Dark Materials.

Enter the Shadow Walker. Star Wars eat your heart out.

Glaringly unfathomable technical mechanics aside…they’re trying to build a robot that can walk up and down stairs.

By they I mean London’s Shadow Robot Company.  Yeah, “Shadow Robot” is what I said.  I know. Their website is here.

I found them on this coolio site called Android World. Scope.

This is supposed to help kids brush their teeth? I found it roaming on ebaumsworld. More horrors can be sought here.

I don’t want to brush my teeth let alone go to bed ever again after watching this. WTF is wrong with the puppeteer? No more Novocaine for that guy.

I really wish I had the skill to imbed the video for this. I don’t, yet, so here is a teaser image:

Artist Michel Gagné created this series of shorts for Nickelodeon’s Halloween Shriekin’ Weekend in 2005. You can watch this amazing piece of flash animation here.

They are also available in individual format at his website, here.

Thanks to the brilliant no fat clips!!! video blog for this. Check it out.

Everyone should listen to Radiolab. Their website is here.

Today I was listening to their episode “Deception”.

It turns out that people who can effectively lie to themselves are happier. Those who see the reality of life, in all its cruelty and tragedy, are bound to be depressed. Just great.

We can also tell who those happy people are, thanks to the science of microexpressions (among other things). Paul Eckman is one of the premier researchers in this field:

We all know he’s out there, just waiting to befriend one of us and give free rides through the clouds.

Really the reason for this post is because I stumbled upon the Cloud Appreciation Society, formed to “fight the banality of ‘blue sky’ thinking”.

Lame.

However, they take amazing pictures, just look.

You asked for more? Oh…no?…OK…well…whatever.

I spent a lot of my time that day looking at the ground or just above it.

And then there were the pigeons. You have no idea how long it took me to get a shot of their shadows in flight. Savor this one:

There are a lot of killer shadows at 85th and Greenwood at 11:00.

I took these with my cellphone so the resolution is pathetic.

You get the idea, though.

…of how we’ve been numbed since the beginning.

The kid with the gray and red plaid shirt…that’s me. I literally had that shirt. I watched so much television as a kid that it’s kind of surreal I’m even able to type without electrical prompting. The question of how/if I’ve been scarred irrevocably by all of those hours in front of the box is the sort of thing that keeps a body up at night.

This video is compliments of my friend Jess Smith at Seattle Repertory Theatre. You can find out about them here, since I can’t link you to her non-existent website.

Every once in awhile an idea turns out better than you expected.

When I set out to plan my middle school class for the Spring, I made the crazy decision to attempt shadow masks. I’d never made them, and didn’t have any resources to explain the technical details to me. Tonight I took on the task, throwing caution into the shadows.

And like that I’m a frickin’ cartoon werewolf.

Ray Harryhausen was one of the few film artists I knew anything about as a kid. And I only knew because so many of the things I loved in features I watched over and over were his creations. Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts are two of the more well known examples. If you want to learn about his work, visit his website. That’s right, he’s 88 and he has a website. I quote, ” I hope you enjoy the site and will visit it often.” Click here.

There are so many of the animations in this video that I’ve never seen before.  I’ve got work to do.

It’s also a good intro, visually, for the Harryhausen neophyte: