As I was getting up to date with my list of feeds, I saw two videos posted in one of the few blogs about design I'm suscribed to, that looked particularly interesting judging by their description.

The first one is amazingly cool, I love it. Called "Western Spaghetti", it shows a recipe for spaghetti with very particular ingredients.


The second one is a music video of a song by Oren Lavie^w called "Her Morning Elegance". The video shows that elegance, and the song is not bad.


Hope you like them :)

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via Cuarto derecha

Christmas is the time for games, and I found two that look fun and use novel ideas, either in how you control characters, or how you solve the problems you encounter

The first one is a Flash game called Straw Hat Samurai, and as you may imagine, you are a samurai. The objective of the game is to defeat the warlords that are raging war across the land, and between you and them stand tons of other samurais. The cool thing about the game is that the control is mouse-driven, and to kill the other samurais you have to slash through them using mouse gestures. Aim for vital parts and cut them in group to get higher points.


The second one is the work of a company called ratloop, and is competing on the 2009 IGF. It's a 3D platform game, where you play as two characters, the Engineer and the Actionaut solving puzzles and collecting items. Nothing groundbreaking. What it's groundbreaking is the way you can solve the puzzles, which is explained in the link below. My jaw simply fell to the floor.


If you don't want to play or your hardware does not support DX9 (unlikely), watch the video and prepare to be amazed. And curse everything for not having a scanner.

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via Pixfans and TIGSource

Today I collected a couple of links to interesting pages that involve photography in various degrees. So I decided to include them in just a single post, instead of one per page. Let's start.


The Boston Globe, like the Wall Street Journal, has a daily section devoted to posting high-quality photographs illustrating different news around the world. Today they posted the last part of a special edition dedicated to showing in photos how the 2008 was. It's pretty amazing overall.


Part 2 and Part 3. The three pages are pretty heavy in graphics, so they may take a while to load. Word of warning: The most striking photos are not showed by default, so be sure to read the description below each one before clicking in the frame to see the picture. A couple ones really are not for the faint of heart, so proceed carefully.


It's not a secret that most photos in professional publications nowadays are retouched using the ubiquitous Photoshop, or similar photo editors. In his page, Glenn Feron exposes some of the work he did for his clients, showing us the retouched photo and the original one if we move the cursor over it.


Weight is lost, wrinkles disappear, breasts get bigger and, in general, everyone is younger in the hands of Glenn. The results sure are better than plastic surgery :P


Even if digital cameras are far easier to handle than traditional ones, Chris Foresman at Ars Technica teaches us a few tips on how to get the best out of that gorgeous new digital camera, and make better shots, complete with some graphical examples.


Seasoned photographers will probably not learn anything new, and a few ones are common sense (flash, blergh!), but with the commoditization of digital cameras, knowing how to make good photos sure come in handy.

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via Fotografía Microsiervos and the Ars Technica feed