Tiny Gigantic

Clement Valla has a killer collection of Google Earth images in which the terrain mapping software isn’t working like it’s supposed to. Some of these are quite beautiful.

Via Kottke.

So most of you probably know by now that I like robots. But mostly, I like the old-school, Forbidden Planet type robots. Still, these robotic, er, bionic penguins are kinda cool. Freaky too.

Travis Louie has made a series of drawings called The Creature Show. He also writes sweet little back-stories to accompany each drawing. Excerpt below:

Sir Frederic Burke imagined himself to be some kind of adventurer. He used his family’s vast fortune to investigate mysterious stories about mythical creatures. He had heard a tale about a great aquatic beast that was supposedly sighted in the North Sea. He chartered a large sailing vessel equipped with what he thought could hold such a “monstrous” animal. After months searching for this elusive creature, he hears word that the beast’s lair has been discovered in a cove. When he arrived at the location he discovered a large egg just beginning to hatch. The emerging creature reminded him of his old dog, who had recently passed away. He swore the crew to secrecy and took the newly hatched “monsterling” to his estate in Devon. Before long, the aptly named Leviathan began to grow to enormous size.

And if you like this, you’ll love my friend Shawn Feeney’s Musical Anatomy series.

Stumbled across Darcel Disappoints today, the illustrated blog of someone named Darcel, living in NYC. Really charming work. Enjoy!

Yes, they exist. And they make large mini-versions of everything using cardboard. Most recently, Cardburg. Oh wow, and yes, and awesome.

I love this. It’s called How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me.) It’s everything they should have taught you in art school but didn’t.

And it’s by an artist and writer named Austin Kleon who’s clearly worth following.

Fantastic article by Steve Blank on what makes an entrepreneur. Since I am one, and much of my friends are as well, I spend a bunch of time wondering if I actually have what it takes to be one, despite the fact that I’ve been one for almost 10 years.

Which makes me think that maybe there are degrees of the entrepreneurs personality that this article glosses over. Like, I’m good at deceiving myself (an essential quality in entrepreneurs) to a point, but once the self-deception gets laid bare, I get briefly discouraged. My sense is–and all the rockstar founder stories in the media support this–that this is a quality not suitable in a founder. Still, here I am.

Here’s a choice excerpt:

Founders fit the definition of a creator: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers. This concept of creating something that few others see — and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it — is at the heart of what startup founders do. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management…

…Founders then put in play every skill which makes them unique — tenacity, passion, agility, rapid pivots, curiosity, learning and discovery, improvisation, ability to bring order out of chaos, resilience, leadership, a reality distortion field, and a relentless focus on execution — to lead the relentless process of refining their vision and making it a reality.

So here’s the not-very-new question: What’s the minimum balance (or range thereof) of traits required to be an entrepreneur?

Because I like Skateboard videos and lots of you like dogs. So now, everyone’s happy. Except maybe PETA.

Thanks to The Rumpus for this.

The artist Mike Leavitt caught my eye with a 10-inch tall action figure of Takashi Murakami, creator of the sweet and weird and saccharin and awesome superflat style, we’ve all grown to love and imitate.

He’s also made some super nice figures of R. Crumb & Matthew Barney. Enjoy!

I was raised on Where The Wild Things Are. And likely you were too. Hell, you might have even raised your own kids on it. So you’ll be psyched that Maurice Sendak has new book out. It’s called Bumble-Ardy. It’s about a 9-year-old pig who has managed to avoid having his birthday party — until now. It’ll be out in the fall.

Yes, every word of this is aimed directly at me. And most likely you.

Here’s a taste:

Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

Thanks to Ethan for the link.

Ants built a city 50 meters in diameter and 8 meters into the earth. What??

Now they need to make one that fights itself to turn itself off or on. My brain hurts.

So there’s this famously weird and awesome game called Katamari Damacy, in which you roll a ball over stuff. Said stuff sticks to ball, ball gets bigger, you win game. That’s it.

Now some genius has written a hack so that you can play Katamari simply by pasting code in your browser. Love it!

Seriously. If you’ve been hired to work on a naming project, the availability of an exact match domain name doesn’t matter. What I mean is that if you come to a name you like, and it has actually been blessed by the lawyers, that’s a big success.

You can always find workarounds for the domain name. You add verbs like “get” or “go”, or phrases like “I want” to the front of your the .com. Or you add to end of the name things like city abbreviations (SF, NYC, etc…), or descriptors like “app” or “health” or “movie.” See? Find a creative workaround. Cuz naming is hard and messy enough without the whole domain name problem.

I’ve harped on this idea before, but it’s been coming up a bunch in my world again recently.

…writers, as much as filmmakers, are responsible for our visual grammar—that their imaginary jumps, and the thematic use they’ve made of those jumps, have laid the groundwork we take for granted today whenever we watch anything more demanding than Blue’s Clues. If the camera goes somewhere special, the chances are good that a writer’s imagined camera has gone there before—and shaped not just filmmakers’ sense of what’s possible, but the expectations we bring to the screen.

Truer now, than ever.

If the recipe for iPhone game success is super charming graphics, simple one-touch gameplay, and cute sounds and characters, Tiny Wings is gonna kill it. Can someone please make this for Android now?

“To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits might lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail.”

From this NY Times Magazine article on mental athletes.

Happy Friday.

So as I was syncing my Dropbox account to my home computers, I noticed this smart little bit of branding.

There’s three things of note here:

1. No status bar to watch until your eyes bleed.

2. Dropbox is setting my expectations right up front. They’re telling me very clearly: “Hey, don’t to sit around and watch this sync. It’ll take a while and we don’t want you to get frustrated.”

3. “Grab a Snickers.” Whoa! Is this new opportunity for advertisers? I hope they’re charging Snickers for that mention.

Because everyone has to install stuff on their computers and mobile devices, and everyone has to wait for said stuff to finish installing, might there be an opportunity to push related brands right there in the moment?

Nice article in GQ about the utter lack of originality in Hollywood right now. And nice analogy to brand making too: Here’s a taste.

Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. The Magic 8 Ball (tragically, yes, there is going to be a Magic 8 Ball movie) is a brand because it was a toy. Pirates of the Caribbean is a brand because it was a ride. Harry Potter is a brand because it was a series of books. Jonah Hex is a brand because it was a comic book. (Here lies one fallacy of putting marketers in charge of everything: Sometimes they forget to ask if it’s a good brand.) Sequels are brands. Remakes are brands. For a good long stretch, movie stars were considered brands; this was the era in which magazines like Premiere attempted to quantify the waxing or waning clout of actors and actresses from year to year because, to the industry, having the right star seemed to be the ultimate hedge against failure.

But after three or four hundred cases in which that didn’t prove out, Hollywood’s obsession with star power has started to erode. In the last several years, a new rule of operation has taken over: The movie itself has to be the brand. And because a brand is, by definition, familiar, a brand is also, by definition, not original.

The whole thing is here.