Hasta La Gadget!

Life moves in mysterious ways. (And yes, you caught me, I totally stole that line from a song.) One moment you might feel like you’re on top of the world, then something happens to bring you down to your very lowest.

Before you start thinking that your life sucks or that your world is about to end – take a second to look at the world and life through someone else’s eyes.

Why? Because it just might give you the perspective you need to push past whatever it is you’re going through right now. And also to show you that hey, the world’s still spinning around, and whatever problem you have – no matter how big or small – doesn’t spell the end of it.

You can do just that by checking out This is Now, a site that displays Instagram photos from five major cities of the world as they’re posted in real-time. The project was thought up by Marcio Puga, Mauricio Massaia and Per Thoresson and uses Instagram’s API to access and display them for the whole world to see. Here’s how they describe their project, in their own words:

The This is Now project is a visual composition which uses real-time updates from the ever popular Instagram application based on users’ geotag locations. The tool streams photos instantly as soon as they are uploaded on Instagram and captures a city’s movement, in a fluid story.

Get out of your shell and see the world in other’s people’s eyes on This is Now.

[via CNET]

Chances are you’re familiar with Banksy, the never-visible face of modern day street art. As awesome as Banksy’s art can be, the secretive underground scene he runs in is even more interesting. Exit Through the Gift Shop provides a rarely candid look into what is probably the coolest illegal operation around. More »

Technology is great for lots of things, but it’s not doing book publishers any favors. At least, those who haven’t gone digital and just sell books in their traditional form.

Book sales have been dropping ever since iPads, Kindles, and Nooks hit. So what does publisher Eterna Cadencia do in response to get people to read books again – and read them fast? Print books that go invisible.

That sounds a bit misleading, so let me rephrase: it prints books with text that will go invisible after a short period of time.

The book is called ‘El Libro Que No Puede Esperar,’ which translates to ‘The Book That Can’t Wait.’ It’s a literary collection from Latin American authors with a twist, not only in content but also with the actual book itself, since the text is printed using invisible ink.

Once the book is taken out of its packaging, the reader will have two to four months to read it before the pages go totally blank. It’s a novel concept and it pushes its point in a very creative way. But it’s also pretty impractical since you won’t be able to read it again when you want to a few months or years down the line.

[via Red Ferret]

Newton’s Cradle is well-known for its repeating clicks, and gracing the desks of executives everywhere. This fragile, but awesome installation by Yasutoki Kariya changes things up a bit by using light bulbs instead of metal spheres. Surprisingly, they manage not to shatter. More »

We’ve featured Jed Henry’s Ukiyo-e style prints of videogame characters before. Now’s your chance to own printed versions of his amazing art, featuring characters from popular franchises including Super Mario Bros., Zelda and Street Fighter.

Jed Henry is offering all 12 of his designs in digital print forms. But he’s also working with a woodblock print maker named David Bull to make woodblock prints by hand, i.e. the way Ukiyo-e were made centuries ago.

Here’s Bull making the first woodblock print of Henry’s art:

As you can see it’s quite a painstaking process, which is why Henry has set up a Kickstarter fundraiser. A pledge of at least $40 (USD) gets you a digital print (you can choose which of Henry’s designs to order) while you’ll have to cough up $135 to get a handmade woodblock print.

Currently only the Mario Kart print has a woodblock proof, i.e. template, but Henry did say that they’ll make proofs for the other designs if they exceed their $10,000 goal. Thankfully as of this writing they’ve already gathered more than $50,000 in pledges, and that’s with 28 days to go. I think it’s safe to say we can expect more designs for the woodblock prints.

[via GoNintendo]