Featured Site: Message with a Bottle

Message With a Bottle is a pretty darned charming Tumblr by a stay-at-home dad who writes post-it notes to himself about parenting and fatherhood. They're both true and hilarious. It's only a matter of time before CBS makes these notes into a television series.

Video Distraction: Science Flash Mob

Created for the online science museum emergentuniverse.org, this dance flash mob illustrates the behavior of electrons in a superconductor. Superconductors are materials which, at very low temperatures, can conduct electric currents without any resistance. That means that the current can flow forever with no energy loss.

Featured Site: Our Valued Customers

A moment of clarity as he paid for his books...

Our Valued Customers is a brilliant blog of minimalistic sketches capturing one single moment of idiocy on the part of comic book store customers.  Like Overheard In New York, this site is certain to entertain you for hours on end.

Video Distraction: WoW Dance Party

Daily Links: April 20, 2011

Chocolate Cthulhu Idol

From the depths of R'lyeh comes an idol of Cthulhu cast in solid green milk chocolate! Get yours now at Ghost Stories for US$10 each.  Warning: Madness may Ensue

6 Ways to Decorate Easter Eggs. Not including the easy way: buying them in pre-colored plastic.

9 Wedding Foods Around the World from WomansDay.com

The 10 Strangest, Most Terrifying Creatures Ever Found

24 Cool Steampunk Weapons from Another Era

Build a battery out of pennies with this tutorial from Instructables.

Help Identify These Mysterious Scientific Objects

Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay? Twenty-five years later, the Red Forest still has high radiation readings, but animals live there like they always have -or do they?

Make your Kindle look busted with this screensaver.

Video Distraction: The World’s Most Complex Rube Goldberg Machine

The Purdue's Society of Professional Engineers team has shattered the world record for most steps ever successfully completed by a Rube Goldberg machine. In 244 steps the "Time Machine" traces the history of the world from Big Bang to the Apocalypse before accomplishing the assigned everyday task of watering a flower. The machine is featured in the online edition of the World Records Academy and has been submitted to the World Records Academy.

When all was said and done, it took five months of work to build the machine’s 10 modules. It’s actually pretty smooth despite all of the complexity—there is even a CO2 rocket ship launch at the 1:30 mark.

Via: Popular Mechanics

Video Distraction: If Moses Had The Internet

Daily Links: April 19, 2011

Intriguing Museum Sign

12 Hilarious Signs That You Are a Computerholic.

To promote the new Internet Explorer 9, Soap Creative developed the world’s biggest Pac-Man game which involves thousands of user-submitted screens, and could take years to play.

Urban explorers surreptitiously gain access to the Post Office Railway underneath London, take lots of photos. 


Wayne Dorrington gave us Star Wars Episode IV in icons a couple of months ago. Now he has completed the plot of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the same manner, which he calls “Iconoscope.

Video Distraction: Pengasm

That's right. It's a baby Penguin being tickled. Possibly the cutest thing ever in the history of the world.

Video Distraction: Speed Painting

Amazing video of Japanese artists painting murals during the course of one week! They paint on a big wall, painting them out and starting over each day.

Featured Site: Everything is Cuter In Bunny Ears

Suicidal Robots by Ryan Green

(Almost) every day for the last year, cartoonist/animator Ryan Green has demonstrated that Everything is Cuter In Bunny Ears

Video Distraction: T-Rex on the Loose

Australian Elementary students receive a visit from a Tyrannosaurus Rex

Daily Links: April 15, 2011

Banana Carving Art

The Apple Canvas: 10 Outstanding Works of iOS Art

The Big Map Blog is a great blog for antique map lovers

How to hack yourself a standing desk - an illustrated guide

Soldering is easy - 7 page comic book about how to solder

Why the password "this is fun" is 10 times more secure than "J4fS!2"


Yes, That Can Be My Next Tweet creates random Tweets for you based on your previous ones. MarkovFilter in 140 characters.

Ads: Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales just finished with one of his unsettling I'm staring at you banner-driven fund drives, so maybe he's now going to waste your donations on creatively-suspect ads worldwide—starting in Slovakia! Or, possibly, these are scam ads - the main clue being you don't break the brand name in the copy? The ads are on the Jandl in Bratislava agency website.

Source: Ads of the World via Slovak Republic

Tech: Glasses-Free 3D Display

Head Tracking for iPad: Glasses-Free 3D Display - Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory track the user's head using an iPad's front facing camera, using the positional data to create the impression of depth without the use of specialized glasses.  The demo with the targets has been inspired by the work of Johnny Lee with a Wii remote.

Movie Mockery: Shaun of the Dead in 30 Seconds

This is basically my love letter to all things Edgar Wright/Scott Pilgrim! I saw and read Scott Pilgrim in the summer of last year, and it had such a massive impact I decided to make this to vent my creative juices!

