Video Friday: Internet Party 2 (The Intervention)

                                    

Back in January, we posted a video from Those Aren’t Muskets called Internet Party, exploring what would happen if you got a bunch of popular websites together in one room. It’s damn funny stuff, and now comes the second installment, in which MySpace’s friends tell him that enough is enough. The video is probably NSFW (language and some same-sex mackin’), and will autoplay after the jump

Steampunk Telectroscope Uses Secret Tunnel To See London From New York

Behold!

“Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel will finally be completed. Immediately afterwards, an extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope will be installed at both ends which will miraculously allow people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.”

I hope I’m not bursting anyone’s bubble when I reveal that the Telectroscopes (designed by artist and inventor Paul St George) are connected not by a tunnel but by fiber optic cabling, and an HD camera and projector on either end provide live streaming video. But who really cares, you can still look in one end of this device in New York and see out the other in London. You’ll find one end next to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the other across the pond, next to Tower Bridge.

Interestingly, the concept for this device has been around for over a century. Read about its origins, and check out a picture from one of the apertures, after the jump.

 

 

From The Road: Pac-Man Invades A Transit Shelter

                        

I’m not necessarily an advocate of graffiti, but when someone manages to turn a regular transit shelter into an awesome retro video-game-themed shelter, I can’t really find a reason to complain. For some reason, whether it be for decoration or to make the glass more visible, the streetcar transit shelters here are adorned with a strip of yellow dots running all the way around. So a local artist (and possibly gamer) added some strategically placed graphics to recreate a scene from Pac-Man.

But this isn’t the first video game themed graffiti I’ve come across here. A few months ago a local artist named Posterchild paid tribute to Valve’s Portal game with a 3D Weighted Companion Cube passing through a couple of buildings. Unfortunately by the time I got back with a real camera to snap a photo, it had already been taken down. But a photographer friend of mine did manage to take a few shots before it disappeared.

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