Kanye interrupts Arrington at TechCrunch50
(In case you didn't catch Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards this weekend, here's some context.)
cartoon posts
(In case you didn't catch Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards this weekend, here's some context.)
Filed under: Design, Fun, Lists
10 free cartoonish icon sets to spiff up your desktop
All of these sets are totally free for personal use, so download away! If you know another great set, feel free to share your links in the comments!
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Video, Beta
Anyone can make animated digital clips with Xtranormal
A beta web app by Xtranormal aims to level the playing field by making movie creation drag-and-drop simple. If you can write dialog that makes sense and click a mouse, you're well on your way to creating a digital masterpiece.
Choose a character, type in a block of text, and drag in facial expressions, actions, and sounds. The speech is surprisingly fluid, all things considered - no MS Sam here!
You're currently limited to one or two actors, but that's plenty for putting together a quick, fun clip. You can choose either Lego-style (my preference) or more life-like actors to play out your script.
When you're done piecing together elements, just click the action button and Xtranormal will render your clip. If you've registered for an account you can save your work for later. Finished clips can, of course, be shared for anyone to view.
Quite honestly, I don't have the time or skills to throw together 3d animations from scratch. Even if I did, I'm not certain the half-baked ideas I come up with would merit expending any serious effort.
Xtranormal is a great way to finally see your cinematic ideas in come to life with minimal fuss.
Filed under: Design, Fun, Internet, Kids, Windows, Macintosh, Social Software
Toonlet - Create a comic strip starring you
by Emily Price Jan 21st 2008
In order to create your own strip you have to first create characters. The character builder on the site has a massive amount of body parts, hair, and clothing to choose from and unlike other similar character builders all of the parts can be adjusted in size as well as moved around. You're probably not going to make a character that looks exactly like you, but you can probably get pretty close.
Once you create an original version of your character you have the option to create additional version of the same character experiencing different emotions. For instance after we created "normal" Emily we went ahead and created a "surprised" Emily as well by changing the eyes and mouth on the current creation.
Filed under: Audio, Fun, Video, Time-Wasters
Time Waster - We love internet people
by Chris Gilmer Sep 11th 2007
Viral videos... everyone loves these great time wasters, and I'm sure that many of us spend hours and hours each week watching the latest and greatest over and over again. From the stupid dancing peanut butter jelly banana, to the star wars kid, Kramer at the comedy club, grape stompers, coke and mentos, angry german kid, little superstar.. The list can go on forever. Now you can reminisce of the time spent enjoying these great videos by watching an animated feature by Dan Meth. Dan created a tribute to all of the "internet people", thus creating his own little viral video that helps us waste even more time.
Filed under: Design, Fun, Internet, Time-Wasters
Create your own comic strip with ToonDoo - Today's Time-Waster
by Chris Gilmer Mar 29th 2007
What better way to waste time then to create a cartoon. Who cares if you have no skills, ToonDoo will help you out.
ToonDoo is created by Jambav, and backed by AdventNet, the folks behind ZoHo. They have put together an easy way to create comic strips where users can choose characters, props, and backgrounds and make a cartoon in under five minutes. Seriously, you can sit for hours playing with different scenes and setups, fine tuning characters and writing scripts in speech bubbles. Cartoons can be saved, and when you feel they are good enough, you can publish them for visitors to the site to check out. It's very addicting.
Feel free to drop a comment with a link to your ToonDoo!
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
