Last year in April I wrote about a cool Etsy shop I had come across that sells tattoo socks, see-through socks with tattoo-like designs printed on them. Since then they’ve added a couple more designs to the store and I knew I had to share them with you:

A Twitter “follow me” design! Not sure whether I’d ever wear this, but I know some people who would love these socks!

The Octopus one is super cute! Although this one is my favourite design:

There are 6 different colours, but it depends per design which colours are available: white, ultra pale, light mocha, deep mocha, cafe latte and grey. The socks come in knee-high and thigh-high length, in sizes S-XXL, and the prices range from $13-$23.

Check out the Etsy store to see more designs and to get a pair for yourself.

Interesting links for January 11th through January 18th:

• Rooftop Trailer Park: 7 ‘Mobile Home’ Penthouses for Rent – I've never understood what people see in mobile homes, but I kind of like what this hotel has done with them.
• Game Design 101: What Are The Odds? – Good post about the odds in game design.
• Modern Architecture – All Along the Watchtower – Awesome apartment.
• Does Lost Have The Biggest Ensemble Cast Of All Time? – Nice overview of the amount of recurring characters in our favourite sci-fi shows, including Lost, Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1.
• A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com – Cool interactive map showing the amount of rentals of the most popular movies from Netflix in different regions.

Another book of which I haven’t even read it’s predecessor yet (The Shadow Queen), but which I’m already coveting:

Shalador’s Lady is the fifth stand-alone book after Anne Bishop’s Black Jewel’s trilogy. It will be released in March 2010.

I should have done this last week, but because of my arm, I’m really running way behind with my blog posts. It’s already feeling better though, so staying completely away from my laptop is doing the trick.

This post is kind of a round-up of the contests I’ve held during the holidays, finally announcing all the winners. Thanks to everyone who entered, I loved reading all the comments that you entered. For each of the contests I did a random draw, picking 1 person to win.

So to start things off, the winner of the Moon DVD is:

saamFG!

With the comment:

Moon’ was pretty great, an interesting exploration into humanity and identity, emphasised by a fantastic score by Clint Mansell and compelling performance from Sam Rockwell. And Gerty. I love Gerty.

In terms of fave sci-fi films, I’d have to echo ‘Sunshine’ and also ‘Gattaca’, ‘Twelve Monkeys’ and ‘The Matrix’. But I think one film that’s stayed with me even more than those is ‘The Prestige’. Although I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow!

Labelling ‘The Prestige’ as sci-fi does give away the game a bit but that’s not such a big deal in the context of the ending. Certainly a film that deserves repeated viewings. Great little cameo from David Bowie, brilliant central performances from all the lead actors and Christopher Nolan does his usual, impeccable work in the director’s seat.

The winner of the World of Warcraft books is:

Sporky!

With the comment:

Awesome giveaway! I’ve been into gaming ever since I could hold an SNES controller. My parents thought I was too distracted from studying playing with the playstation and soon the ps2. And they were right! Since I’m in an art school now, I’ve been viewing videogames as a modern art form. It’s a good excuse to play good games so I can study and know what makes them good.

And finally the winner of the Lush goodies is:

Cecilie Harris!

With the comment:

It always smells very good when I walk into a lush shop, and there are so many things I haven’t tried yet. I love the smell of xmas (yes I know it’s over, but still), so anything with spice and cinnamon. Also love the smell of vanilla.

Congratulations, you three! Thanks to everyone else that entered, keep an eye on the blog cause ‘m sure to do more giveaways in the future.

I haven’t been posting much lately, mainly because I strained my arm during the holidays and sitting behind my laptop only makes it worse. This entire post is now being typed with only my left hand… freaking annoying. Anyhow I’m going to try to get posts out on a regular basis, but I also have to try and give my arm as much rest as possible.

I love slightly quirky, not that normal jewelry and this pocket watch definitely fits that description! For the math geeks among us:

Here’s a cheat sheet for if you don’t know what all the numbers stand for:

1 – Legendre’s constant is a mathematical constant occurring in a formula conjectured by Adrien-Marie Legendre to capture the asymptotic behavior of the prime-counting function. Its value is now known to be exactly 1.
2 – A joke in the math world: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says, “You’re all idiots,” and pours two beers.
3 – A unicode character XML “numeric character reference.”
4 – Modular arithmetic, also known as clock arithmetic, is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers “wrap around” after they reach a certain value. The modular multiplicative inverse of 2 (mod 7) is the integer /a/ such that 2*/a/ is congruent to 1 modulo 7.
5 – The Golden Mean…reworked a little.
6 – Three factorial (3*2*1=6)
7 – A repeating decimal that is proven to be exactly equal to 7 with Cauchy’s Convergence Test.
8 – Graphical representation of binary code.
9 – An example of a base-4 number, which uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number.
10 – A Binomial Coefficient, also known as the choose function. 5 choose 2 is equal to 5! divided by (2!*(5-2)!)
11 A hexadecimal, or base-16, number.
12 – a radical

The watch is available for $85 on UncommonGoods.com.

