A Humane Turtle

Almost a month ago I posted about my white-board Advent calendar project, the Creepy Creature Calendar. Thanks to Claudio I know that this technique is called exquisite corpse (check out this exquisite book!).

24 days later the calendar is all filled out, thanks to my colleagues at work. It was a fun experience, and I think this has potential to become a tradition. The creature has lots of eyes, a bunch of heads and feet, and there is a bird. Also, the creature is (at least partly) female, and she is exploited for her milk.

Here is an animation of how she came into being:

I started taking a picture every day, but my phone got stolen, so I had to create this progress animation from the last photograph.

Here are pictures of some of the creepy creature’s features:

The cross-eyed siamese teddy bear.

Swinging udder.

Arms and legs and… the creature is reset to 0. Or something

The peaceful bird, scratching into the heart-adorned arm.

Mr. Floating Pumkin, and Mr. Angry Meat-Eating Plant.

“I’m in the middle but nobody likes me”-dude.

Eye-tongued trident-armed dragon head, aiming to kill that bug.

Thanks to the following people who participated in this fun little project:

1. Espen
2. Erle
3. Esteban
4. Tommy
5. Daniel
6. Øyvind H.
7. Axel
8. Arjan
9. Petter
10. Oleg
11. Thomas
12. Øyvind Ø.
13. Yenny
14. Anders
15. Karianne
16. Helge
17. ?? (a mystical person who participated over the weekend)
18. Stein Cato
19. Tony
20. Roar
21. Arne Martin
22. Alex
23. Eirik
24. Aleksei

(Watch this post in Opera 11.60.)

Yes, Opera can draw double rainbows out-of-the-box (Double rainbow, all the way!!!1!). It’s only the second easter egg after the slashdot one that I know about. /me likes

If you have followed this blog the last few days, you might have noticed my modest excitement for Advent-y stuff. Now, I wanted to have a physical, potentially collaborative, Advent calendar at work (in addition to the other Advent stuff I set up). So I made one on the whiteboard this morning:

Each day until Christmas, someone can continue drawing parts of the creature(s). Today it got an additional set of eyes

White bird,
in a golden cage,
on a winter’s day,
in the rain.

White bird,
in a golden cage,
alone.

The leaves blow,
Across the long black road.
To the darkened skies,
in its rage

But the white bird just sits in her cage,
unknown.

White bird must fly or she will die.

White bird,
dreams of the aspen trees,
with their dying leaves,
turning gold.

But the white bird just sits in her cage,
growing old.

White bird must fly or she will die.

The sunsets come, the sunsets go.
The clouds roll by,and the earth turns old.
And the young bird’s eyes do always glow.

She must fly,
She must fly,
She must fly.

White bird,
In a golden cage,
on a winter’s day,
in the rain.

White bird,
in a golden cage,
alone.

White bird must fly or she will die.

Just took some pictures on the way home. Was a nice night out…

My point-and-shoot camera has many fancy – and not overly used – effects. Among them is a fake tilt-shift effect, which now finally got used once. In the picture above, you see what fake miniature looks like, photographed out of the window of my apartment. The neighbors’ cars never looked smaller before ..

Tilt-shift photography really is quite amazing, but usually takes a little more effort than the one I’d put in. Alex Edgar has a really nice Miniature Norway photo stream on Flickr, for example (make sure to also check out her other work). And Spoonfed Design has a nice set of fake miniatures on their blog. A Google search will of course provide you with many more fabulous examples.

And then there is Michael Paul Smith. What he does is quite the opposite of tilt-shift’s power to make real look miniature: he creates miniature settings, but makes them look real on his pictures. Check out the BoingBoing article about him, and his Flickr photo stream.

Needless to say, I like both ways. Unfortunately, I can fake only one of them with almost no effort

During my stay in Munich a couple of weeks back, I got to know Barbershop music in a very special way. The organizers of the conference I was attending set up special social events one evening, amongst them going to the beer garden, improvisation theater and: singing. Needless to say, I signed up for the singing

So this one sunny afternoon, a group of 8 went over to the Hofgarten park pavilion to sing. We met up with this nice British guy who gave us an introduction to Barbershop music, and taught us some tags. He was amazingly good at teaching us, and it was great fun!

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