As the colonial hold of the great powers began to fade and the region witnessed a wave of Arab nationalism, which shifted Syria through a succession of military coups. However, in 1970, Hafez al-Assad, an ambitious minister of defence, seized control. Rising from a humble background in western Syria, he was to rule the country for 30 years.

His was an autocratic one-party state in which any dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. Following the death of Hafez in 2000, the father was succeeded by his son – Bashar al-Assad took the reins and a dynasty was born.

Shit, all I see are people who are electronically dependant,

they all wear their Facebook profiles like a religious pendant.

It’s like watching a fiction of a fiction,

Life seems to have lost all it’s friction,

just a bunch of contradictions formed by competition,

made from petty perceptions, all designed for misdirection.

Bombings, sport cars, money and bitches make you play the game,

but in the end were all fated to be the same.

fallen in a grave six feet under,

mannequin tears hit your tombstone like thunder-

It all seems like a pointless blunder.

We’re all shocked when there’s no payoff when we thought we made it,

instead we watch as one by one our family and love ones get cremated.

All that is left is just yourself, and even you, yes you, will become abbreviated.

Everyone will go on with a double-think, knowing the lies we hear will never be stated.

So don’t be blind to the truth, hope these eyes of mine don’t be shaded.

I’m just going to be the D-bone rolling that Sisypherian stone,

just another happy mutt chasing the bone.

All his works are truly eye popping, but his morning due series is the most captivating. Chambon has the created a morning ritual out of his works, waking up nice and early when the due is still fresh on the world and stalking his insect subjects as they perch their glowing marble beaded bodies on flowers or leaves.

David uses a Canon EOS-1D Mark III for most of his shots at around 252mm, and uses a Tamron 180mm macro lens paired with a 1.4x teleconverter to get those magic shots.

Chambon is from Lyon, France, but now currently resides in the beautiful town of Dampierre-les-Bois, situated the eastern region of France. If you’re craving more of his wondrous photo’s you can see more here!

Paige’s artistic life most likely began in the void before she was born, perhaps she was sculpting the stars but for what ever reason decided to be birthed onto our lovely little planet in the calm beach town of Carmel, California. By the age of nine she knew she’d had a calling for art, it was her gift to which she wanted to further. Bradley was immensely fascinated with the human figure and believed it to be a suitable canvas to carve the emotional undertones of life, which anyone can translate and understand.

I particularly enjoy how she utilises the abstraction of fabrics, as Huxley said in his book The Doors of Perception, “When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational – the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go…Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist.” For every tight pull, untortured fold and blissfully flowing piece of sculpted fabric Paige creates a muted passage describing what she’s trying to portray, mix that in with the highly expressional  human figure and you get a super nova of raw significance- utterly breathtaking.

 By the time she turned ten, she was already honing in her skills as a proficient artist by sculpting nude models, and by the time she turned fifteen she was jumping from one university campus to another acquiring as much knowledge for her craft as humanly possible- this allowed her to cast her first bronze sculpture by the time she turned seventeen! That folks is what you call ambition and a love for your job. She was later accepted into Pepperdine University but then went off on a Uni study program to Florence, Italy a city with one of the richest artistic heritage’s on the planet. There she took classes at the Florence Academy of Art, which included a course in Art History (couldn’t have picked a better place to do that subject). She continued along with her education at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied sculpture and learned how to paint and print using several different mediums.

Paige has gathered much prominence over the past two decades, opening many solo and group exhibitions around the world some of which include: Ode to Art in Singapore (2010); Panter & Hall Fine Art Exhibition, Lloyds Club in London (2012); 98th Annual Exhibition, Allied Artists of America, New York, NY (2011) and much, much more. She has been voted into acclaimed artistic clubs such as the National Sculpture Society, the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club and The Salmagundi Club as a professional sculptor and has won numerous awards, which is a given if you had the talent she does.

