Blog: The Sly Oyster

The Image Toaster is an art project by Scott van Haastrecht that combines your morning news with your breakfast. Think of it as offering a Rube Goldbergian solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. The Image Toaster is a Wi-Fi-connected appliance that scours the web for a popular photo of the day, then burns this low resolution image into your bread - whereby anyone with good taste will slather it with Adams Peanut Butter and homemade strawberry jam before consuming the news and breakfast at once. [...]

'Luke’s Change', by  Graham Putnam , is a perfect parody of Loose Change , one of the most infamous 9/11 conspiracy videos . The attack on the Death Star is such a perfect stand-in for the World Trade Center it's amazing no one has done this parody before or that it's taken so long for it to happen. Enjoy. [via BoingBoing ]

Information is Beautiful visualizes the major causes of death in the 20th Century. If you're keeping score at home , cancer, infectious or non-communicable diseases, cardiovascular disease, and people are the worst. You'll definitely want to see this large and in charge to get a true sense of the numbers. [via explore ]

The aurora borealis blankets the sky above the Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox church in Kenai, Alaska. (AP Photo/M. Scott Moon) [via hypervocal ]

Ten minutes of Ricky Gervais at his most David Brent-ian. This picks up ten years after the Christmas special. Gotta be honest: it was ... okay? Feels a bit like Gervais has lost his mojo between this and 'Derek', which wasn't funny in the least bit. Could the lack of Stephen Merchant have anything to do with that?

This is pretty huge in the mobile/cloud app space: The companies reported the deal to the Wall Street Journal on Friday , saying that Mailbox would remain a separate app as the entire team joins Dropbox. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told the WSJ that his company felt it “could help Mailbox reach a much different audience much faster.” Aside from keeping Mailbox running as a separate, standalone application, Houston told the WSJ that Dropbox will use Mailbox’s tech to improve its own features, including handling email attachments. Mailbox is from Orchestra, [...]

Ohio Senator Rob Portman came out in support of marriage equality , largely because his 21-year-old gay son convinced him being conservative and supporting marriage equality weren't at odds with each other. Slade Sohmer has a good take on the reversal : Ultimately, this isn’t about gay rights, or even gay people for that matter. It’s about exposing yourself to the unknown. The same could be said for our opinions about what it’s like for others to be poor, or minorities, or immigrants, or whatever group we currently don’t [...]

Gabriele Galimberti takes photos of kids with their most prized possessions for a series aptly named 'Toy Stories'. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day. Ultimately, the toys on display reveal the hopes and ambitions of the people who bought them in [...]

"It’s easy, cheap, and sometimes even fun to be mean. It’s a whole lot braver to be open and sincere, and to acknowledge that it’s perfectly okay to unapologetically love something even people you respect might find suspect." - Nathan Rabin , yes, vouching for his love of Phish, but also offering a succinct and perfect critique with everything that is wrong with pop culture and writing on the Internet.

Om Malik has a fantastic conversation with the creator of Google Reader, Chris Wetherell , wherein he admits the product he created lived on borrowed time. More interesting to me, however, is the part about how much it cost Google to keep Reader up and running. In my initial post about Google shutting down Reader, I asked, "How difficult/financially arduous would it be to hire one or two engineers to oversee the product and make incremental updates?" As it turns out, according to Wetherell, quite a bit: [...]

Now, that we've all gotten over the butthurt feelings of Google shutting down Reader , the next question is what are the alternatives? We compiled an initial list of suggestions, but someone started a crowd-sourced spreadsheet to further help our your selection process. Most surprising is the team behind the new Digg (which is excellent now courtesy of Betaworks and you should totally check it out) is fast-tracking a Google Reader alternative. We’ve been planning to build a reader in the second half of 2013, one that, like Digg, makes the [...]

Nobody does personal data visualizations and tracking quite like designer Nicholas Felton , who has been serving up his annual report on his life since 2005. Order yours here . The 2010 tribute to his father's life is probably my favorite. This year, he relied on a custom built data mining iPhone app for much of the information. Previously: 2009 | 2010 | 2010/2011 biannual report

The best part of 'Kick-Ass' was far and away Chloe Moretz dishing out a dose of ass-whoop and calling people cunt. The sequel looks like its more or less treading similar ground. Hopefully, the movie won't be as vile as the comic book sequel (supervillain gangrape and cutting heads off dogs, no thanks). In theaters August 16. [via io9 ]

Farhad Manjoo goes to Kansas City to find out : During my time in Kansas, when I finally got some free time with a machine connected to Google Fiber, I couldn’t find any better answers for what I should do with it. My first instinct was to try out all the things that strain today’s Internet lines—I loaded up a lot of Web pages, I tried to stream lots of videos, and I even attempted to illegally download some movies. Those things worked perfectly well. And then I didn’t know what else to do. I [...]

I'm quite smitten with Pepsi's latest round of advertisements that take famous celebrities, hide them in a costume, and then let their athletic talents wreck havoc in the real world. The Kyrie Irving campaign was awesome and this new one with Jeff Gordon is no different.

In digging through previous posts about ' Veronica Mars ', it came to my attention that I never posted the infamous season four FBI teaser they shot included as part of the season three DVD package. It's worth-watching, now that there's going to be a Veronica Mars feature film , because it's technically part of the canon. I forgot that the sublime Walter Goggins, best-known for playing Boyd Crowder on 'Justified', was in this. Be nice if they could get him for the movie. Part two is after the jump.

The sound you hear isn't that of a little girl getting a pony for her birthday. Nope, it's me upon realizing that Rob Thomas, the creative mind behind 'Veronica Mars' and 'Party Down' for that matter, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $2 million necessary to make a 'Veronica Mars' feature film . Kristen Bell is in. Warner Bros. still owns rights to the show, but has given Thomas the okay to proceed and even agreed to help distribute the film should it meet its funding goal. The project launched yesterday and has already raised [...]

This is only going to matter to the people who rely on an RSS service to cull through millions of websites. However, Google announced today that it'll be closing Google Reader's doors on July 1st of this year. It's total bullocks. I can't imagine Google is putting that much money into Reader, how difficult/financially arduous would it be to hire one or two engineers to oversee the product and make incremental updates? Lifehacker has a good round-up on alternative solutions and a tutorial for extracting your feed data to import into another service. I've [...]

His Pope name is Francis I : The archbishop of Buenos Aires is the Argentine-born son of an Italian railway worker. Seen as a compassionate conservative, he reportedly came in second during the 2005 balloting that ultimately elected Benedict XVI. The Jesuit prizes simplicity and humility and would encourage priests to do shoe-leather evangelization, his biographer says. He's the first Jesuit Pope and first from Latin America. At the same time he believes that marriage equality is the work of Satan. On the other hand, he takes public transportation and [...]

The poster was created by Brian Sanders , himself a former advertising man in the 60s. But as the show prepared for its new season, which begins April 7, its creator, Matthew Weiner, inspired by a childhood memory of lush, painterly illustrations on T.W.A. flight menus, decided to turn back the promotional clock. He pored over commercial illustration books from the 1960s and ’70s and sent images to the show’s marketing team, which couldn’t quite recreate the look he was after. “Finally,” he said, “they just looked up the person who [...]