TheSpunker - by Ben Popken. Published by Gattaca, Inc.

Little Prada in the Desert

"[C]ome Saturday it will look as if a tornado had picked up a Prada store and dropped it on a desolate strip of U.S. 90 in West Texas. That is where Prada Marfa, a permanent sculpture by the Berlin artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset will be installed. (Actually it will go up in Valentine, Tex., about 26 miles outside Marfa, a town of 2,400 that has become a magnet for artists and art lovers.) The sculpture is meant to look like a Prada store, with minimalist white stucco walls and a window display housing real Prada shoes and handbags from the fall collection. But there is no working door."  (New York Times via BoingBoing)

Disney's "The Shining"

Hilarious remix of The Shining into a feel-good family flick preview trailer. "Meet Jack Torrence. He's a writer searching for inspiration. Meet Danny. He's a kid looking for a dad."..."Now, sometimes, what we need the most, is just around the corner."...Cue Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill.

UPDATE: Titanic as a horror film. West Side Story as outbreak flick.

8014 Free Photoshop Tutorials

Tutorial Select boasts a slew of easy and free Photoshop tutorials for tons of effects. Learn how to craft a hypnagogic color array, a flaming hot fireball or a fake software box.

Billboards of New York

Wouter Deruytter exhibits  his large b+w photos of the billboards of New York at the Wessel + O'Connor Gallery . The series details the relationship between the passersby and their desires as projected in hypsersize by Madison Avenue.
For the past four years Deruytter obsessively documented the omnipresent billboards watching o'er New York. Online gallery. (Gothamist)

Wailing Text Message Wall

"The SMS Chatwall receives short text messages, sent by any mobile phone and shows it on TV and projector systems."  (Adverlab)."  Entire bars could be themed around it. Megaclubs could boast a cellphone chat room. For once, a use for cellphones that brings people together instead of separating them into discrete, privileged pairs.

IKEA Panopticon

IKEA's new 360° flash site lets you spin around several IKEA environs, matrix bullet-time style. Or would we consider this champagne-cork-time style? Be careful, the site is written completely in Ikea. That is to say, Swedish.

My Firefox is Burning

Great flash banner spotted on Vice Magazine. You can actually peel it awaywith your mouse and see a young fellow branding his head with a waffle maker, all in the name of selling "kewl" t-shirts. Yay. BUT THEN infinite windows of 55DSL's site pop up, crashing your browser. Designers, get the fuck with it and recode your site to accommodate Firefox. Right now. Or your head may be next.

Bumvertising Gets Bummarked

Benjamin Rogovy, a Mercedes driving 22-yearold entrepreneur, trademarked "Bumvertising," his invention of paying homeless people in food and water and $1-$5/hour, "depending on traffic patterns" to attach "visit pokerfacbook.com" to the bottom of their begging signs. His website is a window dressing page to lure people to partypoker.com (he gets paid for people signing up and percentages of the money they spend). Here is nice Daily Show video eviscerating Mr. Rogovy. "Since the show, Google hits for "bumvertising" have gone from 9,000 to 43,000," reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Rocketboom Makes Heart Go Boom

If you've ever dreamed for a videocast version of BoingBoing, here's your answer. Rocketboom is an amusing and quirky 3 minute videoblog (vlog), with subjects ranging "top new stories" to "internet culture." Recent topics included motorcycle bots, a Fidel Castro Stroh's commercial and how much bling the BitTorrent inventor makes. Bookmark it. Good to watch in the background with your morning coffee.  Plus, Amanda Congdon ain't so rough on the eyes.

Hi-Def Web TV

As barriers between traditional media and online continue falling, intermediate technologies such as NubaTV will become more important.  NubaTv bill itself as the first people to offer hi-def Web TV. A quick glance: Little content now except for some movie trailers, although there is a Pink Floyd Live 8 performance. Artifacts emerge in sizes larger than 600x400. Compression on the vocal track - sacrificing audio quality for the visual. Doesn't support fast-forwarding. One should take issue, however, with their claim to be "reinventing media" - it's still the same pony, boys, just new bows. Especially since it's running off Windows Media Player code.