Keith Weesner is a background animation illustrator and a painter. I like the simplicity and mood of his work. Link (via The Cartoonist)

Following up on a series of BoingBoing posts related to allegations of spammy recruitment tactics by the US Army (posts: one, two, three), reader Mark Miller says,

After the response from the previous BoingBoing post, I now have a recording of the call I received from the Army. I think it sums up the feeling by listening to it than any words can convey...

Link

Fifty Years of Disneyland Souvenirs features pictures and commentary on Disneyland souvenirs from 1955 to the current day, grouped by year. Link (via The Disney Blog)

This clock is made out of heat-sensitive paper whose "pixels" are changed to reflect the current time by warming it from behind with computer-controlled LEDs. Link (via Gizmodo)

Check out this bad-ass home-made Half-Life 2 cookie-stamp and tin, fresh off the tin-snips and out of the oven. Link (via Wonderland)

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London has hundreds of free MP3s of Sherlock Holmes radio plays from the 1930s -- amazing! Link (via Ben Hammersley)

Duke Law held a contest to make a two-minute mini-documentary about copyright. The finalists are online now for your votes -- they're all tremendous.

We are happy to announce the finalists in our Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. Many thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who helped spread the word about the contest. The judges are selecting three winners from among these finalists, and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2005.

Link

GREAT article on how Disney keeps the Haunted Mansion's interior nice and spooky-grimy:

"It's something that we take very seriously at Imagineering," he says. "In the case of the Mansion, it's kind of fun because there are all those anecdotes about how everything else in the park is kept so pristine, and inside the Mansion the challenge is to keep it as rundown and dusty and musty as possible." The goal with all the attractions at Disney parks, says Jason, is to keep them looking and sounding just as good as they did on opening day. "This is the 35th year for the Haunted Mansion, and when you walk in there every single thing about it is just as it was intended to be back in 1969 when it opened!"

Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

Jon sez:

The 12th annual SXSW Interactive Festival is Scheduled March 11-15 in Austin, TX. SXSW Interactive brings together the web's most creative innovators for five days of panels, parties networking, and fun. Highlights include the following:

* Opening remarks by web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman on Saturday afternoon, March 12.

* Keynote speech by "Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell on Sunday afternoon, March 13.

* Keynote interview with Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox on Monday afternoon, March 14.

* Keynote conversation featuring Alex Steffen and Bruce Sterling on Tuesday afternoon, March 15.

* SXSW Web Awards ceremony hosted by Laura Swisher, co-host of the late great "Unscrewed with Martin Short" on G4techTV.

* Blogging-related panels such as "Building Your Brand With Blogs" with DL Byron, Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and Robert Scoble.

* Business / entrepreneur-related panels such as "The New New New Economy: Is 2005 the Next 1997?"

* Design-related panels such as "How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS" with Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Christopher Schmitt and Dave Shea.

* Activist Technology track with panels such as "How to Think About Democracy and Technology."

* Joint panels with SXSW Film Conference covering topics such as "Future of DVD Distribution" and "Future of High Definition."

Cost to register for the SXSW Interactive Festival is only $225 through January 14; walkup price is $275. For more information (including complete list of speakers), see http://www.sxsw.com/interactive .

I interviewed game developer and novelist Greg Costikyan for TheFeature about the challenge ahead for mobile gaming.

"Nokia recently shipped an N-Gage title called Pathway to Glory, which is the first mobile game I've seen that uses voice over IP for in-game voice communication. This is one of the things I think is vital to making multiplayer mobile gameplay work. In every online game, even the simplest, like Hearts, or Backgammon, there is a chat facility. And being able to talk with people while you're playing is one of the major appeals of online gaming, because multiplayer games in particular are inherently social in nature."

Link

This person assembled mechanical logic gates from Lego. Digital logic gates are the building blocks of computer processors.

"I have now designed working NOT, OR, NOR, AND, and NAND gates. Using two NAND gates I have produced a NAND gate latch or Flip-FLop. The natural follow on from these is clocked logic, full-adders and ultimately a genuine "computer" device. At the moment all these gates essentially just demonstrators. They work, but because of the limitations that arise through gear slippage, the real practicable use is probably not that great."

