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Kinect Hack Makes Shadow Puppets Real(ish)

The Microsoft Kinect has been selling like hotcakes, and geeks have been using it to do amazing things. The best I've seen so far is this "shadow puppet" app created in one day by exhibit designers Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson using free, open-source drivers for the Kinect. They actually connected the Kinect (ahem) to a Mac and wrote some code in order to make this work. This app tracks "the elbow, the wrist, the tips of your fingers, and your thumb" in order to turn a shadow puppet gesture into a... READ ON

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Yeah, That's Probably the World's Biggest Harry Potter Fan

Apparently Moviefone is holding a contest to find America's biggest Harry Potter fan. Well, "HarryPotterHimself" argues that he is not just America's biggest Potter fan, he's the world's biggest fan. If you don't believe his claims, check out the video below showing a tour of his house, crammed full of collectibles. My favorite quote: "I can wear Harry Potter clothing every day for three months without wearing the same thing twice [waves his wand at a bed covered with HP shirts]." The YouTube... READ ON

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Crazy in the Coconut: "Frontier Psychiatrist"

From the annals of weird internet history, I bring you "Frontier Psychiatrist," a music video by The Avalanches from 2001. The Avalanches use tons of samples to construct catchy, often bizarre songs. "Frontier Psychiatrist" itself reportedly contains samples from 37 spoken word records. This video, directed by Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire, puts on a crazy mixed-media stage production to go along with the song. I thoroughly agree with one of the top YouTube comments on this video. As "CaptainPotWeed"... READ ON

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The 20 Longest Pages on Wikipedia

Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, according to Wikipedia, #830 in the Line of succession to the British throne. Back in July, our own Will Treece pointed to the then-longest Wikipedia article: Licensed and localized editions of Monopoly. However, since then, the Monopoly page has been broken up into a series of shorter pages. I thought I'd check out what the current Top 20 list looks like today -- and it's totally bananas. While most of the longest articles are themselves long lists... READ ON
  1. FIND THESE T-SHIRTS AND MORE IN THE STORE!

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"There Will Be Blood," SNES Style

Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen 2007's There Will Be Blood, the video below is a massive spoiler -- in the best possible way. The creators turn TWBB into a sidescrolling Super Nintendo style game (sorry, not a playable game -- just a video) lasting just one minute. The original film is 158 minutes long, so this 158:1 compression is shockingly impressive -- particularly given that it seems to get all of the major plot points in there. If you have seen TWBB, you owe it to nerds everywhere to watch this... READ ON

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The [Spider] Web

Beautiful and creepy: this video uses macro photography showing a spider's web, covered in droplets of dew. At least one of the spiders is a European Garden Spider (there are zillions of them in my yard). If you're arachnophobic, don't watch. If you're a little skeezed out by spiders, actually DO watch, since it's mainly just empty webs, beautifully photographed. The spider shots are in the second half. The Web from Bill Newsinger on Vimeo. (Via... READ ON

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What a Glorious Space to Dwell

Here's a catchy, simple song to brighten your Tuesday morning. Songwriter Jonathan Mann has ben doing a song-a-day project called Songatron for quite a while now; song #659 is called "What A Glorious Space To Dwell (Fun Facts Song)." He explains it like so: I stumbled on to a really wonderful thread on Reddit.com about the most mind blowing facts people could think of. I collected a bunch of them and made this song! Here's a sample of the song's lyrics: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas,... READ ON

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Tommy Wiseau's New Bad Movie

Tommy Wiseau is best known (okay, only known) for his awful movie The Room; if you haven't seen it, check out Ransom Riggs's post The Remarkable Success of the Worst Movie Ever. The Room is generally considered "so bad it's good" because Wiseau is such an awful writer, actor, and director. Well, now he's back -- with a twelve-minute horror spoof called The House That Drips Blood on Alex. Guess what the plot is? The new movie features Wiseau as "Alex" and he directs the thing, except this time it was... READ ON

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Video Projected on a 600-Year-Old Clock

So let's say you're in Prague on the 600th anniversary of the construction of the Prague Astronomical Clock and you want to have a good time. What do you do? Make a fantastic video and project it onto the entire face of the clock tower, which is quite a feat given the dimensions of the tower. The video below shows what happened -- 10 minutes of animation on the tower, showing among other things: the construction of the tower, its inner gears, luminescent rain, various wars, and floaty astrological... READ ON

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Dan Hanna: 17 Years of Self-Portraits in One Video

Artist/animator/filmmaker Dan Hanna has been photographing himself every day from two angles, for roughly 19 years (he started in 1991). In the video below, he shows the first 17 years' worth in a rough edit (a fancier version is coming later; as you can imagine, scanning and arranging all those photos is very time-consuming). Actually, the video only uses images from every second day in order to keep the video short. Hanna describes the rather amazing camera rig he built to take the photos like so:... READ ON

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