Moustache May begins tomorrow. If you would like to participate on any level (meaning, post pictures to the site), hit me up with an email so I can get you a login and password.

Remember, it's not a contest - there's no clean shaving required at the beginning - it's just an all out - blowout celebration of moustaches. You know you want in (at the very least to see if you can actually handle having a moustache for a month). Ladies welcome.

If I had more time, I might thoroughly explore 2D Depot and the Ximo adventures. Definetly a well done little virtual world..

Jon Purvis has returned. His new site features a nice combination of his older work and his new stuff that he's shot since living in Massachusetts. Always enjoyable to see his photography.

Sometimes even FOX says stuff is too racy.. the Family Guy DVD Box Sets had several things cut out as they were deemed "too inappropriate." But now you can download them if you want to and relive that Osama Bin Laden At The Airport joke over and over.

Hale Links: They Made Me Do It - posted here before. Lots of graff style to it, and a couple new projects. For some reason the layout makes me think of David Bean.. got his style.

Freak bird - Kind of at a loss for words on this one.. insane bird. Worth viewing.

Swan Arts - cool combination of hand drawn style and textured goods (papers and such).

Open Concepts - bizarre concept design for a whole gambit of items. At the very least check out the "Candy Throne" under Industrial Design.. that's just too much. Lots of good idea's, a handful of eyebrow raising / inquisitive look inspiring ones.

I've not seen a whole lot of press about this, so I will mention it and see if people think it's for real, a scam, or just lame.

Have you heard of All of MP3? It's a music download site apparently based out of Moscow. The site offers "online encoding", so you could download your music in loads of formats (mp3, flac, ogg, etc.). But the clincher is that you pay for bandwidth usage, not for song licensing. You want 500 Meg worth of downloads? $5. A gig? $10. Artists that offer nothing on iTunes or any US service have music available here, there are ridiculously complete discographies (check out Radiohead, or Bjork), and somehow this all happens through some sort of blanket Russian copyright law that keeps it legal. You can read a bit more about the service here, or just visit their site.

It seems a bit sketchy to me, and I'm not really down with the web based interface for procuring music.. but never-the-less.. it's an interesting phenomenon.

Nice.

I watched the Making The Video for Jay-Z's "99 Problems" last night - mostly because it featured Rick Rubin and was directed by Mark Romanek.. and apparently there is some controversy over the video because it shows Jay-Z being gunned down randomly in the video (it's not a linear story.. it's just him being shot for no real reason). You can watch the video with Real Player or Windows Media. It's shot well, great composition, nice black and white film, some cool NY scenes, but it's really not outstanding or all that controversial. The Vincent Gallo appearance is pretty much totally random.

Also, I think that may have been the poorest writeup of something that I've ever done. Sorry to everyone that had to stumble through that 8th grade style review.

The new Secret Machines video reminds me of something Andy Mueller would shoot.. they actually sound alot different than I had expected but still enjoyable.

The latest Courtney Love single is god awful. If you haven't forced yourself to hear it yet, you can check it out here. Strangely enough, I don't think my hatred for this song will gain the ultra defense squad for as my disparaging comments about Sublime did (and yes, they still suck).

Correction: I keep hearing "Zeplin Song" on Radio IO and assumed that was the single. The actual single, "Hold On To Me", is bad.. but not god awful. "Zeplin Song" is wretched.. and I have a hard time envisioning anyone listening to it on playback and agreeing that it should be included on a record. I wonder how bad the b-sides are.

Ryan Hale links: RE. | Design News - in the vein of Mocoloco.

Rust Fetish - ridiculous amounts of textured photos featuring.. you guessed it, Rust.

Rasterbator - not as bad as you think it is. Online program that takes any image and blows it up huge and ready to printed on many, many, many sheets of paper.

Dead Batteries - old batteries + random art = stuff people want you to buy. Kind of a neat kitschy idea.

Brotron Gallery - get your own sci-fi WMD moon smasher and more.

Ryan sends me alot of links, I think I may begin just posting them all here with a few bits of commentary. Think of him as a ghost author.

Check out this rather lengthy article about the benefits of kissing. If it wasn't talking about dopamine, norepinephrine, and the affect they have on your system I wouldn't bother to post this - but the actual scientific breakdown of sorts is rather interesting.

Typically I don't post Craig's List stuff, but this one is too amusing to pass up. Silly crackheads.

My first foray into the world of Hunter S. Thompson novels is complete. I finally got around to finishing off his Kingdom of Fear novel that I received for Christmas. If you haven't had to check out his stuff.. I suggest you do, as it is more like being told the most interesting, bizarre, engaging, and true stories from one helluva crazy guy than it is like reading a book. Anyone have suggestions as to what to read next?

Speaking of ripping... I'm having to rip a DVD today at work, extract a chapter from it, and get it into a web viewable format. So far I've been guided to use DVDbackup and forty-two for the conversion to a Flash importable format. I'm still in the midst of doing all this, so don't take these suggestions as the definitive word.. at least not yet. Anyone had any interesting experiences with DVD ripping (Duncan better have a word about this) ?

So I just ripped a Phoenix CD for "Everything is Everything" that supposedly was rife with copy protection. The disc wouldn't actually play in the computer without installing additional software, but it ripped just fine. Isn't that more incentive to convert to mp3?

No posts today.. the Internet here at work is being incredibly slow so I can't really browse, and compound that with the fact that we have 2 fairly large sized sites due very soon. So, maybe entertain yourselves in the comments - share something interesting you saw today.

Turns out that Digiorno is, in fact, not like delivery. It's much worse.

Weekend Links: Melissa Auf Der Maur online jukebox to preview her new album. Which is, honestly, quite good. Sucks that it appears to have been pushed back to a June 1st release now.

Mindless little Kill Bill game.

Trailer for The Terminal - a sappy Tom Hanks / Catherine Zeta Jones movie that I wouldn't bother mentioning if it didn't have Kumar in it for a second juggling.

The I, Robot robots are way too similar to the All Is Full of Love robots. So similar that I'd say someone ripped him off (regardless of however they may have been described in the book).

Coffee & Cigarettes looks way more scripted than I presumed it to be.

New stuff up over at the Mooks site.

Some nice works at Pop Junkie Design - the custom books are particularly nice.

What happened to web design? Do I just not see innovative new sites anymore or is it just all stagnant? Anyone got any anything worth looking at?

Not to group them all together as ridiculous, inane, and all around insipid.. but Republicans have a serious problem. Like, this whole thing about banning "low slung" pants that expose "intimate clothing." Land of the Free? What? Retardation abound.