We need these in the US. Some of the other vending machines linked to are cool too.
Japanese lobster-vending machine
Cory Doctorow:
Earlier this week, I blogged a great collection of Japanese vending machines, but this one is even better, sporting, as it does, a coin-operated live-lobster vending machine! Link
(Thanks, GenkiGecko!)
Update:Here’s a commercial supplier of coin-op lobster game/vending-machines (courtesy Daniel Drucker)
[via Boing Boing Blog]
AdRants has an post about people being upset about ads on Flickr. People seem to be blaming Yahoo! for this practice.
With Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr, it didn’t take too long for Yahoo text ads to begin appearing next to Flickr member’s pictures. Unlike Google AdWords, Yahoo text ads, at least on Flickr, appear on personal Flickr pages whether or not the member wants them. Granted, Flickr provides the service for free which negates a non-paying Flickr member’s ability to completely control what appears on their photo pages but one Flickr user, tanais, doesn’t like the practice, commenting on an ad placement next to an image of, we assume, his dog, “I do not like my pictures being used to advertise a specific breeder (they may be excellent they may be terrible – that’s not the point)… so I shall sit down and think about how best to AdBust this.” [AdRants]
IMHO the people complaining are idiots. I’ve been a user for ages, and Flickr has always had ads for free accounts. It’s been one of the big selling points for their Pro accounts. I’m not a fan of advertising, but you can’t expect to get something for nothing.
Flickr is one of the few web sites that I think does get it right. And my Pro account has been a very good deal. If it’s that much of a big deal pay for the service.
People have been pestering me to get crossposting working again so that my blog posts show up over on LJ. I finally got it working this morning after quite a bit of fiddling. I’m using the ljcrosspost plugin for Movable Type. It works fairly well, but took some fiddling to get it to work right. I should email the author and let him know the issues I was having.
Next step is to get OpenID working so that people over on LJ can log into my blog for comments using their LJ info.
One big gripe I have about MT plugins these days is that not enough of them work with dynamic pages. I’ve got 4000+ entries and rebuilding it all just for a new plugin really sucks (and takes forever).
Ugs. The family is going out for one of the few things that I cannot really have post transplant. Sushi. This sucks.
Another try
Recently the New York Times ran an article about Manga for Girls. In other words: shoujo manga. Even though I might nit-pick on a few points, it’s a pretty solid article.
Shojo – the word means girl in Japanese – frequently involves a lovelorn teenager seeking a boyfriend or dealing with situations like entering a new school, being bullied or trying to break away from a clique. There are also action stories featuring girls in strong roles as scientists and samurai warriors. (The shojo genre has been called “big eyes save the world,” after the characteristic drawing style of girls with saucer-shaped eyes who are sometimes endowed with supernatural powers.)
But parents and teachers, who are sometimes happy to see teenagers reading just about anything, might be caught off guard by some of the content of the girls’ favorite books. Among the best-selling shojo are stories that involve cross-dressing boys and characters who magically change sex, brother-sister romances and teenage girls falling in love with 10-year-old boys. Then there’s a whole subgenre known as shonen ai, or boy’s love, which usually features romances between two impossibly pretty young men. [NYTimes: Manga and Girls]
From #!/usr/bin/girl, more flash game fun. Remember Grow? Remember Grow RPG? Well now it is an all new Grow, this time it’s a cube!
Flash Fun: GrowCube
Here’s a little fun for your Monday: GrowCube. I like to have something to distract me from the beginning of the week. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]
I’ve almost got it figured out!
Wow, grade school kids redo the video for Devo’s Whip It. And it’s pretty cool! [via Boing Boing]
Been a nice day for World of Warcraft. We got a new patch today with much goodness. Blizzard finally relented and put up two Role Play-Player vs Player servers. People have been asking for these forever and Blizzard had made it sound like it wasn’t going to happen. On the downside, they only put up two servers and the wait for them was an hour last time I looked. I recreated my original RP character over on Emerald Dream and will be playing a bit there also. Look for Parfait if you go there.
And last but not least. A link Kynn paged me with about the perils of cybersex on World of Warcraft that made me laugh out loud.