She currently lives in London, working tirelessly to serve the public some of the best the sculpting world has to offer. If you dig her works and wish to see more of this brilliance, go ahead and click on this link: http://paigebradley.com/index.html

It’s not everyday you can see footage of another planet, yet alone a rovers hasty approach toward alien terrain but today you can! It took four laborious weeks for Bard Canning to turn the original 4 frames per second Curiosity decent into an ultra-resolution, smooth-motion, detail-enhanced, color-corrected, 30 frames per second video. This is real-time film, which shows the actual velocity that Curiosity had while plunging towards the martian surface. Mr Canning says it was out of love he did this but is looking for donations if you have the heart to spare some cash! You can donate here http://goo.gl/rmnqv.

It’s no stroboscopic light levitation effect at play here or a wizards trick, although in the past it would be considered as such. This is actually the result of two sound waves, shot from speakers parallel from each other, causing the waves to perfectly interfere with one another creating a phenomenon known as a standing wave. No, you silly person, not like the ones you see in sporting stadiums.

At various points on a standing wave, known as nodes (you can see them above as a red dots) there is no net transfer of energy- simply meaning, there are two forces simultaneously pushing and pulling, creating neutrality at these points. This is caused from the acoustic pressure from the sound waves, which are sufficient enough to cancel the pull of gravity, allowing light objects to float when placed at the node.

Whats the point of all of this though? Well, I was hoping the answer would be anti gravity chambers you can play in, the future in bouncy castle development. However, as cool as that would be science is a little more serious and focuses more on saving lives first then goofy fun later. Currently these machines are used for pharmaceutical advancements in making more efficient digestive pills.

Apparently at a molecular level “pharmaceutical structures” can be placed in two categories: amorphous or crystalline. The amorphous category of drugs are typically more effective at being absorbed by the body, unlike the crystalline forms. This is because amorphous drugs can dissolve much more rapidly and have a higher chance of triggering a reaction (bioavailability), which means lower doses can be administered to produce the desired effect.

How levitation ties into this hot drug filled mess is through the formation of amorphous states, which aren’t easy to attain. While transforming a pharmaceutical solution into the amorphous form, if the solution evaporates while in contact with a vessel it is more likely to turn into a crystalline structure- almost as if it wants to be crystalline. To solve this problem scientists have gotten rid of the vessel completely and just caused the solution to levitate. The technology, was originally designed by NASA to simulate microgravity environments, but was later adapted for this purpose. So thank you Mr and Ms Scientist for these zany contraptions to keep us heathy, but now I think its time to find out ways to apply anti gravity in daily life- make me float god dammit, Redbull isn’t giving me wings!

I did a little more digging up on the subject and found out that this fishy group has been installing a bunch of goldfish tanks in the form of phone booths around the streets of Osaka. No one seems to understand why they are doing this, but it is known that the group debuted their contraptions in an art festival sometime in 2011.

I am sure of this though, Japanese people take their fish very seriously, they enjoy eating them and they enjoy worshiping them as some sort of ancestral spirit. The goldfish are in a way an icon in the country, making these tanks a sort of “relic” for those who pass on by as well as a very cool living art installation.

In spite of that, spectators have been showing some animosity towards the art pieces, saying it’s inhumane (haha, don’t these guys hunt dolphins and whales?) as the fish are stuck in between what seems to be two panes of glass, making for an artfully cruel, functional phone booth- these rumours have been dismissed, as the group released a few making-of images, which show that the booth is a working fish tank. If you can read Japanese and want to give me more information or just want to see additional images, go here.

I love Daft Punk and anyone who is a fan should give this anime a serious watch since it’s a collection of cartoon clips from their album Discovery which has some classic DP tunes. On a side note, I found this because for some bizarre reason I had a nonfigurative flashback of viewing this as a child. I remember breaking a household law (something called bedtime) to watch an episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog. 

I snuck past my parents and my siblings like a ninja and crawled downstairs to the basement and silently turned on the TV; needless to say I never got around to watching my show because this badassery was the first thing that popped up on the screen- glad it was because it introduced me to two things: good music and Japanese anime. So i suppose this is a tribute to that moment in time, I hope it touches your child heart like it did mine, so many years ago and still again today.

Mr Witte was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1964 and graduated from the Bielefeld School of Photography; afterwards, he became an assistant for numerous renowned photographers, learning the master trade of picture taking. After gaining much experience on various camera techniques, he decided it was about time to walk down the path of a freelance photographer.

