Hasta La Gadget!

Chairs are more than just pieces of furniture. At times, they can also be random yet awesome pieces of artwork, like the Enginering Temporality chair by Design Academy graduate Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen.

Tolvanen got the inspiration to do his project after witnessing his grandmother’s declining health due to Alzheimer’s. The project is actually a tribute to human fragility, and from the looks of it, Tolvanen was able to get that point across very well.

Perhaps the process to get the chair looking like that is even more striking than its final appearance.

So here’s what Tolvanen did: he cut up some tubular steel into rings and then joined them back together to form a semi-covering over the chair. And then he burned the entire thing. He says:

My pursuit was to give an object a memory, create tension and stage a play between the perfect, anonymous mass produced structural material and the imperfect of human being. The shell that is left caresses the vanished object, the memory of it, referring to the past.

It looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? In addition to the chair, Tolvanen also created a cabinet, using similar techniques.

[via Design Boom via Chair Blog]

So last week, we saw how awesome dads could be. First, there was the dad who built his daughter her very own backyard roller coaster. Then there was the dad who turned his kid’s toy car into a real one. But moms can be awesome, too, and today we’ve got an example of one. Now what she did might not be something of epic proportions or mechanical in nature, but it’s a labor of love, just like what those dads did.

Redditor zacch wanted a pair of Batman Converse, but didn’t have the cash. So instead of buying one for him, his mom took one of his old pairs and painted all sorts of cool Batman stuff on them.

Not only do they look awesome, but they’re also one-of-a-kind, considering that his mom customized them and all.

The post on Reddit has amassed a lot of praise, comments, and request, which prompted zacch’s mom to accept requests for customized shoes. If you’re interested in getting a pair of customized kicks, check out his mom’s blog and use the email on that site to send in your requests or inquiries.

[via Boing Boing]

Jen of Cake Wrecks – the chronicler of confectionery catastrophes – is also a recycling Jedi. She and her husband John made this steampunk lightsaber out of an old flashlight. It doesn’t emit a straight beam of plasma, but it still makes for an awesome cosplay accessory or night light.

Aside from the old flashlight, Jen and John used a green LED, a plumbing pipe (the perforated part), brass mesh, rhinestones, buttons and other doodads to finish the lightsaber.

Jen actually made the lightsaber as an accessory to her work-in-progress Lady Vadore costume, which includes a steampunk Vader mask that you really have to see. Check out her website for more pics and info.

[via Nerd Approved]

After invading living rooms with his Space Invaders couch (which btw are now for sale), Igor Chak imagines the king of shelves, patterned after one of the most famous videogame stages ever made: the construction site aka Barrels stage from the legendary 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong.

The concept took shape when Chak imagined where the props in games are taken after they’ve served their purpose. He thought of a way to “encourage Mario” – who has since moved on to pipes and bricks – to take back these old steel beams and ladders. I’m not sure if Mario owns the construction site, but I’m sure both he and Donkey Kong would love to have this shelf in their cribs. After all, they owe a lot to this pixelated scene.

Insert a token in your browser and jump to Chak’s website for gorilla-sized versions of the images. I sense a trend of platformer-inspired shelves incoming.

[via HiConsumption]

Old consoles never die, they just get digitized. The Game Boy Color is one such system. You can find emulators of it running on PCs, Macs, PSPs, smartphones and even calculators. Here’s a GBC emulator for the cloud age: a JavaScript & HTML5 emulator that you can play on your browser.

The emulator was written by Software Engineering student Grant Galitz. Like most browser games, it doesn’t need you to install anything on your computer. It even has built-in games! You can also load .gb or .gbc files, although I wasn’t able to test that. I also don’t know how the emulator handles game saves.

Technically the emulator can run even on mobile browsers, but it was slow and unplayable on my iPad 2. Perhaps newer devices will fare better. Check out the emulator on Grant’s website before Nintendo falcon punches it down. You can also check out its source code at GitHub.

[via TechCrunch]