January 2012
8 posts
1 tag
Jan 1st
1 note
December 2011
17 posts
2 tags
WatchWatch
Lego Friends promo video from Amazon Japan. It seems more aimed at retailers than consumers. It shows a whole pile of playsets - Some of them look unfamiliar, but the video is too small to really discern much. Note the use of illustrated Friends characters, rather than the CGI versions used in the US marketing! I wonder if it’s because the video pre-dates the development of the CGI models,...
Dec 30th
1 note
2 tags
Lego Friends website is now live. →
And the giant purple Freudian metaphor from my prior post has, mercifully, disappeared. I’m relieved to see that, in fact, none of the characters are being tagged as “the smart one,” “the popular one” and such by Lego themselves. Even better, no-one is the obvious queen bee, and they all have weaknesses as well as strengths. Plausible personalities, in other words....
Dec 30th
1 note
5 tags
Just Wow! →
Read the whole email transcript as an amazingly inept gaming peripheral company manages to completely expose themselves as hilariously idiotic, arrogant douchebags in public. Normally I’d be surprised that Mike was the one handling this mess, except that Jerry would surely be incapacitated in rage just by their brutal abuse of punctuation.
Dec 27th
2 notes
6 tags
Dec 20th
5 notes
More Ordos links
Ominous Ordos: Dispatch from a Chinese Ghost Town China’s Ordos property bust offers warning sign China built a ridiculously science fictional museum in a city where nobody lives Timber! Home prices are crashing in China’s ‘ghost city’
Dec 18th
1 note
1 tag
Chinese City Has Many Buildings, but Few People →
Ordos, written a year ago.
Dec 18th
1 note
2 tags
Dec 18th
2 notes
2 tags
Dec 18th
2 notes
1 tag
Dec 16th
1 note
2 tags
Dec 16th
1 note
3 tags
Dec 15th
1 note
Dec 13th
388 notes
5 tags
Dec 13th
4 notes
1 tag
Pothole Pig! →
This is how the Tacoma Weekly documents their city’s pothole problem: With an adorable ceramic pig. And a Google map.
Dec 8th
5 tags
Flagged as offensive, I guess
So I ran a news article about the latest issue of Nakayoshi through Google Translate. Somehow, Google Translate has decided that “Ikimono Gakari” (Referring to either the kids at a Japanese elementary school who take care of the pets and stuff, or to a pop-rock band that’s adopted the term as their name) translates to… “Chris Brown.” (There’s a selector...
Dec 7th
3 notes
1 tag
The toothpick bends
Remember Ordos? I posted about this Chinese bubble town back in September. Real estate prices in Ordos have fallen by about 70% since September.
Dec 7th
5 tags
Dec 3rd