The internet stole me tonight:

• Here is the sweet new promotional postcard for Newcastle's annual This Is Not Art festival, designed by the very talented Studio Racket. I'll be having some of these please.
  
  

• One of the most amazing things I've seen on the internet: Soytuaire. You basically just move your mouse around and it makes these amazing pictures, to music (a bit bandwidth heavy and you have to wait a moment or two for it to load, but you'll be glad you did).
  
  
• Photos of amazing drawings on dirty cars. My particular favourite is:
  
  
  
  
• Uncannily similar photos of Kermit the Frog and Christian Bale.
  
  
• This strange animation called Pills.
  
  
• I would love love love a copy of this book when it comes out!;
  
  
  ^ link.
  
  
• I love the work of BLU, here is one of his wall painting animations.
  
  
• This video basically sums up the uses of the internet; Lipdubbing, genious.
  
  
• It's likely that you wouldn't buy or wear this shirt or condone anyone else doing so...
  
  Now read the 100+ reviews of it on Amazon, e.g. "When I put this T-shirt on for the first time, my wife left me! Thank you, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt". I'm unsure whether it is currently, but this was the number one selling apparel item on Amazon.
  
  
• The 'Internet Meme Database'.
  
  
• We Feel Fine, is a program that searches for blog posts about how people are feeling. Woah.
  
  
• C showed me WWOOF, which stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms, where you basically exchange some farm work for a place to stay and food for as long as you like, and you can do it in various parts of the globe, or similarly Meet Up, Air B'n'B or CouchSurfing. I'd love to travel that way.
  
  
• Did you know that during his campaign, Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online?
  
  
• How about this diagram of 'The Spectrum Of Online Friendship'.
  
  
• Further into my internet travels I came across this website called Kickstarter, which exists as a funding platform for artists, designers, film makers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, etc. Cool, huh? At the moment it's done on an invite only basis and you have to be a US resident, but they're still expanding. I'll definitely be checking this out a bit more.
  
  Similarly, there is a website called Kiva, where you loan a person in need as much or as little as you can afford towards their entrepreneurial need, to lift themselves out of poverty, and they repay you once they make it back. Interesting, I wonder if it works.
  
  
• An interesting article about 'Digital Natives' (people born after 1980) vs 'Digital Immigrants' (those born before 1980).
  
  
• I have no idea where this is from, and I'd like to find out:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• This video made with Post-Its:
  
  
  
  

• Several of these links were nabbed from the amazing Jessica from Something Changed, so I just wanted to give her due credit.
  

Phew! That took a long time. I was so swamped by the internet tonight. I got home from the movies tonight and the internet just claimed me.

This is one of those days for me where you realise that the internet is fucked up and amazing and creepy and intense and voyeuristic and useful and strange and ever evolving and impossible to understand.

Sorry for the link heavy blog, I'll write something of substance later in the week.

^ daniel ludwig

Some things I have learned recently from FuckYeahFacts:

• The average pregnancy of an Indian elephant lasts 650 days.

• The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms, and potted plants.
  
  
• When you are looking at someone you love, your pupils dilate; they do the same when you are looking at someone you hate (I made C look at me and his pupils didn't dilate, therefore he doesn't love me! He protested)

• During the First World War, Hitler was asleep in a foxhole when he had a nightmare in which his mouth was filled with dirt. He woke up and went for a walk “to get some air” and a shell scored a direct hit on the foxhole killing all the occupants.

• Annually you will shake hands with 6 men who have recently masturbated and failed to wash their hands. (This reminds me of Manneh)

• Annually you will shake hands with 11 women who have recently masturbated and failed to wash their hands.

• In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.

• In ancient Greece, children of wealthy families were dipped in olive oil at birth to keep them hairless throughout their lives.

• It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

• In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.

• A common custom in Spain is to eat one grape for each of the last 12 seconds of every year for good luck.

• The largest toy distributor in the world is McDonalds.

• In World War II, the German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

• Being unmarried can shorten a man's life by ten years.

• Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

• Pearls melt in vinegar.

• In the movie Willy Wonka, in the scene where squirrels opened up nuts and dropped them onto a conveyor belt, was not animated. 40 squirrels were trained to do that stunt.

...okay, that's probably enough.

Today I went to pick up my 'repaired' phone. As the cynic in me assumed, the fault wasn't repaired when they handed it back to me, and they ended up sending it back. The girl serving me wrote 'FAULT WAS NOT REPAIRED. PLEASE REPAIR. THIS HAS BEEN A WASTE OF TIME!' in fluro highlighter on the paperwork which I liked.