Fully sprouting his wings in 1989, he bought his first studio and began working on what he has become known for: the aesthetics of the female body, the erotic play of shadow and light, revealing the stripped sensual nature of womanly beauty. He has earned the title amongst photography-circles as the “venerable priest of beauty.”

It’s quite astonishing how Mr Witte artfully captures nudes, even though his subject is completely unclothed it’s as if his skill with the camera covers the models with a secret veil, which masterfully makes his pictures echelons higher than pornographic smut. It’s not even about the body of the ladies but the way he captures the face; It’s the strange childlike innocence (or is purity the right word?)that emanates from their faces that really intrigues me.

Carsten has opened numerous exhibitions around the word, some of which include: MAK Vienna, Stilwerk Hamburg, Galerie Holbein Hannover and the Metro Gallery in Melbourne.

If Carstens works excite your mind enough, you can run along and have a look at his many stunning shots  here.

In this intriguing documentary, philosopher Roger Scruton argues that 20th century art, architecture and music have shunned beauty and have instead made a cult out of ugliness, which Scruton says will lead humanity towards a complete spiritual wasteland. He will try to prove the importance of beauty in the arts and in our own lives using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart. He reveals where art when wrong and his own solutions for restoring beauty to the throne of civilisation.

McBride Charles Ryans is the Melbourne based architectural firm whose innovations have lead to many critically acclaimed building projects, the Cloud being one of them. Mcbride has designed the house in three portions, all of which subtly prepare you for the next as you move through the spine of the property (a long hallway that shoots through the house).

The first stage is the initial entrance way, which still holds onto a modest facade of the Edwardian home, a sign of respect by the owners for surrounding neighbourhood, which still retains that old Melbournian charm. Open the door and you’ll find yourself fooled, as the interior has undergone some pretty comprehensive renovation work. The spaces in the original home are painted a classy white, while along the hallway a lovely exotic floral patterned carpet prepares you for whats to come.

As you walk through this architects Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, you’ll find yourself entering new worlds, with new sights and feels unlike the previous encountered space. After the jungle white-out experience, you’ll emerge into the hot red kitchen, the heart of the property. The kitchen looks like something out of Tron, with cubiefied bits and pointy 90 degree angles strewn around within a cube that holds it all together.

Now comes the finale, the cherry on the cake: the Cloud itself. Literally stepping out of the kitchen box, you arrive in a spacious open living room, situated next to the pool. This is the highlight of the entire property as its allows friends and family a gathering place to eat and dance within a brilliantly designed wooden, child-like space; where the walls seamlessly glide together with the floors and ceiling.

The large glass windows face towards the North sun, encouraging a controlled amount of light to join in on the festivities within. The property neatly summarises the phrase, “got your head in the clouds” as it dreamily floats across a spectrum of spaces that seem to strip away the stresses of life as you make your way through them.

You’ve had a series of unfortunate events, made some bad choices and met up with all the wrong people. Now you’re on your knees with your hands tied behind your back, looking down at your own grave with a pistol stuck on the back of your skull- ready to fire. What would you do? Cry for God’s mercy, try to humanise yourself by talking about your family or just close your eyes and wait for the end? This might be a fun idea to try when you are in that situation… watch the video above to find out!

Around the early 1950’s, once the war had ended, the forts along the coast were abandoned and left to rot in the high seas. However, six of the seven forts had to be torn down, because the British ministers were worried about having “another Cuba off the East coast of England”. The only fort to remain was Fort Roughs Tower which was legally deemed res derelicta and terra nullius- meaning it made up for extra-national territory. Territory that was claimed by Roy Bates a former infantry major in the first battalion Royal Fusiliers.

The independence of Sealand was upheld in 1968, when the British court judge announced that since Rough Tower stood in International waters it did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This gave rise to Sealand’s national motto,”E Mare Libertas” or “From the Sea, Freedom”.

The little country has its own dollar (a fixed exchange rate of one U.S. dollar), passports, stamps and it’s own state bank. So if any of you are planning on defecting to this wonderful dreamland out in the sea, check out more here.

