Roger Hargreaves's son Adam shows how to draw Mr Men characters. Via.

READ MORE - How to draw Roger Hargreaves's Mr. Men characters

1. Check out Stephen Gammell's creepy illustrations from the three Scary Stories books. Here's an animated gif of one. Via.



2. How to create a 404 error page for Wordpress (designing the page, modifying the code).



3. "Corey Helford Gallery will be offering complimentary mini-giclees of Korin Faught's new painting 'