“Lemons make me smell so great!”

This isn’t going to be much of a post, I just wanted to give more atten­tion to a cer­tain (now infa­mous?) sticker from my 80s sticker book I shared the other day: this weird, kind of dis­turb­ing sticker of an uncom­monly intel­li­gent fish lay­ing on a din­ner plat­ter encir­cled by lemons. He’s pretty enthu­si­as­tic for a fish who’s about to be eaten. He’s also self-aware enough to real­ize fish smells pretty bad, cooked or not.

And before you ask, yes, I pur­posely cropped the fea­tured image of the lemon sticker so that it spells “emo.” This fish should be fuck­ing emo, but instead he has rather com­pla­cently accepted his fate.

What’s his backstory?

This trippy synthesizer animation is totally mesmerizing me today.

To steal a line from Gin & Juice, Moog’s got the cul­ti­vatin’ music that be cap­ti­vatin’ me.

This is essen­tially a glo­ri­fied ad for the new Moog Sub Phatty syn­the­sizer, but it’s awe­some nonethe­less. And you don’t even need to be on drugs to appre­ci­ate it. This is exactly the type of thing I love look­ing at, which is prob­a­bly why I enjoyed the also-trippy-as-balls musi­cal game Dyad as much as I did .

In honor of the new Moog Sub Phatty ana­log syn­the­sizer Fly­ing Lotus & Adult Swim vet­eran, Adam ‘Lil­fuchs’ Fuchs col­lab­o­rated on a short ani­ma­tion called Moog Sub Phatty: New Machine For Liv­ing. You can hear the new Sub Phatty ana­log syn­the­sizer in Fly­ing Lotus’s orig­i­nal score for the ani­ma­tion, called ‘Such a Square’.

 [via Giz­modo ]  

I think I’m in love…with this guy’s insanely cool pop culture artwork.

When I first caught a glimpse of these bleed­ing cool pop cul­ture por­traits by Chilean artist  Fabian Ciraolo , my eyes nearly melted in their sock­ets. It’s like he’s man­aged to tap into my stream of consciousness–where there exists a neb­u­lous mashup of music, pop cul­ture icons, Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons, hor­ror, and cult films–and illus­trate it.

I mean, Julie Andrews in leopard-print leg­gings wear­ing a Joy Divi­sion t-shirt as she gives us an almost-flash of her tits? Skele­tor in a 70s-looking used car sales­man plaid suit? COME ON. I love these. I love every­thing about them; the over­ex­posed pas­tels, the dreamy pat­terned back­grounds, the fact that they could have been lifted from one of my every­day 80s music-fueled hallucinations…

There’s plenty more to see on Fab Ciraolo’s blog , which you’ll prob­a­bly need to trans­late. I would also fol­low him on Twitter–if I could under­stand any­thing the man tweets.

[Dis­cov­ered via The Curi­ous Brain ]

My dream job is to do nothing.

This week’s assign­ment from The League  was an inter­est­ing one:

If money was not a con­cern and you could choose any career path, what would be your ulti­mate dream job? 

Well, first of all, there’s a false assump­tion here that I would  want  to have this thing called “a job” if I didn’t have to. If money was not a con­cern, I would hap­pily live out my days play­ing video games, watch­ing movies, read­ing books, etc. etc. and get out even less than I do now. That’s right, I would do nothing.

But, if I have  to give an answer (and you know how seri­ously I take these League assign­ments, so I will), my first incli­na­tion would be to say I’d pur­sue some­thing cre­ative, whether it’s writ­ing a novel or screen­play, direct­ing a film, or rekin­dling my long-held dream of design­ing a video game–specifically a point-and-click adven­ture game just like my per­sonal gam­ing hero, Jane Jensen .

But my prob­lem, as always, is the fear that once it becomes my  job to do these things, I’ll cease being pas­sion­ate about them. That’s kind of the bitch about cre­ative endeav­ors. Once things like con­tracts and money and dead­lines and oblig­a­tions and other people’s opin­ions are involved, I’m almost pos­i­tive I will lose inter­est. I often won­der what amaz­ing films, books and games would exist if the tal­ent behind such works had absolute cre­ative power and unlim­ited resources. Then again, I look at guys like George Lucas and start to re-think this position.

What’s your ulti­mate dream job?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to pre­tend that money was no con­cern and pur­sue a career we’re pas­sion­ate about. Here’s what my fel­low Lea­guers said:

Adamo­tomy wants to do some­thing involv­ing management…and golf?
For­tune and Glory Days wishes he could be a toy hunter . Or an archae­ol­o­gist! They’re the same thing, really.
That Fig­ures wants to explore space. SPACE, bitches!
Lair of the Dork Horde already has his dream job. And yeah, we’re all jeal­ous.
Flash­lights are Some­thing to Eat wishes he could work at and indie record store , like in High Fidelity .
The Man Who Stares At Toys wants to write a book on the his­tory of toys!  Fit­ting.
Hench Girl’s dream job is very spe­cific: to be a  Well-Heeled Exec­u­tive of a Sleazy Com­pany  I admire that kind of brazenness.

Pop Art Pop Tart: Moving LEGO Nyan Cat

Well this is cer­tainly the most internet-y of internet-iest things I’ve seen today. An ani­mated, mov­ing LEGO sculp­ture of peren­nial favorite inter­net meme, Nyan Cat …in a Flickr video. The only thing more inter­net bait-worthy would be a Gang­nam Style Christ­mas lights dis­play. No, wait, that already hap­pened . ( Mul­ti­ple times , apparently.)

This “pop art pop tart” (Do you like that? It took me five whole min­utes to think of it!) was cre­ated by artist H. Y. Leung, who made a bunch of other cool LEGO cre­ations you can check out here .

On a related note…did you know Nyan Cat has lyrics?

Animated 8-Bit Pixel Art Celebrates the History of Music

So there’s this awe­some guy named Josh who has this awe­some Tum­blr, Music His­tory in GIFs , filled with his awe­some ani­mated pixel art that cel­e­brates music’s most awe­some moments in his­tory. I know, I’m using the world “awe­some” a lot, but in this case it’s well-deserved. Each 8-bit ani­mated GIF also comes with a side of musi­cal trivia so you can brush up on those all-important pop cul­ture facts, like know­ing that MC Ham­mer intro­duced para­chute pants to the world in 1990, and there was much rejoicing.

Here are some of my favorites, for obvi­ous reasons:

[via Buz­zFeed  by way of The Curi­ous Brain]

These Nintendo Roombas can vacuum my floor anytime.

I’ve wanted a Roomba ever since I saw one of those YouTube videos of cats rid­ing around on them , not to men­tion the fact that I’m lazy, but now I have a new, much cooler reason:

For SUPER iam8bit , a group art exhi­bi­tion fea­tur­ing over 100 artists remix­ing their 80’s videogame mem­o­ries, we col­lab­o­rated with iRo­bot and fab­ri­ca­tor Kelice Pen­ney to cre­ate a series of “char­ac­ter cov­ers” for sev­eral dif­fer­ent Roomba models.

Hand-made and intri­cately detailed, their func­tion­al­ity was unal­tered. And while the pres­ence of a clean­ing device might usu­ally be poo poo’d in a party sce­nario, the thou­sands of guests at the SUPER iam8bit open­ing wel­comed these crea­tures with mouths agape.

I sup­pose it was only a mat­ter of time before some­one real­ized “Roomba” rhymes per­fectly with “Goomba,” which is one of the char­ac­ters from the Mario games fea­tured in this video, along with red and green Koopa shells and an Octorok from The Leg­end of Zelda . Sadly, none of them are Metroids.

I pre­dict an imme­di­ate demand for cus­tom geeky Roomba cov­ers on Etsy.

[Thanks  OHMZ ]

The Rap Coloring Book…is exactly what it sounds like, i.e. awesome.

For those of you who don’t know the dif­fer­ence between Ice Cube and Ice-T, the Jumbo Activ­ity & Rap Col­or­ing Book is here to make learn­ing fun. And shit.

It’s a Tum­blr cre­ated by Bun B –the rap­per who intro­duced the word “trill” to my vernacular–that includes print­able col­or­ing pages and fun-tivities that will sharpen your staying-within-the-lines and connect-the-dots skills while teach­ing you very impor­tant rap facts, like how rap­pers love weed and money, or that Vanilla Ice was once rel­e­vant. (Although, in hind­sight The Rap  Spelling  Book might have been a lit­tle more use­ful. I still strug­gle with my “izzles” and proper usage of apostrophes.)

