via ipodstyle - This morning young and sexy Japanese photographer Julie "Samurai Girl" Watai broadcasted live on Ustream the photoshooting of her Cyber Alice selfportraits series. The location are the Arduino headquarters in Japan.
Julie's ability to mix cosplay, plastic bondage (executed by a shibari master) and technology is astonishing! I love her artworks that seems make for a "sexy cyberdelik" version of Make magazine!
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I just discovered that Danny Choo is producing his very own anime!! Contratulations Danny but please remember: "No panchira, No anime"!!
Now that I think about it, I should follow the steps of "Danny Sensei" and start soon the production of my own eroge!
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via sexynews24 - On 12th march Japaense porno powerhouse SOFT ON DEMAND partecipated to the Shanghai Adult Care Expo 2010...
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If tomorrow you will be in sourthern Italy (in Bari exactly) you shouldn't miss DISPLACED: a one night organized by my old friend Ivan Iusco from Minus Habens (a cult electronic label that produced a couple of my tracks back in the days + published my column on the "printed" cyberpunk zine NEURAL edited by Alessandro Ludovico) in collaboration with Luca Curci, Andrea Piva, Francesco Lopez and Vasily Iannuccilli.

Damage: 10 euroz

Location:  www.accaventicinque.com

Lineu Up:

ALVA NOTO
ELECTRONIC LIVE SOUNDTRACK
durata: 80 minuti

IGINIO IURILLI
SCULTURE
(soundtrack by IVAN IUSCO)

NEXT IDENTITY
INTERNATIONAL VIDEOART

DJ LUCA DOOBIE
LIVE-SET

DJ LUCA MAGDALONE
LOCAL WARMING

via Antenna 7 - The German artist Boris Hoppek is going to exhibit his "Sushi For Ever" in the Japanese art gallery Diesel Denim Gallery Aoyama in Tokyo. This bondage inspired live art/performance is part of the exhibition "Ever" curated by Kimiko Mitani Woo (MW Company).

会期：2010.4.21 (WED) ~ 2010.7.12 (MON)

Rockman meets Sakuma drops. Retrogrames candies on sale at 350円 from 6 march in Animate and Kotobukiya shops.
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via Make - Akihiro Uehara, a Japanese Lego hacker (blog.reinforce-lab.com), built an interface between a LEGO MINDSTORMS Alpha Rex and a Wii Balance Board. User can control the robot's leg motors speed and direction by changing the vector connecting user's center of balance and center of the board!

Now tell me that PS3 is better than the "Japanese" 360...

^_^

(via Büro Destructr) MM Bunny the first preview of the upcoming “BD Memory Men” USB stick series of 5 different characters arrived. Expect the Memory Men this spring/summer season published and produced by Pat Says Now.
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Tim Rogers posted on Kotaku a rant against Japan and Japanese culture. I really dig Tim's writing about videogames but Kotaku is not Action Button and his post sounds more like a rant from a pennyless english teacher who was never able to get out from Nova  than a critic of the real problems of Japan (no sorry Tim: 500 yen drink tickets or putting a little piece of tape over the barcode while shopping for a Coke at 7/11 are not problems)...
I suggest to Tim to pack things up and travel few months outisde Japan so he could get a better prospective of what he likes and what he doesn't... Good luck Tim you deserve it!!

Update: Brian Ashcraft commented Tim's rant. I share Brian open mind but I think that Tim really needs help from his friends to be happy (in Japan or any other country he chooses)...

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Apple talibans censors probably don't speak Japanese as there are sexy games like The Pantienon and KissComi still on sale in Japanese Appstore... maybe Apple Japan didn't ban KissComi (starred by AV idol Tsubomi) as it's co-produced by a well know porno DVD producer and, as everyone knows, the Japanese adult video industry is runned by "traditional organized crime syndicate"... or maybe they just love Japanese porno stars more than digital artists... who knows?!
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Japanese advertisement from 1982. Tomy bowling was the company first wrist-watch game (the gameplay was taken from the Slimboy Bowling LCD game) and in 1982 the toy company released the Golf watch.
via 昭和之

I'm just back from 3 days in Ivrea for the Arduino vs Gakken press tour. We had really great fun with Gianluca Martino, Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles (in the photo interviewed by Shigeru Kaneko: the mastermind of the cult Japanese magazine Otona no Kagaku)! Also the Japanese distributor Shigeru Kanemoto joined us in these full immersion with the creators of the most famous Italian tech project of the last 20 years!



Food in Ivrea (Piemonte) is great!! It's a shame that there is not sensorama on the web as the aroma of these "Ravioli al tartufo" (truffle pasta) was even better than the one in the Arduino's PCB manifacturing company!
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Phil Torrone, Senior Editor di MAKE magazine, during the DIY week (on Life Hacker) posted this photo of Jeri Elisworth fixing her Punk Shot arcade board released by Konami in 1990. She looks like the perfect girlfriend for any arcade game collector out there!! ^_^

Jeri Ellsworth is an American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer. She is best known for, in 2004, creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. The "computer in a joystick" could run 30 video games from the early 1980s, and was very popular during the 2004 Christmas season, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel. She is a pinball machine aficionado and owns over 60 full-sized pinball arcade games (via wiki).

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via expo7000.tumblr.com NSFW
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Nintendo never made a "Go" game. The reason is that ex-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamazaki won't allow one to be released unless the game could beat him. But Yamazaki is a 6 dan (high rank), and also it's hard to create routine Go strategies.

via mari_diary (photo psywarrior)

As Kotaku pointed out, the iPhone and iPod Touch (as well as the iTunes Application Store) are Apple products so the free speech argument doesn't fly. But the iPad is a different story as Apple needs the support of many magazine publishers (not only the giants) will never take off...

Magazine publishers are not small developers. To get on the "tablet mags" bandwagon they need to invest real money. The GUI of "tabletmags" is really expensive and will involve even more work needed for DVDs menus... Publishers are also used to newstand distribution system so I don't think they will accept a single distributor because a tablaet mag is not an MP3 or a digital books: as they need to spend a lot of money to transform a printed magazine in an interactive "tablet mag" (no PDF will not be enough for customers) and so magazines publisher will not be as happy as  records companies (are they?) to work with App Store / iTunes. This is even more true after the  Apple talibans Purge of sexy Apps from Online Store (via Tech Crunch via Gizmodo). And if Flash will not be embeddable in iPad applications it will be possibile to distribute a Flash version of "tablet mag" on 99% of iPad competitors while there will be the need to have an extra budget to deply on iPad only...

iTablet needs many specialized magazines on board as the digital ink tablets are stronger than iPad for Books visualization and if you don't have movies and animated menus on the screen you do not need to spend money on iPad as you can get a cheaper Kinlde for ebooks and probably already got an iPhone/iPod for music and videos...

So I wonder who is the mid sized publisher that will bet his money on an unreliable distributor as Apple?! Will Apple's censors accept popular magazines like Nuts, Maxim, Hightimes, Sabra, GameLabo (second bestselling videogame magazine in Japan), or the Company will once again change its policy if these magazines will get on top of its sales ranking? 

Anyway... Adobe will be the company to watch for the future of Tablet magazines...




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I love pirates! I just found a site with ELEVATOR EP: the very first techno record I produced 18 years ago with an Amiga 500. The vinyl has been released on UMM and as far as I know it was the first record with the sample "hardcore" used in a 4/4 beats track (back then hardcore referred to UK's "happy hardcore"). My favourite track is "Most Illogical" that features a sample of Mr Spock (I recorded it with Alessandro Merola as all the other tracks).

Click here to listen to a preview of the 5 track of Elevator EP

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The official website for the drama adaptation of Masayuki Ishikawa's Moyashimon manga has launched with a one-minute promotional video.
In the linked page, select the pink "スペシャル" germ in the menu at the bottom. The July television series will be the first live-action work on the Fuji TV's popular late-night Noitamina timeslot.  via ANN
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Last weekend Apple talibans removed from iPhone App Store, among other thousands of sexy/gravure applications,  the application created by digital artist and photographer Julie Watai. If you check the video it's clear that the appli is not "for adults" (almost it wouldn't be considered offensive outside Afganistan)...

Passion combines with creativity in this documentary that features a selection of AFOLs (Adult Fans Of LEGO) from the Pacific NorthWest.  Directed by Jess Gibson

via digitaltools

Domo-kun a mascot prduced by NHK and soon became a net meme in Japan and whiting the roeign otaku scene. Jason Freeny just posted this impressive Domo Kun Qee figure anatomy illustration.
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The ArduinoBoy, developed by Timothy "trash80" Lamb, is a device based around the Arduino microcontroller that allows one to use their GameBoy as a musical instrument.  It translates MIDI signals from a computer, keyboard, sequencer, or other MIDI device into a language that the GameBoy, specifically trash80's mGB application, can understand, allowing the GameBoy to produce a sound in response to the MIDI signal.  Not only can it be used with mGB, however, it can also be used with Nanoloop and LSDJ, two very popular GameBoy music creation apps in use by chiptune composers.

Click here to buy an ArduinoBoy or here to download the schematics to build one.
via TCTD

My mother always tought me to not play with food but these Tomica sushi art toys are by Paramodel irresistible.
The same artists behind these sushi cars decorated my favorite bar in Akihabara!

Paramodel is an artist unit formed in 2001 by Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano. Their title is essentially a manifesto in sum - fusing the words "Paradise", "Paradox", and "Model", the portmanteau also plays upon the Japanese word "puramodel" (toy plastic dioramas). Through elaborate combinations of plastic toys parts with other everyday objects, they attempt to create blueprints of Paradise whilst underscoring life's paradoxes. 

via Shift

Finally Hatsune Miku fans can experience "real love" with their very own virutal idol... it's a shame that Valentine Day is over!!

via www.amazon.co.jp
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The Japanese artist duo Mywa Denki specialized in nonsense toy/music machines (recently they released the Otamatone) teamed up with Tamiya to create the small sound robots  Robogakki.
On 28 march in Yokohama the brothers Masamuchi and Nobumichi Tosa will held a workshop in the Tamiya’s Plamodel Factory store.

via Modellismo HobbyMedia
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 Ebten has just released a wonderful Official Gradius T-Shirt (I got it and it looks way better than in the photo). Damage = 4500 Yen
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Young Animal (ヤングアニマル) is one of my favourite printed magazines in Japan. It's a semimonthly publication with about 288 black and white pulp pages of comics wrapped in about 20 slick pages of color photos of sexy gravure idols.
Young Animal was first issued in 1989 as Animal House but was renamed Young Animal in 1992. However, it may have begun as early as 1981 as a shōnen magazine entitled Gekkan Shōnen Jets, since manga serialized in Young Animal is later published in tankobon graphic novel form as part of the "Jets Comics" line, and since Shonen Jets was discontinued in the late 1980s (Wikipedia).
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Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn't use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There's a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.

KodyKoala created a Custom Mario Mech Vinyl Figure starting from a giant Mario toy bought at Toys'r'us and a Mario Keychain.
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MINI MARKADE is a new project created by Moslevin. It features Tetris, Space Invaders and Breakout - all selectable from a frontend application. Smooth 60fps graphics are displayed on a 1.5 inch OLED display (by 4D Systems), while controls are input through a custom Atari-compatible joystick made from random parts off digikey. Powered by 2xAAA batteries, the system will run for 12-15 hours between changes.
The Markade also runs FunkOS, a custom RTOS for low-resource microcontrollers, which you can download from this sourceforge page: http://funkos.sourceforge.net. The system uses about 1800 bytes of RAM and all but 80 bytes of the available 32KB of flash. Not bad!

Super7 announced the first collaboration with Lucasfilm Ltd.: the highly anticipated Star Wars Stormtrooper Super Shogun.  The Star Wars Stormtrooper Super Shogun stands a whopping 24 inches tall, and includes all of the features that you expect from an authentic Jumbo: free rotating wheels on the bottom of his feet, and a spring-loaded Rocket Punch firing fist. Utilizing the same techniques implemented by Japanese toy manufacturers in the 1970s, the Super Shogun is constructed from durable, blow-molded polyethylene with a painted vinyl helmet.
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Chris Anderson, and not Apple's iPad, is going to save the publishing industry: Wired Tablet App will force Apple to accept Flash on iPad/iPhone to keep the pace with competition's tablets... this will open the development of interactive tablet magazines and start a new industry that with a closed system would never take off (how many digital magazines have you read on an iPhone/iPod)?

The publishing industry needs a single tool to deploy tabletmags to many different mobile platforms and if Indesign/Air will become the standard design/development tools Apple will be forced to accept Flash (almost as embedded code)...
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Shoryuken DJ Style!!!

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Wired Autopia posted my photos of the life size Tamiya Sand Scorcher I spotted during the Nuremberg Toy Fair 2010. Thanks to Chuck Squatriglia and Keith Barry.

タミヤの往年の人気ラジコンが「実物大」に変身：ドイツ http://wiredvision.jp/news/201002/2010021720.html

WOW!

From Strapya...
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Yuka Toyota... I'm in love again!!
^_^

Last week during the Toy Fair 2010 (held in Nuremberg) I spotted prototypes of several new LEGO licensed products like these BENTO BOXES made to finally being able to enjoy a truly plastic lunch like a real minifig from Legoland!!
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Tonight Danny held his (semi)monthly geek meeting in Akihabara. I'm stucked in Europe for a couple of months so I missed this summit but super blogger Shibuya246 shooted this cool photo of one of my super favourite idol/artists Julie Watai (aka Amano Ai)!
Nice!!