Big Dog

One of the most uneasy videos I have seen in a while. It's movements are so blind and desperate, particularly as it tries to negociate the ice and being kicked.

Buff house

This looks like such a cool house/studio: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/29/magazine/0302-STYLE_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink Love how they kept the exterior exactly as they found it.

Garfield minus Garfield

This is a piece of genius:

Someone has taken that fat ginger cat out of his own cartoon and created a depressingly effective illustration of a man wrestling with his mundane modern life.

More here.

Long boarding

After my sister was given a 3 foot pintailed beast of longboard handmade by her ex-boyfriend I have been mildly obsessed by these slightly goofy skateboards. Carving her board down the hill outside my house during breaks in my revision for my easter exams was life saving. Now having been in Newquay in Cornwall for the last few days for the BUSA surfing competition and being surrounded by every different incarnation of longboard has only heightened my resolve to finally buy one and learn to slide it leasurely round town in my own private 'Endless Summer' film.

This film (via sissyfish) encapsulates nicely just how much fun it is:

Mike Miller, trails style.

Miller Time:



This 19 year old from Tadley has got a style that is the future of trails riding: wide bars, huge tucked up whips, tight nosed in landings, floaty 360s and inverted tables.
Check out Chase Hawk and Mike Aitken in this Fox Trails vid from last summer for more of this tight, floaty style of riding:



Footplant on the landing wtf!?

Laser graffiti

Some guys in Vienna and the Netherlands have figured out a method of writing huge, non permanent graffiti pieces on pretty much anything. Check it out here. It all seems a bit techy but its cool to see this sort of technology in the hands of creative individuals and not just being used by advertisers.

Predicting emotional futures: David Gilbert

A really interesting interview that came via The New Sheltin Wet&Dry. It seems alot of people are realtively successful in recovering from unhappiness yet in this article David Gilbert questions just how effective we are in predicting what will make us culmulatively more happy. He argues that just as we recover from being too unhappy we have an inherent ability to combat being too happy.

"Human resilience is really quite astonishing. People are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be. People who suffer real tragedy and trauma typically recover more quickly than they expect to and often return to their original level of happiness, or something close to it. That’s the good news—we are a hardy species, even though we don’t know this about ourselves. The bad news is that the good things that happen to us don’t feel as good or last as long as we think they will. So all that wonderful stuff we’re aiming for—winning the lottery, getting promoted, whatever we think will change our lives—probably won’t do it after all. We’re resilient in both directions. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy."

All this ties in pretty interestingly with a survey undertaken in the USA and in the UK looking at happiness in our populations: link here. It seems that we are at our most unhappiest at the age of 44, the age when we are perhaps expecting to be most successful having slogged away making a career or life in our younger years.