Make Your Own Squid
Emily told me about this awhile ago — it’s a fun little game where you can build your own squid and then set it free into the virtual seas. It’s pretty minimal, of course, but amusing. At the end you can play with your squid by dragging and dropping it around the screen, and you can come back later to check on it. Right now my squid has traveled zero kilometers, weighs one kilogram, and has had only one adventure (“hunting for shoes”?).
Presumably these things will change.
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An Announcement And A Link
I’m writing this just before eight o’clock on Monday evening, but by the time you’re reading it — assuming you’re reading it on Tuesday morning or afternoon — I will be some 38,000 feet in the air, on my way to visit Emily in New York City. I don’t think blogging will be much affected by my trip, but if it is, you’ve been forewarned. We have planned a lovely week of museum tours and gallery visits.
Anyway, my girlfriend, Jessie, pointed me toward this bizarre video of an “alien-like” squid filmed very deep in the see. It’s freaky. I couldn’t even watch the whole video, that animal is so strange. Wow.
Oktapodi
Via Dark Roasted Blend, here’s a very short, adorable animation, telling a tale of octapodal love.
Lana Crooks’ Many-Tentacled Toys
From Boing Boing, check out this great gallery tentacled toy animals. They’re the work of one Lana Crooks. Great name, right?
The creatures are just the right balance of cute and menacing.
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Encounter With A Nautilus
Via Boing Boing, check out this gorgeous footage of a human (one Peter Ward) interacting with a nautilus. Wow!
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Octopus With 88 Extra Tentacles
Something about this octopus with 96 tentacles (via Boing Boing) makes me want to cry. It’s grotesque, upsetting. I had no idea I was invested in the configurational integrity of anonymous cephalodpods, but that you have it.
Horrible.
Brit Leissler’s Octopulse Instrument
Well, this is amazing. One Brit Leissler is responsible for an instrument called Octopulse: a soft, cuddly octopus, with sensors in its “tonetacles” that connect directly to an analog synthesizer. Play with the octopus, create music (or something like it).
The goal is to make music-makers out of the average music-appreciater (i.e. everyone), by converting cold, unapproachable technology in an inviting friend. What an interesting project — I would love to play with one. Go watch this video to learn more, and see it in action.
“Octo-pied” Building Installation
Take a look at this cool installation (via) — enormous, inflated tentacles emerge from a building’s terraces, suggesting a huge cephalopod living inside. Excellent.
Tentacle Casting Jewelry
From Boing Boing, check out this amazing Etsy store. It’s full of beautiful jewelery made from castings of octopus tentacles and suction cups. I suspect that many octopi were harmed in the making of the jewelry, but theoretically, these pieces could be made semi-ethically: cephalopods can regrow arms, after all.
Anyway, it’s gorgeous.
I would love some if it were so expensive. There are rings, earring, necklaces, and more.
David Doubilet’s Portraits Of Sea Slugs
Via Boing Boing, check out this amazing gallery of pictures of nudibranchs, most of them taken by one David Doubilet.
Nudibranchs are sea slugs, in this case of the toxic, brightly colored variety. And they are gorgeous. And the gallery is huge, featuring some thirty photographs.
Can you believe things like that are alive?
See also the accompanying article, which opens with this:
Nudibranchs crawl through life as slick and naked as a newborn. Snail kin whose ancestors shrugged off the shell millions of years ago, they are just skin, muscle, and organs sliding on trails of slime across ocean floors and coral heads the world over. . . .
Hahaha
