Wonderland: Cupcakes of Catan – Hmm, somehow this would have made more sense (or even less sense for the actual game play) if all the resource cards were also cupcakes. "I'll trade my wood for you sheep" "No, that can't. I just ate them in the previous round."
Jason Mecier – Cool gallery of Jason Mecier, who makes portraits of celebrities with "weird" materials, like candy.
My Organized Closet – Wishing I had space for an organized closet like this.
Power of Seating – Three designs of chairs, personifying three great figures: Queen Elizabeth, Superman and The Thinker from Rodin.
Top 10 Gruesome Fairy Tale Origins – Some of the fairy tales we were told as kids, didn't start out as fairy tale-ish as they are now. A lot of them were way more gruesome, ending with not-that-happy-endings.
Interesting links for December 30th through January 6th:
Cast Puzzles – I want to try to collect all of these puzzles. Birthday present, hint, hint?
TV Guide – A nice overview of all the series coming back in January in the US (when and what channel).
15 inspiring ambigram logos – I love ambigrams. For those who don't know what they are: they're logos who read the same when turned upside down. Here are a couple of cool examples.
Abandoned London – Cool photos taken early (between 8 and 10) of London's West End on Christmas Day morning. You'll never find those places as deserted as this.
All-Console Avatar Showdown – Comparison of the customisable avatars from the Wii, 360 and PS3, recreating famous "people", like Lara Croft, Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin.
Moleskine; The Sepia One – Collection of photos of illustrations of Andrea Johnson. She filled an entire Moleskin sketchbook with a total of 53 illustrations (more than 300 hours of work).
Interesting links for November 30th through December 4th:
Resampled Space – Amazing "photos" of a Belgium photographer who "combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures". He's created some cool looking, but slightly impossible structures.
Vintage Ads: Oldies But Goodies – Wow, vintage ads! Get a fridge to match your style and decor… Love the French Provincial one.
By now you should know my addiction to Threadless T-shirts. They have some of the cutest/weirdest/geekiest tees out there. Ever since I bought my first one 1.5 year ago, I’ve been wanting to get more. So far I’ve got 6 tees myself and have bought 6 tees for other people (they make great Christmas presents).
So why this post? Threadless has another sale going on! And this time tees are going for $15, $10 and even only $5. Now that’s a bargain! Here are some of my favourite tees:
Beastly Planet:
The Food Chain:
Well, This Just Really Sucks…:
The Sound of Colour:
Infamous Mishaps Throughout History:
So head on over to Threadless to get yourself some brilliant T-shirts!
Interesting links for November 16th through November 20th:
Map Plates – These procelain plates in the shape of countries look cool, but am I the only to notice that they're leaving countries out? Where's the Netherlands? And Belgium? And Austria isn't *that* big!
The Twilight Zone – A Vanity Fair article about the hype around Twilight, the vampire books by Stephanie Meyer (and the soon to be released movie adaption). I've been puzzled by the Twilight fans for some time now; while I haven't read the books, they truly seem just like a bad rip-off of countless other (older) stories (LJ Smith anyone?).
10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7 – WordPress is again getting a major update, this time with a lot of user interface changes. This is a useful post on the key differences between 2.7 and 2.6.
A Q&A With Sound Master Ben Burtt – Interesting interview with Ben Burtt, the genius behind the sounds of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and more recently Wall-E.
Interesting links for October 18th through October 28th:
Hot Cold Openings – Interesting blog post from Jane Espenson (writer on Buffy, Battlestar) about the pilot openings from tv shows and how they set the tone and atmosphere of the entire series. She gives examples from famous TV shows, like Cheers, Battlestar Galactica and (of course) Buffy.
50 Beautiful Movie Posters – Cool collection of pretty movie posters. Some of the usual suspects are in between them, but there are also some that I'd never seen before. It's also great that the list consists of beautiful posters, disregarding the popularity/success/badness of the movie. Some terrible movies have super posters, which is such a shame, cause no one is gonna hang up a poster for a movie they didn't like.
Last Tuesday was time for another London Bloggers Meetup. I’ve been now three times to these meetups and the event just keeps getting better and better. Organized by Andy Bargery, it’s a great monthly event to meet and catch up with other London based bloggers.
This time it was sponsored by Smirnoff and it was held at the bar of their parent company Diageo. Of course that meant: free cocktails! The poison of choice that evening was the Moscow Mule, a delicious wodka and ginger ale combo. Here’s a short video on how to make one yourself:
Now before coming to the event, I had heard that they would design cocktails based on everyone’s blog. All of us kind of assumed they’d just concoct something there on the spot based on what your tastes were. In reality though they were way more pre-organized than that: there was a book with all our names, blog descriptions and photos to guide the cocktail makers in their design. Brilliant!
The actual creation and decision making of what should go into the cocktail though did happen there on the spot. It was simplified by the fact all cocktails were based on the Moscow Mule (so wodka and ginger ale). But still I loved how they came up with the Miss Geeky Cocktail. They didn’t even read my blog’s description, they just wanted to create a drink that was “Geeky”. So they started brainstorming on what fruit was “Geeky”. According to them, banana was smart (I don’t get that logic though), but sadly they didn’t have any there (you might not notice but I’m being sarcastic here: I hate banana). Eventually one of them came up with the clever idea that geeks are passionate… so let’s use passionfruit! Ooh, yes please, I love love love passionfruit. Then they added a bit of mint, ginger and orange bitters to complement the taste, and mixed that with crushed ice:
Delicious! It was really a great fit for me, which I hadn’t expected at all. I also loved to see all the other types of cocktails they further came up with, for instance the Italo-Netherlands or the Mind the Gap. Besides the wonderful cocktails, it was great fun to catch up with some of the regulars, like Annie Mole and Chris Gilmour. And of course I meant a whole bunch of lovely new people: Gary Andrews, Hayley from Punlimited, Tom Phillips, Melanie from Fake Plastic Noodles and Rax from Splendid, who co-organised the event.
Kudos to Smirnoff and Spendid for organizing this great event. To top it off, at the end everyone got a “little” goodie bag… each containing a 75ml bottle of Smirnoff in it. Coolness! Looking forward to the next event!
Sidenote: just noticed that every recipe card all of us bloggers received from Smirnoff contains a splling error: Sminoff without the “R”. Ehm, fail?
