Phil Gyford (mefi's own!) realized last year that after he and his friends spent much of their professional lives freelancing, they were missing out on a key part of business life: Office Culture. So he invented his own, launching a synergizing solutioneering company site called Pretend Office complete with stock art. The key component that made the ruse complete was the inter-office @everyone mailing list, which is also online. Through the mailing list, they create the story of the most painful fictitious office on earth. A personal favorite of mine was the Christmas Dinner thread, do step through the conversation.
posted on Feb-6-10 at 9:10 AM

Find the visual business cliches in this holiday poster from XPLANE. Boil the Ocean. Low-hanging Fruit. Drink the Kool Aid. Find the Strawman. (big PDF you really have to zoom in to appreciate).
posted on Dec-21-09 at 8:12 AM

Phil Agre, online pioneer that ran the Red Rock Eater News service (predating most blogs) has been missing for about a year. Former colleagues believe it could be a mental breakdown or a walkabout and they've begun a controlled search using social networks with a goal of simply finding out if he's ok.
posted on Nov-25-09 at 8:10 AM

Rob Cockerham is no stranger to giant Halloween costume projects (and no stranger to MeFi). Every year he famously chronicles his costume builds (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) including everything from idea to final design. This year we not only get to see how his "Money you save with Geico" costume went together, he also published shots from other bay area halloween costume builders (now that's a sub-genre) including the awesome Tauntaun that beat him and the Transformers Bumblebee costume that took ten months to create and went all the way to win in Las Vegas costume contests.
posted on Nov-24-09 at 9:04 AM

In the late 1890s, a wooden "cycle-way" was built between Pasadena and Los Angeles for bicycle travel before freeways existed. It ran along the Arroyo Seco and though it was planned for the full ten mile distance, only two miles were completed by 1900 as the popularity of the bicycle waned. In 1983 a bike path was built along the stream basin but is both riddled with glass and debris and dangerous to impassible during a rainstorm. For the last 15 years, a group in Pasadena has been leading the effort to restore a bike path between Pasadena and Los Angeles.
posted on Nov-9-09 at 9:51 AM

Matt Meola surfs like a character in a surfing video game. Sky rocketing airs, barrel rolls, 360 airs, shuvits, & weird flip spins that are more at home in a concrete skatepark or snowboard trick park than a Hawaiian wave.
posted on Nov-3-09 at 3:32 PM

The Last Days of Gourmet Some photos of the last few days of clean-up from the inside of Gourmet Magazine's offices.
posted on Nov-2-09 at 4:57 PM

Janey Thomson's Marathon Any longtime fan of 80s arcade game Track & Field and fan of old gaming lore around Desert Bus will no doubt fall in love with this new classic game written in the perfect style of early 80s Konami combined with brutally long punishment games. I gave up after a few minutes but damn did I want to keep going and see the finish. [via mefi projects]
posted on Jul-17-09 at 11:33 AM

David Sedaris delivers a pizza. Pitch-perfect parody at youtube from the comedy group Weak Nights.
posted on Jul-16-09 at 8:43 PM

Home Movie Reconstructions 1974 / 2004 MeFi's own dziga takes family movies from 1974, revisits the locations 30 years later with the same people doing the same things. Amazing. [via mefi projects]
posted on Jul-9-09 at 3:03 PM

How to properly open a bottle of bubbly with a saber is an awesome entry from the French Culinary Institute's tech blog. Features a detailed video how-to with 1000 frames per second super slo-mo shots of proper saber technique. Impress your drunken friends at your next party with the ultimate sommelier trick!
posted on Jul-3-09 at 11:09 PM

If you love 1970s food-related advertising mascots as much as I do, you'll probably love Waffle Whiffer's blog. Loads of old posts on fast food characters, sugar cereal boxes, and even pogs! The Waffle Whiffer's flickr stream is a similar treasure trove of goodies with too many worth mentioning. Ok, just one: who knew the Thompson Twins had such great iconography (and why did they do a deal with Cap'n Crunch?)?
posted on Jun-8-09 at 3:29 PM

The most important article you'll ever read about the Jonas Brothers which smartly breaks down the extreme disconnect between their message, their medium, and how hot foam spray guns figure into the conservative culture wars.
posted on May-3-09 at 12:21 PM

Antarctica travel blog, done Big Picture style. Kevin Fox, formerly a designer at Yahoo and Google (who wrote a great response to Doug Bowman's design-by-metrics post) took a trip to Antarctica a couple months back and has been slowly updating a mini-site, exhaustively describing and showing photos from each part of each day he was down there. There are icebergs. There are penguins. There is swimming. There is drinking. It's all done in a wonderful large image Big Picture style that makes me drop everything whenever the feed updates. Start at the top and read the whole way through.
posted on Mar-23-09 at 8:47 PM

There's a showdown in Ann Arbor, MI between geeks and suits. It starts when local public tax-funded parking garages start posting the number of available spaces on their site. A few geeks decide to make it more useful while driving so they code up some asterisk hacks to scrape the page and bridge the web content to a phone and presto! you can call to hear which garages have the most spaces available for parking. Not so fast says the city and they shut down access to the site from the app and stop publishing real-time stats (mostly grumbling about a loss of "control"). Geeks are in an uproar (mostly trying to teach the suits what "public domain data" means). This long ass blog post tells the entire tale from both sides of the fight.
posted on Mar-16-09 at 1:57 PM