Link (via Slashdot)

Art group Temporary Services worked with an artist named Angelo who is incarcerated in California to create a book containing Angelo's illustrations of inventions made by prisoners, from chess pieces fashioned from toilet paper and sugar water to a battery-operated tattoo gun (shown here) to a "muff bag" (sex doll). Temporary Services also recreated many of the inventions for exhibition based on Angelo's drawings. From Angelo's introduction to the book:

"Writing this book was a revelation. To be able to present these examples of human inventiveness to you, I had first to discover this technology all over again. If some of what’s presented here seems unimpressive, keep in mind that deprivation is a way of life in prison. Even the simplest of innovations presents unusual challenges, not just to make an object but in some instances to create the tools to make it and find the materials to make it from. The prison environment is designed and administered for the purpose of suppressing such inventiveness. Officially, the devices described here are considered contraband, subject to confiscation in routine cell searches. But inmates are resilient if nothing else—what’s taken today will be remade by tomorrow, and the cycle goes on and on."

Link (via Near, Near Future)

Fabricated in 2000, the Skeletar was carved from a single piece of rock maple, bleached white. The bones of the arm are inlaid in ebony with blood stones as the position markers. From luthier Peter McGilton's description of this masterpiece:

"My electric guitars were once described as encompassing 3 major themes of rock and roll: love, sex, and death.... The (Skeletar) image was conceived on a tour of the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna. In the basement are the family crypts and funeral vehicles, all elaborate Rococo sculptures glorifying death: Skeletons with Angel's wings larger than life in black cast iron."

Link

The latest issue of RU Sirius's NeoFiles is now online. In this edition, RU interviews Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Heard, about his psychedelic adventures, and EFFer Annalee Newitz on whether Transhumanism sucks. As a special bonus, NeoFiles publisher Will Block interviews RU about his excellent new book Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House.

In this edition of Neofiles, we drift far afield to explore some views that some neophiliacs may find either too far beyond the pale or too close to the bone. This is all part of our effort to make a varied discourse, much of it circling around the concept of transhumanity or radical mutations in the human condition.... What we do and think at the edges in this generation will likely be central concerns to generations a few decades or centuries into the future. Let’s get all the possibilities and impossibilities on the table now. You never know what vision or critique may prove useful in whole or in part some time in that future.<

Link

Photographer and BoingBoing reader Juergen says,

"I attended a organized photo shooting with 1000 photographers and 20 models...you do the math: 50 photographers for 1 model! Where? In Japan of course."

Link to a gallery of 160 photos Juergen shot at the event.

Ed Felten and Alex Halderman have created the world's smallest functional P2P filesharing program, written in fifteen lines of code.

TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.

Link

Yummy, yummy, yummy I got bugs in my tummy! Canned chrysalis -- caterpillars in soy sauce -- are a somewhat popular food in Korea. On this blog, their culinary properties are examined by two Austrian dudes in Vienna. Link (Thanks, Martin)

BoingBoing reader Wayne Choi says,

I immigrated to the US [from Korea] when I was three and didn't go back to visit until I was 10. When I went back I recalled eating something when I was three and I had fond memories of it. It was chrysalis...more of the barbequed variety as opposed to canned. I ended up trying it and got sick. I completely forgot about this until I saw your post. Thanks...I guess.

ArsTechnica reports that last month's iPod firmware update makes music encoded in RealNetwork's Harmony unplayable on certin iPod models.

The Harmony software mimics the FairPlay DRM used by Apple's iTunes Music Store for all of the tracks it sells. RealNetworks introduced the software with great fanfare last July, announcing that they had broken the stranglehold Apple held over the iPod and enabling customers of its RealRhapsody music service to purchase tracks that could be played on iPods. Apple was not pleased with RealNetworks' efforts, accusing them of adopting "the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod."

Link

Reader Stefan Pause says,

Just thought this might be of interest to a few readers -- credit where credit's due and all that -- it wasn't Real who did the hard work of reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay DRM, it was "dvd Jon" Lech Johansen (of DeCSS fame). The Register did a good write-up of the whole thing back in January: Link, and there's more general commentary over at Jon's blog's Apple section: Link

Glenn Fleishman says,

There's been a lot of intelligent discussion about RSS bandwidth since I started my reports and throttling attempts, and I decided to start Regular Sucking Schedule as a clearinghouse of advice, free software, and discussion.

Link