Mssv

There’s an advert on TV for I, Robot where a typically breathless voiceover proclaims that in the movie, ‘Will Smith defines excitement’. For some reason I can’t get out of my head the image of Will Smith beginning the movie by reading out the definition for ‘excitement’ from a dictionary.

I just watched the DVD for Honda’s Cog advert, which you can order for free, and it has clearly been made with the same loving craziness and ingenuity that the advert enjoyed. There’s a ‘making of’ feature, about five minutes long, in which they interview the makers and show some outtakes. There’s also an ‘Illustrated [...]

Cog (4MB Quicktime) – It’s been mentioned in a few places on the net already, but this new advert by Honda is an understated work of art. Some more info at torrez.org.

Guerrilla advertising – Meg has cleared up a mystery for me! When I was in London last week, I saw a lot of anti-Esso Poems on the Underground which surprised me no end since I couldn’t see how the London Underground could get away with it. It turns out that someone has been printing and [...]

Is this Lord of the Rings Winamp Skin really by New Line Cinema? It certainly looks like it, and if so, it’s quite a clever piece of work. It’s had almost half a million downloads so far, and for the price of however long it took an artist to design it, it’s generated an incredible [...]

Eat at McDonalds in Sims Online. I have no problem with in-game advertising, but apparently you can improve your standing in the game by eating McD’s food, which is ridiculous and will no doubt cause a player backlash (via ec).

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. This is a brief report of what I learned there.

Stephen Fulljames wrote to the Culture about a terrible scam being perpetrated by Acclaim (a computer games company). Basically, Acclaim ran a marketing promotion for their new game Turok Evolution, where volunteers would receive £500 and a free X-Box if they changed their name by deed poll to ‘Turok’.
The winners have been announced, and if [...]

Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun (well, okay, some fun) going around the web with Mozilla 1.1 and BannerBlind making all the adverts disappear. Between them, they knock out all popups and most sizes of ad banners. For all the other ones that remain, I just block the images coming from the server [...]

I was reading a thread on Metafilter about television when I realised that there are now two ways to look at it. You can watch television, or you can watch a programme.
To me, ‘watching television’ treats television as an end in itself, whereas ‘watching a programme’ treats it as a means to an end. This [...]