Sorry for the misleading title but I could see this being a prospective Apple product one of these days, which is worrying and quite thrilling- Siri’s replacement is a sentient robot friend. As my cousin said when he saw this, “it’s hard enough to compete with other humans, now can you imagine going against that?” No, no I can’t, unless of course I got brain implants to magnify my brilliance ten fold. If you’re out of the loop of things this was a smart advertising campaign Hollywood pumped out for Ridley Scotts movie Prometheus- a movie I have yet to see, but I really must after seeing this.

I very much enjoyed ogling over Kalberg’s creations for Plaza Magazine, as i’ve always been into large instalments which use small bits and pieces, kind of reflects the systems found in life- besides, as a kid i used to watch Art Attack, a show where they would make massive pictures out of small house hold materials. These very inventive sunglass ad’s which were created using 1,200 coloured sticks inserted into a peg board is just one beautiful example of creating a whole through the sum of it’s parts.

I’ll shed some nifty  information on the man behind the work, because i know your big heads want to know more about him! Philip was born in 1973 and is one of the Stockholm’s most talented and respected still life and interior photographers. His photo’s are “characterised by a pristine, near-perfect quality that nevertheless retains a suggestive secrecy. Philip Karlberg’s visual ingenuity transforms a still life into a mystery, riddled with visual clues. His pictures often display a sheen of luxury combined with strong emotions, tense moods, and a visceral feeling of presence. The images entice the viewer to pause and search for the story hidden within.”

His commercial clients include Swarovski, Marc O’Polo, Kasthall and NK, who have a ten year strong history with him. The editorial clients are Plaza, Wallpaper, Tush, Dansk, and Residence. If you want to check out more of his works just click here.

From top to bottom, the actors in each of these pictures are: Karl Lagerfeld, Jackie O, John Belushi, Lady Gaga and lastly Johnny Depp; all of who are known for wearing their sunnies all day everyday.

]]> http://sillyreverie.com/2012/09/08/stephen-fry-bbc-the-machine-that-made-us/feed/ 0 0015bf5e_medium sillyreverie http://sillyreverie.com/2012/09/07/neil-krug-the-cowboy-of-artistic-vision/ http://sillyreverie.com/2012/09/07/neil-krug-the-cowboy-of-artistic-vision/#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2012 12:02:25 +0000 sillyreverie http://sillyreverie.com/?p=2405 Continue reading »]]> You ever get that amazing uproarious feeling when you find a song or a band that speaks to your soul? It’s almost equivalent to being lost in a desert of drabness until you find that water source of wonderful to fill your bones back with life. Ladies and gentlemen, finding Neil Krugs photographic genius has made my heart sore, I’m getting giddy writing this piece, it’s better than finding a song that suits my soul. I’m a massive fan of film and for some reason these pictures are reminiscent of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, a B-grade 70′s movie or a cocaine filled Tarantino flick- all round epic. 

Born in 1983, Krug is currently based in Los Angeles, finishing up projects in photography while trying his hand at being a director. The maelstrom of attention that sped at him at 90 miles per hour was caused by his postings of the stylised photos of his girlfriend, now wife, the supermodel Joni Harbec. No, it wasn’t because his wife is a super attractive bombshell (although i’m sure it helped) but because of the way he took the pictures. Specifically, he was shooting with a reel of Polaroid film, giving the shots a “grainy, sun-scorched feel” that added to the zest of artiness.

The 2011 Pulp Art Book was the first born baby monograph child of the couple, who fused their polaroids into an LP-sized hardcover book, which is split into several vignettes ranging from a spaghetti western theme to a Bonnie and Clyde revival and to the struggles of a 1950s housewife. The series has a cast of characters played  by Mr Krugs beautiful wife, and will be expanded upon in further volumes. The inspiration for the pulp theme stems from Neils deep appreciation of the life and times of the peace loving 60′s and 80′s.

Anything from Old LP jackets, Giallo posters, vintage book covers, and B-movie cinema themes have made their way into this project. The project began as an embodiment of something simple and sexy, however, as the photo shoots went on, natural story lines emerged, evolving in complexity. The subsequent result is a crisp highly original capture of the past decades.