Via ChipChick

Episode 156: ” Red. Black”

Cool music visualization with coloured ink and water:

The creator actually shot each drop individually and synched each one with the music using multiple layers in Adobe Premiere Pro. He ended up using 134 layers in total. To find out more about the project, check out the Just Colour blog.

More pretty jewelry, this time from Oye Modern:

Zip-it Necklace in three colours: Antique Silver, Antique Gold and Polished Silver £34

Zip-it pendulum earrings in Antique Gold £31

Headphone Ring £171

Pencil shaving necklace £114

Via Kingdom of Style

Sorry, it’s been a bit quiet here the last few days. I’ve been enjoying the Christmas/New Year aftermath and trying to catch up with some reading while at my parents (the more books I finished while there, the less I had to bring back with me to London). Anyway, yesterday we got back to London, and while it was great to visit family again and spend Christmas there, I am kind of glad to be back home.

It wasn’t all fun and games this trip though. Somehow every Christmas (at least for the past 5 Christmases) I manage to discover “something” that makes me have to do to doctor/dentist/etc. 5 Christmases ago I sprained my ankle really bad, 3 Christmases ago was the saga of my wisdom tooth surgery (if you weren’t around then yet, here’s the complete story). This year: it’s my eyes. Last time I went to Holland I got my eyes checked for the first time in 4 years. Of course, there was quite a jump and my eyes had each declined about -.50 (instead of -3.50 and -4.25, they were now -4.00 and -4.50). It didn’t feel right though and I went back 3 times to try different strengths out. In the end, I knew it wasn’t completely right, but didn’t have time to try out more and ended up with a set that was sufficient, but still not right.

So this time I got my eyes tested again. The verdict was my eyes had declined another -0.50 (now -5.00 and -5.50) and the optician felt uncomfortable with providing me new contact lenses until I’ve gotten it checked out by an eye doctor at the hospital, because it’s jumped twice in one year. Grrr. What I think happened is that it gradually got worse over the past 4 years and that last time they just didn’t check it properly.

I had an appointment on Monday with the GP about my eyes (not sure how it is here in UK, but in the Netherlands you always have to go through your GP to arrange anything at the hospital) and as I expected it was 3 minute meeting with the doctor going “nope, I can’t do anything, I’ve faxed your details to the hospital”. Now I have to wait until the hospital has time for me, so I’m guessing I’ll have to book a trip around February/March again. I know it’s better to have them checked just to make sure there isn’t anything wrong, but it feels like I’m wasting time.

Next to that my Dutch sim card died. Okay, not a problem, I thought, just go to the KPN store and ask for a replacement. Went to the KPN store and was told it wasn’t possible, because I’ve got a prepaid card. What I had to do was buy a new sim card, call customer services to get my old number transferred. Now normally I wouldn’t even have bothered with transferring my number, I would have bought a new sim card with a new number and live with that. But my bank account is linked to the old number and I didn’t want to go through the hassle (and the time) to get that transferred. I thought transferring the number would be easier.

Wrong. I ended up buying a new sim card a couple of days later at another store where the guy said the same thing. Buy a new sim card here and then call customer services to get the number transferred. So bought the new sim card and once home I called customer services. Call number 1: the girl told me they didn’t do that over the phone, but that it was on the website. Okay, easy I thought. I checked the website, couldn’t find the option. Call number 2: no, no, we’re not able to transfer numbers for prepaid cards, maybe if you call the department of “Nummerbehoud” (number retention?) on Monday they can help.

So on Monday I called, and unlike all the previous people I talked to this one actually knew what she was talking about. What I should have done and what all the other people should have told me was to order a new prepaid sim card on the KPN website checking the box “transfer this number”. There was no way whatsover to transfer the old number to the new sim card I got.

What did I do? I ended up keeping the new number (which is also way easier to remember than the old one) and transferring my bank account details. The stupid thing is I’m mainly annoyed with the amount of time I wasted, because the four people I talked to first each didn’t know what I should have done.

