Pop Culture

Aka the soft machine. Love it. A 2008 design by Benedetta and Carlo Tamborini for Diamantini & Domeniconi. From Italy (where else?). [via reader Jo Woo Bay who all of a sudden is on a roll — more like this, please.]

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mailin their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.See More Secrets. Follow PostSecret on Twitter. PostSecret on Facebook Amazon.com Widgets-----Email-----Three years ago I had the privilege of meeting you at a PostSecret Event. That same night, I also met a guy named Tyler. He was extremely good looking and we both loved PostSecret. We started dating a month later and it has been an amazing three year journey with him. Just last month he proposed! We are now in the midst of the crazy, yet exciting wedding planning and I just wanted to say "thank you" for creating such a wonderful project that brings people together - in many ways - through anonymous secrets.-----Email-----Hi Frank,I don't know if you can help. My girlfriend left me. I've loved her since we met and was too scared to tell her. We used to lie in bed every Sunday reading the Sunday Secrets. She's obsessed with it. I want her to know I loved her and I think this is my only shot at telling her.

The Doctor, Amy Pond. and The Daleks Doctor Who Seatbelt BeltAttention Doctor Who fans! Are you looking for an out world accessory worthy of adventurous Time Lord such as yourself? Behold The Doctor, Amy Pond, and The Daleks Doctor Who Seatbelt Belt from the NeatoShop. This fantastic belt is made of tough nylon webbing and features an authentic seatbelt clasp as the belt buckle. Be sure to check the NeatoShop for more great Apparel & Accessories. Link

Photos: Henrik PeterssonAdd this to the list of amazing cityscape art we've featured on Neatorama before: Still Life by Petter Johansson of PJADAD, made as an advertisement for Atelier Food. Link - via Dezeen

What is J.J. Abrams going to do with Episode VII of Star Wars? Given the success of his rebooting of the Star Trek franchise, these cookies illustrate a likely option. Sarah Trefney made these cookies mashing up the two franchises. Darth Vader is now a Klingon, Princess Leia Uhura works the comm station and Chewbacca is a tribble. You can view more photos of them at the link.Link -via Between the Pages

(YouTube link)I put this new Windows 8 advertisement on my own site because, although it's funny, I didn't think it was quite "neat" enough for Neatorama. Then later, I found out something strange about it. No one seems to know what language the actors are speaking!Native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean declare that it is not any of those languages. The first time I listened to them, the ads sounded as though they contained elements of some Wu topolect, a bit like mangled Shanghainese, but I could also definitely hear bits of Mandarin, albeit with unusual tonal contours and slurring. What was most perplexing of all to me was that, although I was certain that the ads contained Chinese phrases and sentences, every Chinese person to whom I showed them emphatically maintained that they could not understand a single word! In contrast, several non-native speakers of Mandarin said they could pick out a word of Chinese here and there.Victor Mair of Language Log asked other people who speak different languages if they recognized the language, but still haven't found anyone who understands it. Link -via Metafilter

Alan Wexelblat comment on the news that Nintendo has claimed "monetization rights" to fan videos on YouTube that feature tips on playing its games. Some of these videos are incredibly popular, and while their use of Nintendo's creations are often fair use, Nintendo gets to use YouTube's monetization system to advertise on all the videos: The basic idea is that if someone makes a video of themselves playing a Nintendo game and uploads it to YouTube any ads shown with that video will be of Nintendo's choosing and revenue from it will flow to Nintendo. Ads may appear beside the videos or actually be inserted before and after the video when people go to play it. The problem here is that "Let's Play" style videos are a pervasive form of information and sharing throughout the industry. I did a quick YouTube search for "let's play" for this blog post and got back over 9.1 million hits. People create these videos to show off their skills, to highlight interesting things they've seen such as game "easter eggs", to provide guides or walk-throughs, or just to share a bit of fun with friends. There are a few professional or semi-professional games writers who use this style of video to promote themselves or their channels, but they are a tiny minority of that nine million. Nintendo has positioned its action as a gentler approach; rather than trying to ban content related to Nintendo games, they just want to make money off it by changing the video that an individual uploaded. Yeah, um, guys that's not a whole lot better. It also comes across as cheap and lazy - rather than creating content for YouTube that fans and players would want to watch, Nintendo is just taking over other peoples' content. Nintendo Decides It Can Own Fans' YouTube Content

What, you don't think I'm gonna win? As I write these words at 8 p.m. today, my chance is every bit as good as anyone else's in the universe. So what if that chance is 1 in 175 million? I've got 10 chances, anyway, not just one: up top, my soon-to-be winning ticket, being blessed by Gray Cat. You can't buy that at any price. But I digress. As Terry-Thomas remarked about playing the lottery: "You know you won't win — but you might." Precisely. You're telling me the hours of daydreaming today about what I'd do with that kind of money aren't worth $2? You, my friend, have forgotten how to dream.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Neatoramanauts. We're now in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, which has the world's tallest indoor tornado.Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] (via Techeblog) to see it in action:

Photography is not a Crime shares the story: New York City police officers arrested a woman who was video recording them from a public sidewalk as they conducted some type of “vehicle safety checkpoint.” The officers apparently stole a memory card from a camera, which turned out to be the wrong one, allowing us to view the video.