Tom Hume

This one just had me sniggering out loud on the train: augmented animals. I want kittens with lasers, goddammit!

Tickling my nodes this week:

• Planes that never got built
• Animal astronauts
• The Poseidon undersea hotel
• H2G2 trailer: amazingly, this actually looks quite good.
• Paper robot wrestlers

Check out That Mitchell And Webb Sound - it's a new radio series from the guys behind Peep Show (which I rated as one of the best TV comedies of last year - hideously uncomfortable viewing).

This last weeks episode is particularly wooo for its skit on people complaining about cameraphones. Oh and the running bear gags. Bear gags good.

Via Mr Gooby, Zogg: "Our kind travels between the stars as an endogenous retrovirus..."

Doom - the board game. Wonderful, but I want more. I want to see multiplayer, on-paper games of Microsoft Office: format that paragraph! Throw 2 sixes to save successfully! Play your paperclip card for no reason other than to really fuck the other players off!

Lovely things:

1. The knocking machine: "You put it on a table and knock on the table: the device detects the knock through a shock sensor in the bottom, copies and repeats it till you hold the hammer to stop it."

2. Beautiful barcodes - that actually work.

3. FlickrGraph - is there no end to the wonderful windows that Flickr users are opening onto that service?

4. Planes that never got built.

5. Networked pac-man - a lovely mod to the original game. Coincidentally, we've just implemented a similar sort of thing for a client using Bluetooth; maybe I'll be able to post about it one day...

Monkeys will pay for porn.

Romancing the user experience

"We don't have the 250 million pounds to send our own probe to Titan. So we're going to send three virtual probes over somewhere a little easier to get to - Brighton!": Mission to Brighton

Design Synthesis on MMORPGs: "Not since gym memberships took off have so many people paid so many monthly fees to do such a limited number of mindless repetitive tasks."