I decided it would be an extremely good use of my time to bust out the crayons and have at it.

I swear, I have no idea what the Ink Out­lines fil­ter in Pho­to­shop is. I did that last one com­pletely by hand. Honest.

[Thanks UPROXX ]

This Gangnam Style Halloween light show is cheering me up.

You’ve all seen those crazy Christ­mas lights dis­plays that synch up to music, right? Well here’s an awe­some one for Halloween–or not awe­some, if you’re already sick of this song; I haven’t reached that point yet.

From Lees­burg, VA, this stun­ning Hal­loween light show set to Psy’s “Gang­nam Style” uti­lizes over 8,500 lights and roughly 250 chan­nels of com­puter ani­ma­tion. It was cre­ated by Edwards Land­ing Lights  who says it took about a year to make. (Yes, I’m aware Gang­nam Style is only a few months old. I had the same reac­tion at first.) The video descrip­tion goes on to say that the Gang­nam Style theme was some­thing that was added at the last minute–presumably after real­iz­ing that any­thing asso­ci­ated with “Gang­nam Style” = viral video gold. Well done, nerds.

Freddy, Jason, Michael & Chucky Together on One Awesome Retro-tastic Poster

If I had an extra $45 to blow (or I guess tech­ni­cally it would be $48 with ship­ping & han­dling) I would so buy this lim­ited edi­tion poster by The Dude Designs which pays glo­ri­ous homage to the art­work on clas­sic 80s hor­ror movie VHS tapes:

Oh how I miss the days of VCRs with pop-up tape decks! I used to get in trou­ble for press­ing eject just to watch the deck pop up, then slam it closed, then press eject again, then slam it close, then press eject again… Shut up, it was fun. You guys don’t even know.

Can you imag­ine if there was really a hor­ror movie with Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers AND Chucky? My head would explode from the sheer awesome.

[via Dread Cen­tral ]

Frightful New ‘Frankenweenie’ Posters are a Throwback to Old Monster Movies

I saw these new Franken­wee­nie posters over at Dread Cen­tral and they’re just too cool not to re-post.  I’ll give you ONE guess as to which one’s my favorite.

 Franken­wee­nie opens in the­aters this Fri­day! Are you going to see it?

Looking Back on 25+ Years of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [Infographic]

 So, here’s a thing I did that you Ninja Tur­tle fans might appreciate.

A few weeks ago  Under­Scoop­Fire  (friends of ShezCrafti.com and one of my favorite places to lit­ter the inter­net) asked me if I’d like to do a TMNT-related guest post in antic­i­pa­tion of the new Nick­elodeon show and to wax nerdy about the gen­eral awe­some­ness that is Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles. Nat­u­rally I said SHELL YES!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles is a fran­chise that’s going on 30 years old and one that many of us grew up with. Over the years there’s been many dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Tur­tles across all media–comics, TV, film, toys, video games–even the stage. I wanted to do some­thing to pay my respects to the past three decades of TMNT his­tory and show­case the many dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Turtles.

This info­graphic is the result:

[Click here to view it full-size]

Head on over to Under­Scoop­Fire to read my guest post  Shelle­brat­ing 25+ Years of TMNT His­tory  and check out all the other retro-tastic con­tent the site offers for us chil­dren of the 80s!

Album Art Porn: Glass Candy — Beatbox

As it turns out, ran­domly pick­ing albums I’ve never heard of to lis­ten to based 100% on cover art I find attrac­tive is prov­ing to be a viable method of dis­cov­er­ing good new music. So far my Album Art Porn project has yielded three new-to-me albums with at least a 7/10 rat­ing, and today it pro­duced another win­ner.  I’m 4 and 0.

Today’s dis­cov­ery came about dur­ing a highly sci­en­tific process in which I typed a bunch of words into Google Image Search and skimmed through the results. The words I input were “candy,” “elec­tric,” “fever­ish,” and “album.” This is the image I was most com­pelled to click on:

If I were a more attrac­tive, fashion-conscientious kind of girl (and dropped about 20 pounds) and like a thou­sand times more nar­cis­sis­tic, I would totally have a War­ho­lesque self-portrait like this hang­ing in my liv­ing room. I would even glue jew­els to my face, or what­ever those are sup­posed to be on her left cheek. It’s hip, it’s glam­orous, it says, “I went crazy with the fuch­sia eye shadow by smear­ing it all over my head and look at all the fucks I give!”

