Filed under: Art,Design by Branko Collin @ 1:01 pm
Wouter Sieuwerts came up with this life size toy for his graduation from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
It can be wound up, after which it can be made to move. There is a video that shows how this works at Vimeo. Sieuwerts writes: “It won’t go far and it won’t go fast, but it is very dynamic and exciting. I tried to make it look like a cross between an animal and a machine.”
The toy is called Erik, perhaps because of its bug like features? (Eric in the Land of the Insects is a classic Dutch novel by author Godfried Bomans.)
Dutch 14-year-old Stijn Oom has taken his Lego blocks up a few levels and made some fantastic WWII creations without using pre-existing Lego kits. He started building serious models when he was just five and hasn’t stopped since.
Flickr has helped him connect with enthusiasts and surely helped boost his ever-increasing popularity. “When I discovered Flickr, I found out that there was a HUGE Lego community going on! Reactions on builds, comments, favorites! It was the perfect system for every young builder.” Flickr is used by Lego fans to share their creations and they like it because they can annotate their images.
Why doesn’t Lego make military sets like there? Because it’s part of the company’s policy to not make anything military, with the exception of the Star Wars kits.
Filed under: Design,History by Branko Collin @ 1:21 pm
Limburgs Museum in Venlo has an exhibit of Roman Empire household goods with a twist. All the items on display are replicas, and are for sale as part of an exhibit that tries to mimic IKEA down to the smallest detail, including the familiar blue floor map in Latin.
There’s the blue and yellow logo, the shop-by-room concept, and a cheap Roman meatball lunch in the café. Best of all are the exhibit’s housewares, all of them labelled with Latin names and all available for purchase. You can pick up a “Romulus” toy wooden sword, a “Secundus” wine goblet, or a bust of Emperor Hadrian. Furniture available for online ordering include lounges, tables, and storage cabinets modelled after items found in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum.
The furniture was built by Drias in Tilburg based on charred remains found in Pompeji and Herculaneum, on frescos from those same cities, and on an illustrated coffin from Simpelveld (Limburg).
The exhibit/store runs until 6 January, 2012. The web shop is in Dutch, but also delivers abroad.
Shopkeepers in the Netherlands claim they were caught completely by surprise by the sudden increase in demand for Beyblades. It has been 10 years since the spinning tops from Hasbro last were playground hits, the print edition of daily Parool reported on Wednesday.
Beyblades are used in ‘battles’, where tops are launched from a platform (see photo) into an arena. The top that stays up the longest wins.
A possible explanation of the revival may be that Disney channel has started to broadcast the accompanying (and eponymous) manga series again, though at ungodly early hours. Disney’s Vincent Berends thinks that ‘schoolyard talk’ may explain the success.
Earlier this year Jeugdjournaal reported that Beyblades had become the rage again in Japan. There the hype was carefully manufactured.
Filed under: Design,Gaming by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
In his spare time, hidden away in his tool shed, 66-year-old trucker Ad Bruynzeel has been coming up with board games for ages. And finally, after decades, he invented a game called Wobble, which now is an international hit and means that work is soon to be his hobby.
Dutch gamemaker Identity Games signed him up just like that, and although already in Europe, you’ll be seeing Wobble in North America soon as well.
I like the catchy ‘Roll to the Hole’ as a slogan. This game looks like a grandpa with grandchildren kind of hit. “The goal of the game is to get the ball in the right hole by moving or replacing the discs on the edge of the board.”
Filed under: Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:44 am
‘Dungans’, as these toy tokens are called, should be seen as fantasy characters like, I dunno, Pogs (know as ‘Flippo’s’ in the Netherlands), but nope, some Christians got mad and got one supermarket (just one) to stop with the toys. Wow, what a victory.
“Children turn into the Dungan characters, these demons. These evil spirits fight with the children around them, it’s disgusting,” two annoyed Christians in Veenendaal claimed. “We have to protect our children”. And everybody else who lets their children collect Dungans are what, bad parents? Please.
Free tip: TURN OFF THE TV, UNPLUG THE GAME CONSOLE AND COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR CHILDREN. Sorry, capitals were necessary.
Judge for yourself. Note: subtitles are totally whacked, but at least you know what they’re on about. After 1:26 you can stop unless you like home-made YouTube rants.
A solo show inspired by the toys and cuddly sculptures of children, where the change of scale completely changes their function and feeling.
Hofman also took his exhibition on the (rail)road, where it works better in my opinion. A gallery is a canvas, a neutral background in front of which anything automatically becomes art. The railway station of Delfzijl (Hofman’s former home town) doesn’t have that stigma, and his plush animals look as out of place there as he intended.
Guus Oosterbaan, a Dutch designer living in Denmark, is looking for somebody to take these boxes into production for him.
The boxes can be used to store all kinds of things, and when stacked can be combined into huge toy robots. On his blog, Oosterbaan says that his “kids find it very amusing to build robots that are much taller than them and then knock them over while shouting superhero stuff.”
The Play’d is “a soft, thick blanket, developed for very young children that doubles as an interactive play environment.” It is made of squares of differing materials, each with a sensor hidden underneath, for the toddler who knows where their safety blanket is. The blanket can produces light, sound and vibrations. A sample application is when a kid is in its “rolling phase”: lights and sounds can be used to lure a child to roll in a certain direction.
The Play’d netted its inventor, computer scientist Viktor de Boer, first prize in the Nieuwe Ideeën Prijsvraag (New Ideas Competition) of Science Park Amsterdam last Tuesday. Second prize went to Vanessa Evers for her robot “that supports human-robot interaction research.” I am not quite sure what that means, but I do see a pattern of robots trying to get to know us here.
Filed under: Fashion,Weird by Branko Collin @ 12:00 pm
Photo: Bob the Builder
Have you seen this man?
A tiny village in Groningen called ‘t Zand has been plagued by a pyromaniac since August this year. Recently, the police revealed that the arsonist had used a Bob the Builder sock during a failed attempt: they believe the sock was placed in such a way that it should lead the fire to other inflammable material. The fire petered out before it could reach that otherwise unspecified material, according to daily Dagblad van het Noorden (Dutch). The police know that the sock was made in 1993, and sold in the Netherlands, but they would like you to contact them if you have any further information about the alleged sock.
Shopkeepers in the Netherlands claim they were caught completely by surprise by the sudden increase in demand for Beyblades. It has been 10 years since the spinning tops from Hasbro last were playground hits, the print edition of daily Parool reported on Wednesday.
Hofman also took his 
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