ThinkStank

- February 2 -

Fecal Fairy Tales

Publishing venture.  Classic fairy tales rewritten to keep kids interested by pandering to the childhood love of potty humor.  Story text also supplemented to emphasize a pro-potty-training moral.

Launch titles include:

Little Red Riding Pooed

Three Little Logs

Goldiplops

Cinderrhea

Seeping Booty

The Princess and the Poo

Snow White and the Seven Flushes

Poops in Boots

The Goose That Laid the Brown Eggs

Peter and the Toilet

The Ugly Dungling
Rapoonzel

Hansel & Two-ply

Jack and the Brownstalk

The Pied Pooper

Stone Poop

Rumplestipation

Stories narrated by “Prince Charmin”.

- January 11 -

Totally Totally Chatmonster

Japanese arcade dancer in which you engage in “competiversation” with various NPC opponents—a salaryman on the Tokyo subway, a geisha, a schoolgirl, Iron Chef Morimoto, etc.—by stepping on the correct dance pad arrows to fire off the words that construct an effective riposte to their latest rhetorical gambit.

Two players can play head-to-head, using a pair of dance pads to softshoe simplified discussions of a variety of topics.  This will replace texting as the primary form of communication between many Japanese teens.

Further, TTC conversations will be used as a means of plain-sight encrypting communications to stymie nosey adults: the code can be employed in person through basic footwork, or deployed over traditional text chat media by typing sequences of <, >, v and ^ characters that can be decoded as footsteps by a conversant recipient.

- January 9 -

Mapstalgia

Mapstalgia!

Tumblr blog collecting drawings, done only from memory, of maps of video game worlds and levels and such.

I liked this idea enough that I made it happen today, so go check out Mapstalgia. 

And draw up a video game map and submit it while you’re at it.

Mapstalgia!

- December 22 -

Secret Sontag Gift Exchange

Holiday ritual in which each participant draws the name of another participant out of a hat and then sends them an anonymous greeting card featuring a quote by essayist Susan Sontag and probably some sort of holiday greeting while you’re at it.

Some ideas to get you started:

- December 14 -

National Novel Plagiarism Month

Remix culture variation on the traditional National Novel Writing Month: you have one month to rewrite, from memory and without any references, a novel that you have previously read.

UPDATE 12/14/11: RYAN NORTH I AM GIVING YOU A DIRTY LOOK RIGHT NOW

- December 10 -

- December 8 -

Monogrammed mustaches

Ironic bougie hipster facial hair styling option: a nice pair of calligraphic initials poised the side of one’s upper lip. 

Could be accomplished a few different ways:

1.  Dyeing/bleaching monogram into existing facial hair.

2.  Using holding product and some sort of crimping process to rearrange existing facial hair to bear an imprinted monogram as positive and negative space in the mustache.

3.  Taking lock of head hair and pressing/fixing it into a bit of sturdy monogram hair art plaque; cutting “shelf” into mustache to accommodate plaque; using a few mustache hairs to tie plaque into place on shelf.  More work but probably the most stable long-term solution.

4.  Fake plastic monogrammed mustache to wear with fake Groucho-style nose-and-glasses-and-eyebrows glasses, except the mustache isn’t attached to rest so you can whip off the glasses with a flourish and produce double takes.

5.  Body mod special: shave existing mustache, use a soldering iron to brand monogram into actual upper lip, let hair grow back in all the places that you haven’t permanently destroyed your hair follicles.

- December 4 -

Tetris as free-to-play game

Microtransaction-funded free Tetris app for iPhone.

Play like normal Tetris except the default game only comes with the s and z pieces, for an easy learning experience and some challenging puzzling action.

But!  For just a little bit of cash, you can enhance your game experience with these optional add-on features:

- Additional kinds of tetromino cost $1 each for square, L, T and J.  There’s also a really powerful long skinny | piece available for $2 if you really want to step up your game.

- Rotating isn’t strictly necessary but it adds a lot of depth to game and it’s a bargain at $2.  Highly recommended to enthusiasts.

- Tired of waiting for pieces to fall all the way to the bottom when it’s a gimme move?  $3 gets you “Time Warp”, a feature that let’s you hold the down arrow to move a piece toward the bottom much faster.  Frenetic Tetris action!

- Stay one step ahead with “Clairvoyance”, a $5 game-changer that lets you see the next piece before it falls.

- For advanced players looking for more of a marathon than a sprint, $8 gets you “Nuke It From Orbit”, a special feature that will remove an entire row from the game board if you manage to fill all ten squares with tetromino matter.  With the nuclear option, it’s like a whole new game!

- December 2 -

Trillbocop

What If? style cross-over comic book miniseries combining Robocop and Deep Space Nine:

As the result of both gang warfare in early 21st century Detroit and a space-time anomaly in the Gamma Quadrant in the 24th C, mortally wounded cop Alex Murphy is taken to the same secret government hospital as dying, time-displaced Starfleet officer Jadzia Dax.

Murphy’s body is rebuilt using robotic parts thanks to future-tech guidance from Jazdia, in exchange for which help she asks that her Dax symbiote be transplanted into Murphy to keep it safely hosted until Earth develops warp technology and can reunite it with the Trill people.

Trillbocop, six and a half feet of cybernetic freckles, proceeds to clean up the streets and corporate boardrooms of Old Detroit, while Alex Dax engages in a dual struggles to find some continuity of identity to both the cop’s old family and work life and the old symbiote’s violent separation from his previous host and his introduction to an unfamiliar Human physiology.

Cameo by android Starfleet officer Data, who gets in a wrestling match with ED-209.