Classic hip-hop albums, recreated in Lego
posted on Dec-16-08 at 10:31 AM

The story of a speeding ticket, in three acts (click to see full-sized, readable versions). The Cliffs Notes version: man gets speeding ticket complete with a typo on the date of issue, man responds to police with amusing tales of time-travel, infants driving, and automobile prototypes. I won't spoil the ending.
posted on Nov-3-08 at 10:12 AM

How do different wines taste? An interesting visualization tries to answer the question of what is different about a Shiraz vs. a Pinot vs. a Cab, built from scanning keywords on 5,000 tasting notes over a five year period.
posted on Oct-31-08 at 2:42 PM

Elbow's video for their song One Day Like This is pretty simple, but you'd be surprised how much a nice song and some slow motion can make something totally awesome.
posted on Oct-29-08 at 12:34 PM

A-Ha's Take on Me, but done literally with lyrics changed to describe what was happening in the video, instead of the head-scratcher of a 80s video having nothing to do with the song. Also? A-ha still exists and the lead singer still looks the same. This meme of doing new lyrics to go with old videos is novel, previously people made videos to match the lyrics literally.
posted on Oct-6-08 at 1:16 PM

The Peloton. A gallery of professional bike racers taken just moments after they crossed the line after a brutal long stage of 2006's Giro d'Italia. After a hundred miles of racing, the rider dumps their bike on a team soigner and enters a makeshift tent for a quick photo among the finish line chaos. The photos showcase the pain and suffering well, but some photos also capture a bike racer's most damaging feeling: doubt.
posted on Aug-21-08 at 12:42 PM

Dress patterns made from bleeding markers. Simple, but totally awesome. (via ymk)
posted on Jul-7-08 at 10:39 AM

The video for Naive New Beaters' song "Live Good" has a mind-blowing amount of green-screen going on, to good effect.
posted on Jun-26-08 at 9:26 AM

bomomo is a fun little drawing tool that creates some pretty interesting brush patterns using a variety of physics and mouse behavior. You can even save your finest works (Firefox and Safari only though) [via mefi projects]
posted on Jun-4-08 at 1:34 PM

The Big Picture The Boston Globe launches a new blog focusing on a large single image from the day's news. It's kind of surprising how rare it is to see a really big photo on newspaper sites these days and this blog makes the simple concept work. [via mefi projects]
posted on Jun-2-08 at 8:05 AM

Take a photo with your cat, open in photoshop, remove heads from cat and human and switch. Yet another strange but magical internet meme
posted on May-30-08 at 10:53 AM

Just plain beautiful intricate art made from flowers. So simple, but so sublime. [via blort]
posted on May-12-08 at 12:02 PM

Chinese MC Hammer. Move for move nearly perfect redo of the original Hammer video. In someone's living room. While mom knits on the couch. It's a thousand kinds of awesome. via blort
posted on Mar-29-08 at 10:35 PM

The paintings on Nerdkore by Jeremiah Palecek started when he asked readers "What should I paint today?" and they responded. The result (so far) is a bunch of famous YouTube videos captured in oil on canvas, showing stills from some all-time favorites (techno viking, grape stomp, etc oh and NSFW on the oldest entry at the bottom of the page). (via Josh Spear)
posted on Mar-11-08 at 9:48 AM

"It's the first time since Japanese Internment that we've imprisoned children" -- from a post displaying a letter written by a 9 year old Canadian.
posted on Mar-10-08 at 7:15 PM

Uncle Dirty is a fascinating photo essay about a photographer's strange uncle who has lived 86 years obsessed with bodybuilding, penises, and thongs. Not safe for work, but not too crazy, the photos really humanize someone you'd probably cross the street to avoid in real life. (via mjj/blort)
posted on Mar-8-08 at 11:13 AM

Stylish Blight (slideshow of awesome live/work architecture office) The outside says pure urban squalor, while the inside is pure awesomeness. Full story in today's NYT about the project. (via beebo)
posted on Mar-2-08 at 5:31 PM

Marshall ("Major") Taylor was the first black American to be crowned World Champion in any sport, ever. Care to guess the sport? In 1899, he set the world one-mile track record in cycling (and repeated his win in 1900 and 1901. His legacy continues today with an association, a society, a foundation, cycling clubs, and a velodrome.
posted on Feb-2-08 at 1:32 PM

Fuck Planet Earth. The extreme beauty of the popular Planet Earth series comes alive with this comedic bit that simply repeats the F-bomb to great effect.
posted on Jan-26-08 at 2:27 PM

Everyblock has launched. It's local news culled from (any and all available) services, including photos, news, restaurant inspections, classified ads, and civic announcements. Sounds pretty dry, but looking at my old neighborhood in San Francisco, there's a wealth of hyperlocal information that you can't get in one place. They're currently in three major metro areas of the US with many more to come -- their launch announcement has more. This site was spearheaded by Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer of the intersection between journalism and computer science, and winner of a $1million grant last year to build such sites.
posted on Jan-23-08 at 2:07 PM