I must have an affin­ity for those shock­ing shades of hot pink and elec­tric blue, because that’s the same color com­bi­na­tion that drew me to The Elec­tric Punanny Mix­tapes which ended up being unimag­in­ably awe­some. The above album is called Beat­box.  It was released in 2007 and is the sec­ond stu­dio album of the elec­tronic out­fit  Glass Candy , who Wikipedia describes as being a blend of No Wave, glam rock and Italo Disco–so far so good.

But what does it sound like?

The first track was an awk­ward but intrigu­ing intro­duc­tion. It starts off like an 80s aer­o­bics class with the instruc­tor encour­ag­ing every­one to “work that body!” over a sim­plis­tic beat, and then vocal­ist Ida No gives some­thing of a cheesy pseudo-lesson in meta­physics: “Our world, our lives, our bod­ies, they are con­stantly chang­ing. But there’s a rhythm that runs through it all and that’s where we’ll find our true selves. We live in a uni­verse of trans­for­ma­tions, but the heav­enly beat is a con­stant. So keep on danc­ing!” OK, space lady!

The rest of the tracks are pure gold. Some of them, like “Last Night I Met a Cos­tume,” could be part of the score for Beyond the Black Rain­bow . Breathy, sen­sual female vocals over heavy synth waves, chill, low-frequency bass lines and sim­ple elec­tri­cal beats with fre­quent square and saw­tooth leads. (At times like these, when I’m try­ing to describe the sub­tle dif­fer­ences in elec­tronic music styles, I wish my musi­cal knowl­edge was more expan­sive.) None of it is very melodic, but it all sounds so very avant-garde and 1984-ish, much like that Rise of the Obsid­ian Inter­stel­lar chip­tunes album I reviewed a while back. I thor­oughly enjoyed all 9 tracks of this Beat­box album and fully plan on fur­ther delv­ing into Glass Candy’s other synth-tastic musi­cal offerings.

ShezCrafti’s Rating:

8 out of 10 stars.

What is Album Art Porn?

A recur­ring fea­ture in which I ran­domly pick an album I’ve never heard of to lis­ten to and review based solely on its cover art. It could turn out to be the most amaz­ing thing I’ve ever heard…or com­pletely suck.

Of Course Jedi Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Have Lightsaber Ninja Weapons

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how awe­some, amaz­ing, and amaz­ingly awe­some this mashup of Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles and Star Wars is, but I do need to ask just one very impor­tant question:

Where can I get a pair of lightsaber sais?

Jedi Leonardo

Jedi Michaelangelo

Jedi Donatello

Jedi Raphael

Jedi TMNT fan art by ~Q-Dog2099 on DeviantArt

[via Techn­abob ]

And now comes the part where we get to have fun imag­in­ing what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles would be named if they really existed inside the Star Wars uni­verse. Any takers?

Would you still love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if they looked like this?

Here’s a look at one artist’s dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent, mildly fright­en­ing, take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Poor Donatello looks like he went swim­ming in the lake near the  Spring­field Nuclear Power Plant .

This is a poster for an upcom­ing event in Vegas that will cel­e­brate the launch of a new line of TMNT-themed watches designed by pro­lific pop cul­ture artist Ron Eng­lish .

NYC based acces­sories brand FLuD and world renown artist Ron Eng­lish have teamed up to bring Ron’s work onto his lat­est can­vas, a FLUD watch. The acces­sories and art worlds col­lide on this col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­tur­ing Ron’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the world’s mod rec­og­niz­able vig­i­lante mar­tial arts rep­tiles: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles. [via Vibe ]

It’s always cool to see pop cul­ture icons, even my beloved Ninja Tur­tles, inter­preted in new and dif­fer­ent ways. Ron English’s work blends the famil­iar with the realm of the bizarre in bold designs and the use of eye-meltingly bright col­ors. Check out his Popa­ganda gallery  for even more twisted pop cul­ture art.

Are your Etsy purchases supporting hipster sweatshops?

Think twice before you buy your next hand­crafted, vintage-look, beaded, arti­san, beach­grass, cro­chet WHATEVER THE FUCK with birds on it from Etsy. You could be sup­port­ing sw-etsy shops full of over­worked, under­paid manic pixie dream girls sur­rounded by glit­ter and Apple products.