Pulp Art Book: Volume Two has already been released so go get them both! This time around Neil was heavily influenced by the Poliziotteschi films. He has created a vast amount of CD / LP covers for bands such as Justice, Scissor Sisters, My Chemical Romance, Ladytron and The Pierces. Among his commercial clients are Burton Snowboards, Warner Bros. Records and Warp Records; he has als exhibited works in Germany, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and plans on releasing his upcoming feature film Invisible Pyramid in 2012.  The video below is his Pulp Art commercial which you can probably notice has a very 60′s hippy-esk vibe to it:

If your eyes are craving more of his works you can always click here!

The shot you see before you were taken by an outstanding French photography team called Helmo, the crew consists of Thomas Dimetto, a very talented designer; Laurent Croisier, a girl for an eye for fashion  and Christophe Urbain, another amazing photographer who took pictures of all the beasts- rumour has it, he wrestled with the bear until he was able to take the shot.

The group took Blue model portraits and red animal ones, which were then superimposed. However, they added a little surprise by using coloured gels on the panels they are presented on; at times the picture might shift to the human version then to the animal and if the light is just right both at once, this was done only with the original pictures though.

For the installation they thought it better to replace the gelatines with a projector that shone an alternating red and blue light, which switches the images. If you’re wondering the images are 5×8 meters, so we’re talking about a pretty large scale installation, with a total amount of 13 pictures.

I discovered Daniel Wurtzel after watching wooden hand spun mechanisms, specifically a video called ‘Sisyphus Testing Shoes‘. The side bar happened to show a fire tornado (such a raw image, primal, extreme, I had no choice but to click it), which seemed to be created by a vortex inside a room. The artist who made the installation was non other than Mr Wurtzel! I’ve seen many tornado-esk thing’s before so I got bored pretty quickly, but I did decide to look into what other creations Daniel had made, just to see what else was in store. Great mother of fuck, is this not the most entrancing kinetic sculpture ever? Silk sheets plus wind is the biggest win, ever- it defiantly trumps watching the classic plastic bag dancing with the breeze feat. The title also caught my attention, as  I once dated a ballet dancer who loved to tell me about the terminology- in french pas de deux means steps of two or a ballet duet, a perfect title don’t you think? Needless to say, i’m going to write a future post on this man, once I finish with my other gazillion drafts. It’s funny, while I was watching the erotic fabric dance I was thinking about how beautiful the whole thing was, how such a simple act can cause such an awe-inspiring moment.

Causality would force my brain to trigger a memory of a saved video that I had on my reading list, all because I thought of the word ‘awe’. I love my brain, because the video I had saved was exactly what I needed to get through the day all wide eyed and happy. While I was watching, I couldn’t help but feel some sort of patriotic pride towards mankind, the thought, “FUCK YEAH, IM A HUMAN” crossed through my mind along with, “THATS RIGHT! Our 3 pound brains can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, we’re so badass!” Strangely enough, at times, I feel like an outcast for having so much love for my humanity, it’s as if everyone else feels guilty for being born into our race or people tend to associate themselves with another mental schema or ideology that makes them better than human. I don’t know, I can’t really explain it. Anyway, I decided to attack all my open tabs, one of which was a video I have no recollection of opening.

This video was so random I had to laugh, then I started to imagine what you could do with that much water pressure, think of a massive water slide with that water load propelling you onwards! I laughed even harder when I read one of the top comments, “That happens to me after eating Indian food.” After I did my after laugh sigh, I couldn’t help but think about funny laxative pranks, and lo and behold thats what my fingers typed into the search bar.

HAHAHA! Brilliant! I’ve got to hand it to those kids, thats some inventive thinking. Watching this video from the perspective of the Loki-like pranksters has got to be one of the  funniest things i’ve seen in weeks, especially when the seagull poops on the baby’s head- I died, drowning in happy tears. Now watching the video from the victims pooey view would be shit but at least they got a lot of good luck, right? The video also got me thinking about the psychology of humour, is there a unifying theory on hilarity? I had to do some research on it, couldn’t find many video’s but i did come across a few interesting articles: The Formula for Funny, Humour (positive psychology) and I watched this later on in the day The New Era of Positive Psychology.

