Showing posts with label Mondayitis. Show all posts

Monday has reared its ugly head around again, so let´s cut to the chase with some useless distractions:

Police Departments take note, instead of paying an ol´fashioned pad and pencil artist to sketch out your wanted criminal, why not just use the Wii´s Mii feature to create an avatar based on his/ her features?

That´s what Police did in Kanagawa prefecture early in Feb this year, in connection with a trashed car wanted poster.

Maybe not as hi tech as the Motion Portrait avatars we blogged about last week, but still..could work.


In other bits and pieces, you´d think that to get 83,485 Subscribers on Youtube, you´d have to put on a whole song and dance number.
Not so for 23 year old youtube sensation Magibon who just sits in front of her camera, bats her pretty eyelashes and says....nothing.
Maybe it´s because of this (and her tiny face, huge eyes and big boobs) that she´s so popular in Japan?

Magibon who spoke to Pingmag says that people say they are moved by her videos,
¨Because it’s a like a blank slate, it can be whatever you want it to be. There are a lot of other videos on YouTube — some of the most watched ones — that have a lot of arguing and negativity, and then you have my videos, with just silence, maybe just a smile, or a wave. To some people, that’s really meaningful for them, to just make everything stop for a minute, and have someone just smile at them.¨

She is actually from Pensilvania but one day picked up a camera and decided to record herself being her, and speaking Japanese because she always like Japan.

I´m confused about this girl, is she just a lucky moron? Or is she actually smarter than you and me? She´s certainly richer now thanks to her videos, and tapped into something bigger than her: a pretty blank slate all the more real because of her mundanity. Maybe she is a video artist, making her living using easily accessible and distributed technology for mass consumption. Either way she´s still going strong even after 2 years so she must be doing something right..

ZiA

So, it´s Monday and we here at Sci-Blog Japan have a severe case of Monday-itis.

Symptoms include an aversion to work, blurry vision, ADHD, coffee addiction and easily distract-.....

er, what was i saying?

Here´s a minute timewaster for you.
The Hotoku-ji monk hard at work. (Friday, April 23, 1999)

Don´t you wish a robot could take over you work and you could sit back drinking something ridiculously colourful with an umbrella by the pool?

Well guess what? Those Japanese monks are way ahead of you.
They already thought of that idea back in 1999, with a robomonk in Hotoku-ji, a temple in Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture.

The Robo monk sits still most of the time but then chants when it senses somebody approaching. Much like me pretending to type at work on a Monday.

The best part is that the creator ,Yoshihiro Motooka, a 65-year-old former railway technician, made the robot from recycled parts including an old casette recorder and a washing machine motor.

Motooka claims when Robomonk dissapears for maintenance, people are always disappointed and inevitably ask ¨Where´s he gone??¨

And,

I thought this was cool. While some countries just have your poor mans ¨Men at Work¨ sign, Tokyo has this:















ZiA