Food and Beauty is a series of portraits of models with meat (and fish, and other kinds of food). It's strange, it's off-putting, it's sometimes sexy, but mostly ewww. Somehow I bet somewhere there is a Rule 34 site dedicated to weird shit like this (via Serious Eats)
posted on Dec-7-07 at 1:19 PM

Post a controversial comment, get arrested. "Some were disturbed by the post police say James Buss left on a conservative blog, but other observers said it was a sarcastic attempt to discredit critics of education spending."
posted on Dec-4-07 at 4:03 PM

Footloose in America: around the world in 20 years A husband-wife team left their home in June of 2001 to circumnavigate the world by foot, and they took their mule along with them. They haven't gotten very far but it sounds like they've had lots of adventures in the past six years, as they walk from town to town doing odd jobs. [via this flickr photo/story]
posted on Nov-20-07 at 4:52 PM

Slats.org's awesome gallery of QSL cards. QSL cards were like business cards for ham radio and CB nuts. They'd hand them out and trade them with other operators and featured their location and contact info. Bighappyfunhouse bought a boatload at a swapmeet and scanned them in. Great, crude, amusing, folksy art from a bygone era. [via projects]
posted on Oct-15-07 at 6:44 PM

You need organs, they need homes. "We are a domestic and international adoption agency where parents are free to adopt a child who is a perfect match (up to 18 yrs) for the transplant of one or more “non-essential” organs to be donated to one of the adopting parents or your own children. Your new son or daughter would give you their heart, if it was possible, but a lung, eye or three feet of intestine might be enough to prove that love."
posted on Sep-19-07 at 11:16 AM

Miss Teen South Carolina, why are Americans bad at geography?
posted on Aug-26-07 at 1:47 PM

You probably heard the news today and saw earlier threads about Michael Vick, but ESPN has done an amazing job wrapping up the entire case into a handy one-page FAQ. Written by a sports lawyer, it explains all the interesting aspects of the case: what happened, when did it happen, and what results we'll likely see.
posted on Aug-20-07 at 7:33 PM

Diebold Election Systems is no more (at least in name). Taking a page from the cigarette companies, Diebold is changing their name and hoping to reverse the downward spiral after their recent news.
posted on Aug-17-07 at 11:57 PM

The Shoe Project: people and their shoes. Simple and sweet, I don't know why this makes me smile so much but it does. (via swissmiss)
posted on Aug-15-07 at 12:11 PM

Extreme sports have gotten a little, well, extreme as of late. Video games showed a hyper-reality that's now being duplicated in the real world. With the advent of foam pits and foam resi ramps to try new tricks safely, trick progression in skateboard and bmx is moving very fast. While foam practice areas let riders do some pretty amazing stuff, when things go wrong over plywood, they're going really wrong. Witness a double-backflip crash that resulted in broken bones and teeth, Stephen Murray's crash that resulted in paralysis from the neck down, or last night's incredible X games freefall from fifty feet up to flat ground (Jake Brown walked away and only suffered minor internal injuries).
posted on Aug-3-07 at 6:46 PM

Cycling for a cause is the project/site of Canadian college student Michal Brichacek. On May 3rd of this year he set out from Alaska on his bike, aiming to ride all 12,000km (7440 miles) by early August. He's riding to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation and he's over halfway done, currently riding across a hot Mexico landscape. His blog has his daily adventures (mostly about having to look for tent spots, supplies, and meeting interesting strangers). He's also posting daily photos of the trip.
posted on Jul-9-07 at 8:19 PM

The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test is a continuation of the standardized testing Texas has been doing for the past 15 years, a good bit of which George W. Bush pushed as a way to measure teacher aptitude and school performance. The company that administers the test claims that cheating is "extraordinarily rare" but the Dallas Morning news found about 50,000 cheating students in 1/3 of all Texas schools. The most prevalent was the 11th grade science exam, also known as the one you must pass to get a diploma. The article even has cool coverflow-like visualizations of what a cheating school exam looks like. [via the journalist's blog, which promises parts 2 and 3 in the next couple days]
posted on Jun-3-07 at 8:56 PM

Peggy a redo of the Lichtenstein modern classic using 2788 hand cut, sanded, and painted dowels mounted on a wall, forming a 3 x 7 foot work of art.
posted on May-29-07 at 1:40 PM

"Even LG Electronics Inc., maker of the handset Elmi uses, initially didn't believe her photos originated from its LG8100 phone when she asked the company to sponsor a recent gallery exhibit of her camera-phone art." (news, gallery works)
posted on May-24-07 at 8:31 AM

A retired construction guy with a large property was bulldozing a new driveway and noticed some shiny rocks. He excavated carefully, revealing an entire forest of upright, undisturbed petrified trees (photo gallery). Soon he began cataloging and selling pieces to museums but has since stopped. More about his find. (via girlhacker)
posted on May-4-07 at 7:13 AM