Since I started reading up on psychology I became fixated on looking for some videos on the subject, what I found instead was this movie. A whole bunch of tasty video titbits, chined by beautiful thought, ‘nothing to sell but a point of view’ as one of the quotes stated. I enjoyed watching the entire documentary, at first I thought the title would be about Jung’s Anima but instead I was shot off on a surprise joy ride through thought-provoking talks, some cheesy, some fantastic musical performance and more thinking-cap dramatic scenes. Unfortunately for my American brothers and sisters, the video is banned! Damn Ingsoc, i’ll try to find an American friendly version. Give it a watch, you’ll enjoy at least one of the scenes, if not all of them. Anyways, i’m off! I’ll catch you champions next time round!

The house is located off of the golden streets of Toorak, one of Australia’s wealthiest neighbourhood’s and comfortably nestles a family of four with the additional family pet (a Labrador retriever.) Inarc Architects were the grand constructors of this fabulous residence along side Allison Pye Interiors who helped advise on the interior design and decor. The house contains 13 rooms, approximately 850 square-meters (9,150 sq. ft) for the main house, 300 square-meters (3,330 sq. ft) for the basement and 70 square-meters (753 sq. ft) for the poolside pavilion/gym-basically saying you have a lot of room to party.

Demolishing the previous home and clearing away its landscape, the owners and designers got to work from a blank slate (or Latin ‘tabula rasa’-random knowledge incase you want to sound smart); the new landscaping overlaps the deleted trees in order to be sculpted for the needs of the house and its residences. Okay, now if you’re wondering how the house was named, do not fear, I will quell your curiosity with some answers: Roughly 10,000 years ago Ra the egyptian sun God buried an orb of immense power under… Haha, just yanking your chain, it was named the Shrouded house because of the “effective screening of the slightly twisting and turning exterior from the adjoining properties and the street by bronze aluminium battens.” These battens allow for a seamless fusing of interior spaces with the exterior, an architectural feat that brightens the entire house.

Garnishing the whole complex with bronze, steel and glass frees the structure from a militaristic feel as it gives the clouds and light a chance to draw themselves on the surfaces, and welcomes the two into the interior. Furthering the friendliness of the entire design, the architects broke the home into “smaller-scale components” so that the house doesnt look “overly imposing or grandiose.”

The womb of the house (unlike its human counterpart) is open without loosing that snug feel as well as soaked with natural light, joined together harmoniously by white sandstone and oak surfaces; all together these features create a cradle of comfort, privacy and fun- a perfect dwelling for a growing family.

I started with this amazing spectacle of ritualistic song & dance because I recently went to Bali and just started typing up a post about the Kecak dance’s history (you’ll find out more about it sometime soon!) The song they sing is very haunting and has a cool animalistic tempo, to which I thought, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone made a trance/electro remix of this?” But before I could write ‘Electro Kecak Dance’ (It’s never been done, I checked later on) I saw this title: The Life Of The Buddha [Full BBC Documentary- HQ] and so I clicked it (who can turn down a full BBC doc.)

This was a documentary that i’ve seen before, but the lapse in time between then and now had been long enough to make it feel fresh; besides relearning is one of the best ways to keep knowledge chained to the brain. After the 50 minute special was over, i thought about mysticism for a brief moment before I realised the deep thinking road was a bad one to go down before bed. For some odd reason, a video recommendation from a friend popped into my head- I couldn’t quite recall the full name so I typed “New Bibi Yodelling” I knew it was meant to be childishly funny so I didn’t have to worry about sacrificing my sleep for ceaseless thoughts on the mysteries of life and death.

I’ve got to say, ‘what the fuck’ was the first thing that entered my mind, which was immediately followed by heavy laughter. I guess the strange ethnic mess that was dancing and presumably yodelling about chickens tickled the living shit out of me- he’s a Japanese white man singing a German (correct me if i’m wrong) yodelling song with english speaking pump-up sections wearing a traditional Swiss yodelling outfit. Hahaha, people are silly. So wanting to roll with the endorphin rush I kept up with the friend recommendations.

Now here we see a man who is probably a champion at charades and to top it off is bloody amusing to watch. His little show did stir some thoughts such as, “Humour is so weird, what is it about this that makes me laugh? I would have never been able to guess that song. Why is it different for other…” at this point I decided to tap another video because the title had at what I first saw to be an oxymoron “Liquid Fire.” Either way, it was enough to snag me in.