Daily Links: April 11, 2011

Via: Reddit

5 social sites that students need to try 

5 Soviet Space Programs That Prove Russia Was Insane

7 Memes That Went Viral Before The Internet Existed.

Actor George Takei is selling a ringtone featuring his personal catch phrase "Ohhh Myyy!" to benefit the Old Globe Theater.

Angry Birds IRL: Angry Barrels

The Apple Canvas: 10 Outstanding Works of iOS Art

Could A Layperson Land A Jumbo Jet?

Infographic: 50 Years of human Spaceflight

Featured Site: Fuck Yeah Headlines

F*ck Yeah Headlines! Each weekday Eric Wedum finds a headline on a major news site, and illustrates it without reading a word of the story... with hilarious results.

Tech: Construction Robot

Bruce Sterling offers some bad news for the future fiscal viability of the construction industry. A trailer-mounted bricklaying robot named "R.O.B." will be building its second stylishly curved wall on Pike Street in New York later this year. Its first job is a bit ungainly, but refining the process is only a matter of time. In the mean time, R.O.B. doesn't take breaks, go home, demand raise, or wolf-whistle at passers-by.  Plus, don’t forget that buildings can be 3d-printed now, too...

Daily Links: April 8, 2011

The Best use of the [Citation Needed Tag] I've ever seen.

Via: BlackenedButterfly

10 Hilariously Dated News Reports on “New” Technologies. Wonder at the first remote control, the microwave oven, and this newfangled thing they call “internet.” (via The Daily What)

15 awesome dual-monitor wallpapers you should check out

20 essential online resources for finding new music

103 Doritos flavors from around the world vs 101 Pringle flavors from around the world

Check out the Creepy app. It will scrub the internet for location data for a given twitter or flickr ID and display it all in a nice map for you. Good reason to start removing those geotags from your images and social network data.

Daily Links: April 7, 2011

A difference in perspective -what we see and what kids see.

The Eleven Most Terrible Kid's Toys Ever.

How Many Years - How many more years will these resources last?

The History of Science Fiction, laid out on a large timeline. This artwork by Ward Shelley enlarges to a size that might take you all day to follow.

A New Company Promises to Give You a Pretend Facebook Girlfriend. If you want people to think you have a relationship, Cloud Girlfriend can set you up, which, of course, will attract the kind of women who want what some other woman has.

Video Distraction: Star Trek Kinect Dancers

If Star Trek has taught us anything, it's that modern technology won't ever cure the nerd's impulse to make themselves into fools. But whatcha gonna do? You just gotta dance like nobody's watching... except for a convention full of gamers and the entire internet.

Music: Nothing But a Tote Bag

Comedian Mikala Bierma sings an erotic ode to Mr. Ira Glass of This American Life. She becomes disturbingly intense by the second chorus...

Might be time to file a restraining order Mr. Glass.

Daily Links: April 6, 2011

6 Things Our Kids Just Plain Won't Get

The 7 Most Heroic Con Artists of All Time

The 20 Best Supermarket Sign Fails

20 Fortune Cookies That Don't Make Any Sense. In some, you kind of know what they are trying to say, and others are totally off in the ozone.

Airplane Etiquette - You're sitting on the window seat and have to go to the bathroom, but the people between you and the aisle are sleeping. What do you do?

Do Not Touch the Frog. National Geographic photographer Mark Moffett went to find a very poisonous frog, but his awesomely funny adventures along the way will make you forget it’s a 16-minute video.

Video Distraction: Zombie Autopsy

The Zombie Autopsies with Steven Schlozman, MD from GCP authors on Vimeo.

Daily Links: April 4, 2011

The 7 Most Needlessly Terrifying Pieces of Heavy Machinery

Doomsday bunker sales surge in wake of Japan earthquake

The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich. Having money often undermines everything else worth having in life.

Things Organized Neatly is a Tumblr for people who embrace their OCD. Now officially my favorite Tumblr.

Top 20 Ultimate Ways to Use a Disposable Camera

Vatican: The Internet to blame for rise in Satanism.

Daily Links: April 1, 2011

ThinkGeek’s April Fool’s joke this year was offering this "Awesome Mini Apple Store"

• 50 easy April Fool’s Day pranks to play on your friends.

• A Collection of Celebrity pranks around the web.  

• In Case You Missed It: Google Prank Round-Up; ThinkGeek Prank Round-Up.

• April Fools 2011: The Big List.

• April Fools’ Day 2011: Top 10 stories or pranks. 

• April Fools Day 2011 Roundup: The BEST Pranks Of The Year.

• Top 10 2011 April Fool’s Day hoaxes. 

First Post

What is the internet but one gigantic procrastination engine? Well, here's one more excuse for you to put off what needs doing!

I pretty much spend the entire day in front of the computer for one reason or another, and more of that than I should probably admit is spent clicking around the web looking for distractions.  I've got a pack of link portals I comb each day, and I find a lot of interesting stuff.  Here's where I share all of it.