OnelargeprawnIt’s Friday and I don’t think I need to tell you what that means. Today’s timewaster, Star Beacons, takes you to outer space where an evil armada has invaded a peaceful water planet and shattered its sun into many star pieces. And you, the intrepid hero must scour the nether regions of space to retrieve the fragments.
You are positioned at the top of the screen and your objective in each level is to clear all the stars pieces by hitting them with your balls.
Play Star Beacons at Kongregate.
Kanye West is complete nutter, but when it comes to his music and music videos he usually sets the bar higher than most. And it seems his fans do the same. A 24 year-old Ukranian graphic designer by the name of Mykola Dosenko decided to create an 8-bit throwback video for Kanye’s song, Robocop. Mykola created all the graphics specifically for the video and throws in references to classic video games like MegaMan, Ninja Gaiden, TMNT, and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
This video is made of awesome sauce. Check it out or watch it in HD at YouTube.
Hit the jump to see more of Mykola’s 8bit, NES-like music videos.
Despite having an uncle in the furniture business and pricing that is inspired by me, I find product advertisements in South Africa to be a tad bland and uninviting. And in another “they don’t make them like they used to” moment, I found a set of vintage ads that I think are pretty persuasive.
Between 1957 and 1961, a Washington D.C. coffee company commissioned Jim Henson to created a series of TV commercials to pitch their product. Each commercial was 10 seconds long and featured two puppets named Wilkins and Wontkins. Wilkins pushed the importance of drinking the coffee to Wotkins through physical pain. The commercials are violent, dark, and quite funny. Check it out.
[via Super Punch]
Aside from continually spilling food down her top, Lucy Furr also has a knack for bringing up odd conversation topics at the dinner table. Some time back it was the Russian exorcism, and last night as we were tucking into the pasta, she started talking about last meals – as in the customary meal a prisoner is entitled to before they get summarily executed.
According to Wikipedia, the history of the last meals goes back to the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, and Romans; apparently the overly-generous Aztecs fed their human sacrifices for up to a year before their death. In any case, here are some famous last meal requests.
Adolf Eichmann
So called the architect of the Holocaust thanks to his organizational talents, Karl Adolf Eichmann was captured by Israeli Mossad operatives in Argentina and tried for crimes against humanity. Before his hanging in 1962, Eichmann’s refused the last meal but requested a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine.
John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy, Jr raped and murdered 33 boys and young men and hid some of them under a floor of his house. During his trial in 1980 he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but that was flatly rejected and in 1994, he was executed by lethal injection. His last meal consisted of a dozen deep-fried shrimps, a bucket of original recipe chicken from KFC, French fries, and a pound of strawberries.
Ted Bundy
Actual numbers remain unknown but Theodore Robert Bundy is thought to have murdered around 35 people. He would bludgeon his victims and strangle them to death; sometimes he would rape them and perform necrophilia depending on his mood I guess. In 1989 he was executed by electric chair. He declined the last meal, so he was given the traditional steak (medium-rare), eggs (over-easy), hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly.
Timothy McVeigh
Convicted for the 1995 bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. He asked for two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.
Rainey Bethea
Bethea confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old white woman and was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. On August 14th 1936, in front of a crowd of 20,000 people, Bethea was hanged. The previous day his last meal comprised fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream.
If you had to make a last meal request, what would it be? I’d die for a Steak a’ Portuguese from our favourite restaurant, Dias Tavern.
Spotting a speeding bullet with your naked eye is almost impossible, and normal photographic flash units can’t truly capture the impact that a bullet makes after hitting an object. Flickr user alan_sailer knows a thing or two about high speed photography – not only does his super-duper flash unit produces a flash of light around a microsecond (a millionth of a second) but his setup also uses an automatic trigger mechanism.
His photographs are taken in darkness, and as the bullet passes through a laser beam, the flash is triggered, and the image is captured. Here’s a small gallery of this shots:
See more of alan_sailer’s photography on Flickr.
[via futurebackwards on Twitter]
Created by Jake Armstrong as his thesis film at the School of Visual Arts, The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9! is a brilliantly-told sci-fi-noir of a bounty hunter who seeks a monster that has become a plague to a tiny planet.
All is not as it seems though as the bounty hunter faces off against the terrible thing. I don’t want to give it away, so check it out below.
[via Drawn!]
Tilt-shift photography is a technique that makes life-sized locations look like a miniature-scale models. It’s been done to death in photos, but I haven’t come across a video that uses this technique. Until now.
Using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and both time-lapse and tilt-shift techniques, Vimeo user mockmoon creates these most awesome clips of Tokyo and Yokohama. See them below.
Miniature City
Miniature City 2
You can watch them in HD at Vimeo – Miniature City | Miniature City 2.
[via The Awesomer]
After popping some Degoran to combat a cold, I can barely feel my nose much less my brain so my decision making might be a little off-kilter. Today’s first post was a tough face-off between Demi Moore’s hairy bush and a Tetris-inspired timewaster, and I think I made the right decision that will benefit you, our dear readers.
Tetris meets Jenga in the physics puzzle game, Stackle. You need to grab blocks from the tower and stack them on the top to reach as high as you can but take care not to let the whole thing topple over. It’s a simple, addictive premise but can be deceptively difficult if you’re a fly-by-night builder.
Play Stackle at Newgrounds and let us know how many points you scored.
BONUS: Demi Moore’s bush can be seen here – be warned, what has been seen cannot be unseen. It is also NSFW unless you don’t mind people getting the wrong idea.
The Interwebs is a vast, intangible, untameable place. Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, considers it “immense ghost land of disembodied places” that we are able to navigate through every day and return with our body parts intact. So he reckoned we must have a rough map of the Internet in our heads, and at a recent TED conference, he asked people to draw a map of the Internet as they see it, indicating their “home” on the map.
He has collected over 50 maps so far. Here’s a small gallery – click to embiggen.
See more maps at Kevin Kelly’s flickr set.
You can get involved in the Internet Mapping Project by downloading the blank PDF from Kelly’s website and submitting your own map.
[via picocool]
NOTE: This competition has ended.
Time flies like an arrow (and fruit flies like a banana). We’re already into week 3 of our month-long t-shirt giveaway and this time you stand a chance of winning cool gaming-related sweaters from 2BOP!
2BOP draws inspiration primarily from games that were popular in South Africa at corner shops and arcades in the 80’s and early 90’s. Disadvantaged areas during apartheid South Africa had little to offer in terms of exposure to cutting edge international design or computer technology but the bootleg arcade games at the corner shop were a window into what was happening in the outside world.
And we’ve got two rad sweatshirts to give away to our readers. Check them out below:
Monochrome ASCII
Juicy
Full competition details are after the jump!