Cthulhu as the Old Spice Dude
Posted by Michael Pinto on Sep 20, 2010 in Animation
DungBeetle Comics is a webcomic collective that put together this wonderful parody of the viral Old Spice campaign on YouTube. Read more…
Anime Images for Your Amusement
We wasted many hours trolling the net to find interesting and amusing anime inspired images so that you don’t have to! Most of these images were found via Twitter although the above screen shot is from this Japanese blog. My personal favorite is the parody below which makes fun of the typical charts that showcase what new anime shows we can expect to see in the new season: Read more…
Japanese Emoticons: A Stamp of Success
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 22, 2010 in Hobbies and Collections, Tech
I love the illustrational complexity of Japanese emoticons — and now you can share these silly symbols in the real world with this Ginghami Kaoiro Emoticon Stamper. To me there’s something very appealing about taking digital iconography and coming up with such a primitive analog implementation: Read more…
I Can Haz Human Progress?
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jul 4, 2010 in Tech
In this video techie pundit Clay Shirky shares his notion that Lolcats aren’t just a fun waste of time but in fact a sign of progress. His theory is that while in the past humans have had spare time that with the net this potential can be captured to produce things — even if its adding captions to cute kitty photos.
Captain the Internet Meme is Spotted!
This hilarious fan video is titled Captain Kirk Deals with a Strange Alien Culture. I have to admit that while Kirk’s solution broke the Prime Directive it still shows that he’s the best commander in the whole of Starfleet! By the way the internet meme in the video is Russian singer Eduard Anatolyevich Khil (Эдуа́рд Анато́льевич Хи́ль) giving a performance back in 1976. Read more…
Anime for Kids vs. Anime for Adults
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 14, 2010 in Animation
There’s an old saying that behind every good joke there’s just a bit of truth: And the poster above seems to capture a certain contradiction about anime and anime fans which is interesting to say the least. I think part of the reason for this is that on a meta level most entertainment aimed ay kids is made to be so saccharine sweet that it seems that all of the life has been beaten out of it. For example if you look at the Disney channel so many of the shows look and sound like gentle sitcoms from a long past era — however my guess is that a certain number of kids want something more. In fact the best way to get a kid to read a book is to tell them that “you’re too young to read this book” and I think anime has that attraction to it. Read more…
Dancing the Caramelldansen at the New York Anime Festival
Posted by Christian Liendo on Sep 28, 2009 in Fandom
Photography of otaku at the New York Anime Festival spontaneously dancing the Caramelldansen with no prompting at all…
Something is Technically Wrong: That’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature!
Posted by Michael Pinto on Mar 24, 2009 in Tech
Being on Twitter every day I’m always reminded of the web 2.0 mantra that software should always be in beta — so being creative I started to wonder “why not take this to the next level and turn a bug into a feature?” Having some game design experience I know that having fun negative payoff can be much more entertaining than actually winning a game sometimes. So I applied this logic to the now familiar “Something is Technically Wrong” illustration and have come up with a series of customized versions which I propose that Twitter adapt right away. Sadly knowing that Twitter is now mainstream I’ve designed these screens to appeal to original core audience of geeks who may feel abandoned as every brain dead TV presenter boasts of their account on the air:
