I co-founded ILL Clan animation studio in 1998 along with Paul Marino, Manu Smith, and Frank Dellario. Frank is still at it, with Paul Jannicola, Kerria Seabrooke, and Tom Donelly. Tiny Nation is a machinima feat of strength (a.k.a. ‘tour de force.’ But why speak French when we don’t have to?)

It’s funny and subversive, and it looks great.

Looking forward to more great work from the ILL Clan.

But it’s easy to type random TinyURLs, since they are made up of random numbers and letters. I stumbled upon this recently when talking to a friend about TinyURL over IM, and typed an example. Just out of curiosity I clicked the resultant link to discover that the University of Greenwich is looking for an offshore hydrocarbon mapping engineer. http://tinyurl.com/376453

Who knew?

So I started typing in some more random TinyURLs and here’s what I found…

a viral app where you can add your own subtitles to a Bollywood movie clip
http://tinyurl.com/jk76o

Human beatboxer, Kid Beyond, demonstrating an Ableton sampler
http://tinyurl.com/9345g

a helpful list of “Jewish Motorcycle” related websites on google
http://tinyurl.com/8132q

An insightful (if somewhat bitter) comparison of The Matrix and Dark City, auto-translated from the original Spanish, complete with side-by-side images.
http://tinyurl.com/3yk87

some lovely (and slightly racy) pictures of Japanese fruit and nuts
http://tinyurl.com/896tv

I could go on and on (since I don’t have a job,) and TinyURLs are practically guaranteed to be good since it wouldn’t be a TinyURL unless it was awesome enough for someone to share it.

If you find anything interesting, post it to the comments.

My Mom playing Resident Evil 4

She has an unusual relationship to her games that I thought I’d share here, which is best illustrated by some quotes:

Resident Evil 4:

• He saved a dog. But then those men tried to kill him, and he shot them. See those are their dead bodies.
• Oh, I didn’t know they were supposed to be zombies, I just thought they wanted to kill him.
• This is silly, why can’t he walk up that incline? It’s not that steep.

Tomb Raider – Legend:

• Oh, I’m so excited to have Lara back in my life!
• She was on the edge of a cliff, and she couldn’t reach the rope to swing across, so she kept falling and dieing.

Zelda Ocarina of Time:

• The little boy went in the whale’s mouth, but then he kept getting shocked by those damn jellyfish.
• He has to throw the bomb in the monsters mouth, but it’s too hard. You do it for me!

As you can see, she doesn’t relate to the game characters as herself, the way most gamers do. I asked her why, and she said, “Well, it’s not me. I don’t look like that.”

She also was just talking about games recently and said, “I think I know why I like those games so much. They put me in another world, like an alternate universe to escape to, and it’s a lot more fun than my boring life.”

Move your mouse around the page to read my silly commentary, and feel free to add your own captions in the comments.

Enjoy.