Sorry for the rant, readers. I know it’s the second one in two weeks, but I’m now back in London and hopefully I’ll get my regular postings back on track.

Farewell, Tenth Doctor! I’ve just finished watching the latest and last episode with David Tennant as the Doctor. Sniff. I won’t spoil anything yet for those who haven’t seen it, but it was a nice goodbye to Tennant. Not as great as an episode as I had hoped for (and nothing as spine-tingly exciting as previous finals), but still good (albeit a bit soppy).

I loved David Tennant as the Doctor, and since it was announced that he’d leave the show after the specials, I’ve been really curious to his successor. It was revealed a couple of months ago that the role went to Matt Smith; I wasn’t that impressed by the first photos we saw from him, but looking at the latest trailer and the little tidbit at the end of the final, I’m having more faith as him as the Doctor now.

What do you think? D you like how this new Doctor looks like?

Every year I say the same thing: I must try to review more of the movies and books I’ve seen, preferably right after I’ve actually seen them. And for the past two years I’ve ended up with a long list of all the stuff I hadn’t had the time to review. So for the next couple of days I’ll be doing a couple of posts with all the “left overs” I’ve got: short mini reviews about the movies and books I’ve seen/read in 2009.

I’m not even going to try to promise that 2010 will be any different. Instead, I think I’ll make these mini reviews a more regular thing and try to do one once every two months or so. I’ll still be doing reviews for the main movies and books I’ve read, but the smaller stuff (like things I watched on TV a full 2 years after the movie originally came out) will be just done in these mini reviews.

So here’s part 1 of the things I’ve watched in 2009:

Up

I don’t think I can say much about this movie that hasn’t been said yet. It’s a brilliant tale and if you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favour and watch it. It isn’t my personal favourite Pixar movie (that still remains Wall-E), but it’s got some great moments in it and everyone I know who’s seen it loves this movie!

Rachel Getting Married

I saw this movie around Oscar season trying to watch most of the movies that were nominated (in some way or another). This has to be one of most boring movies I saw this year. Yes, Anne Hathaway is good in it, and there’s tons of drama and tension, but really not the type of movie I enjoy watching.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Loved this movie, but I have to admit it has it’s problems. Visually it’s stunning (think the old drawings of Monty Python in CGI), but the plot doesn’t make much sense and I completely lost track of what happened in the last quarter of an hour. I know it could have been so much greater if Heath Ledger was still alive, but as it is, the story kind of falls apart.

FAQ About Time Travel

Brilliant little movie about 3 guys who get stuck in a time loop in a pub. It’s been described as a Shaun of the Dead type movie but about time travel, and it does kind of fit into that description. I had never heard about it before watching it and it pleasantly surprised. Plus it’s one of those movies that does require a 2nd viewing to completely appreciate it.

Law Abiding Citizen

The difficulty with this movie was that you weren’t really sure who you were supposed to be rooting for. Gerard Butler is kind of billed as the main character, but to call him the protagonist… no, not really. After a plea bargain sets one of his family’s killers free, Butler decides to take justice into his own hands. It edges on the border of being a smart, intelligent movie, but in the end fails to deliver.

Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa

Cute, easy sequel to the first animation. Nothing really special, but still an enjoyable movie.

Trick ‘r Treat

I first heard about this movie in 2007, but because of some trouble with the studio it didn’t get released properly until this year. It’s an anthology of 4 Halloween stories, all happening on the same Halloween night. I didn’t like all of the stories, but it works well together. I think my favourite was the one about Anna Paquin, who together with her friends has dressed up as sexy fairy tale princesses to pick up boys.

The Reader

The second Oscar-y movie in this list and one that I hadn’t expected to like. The movie is about Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in the later years of World War II. Kate Winslet is great as Hanna Schmitz and her Oscar win is completely deserved.

The Oxford Murders

Another movie of which I had seen the trailer ages ago and then just never heard anything about. I loved the movie for its mathematic references and discussions and I really think I should read the book. Better than most movies in this genre without the assumption that the viewer is a complete idiot (which annoys me with a lot of movies).

Stranger Than Fiction

From all the films on this list, Stranger Than Fiction is a typical “me” movie; it’s a bit quirky, bordering the line of comedy and drama with an unusual. Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a slightly OCD tax auditor, who one day suddenly hears a voice narrating his life. It’s an unusual movie with that touch of fantasy and whimsicality while still remaining quite serious.