I was immediately captivated by the hosts black hair, wafting in the wind, all the while he and the others talked over soothing nordic music whilst pouring melting hot iron magma into a cast mould of a sword- this was the moment that broke the horses back, something cracked and I started laughing while thinking about how spastically random all my Youtube video selections have been ever since I started using the site (whenever that was.) Thats when I decide that i’d write one of these whenever I get on a good YouTube buzz, god granted my schizoid brain can keep up the dice roll video choices-i’m confident it can. Anyway, the sun is starting to rise, I guess that means I should go to bed for a bit. Till tomorrow! Good night!

Costing only US$299 (a massive improvement to it’s thousand dollar counter parts) this little robot can be synchronised with any android phone via bluetooth or cable. It hold’s your precious cellar devices using a magnet in a housing compartment on its back, which is capable of tilting the phone up or down giving the machine a more friendlier character. This bad boy also houses three wheels on the bottom, allowing the user to playfully move about the environment in all directions- this is great for kids who miss engaging in activities with parents that often have to travel overseas.

If you know what a computer is then you’ve probably heard of Skype, which is what this deft bot was originally designed to be used with. If hypothetically speaking, a Botiful robot suddenly fell from the heavens and onto your chiseled lap (granted that the robot and your legs survive the collision of course), you would become the most fun person to Skype call. Why? Well, because if you place a Skype video call to a Botiful-owner, you will view what you see below: buttons. Everybody loves buttons.

Other than the obvious directional controls, there will also be a spray of applications that you can choose from such as a facial recognition one. This app automatically moves the robot to keep the speakers face centred in one frame, just like the Demolition Man clip, only much cooler. The little bot currently needs callers to be on their Apple, PC or Linux computer to video conference with it; however, they are expanding on this so that phone based video calls can come through as well. Currently Delaunay (the pretty woman seen above) is trying to raise production funds on Kickstarter. Even though her estimated retail price is $299USD, a pledge of $199 will get you one! Here are some of the fun colours you can select for your bot!

If you’re not convinced by this article go check out Claires pitch video here and watch the comical fun you can have with it below!

It’s rare for me to find a video that makes me smile with absolute awe; but tonight folks I have found just that. The University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab have been the stars of the Quadrotor scene, by first showing the extremities of quadrotor flight, and now with this perfectly executed musical number #007. The video was revealed to the world yesterday at the TED2012 conference based in California.

Here’s your debriefing on how they managed to make it all come together: Firstly, the room was heavily equipped with infrared lights and cameras, which was used to get an exact barring on where each quadrotor was. The data received was then relayed wirelessly back to the machines to make them aware of their own location, and of their flying comrades.

All the Quadrotors were programmed to follow three-dimensional waypoints, which they had to reach at precise moments in time. Even though the coordinates had been programmed by skilled operators, it was entirely up to each robot to figure out a way to reach it’s appointed waypoints on time, and without disturbing the rest of the mechanical orchestra. I can’t wait for what else they’ll dish out in the future!

Colours can make you feel anxious, scared, happy or calm; they can be the catalyst to opening you up to a range of feelings and if used in the right way can be ascetically pleasing to the eye, so it’s important to master them. Experienced designers can intuitively tell what colour works well with another (they can smell them) and can also understand the relationships between the many different tints in a spectrum. Using complex algorithms, colorschemedesigners can choose perfect colour combinations for you, or to give you a general idea of what goes well with what- so take that you experienced colour expert people!

The image you see above is the result of me choosing the colour red after clicking the triad button; it instantly chooses two other colours to complement the one I have selected. Underneath you have a choice of picking out a preview of what the colours might look like on a webpage, you have two choices: The light page preview has a white background to it and (you guessed it) the dark page has a dark back drop to base the website on.

 Here you can see that i’ve chosen the light background and have been given an example of what it might look like on an actual web page, pretty cool no? You also have the choice to change the secondary colours by clicking the example webpage to get feel of what you want. You can apply this site-tool to numerous things: interior design, posters, screen prints, websites or (if you don’t have a fashion sense) selecting your own clothes. If your interested in checking the site out click on the link:colorschemedesigner