In GQ’s latest issue, a 2009 recap, I spotted a familiar gadget heading up the ‘Best Stuff of the Year’ section: the Harinezumi camera produced by Superheadz. I remember the rep coming in to give us an initial demo of this fits-in-your-hand digital camera. At the time, I didn’t really grasp the appeal. So, it’s a video camera that shoots without sound? And it’s a digital camera that forces you to use the little plastic viewfinder to take a shot instead of a real-time display screen?

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I get it now. It’s an intentional throwback – as we slowly begin losing the old and familiar, like Polaroid and Super 8 film, it’s important to recreate these experiences with the new tools we have at hand. And the Harinezumi does an impressive job in that department. It’s a comforting experience to take a picture in the old way, combined with the ease of digital.

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And the video  does hearken back to the days when Super 8 was more readily available and, as a result, the whole world looked a little hazier, fuzzier, warmer and more romantic. Just see the video above – part of a great series on Youtube taken entirely with the Harinezumi.

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I’ve been working on a new musical project for the first time in years, so every Sunday for the past few months we’ve been getting together, playing music and talking shop. This past weekend, we came around to the topic of the Kaoss Pad.

For our purposes, we’ll be running vocals through it, but it’s built to process all sorts of audio and musical instruments. What does it do? Pitch-shifting, distortion, delay, auto-panning – any way you want to seriously mess with your sound / blow minds / trip the light fantastic, and so on. The most recent version Korg’s been making looks like the thing up above.

But, as you can see from the top video, people are just too hard to please. I have a guitar. I have a Kaoss Pad. I will never be happy until I have put one of these things inside of the other. Like this.

Perhaps taking a cue from the Muse guitarist, who has had a Kaoss Pad built into his guitar for awhile now because he is a cool cat, this guy Phil (seen in the video, presumably) modded his guitar and posted instructions here. You know, if you feel like Martha Stewart-ing it.

Seen on CrunchGear, this street map clock is fully customizable to display whatever obscure corner of the universe you inhabit. The Fluid Forms website lets you punch in a zip code and click-and-drag till you’re just where you want to be.

The picture above displays the area where my office is located. I doubt I’ll be making a clock out of that intersection to hang on the wall in my apartment, but I could if I wanted to.

Framestore, the visual effects company responsible for the Wild Things’ facial animation, has a whole lot of other cool-looking stuff under its belt. That includes the above commercial spot created for a homeless charity. It’s very appropriately titled ‘House of Cards’ and is tracked to a Radiohead song donated to the campaign; though, for some strange reason the song used is ‘Videotape’ rather than the most obvious choice.

These cards – their construction, their collapsing, and their lighting – were the sole responsibility of 3D Technical Director Simon French. “I was involved from the concept stage,” says French, “And once I knew what they’d need I was able to do some research and groundwork into the most efficient way of constructing these card houses.”

Read more and watch the spot at Framestore’s site.

Yahoo pulled the plug on Geocities on October 26, 2009, and I am writing this 3 weeks too late, only because the Yahoo corporate monster didn’t have the decency to notify me and million other users about the eventual killing of this once-great webhosting machine – Geocities.com. Now I am angry, because Yahoo had essentially obliterated a good portion of Web history, a lot of which Web 2.0 was based upon. This was where most of us started – our first homepage made with Notepad and Paint Shop Pro.

If media is the message and Television being the medium that defined the 20th century, then Internet will (and has already) revolutionize the world in the new millenium. Geocities was the finest of Web 1.0 – Internet communities and webrings linked through rich user content. The websites hosted by Geocities were mostly raw and unprofessional, filled with Under Construction banners, homemade graphics, MIDIs, and personal comments on anything we actually cared about. But that’s how Internet started back in the 90′s, and should therefore be preserved so. It’s a server of our collective memory, as well as the early memory of the Web. Whoever made this decision be damned.

The Achive Team is actually doing something about it, by attempting to save all the data ever hosted on Geocities. They’ve even created an Under Construction Page as well as an Email Me Page, a small number of Under Construction and Email Me graphics scavenged from the servers before their deletion. The crammed pixel page reminded me of The Million Dollar Page, but where every pixel there was sold for a dollar, every Under Construction banner on Geocities represented someone’s desire to create. Geocities was a testimony of our existence on the web, now wiped out by the corporate monster that is Yahoo.

Passion Pit’s new video for Little Secrets goes hyper-literal on the chorus (“higher and higher and higher…”), taking us on a blissed-out trip through outer space.

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This is also a good reminder to re-watch the video’s obvious reference point – Keir Dullea in the classic Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which special effects are created through an expensive and time-intensive process called slit-scan photography.

Here’s something to try – start the 2001 clip and leave the sound up as you watch the video for Little Secrets. The sound effects used in the film (no music, really, just…I guess, space-type sounds?) add a certain cold edge to the ordinarily bright-and-cheery track. And the colors…oh, god, the colors.

Vanity Fair has a great feature today on all the nuts-and-bolts that went into creating Wes Anderson’s stop-motion, George-Clooney-voiced Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’d seen the trailer a while back and didn’t give it a second thought. I realize now that I’ve been coming at this film all wrong.
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I love stop-motion but it’s so old-new that I’d completely forgotten that I do. Finding out that Anderson was working from a Rudolf-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer-type reference point, I suddenly remembered how much I’m into that stuff. Shoot…this could be really, really good.

the VF caption: “Wes sent us his trousers so we could match the corduroy,” recalls MacKinnon. “He said that he wanted Mr. Fox to wear a yellow corduroy suit, ‘the sort of suit you’d see on any man walking down the street in Paris.’