynote looked very Vista to me. And Steve claimed nobody uses the blue wallpaper for long, they like to put their own digital photos up. In my own experience, no matter what I change the wallpaper to, I always come back to the blue Aqua gradients. Because they work, are soothing, and don't distract the eye from anything else on the desktop. If any delicious generation developers can code a shareware app to randomly create those Aqua-style wallpapers, they've got my $15.

Man plays Bohemian Rhapsody with his hands

Attention people. This is art.

MSN Trouble with Gizmo Project

Gizmo Project now allows voice chat with MSN contacts over the Mac client (something Microsoft's own Mac MSN does not do). In trying it out last night with Stuart, I had it add my entire MSN contact list (recommended option). Bad move. Deleting contacts from the Gizmo contact list also deletes them from your MSN contacts! So I have added everyone to my new MSN again, for the 2nd time in a week. Sorry about that. Don't dismiss the request it because it was already done once. Thanks.

EDIT: Gizmo also blocked everyone on my list! I had to manually unblock each person. Whatever you do, don't let Gizmo do a full import of your MSN list. It borks everything.

Safari 3 beta

Nevermind that it's out for Windows too... Holy mother of God, the Mac Safari 3 beta is working perfectly on Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google Docs pages. It now has an inline Find, just like Firefox. And I am very, very tempted to move back.

Tokyo Street Style

HARAJUKU | Tokyo Street Style - Japanese Street Fashion Site STYLE ARENA - A great resource for Japanese street fashion shots, covering Harajuku, Shibuya, Omotesando, Daikanyama, Ginza, and maybe a few other painfully hip districts. The above link is for the Harajuku page. When I was in Japan, my lack of personal style and fashion sense became painfully apparent. Nobody just goes out in Tokyo. Everyone is accessorized, layerized, their hair has been done, stuff has been pierced and painted and encrusted with crystals, things hang from every catch on their bags, cellphones, zippers. And every combination looks jarring to the unaccustomed eye at first sight. But I suppose that's what fashion is. Ridiculous as it may be (and sound coming from me, after greater heads have long decided), I think Japanese street fashion is onto something.

PhotoSynth OMG

(Edited) One of the most amazing photo processing apps I've ever seen. Takes the premise of intelligent tools like AutoStitch and amps them a thousandfold. It's being done at Microsoft now, but I think the presenter said that the technology was acquired along with a company. Essentially, PhotoSynth grabs all the pictures of a given area, and recreates the 3D space by comparing data. The dataset shown in the video is Notre Dame cathedral made entirely from tourist photos found on flickr. Using the power of crowds to document something, the power of the web to aggregate the data, and technology to assemble them. In the process it creates a richer metadata context, automatically determining relationships. Edit: Turns out it was announced last year, and small video demos have been available for awhile now. The video above came from this year's TED conference in March. I found it via Slashdot today, and the BBC has plans to use the technology in a new documentary on How We Built Britain. Of equal interest is the SeaDragon image scaling technology behind PhotoSynth. You can see it in action before the PhotoSynth demo in the video above. Straight out of an SF movie! This is Microsoft's corporate video of PhotoSynth. Also demos what it's capable of: Edit 2: This is the best video yet. A 2006 demo of the original Photo Tourism technology from the University of Washington. The system is already very mature, and you get a lot of jaw-dropping moments from the 3 or 4 environments presented.

Camino 1.5

Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style. The new version is out, and I think I'm ready to leave the imperfection and GUI irregularity that is Mac Firefox once and for all. I'd initially switched over from Safari to have compatibility with Google Apps and Blogger, but now with almost complete feature parity* (RSS, Tab Session Restore, Spell-Check), Camino looks ready for the big time. *Apart from Add-Ons, of course. But I hardly use any.

The Oolong tea diet

Oolong tea can help you lose weight - Slashfood I said it last week, and now here's more proof.

Lunch

Lunch, originally uploaded by sangsara.

A new sandwich shop has opened in my office building. These fat ones cost only 2.50 each. Bacon and tuna if you were wondering. I guess i'm pretty happy to have something new to eat.

Times Square Subway Dancer Kicks Baby

A breakdancing accident that I somehow missed until Joystiq posted a remix today. It's big on YouTube, with quite a few remixes. Here's the original: Here's the Street Fighter 2 one from Joystiq: And this one might be the best of all, for sheer impact:

Indian "Thriller" - Girly Man

With awesome English subs! They ripped off Michael Jackson's Thriller concept, added dance moves from Beat It, and improved the lyrics a thousandfold.

RADAR!

Share mobile photos with Radar [cNet Crave] Yahoo! Tech blog thoughts on Radar I'm extremely excited about Radar, having just uploaded my first photo. It's like a visual twitter, and only for your friends. So it's like flickr + your friends + TV. Every day as you go about your business and take cameraphone photos of interesting things, you send them to Radar. And when you've got a bunch of friends doing that, you can see what everyone's days have been like. It's a continuous photostream of the recent past, in theory. I can only think of one friend with an unlimited mobile data plan, but hopefully more will play along. The days are long boring. I need my friendflickrTV. There's a custom app I'm about to download, but it will work even without it. You can see thumbnails of all your contacts' photos through a page on your phone browser, or you can see them from a browser on a regular PC. The difference between Radar and flickr (that I can discern), is that Radar is strictly for friends. And it has an official Facebook app for integration (flickr hasn't done it yet). Facebook, of course, is how I found Radar in the first place.

Facebook gadget on iGoogle page

Facebook gadget on iGoogle page, originally uploaded by sangsara.

I love the open widget/gadget platforms that Google and Facebook have going. It makes everything interoperable and keeps me very happy. Now I can have stuff all over the place, and integrate them on a small handful of frequently visited sites. Like my iGoogle start page. It prevents me from forgetting to check in, and keeps everyone in view.

How Britain is Eating Its Young

Adbusters : The Magazine - #71 Beginnings of Sorrow / Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young

On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed. Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.

Well worth reading today. Although we may not have the violence, we have here ourselves a burgeoning case of social stratification and consumerist despair. The article states most UK youth are statistically unable to afford a house of their own (and start their families) until the age of 34. Hey, that sounds familiar. [via pumpkineyes]

Indian Thriller - Girly Man (English Lyrics)

As if this weren't funny enough, the English "lyrics" subtitled underneath send it over the edge!

Movie Meme 134/239

Long pointless post ahead. This is the text that comes with it, and since I refuse to sign up for facebook, this blog is where I'm gonna dump it.

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 films, you have no life. Mark the ones you've seen. There are 239 films on this list. Copy this list, go to your own facebook account, paste this as a note. Then, put x's next to the films you've seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click post at the bottom. Have fun.

I've moved it (and myself) to Facebook!

Google Trends does yet not list Allison Stokke

This is Allison Stokke, high-school polevault champion, and new face of Sports Hotness. The story of her 'unwelcome' status as an "internet sex symbol" has now hit the mainstream media. And here. Link to more high-res photos over at WithLeather.com.