I bought a pair of new shoes today which were 75% off. If I had any other camera besides the one in my computer, I'd take a picture of the pretty things. I've blogged about them previously, but they finally got my size in. They're hard to describe, like a red tartan fabric ankle boot sneaker with buckles. My feet are blistery, I wish you could bypass this stage in new shoe wearing.

On my solo mall outing I also had a browse around Borders and drooled over their heavily overpriced stationery and postcards section. Then I had a peep around the World Movies section at JB and picked up one of my favourite moves, 'The Orphanage' for cheap. Scary movie though, I don't know if I'm up to seeing it again just yet. I wanted to get 'Delicatessen' which was only $12 but I thought that it would be full of disturbing images of dead things and blood and cut meats. I should have gotten it anyway, that was a stupid reason not to get it. I don't imagine that anything Jean-Pierre Jeunet touches could go wrong.

I wanted to go to the zine group day today but I woke up too late and was feeling lacking in the social skills to participate. I'll go to the next one, I promise.

I am going to watch a show called 'The Wire' and eat pasta and chill out.

Ps. Isn't this the perfect 'Stuff On My Cat' photo;

It's a picture of C's first cat, Keira wearing a feather boa.

Look! I made two fonts!

I came across this website called YourFonts.com (via What Katie Does) where you basically download their template, print it out and fill in all the characters, scan it back in, upload and it generates a font based on your handwriting. My normal handwriting is similar to those, but more pointy and jagged and upright (I'm sure a handwriting expert would say I was anxious and stressed out or something). I can't really see the use in paying US$9 a pop for my own handwriting, but it's a sweet idea.

I sent my sister off this morning and C and I are about to go for a walk to post some things (two of the postcards I put up last night have already being sent off!). It occurred to me yesterday that a large portion of my $$$'s goes towards mail related things (envelopes, postcards, paper, stamps, etc) and that I basically buy a whole heap of stuff that I send away to other people. Despite the satisfaction and enjoyment I obtain from this 'hobby' (I hate the word hobby), not a whole lot is returned. I really enjoy it though. I think it's nice to have a 'hobby' that is basically about giving to other people.

In other news I HAVE CARPAL TUNNEL AND IT HURTS SO M*THERF*CKING MUCH!

Today my sister came over (I'm forcing her to watch back to back episodes of Dollhouse behind me as we speak). We had a play with the warped effects on my Macbook;




Then went for a wander around Newcastle. Again plagued by this mind-numbing headache and throat infection I didn't spend the day feeling so great, but we had a fun time.

I took Sara to Blackbird Corner and got more postcards;




We got lunch at Natural Tucker and then walked around until we found this little shop with all of these overpacked shelves and tiny aisles filled with paper delights, all kinds of envelopes and paper and stamps and things. I gave myself a $40 budget for the day, so all I bought there was a pack of cute (pricey) pink recycled paper envelopes;



Further up the street was this incredible soap shop called 'Usopia' with a million different soaps that all look like I need to eat them.

Eventually we found what we were looking for and came across Bird In The Hand distro and I have a feeling I'll be making a few more trips back. The girl there was really sweet and informed me of the monthly zine making day running between Bird In The Hand and the Octapod. The first one is on this Saturday at Bird In The Hand, should be sweet. Today there I picked up a zine called 'Joe Jobs' which is quite hilarious about two girls' (Regina Walter & Raquel Ormella) bad job related experiences, Vanessa Berry's 'I Am Camera #13' and a postcard by Arlene Texta Queen. I wanted to get more of her postcards, but I felt that the images on them were just a little too explicit to send to people I don't know in other countries;



Sara bought some picks for her friend's birthday from Muso's Corner, then we ended up at Spotlight and I bought some cute felt stickers. I had to resist buying multiple packs, especially the bright red Helvetica font ones. At $6 a pack I'm glad I stopped myself at one;



So in making up my mind about uni (and anticipating receiving my course materials this/next week), I have made a bit of an ultimatum with myself - while I am doing uni by correspondence I will make another zine. I made one back in 2006 when I was in year ten, for a class, and I really enjoyed it;



We'll see how it goes. I'd like to have it prepared for the This Is Not Art Zine Fair in September and maybe have a table with Paige.
Pay day tomorrow, Sara and I are going to go out for breakfast I think and then she has to catch the train back to Dungog for work in the afternoon.