03.26.09

Not Angry Enough

Posted in Rants at 12:12 am by thomas

After reading this excellent article in the Rolling Stone and then looking up Kleptocracy in Wikipedia, the only question left, is why are we all not screaming at the top of our lungs?

My latest Tweets:
No public Twitter messages.

03.22.09

The Joy of MapSkip

Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life at 12:03 am by thomas

While googling the current footprint of MapSkip on the web, as I do on a regular basis, I stumbled over this on Twitter:

picture this: two of my boys -arms around each others’ shoulders – reading your kids Mapskip comments; smiles; joy in their lives; thank you

I immediately called Kazumi over and showed her this tweet… we were both deeply touched by this, since it is such a honest, real-life example of the impact that MapSkip already has on some of its users.

We launched MapSkip because we both believe that there is a deep emotional impact in stories as they are being told from one human mind to the next. And many stories are about places in time, and what happened there and then.

After now one and a half years, the site is slowly growing to a level where many of our original concepts are starting to work as it takes a certain density of stories to make MapSkip fun to explore. And that is now happening, with new users joining every day, and whole school classes contributing with stories, photos and even sound recordings about their home towns… Let me tell you, we love every minute of this process! :-)

03.01.09

Yum!?!

Posted in Culture, Japan, Travel at 6:23 pm by thomas

Japanese restaurants traditionally display artificial menu items in their shop windows, and every visitor to Japan has been dazzled by the amazing quality and realism of the plastic models for every conceivable food item that can be found in restaurant windows.

Sooner or later it dawns on the visitor that there must be a massive industry for artificial food items in Japan, where huge amounts of fake sushi, spaghetti plates and curry bowls are produced. But for the casual tourist there is usually no opportunity to visit one of these factories.

Tony McNicol is a journalist and photographer in Tokyo and he visited one of the plastic food factories at the outskirts of Tokyo and has a great slideshow and article on this subject on his site.

While looking at the photos I started wondering how often one of the plastic food artists catches themselves licking their fingers while shaping epoxy into the shape of a dessert… :)