Please. Think of the hipsters.

TMNT Sketches by Alex Deligiannis

I didn’t go to SDCC this year, but one of the only things I cared about pur­chas­ing there (other than this and this ) are prints of these awe­some Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tle sketches by artist  Alex Deli­gian­nis . He was nice enough to save a set for me and let me pur­chase them after­ward, and they just arrived in the mail today.

I plan on get­ting them framed together with one of those four-way matte win­dows, and hang­ing the piece above a dis­play of TMNT collectibles.

I loved this nice lit­tle touch on the package:

Alex Deli­gian­nis is an ani­ma­tion and comics artist who is cur­rently work­ing on Nickelodeon’s upcom­ing Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles reboot . If you like his style but you’re not famil­iar with his work, do your­self a favor and go check out his gallery ; there’s all kinds of kick­assery there.  He’s an all-around nice dude, too.

My New Favorite Tumblr: Toy Box Kids

Ever notice how obnox­iously happy the kids and fam­i­lies they show on toy boxes are? Like play­ing with that toy is the great­est god­damn thing that’s ever hap­pened in their lives, no mat­ter how shitty the toy is?

Very rarely are such embar­rass­ing dis­plays of enthu­si­asm over a toy com­pletely war­ranted, say, that Christ­mas morn­ing when you opened your Nin­tendo 64 . But in toy box world these types of reac­tions are the norm. And not only are the kids excited, but Mom and Dad look just as thrilled to be part of the action with big, smug grins that indi­cate their hard-earned money was well spent on a prod­uct that shut those damn brats up for a few hours.

I found a great Tum­blr today that chron­i­cles these phony depic­tions of toy life where “toy box fam­i­lies are hav­ing fun for­ever!” Here’s a sam­pling of some of the retro cheesi­ness you’ll find there:

[via Tum­blr:  Toy Box Kids ]

Puma.com Goes 8bit with Free Running Game

I nor­mally would have lit­tle rea­son to visit Puma’s brand web­site  because I’m a lazy slob I can’t remem­ber the last time I did some­thing remotely ath­letic, but I landed there ear­lier today in the process of help­ing to pull a mar­ket­ing pre­sen­ta­tion together.

Here’s what I was greeted with:

Puma has given its home­page an 8bit makeover, and there’s a fun, free run­ning game for you to play, com­plete with Nintendo-like sounds and graph­ics. It’s pretty sim­ple: run for­ward while col­lect­ing power-ups and jump­ing over hur­dles and rocks. The Zelda-esque hearts are a nice touch.  I also like that your speed is mea­sured in things like “molasses” and “busi­ness casual.” Cute.

Pretty cool, Puma, but why does “The Run­ner” have to be the black char­ac­ter? THIS IS CLEARLY RACISM AND IT OFFENDS ME.*

*Not really.

Is Run Puma Run  a cool game by a hip, forward-thinking brand, or just an exam­ple of bla­tant pan­der­ing to the cov­eted 30+ adult gamer demo­graphic? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I just wasted ten min­utes of my life play­ing it.

The Most Awesome Papercraft I’ve Ever Seen

As some­one who spends copi­ous amounts of time on these here tubes, I’ve seen a bunch of great-looking paper­crafts dur­ing my epic Pin­ter­est and Tum­blr time-wasting marathons, but none quite so awe­some as the cre­ations of Bryan from  PaperFoldables.com .

He’s the same guy who did those super hip  Adven­ture Time paper fold­ables that are cur­rently mak­ing the rounds.

And I must say—wow!

Here’s a sam­pling of what you’ll find over there:

Bryan pro­vides print­able PDFs for all of his awe­some creations–just click on any design.

If you’ve read this blog more than once, you know I’m a huge Ninja Tur­tles fan, so nat­u­rally my eye was imme­di­ately drawn to the kick­ass Krang fold­able you see in the bot­tom left cor­ner, above. Here’s what the PDF print-out looks like:

Now go have fun dec­o­rat­ing your office with ALL THE PAPER FOLDABLES. Just don’t hate me when you run out of printer ink.

Fol­low Bryan on Twit­ter ( @paperfoldables ) and tell him he rocks.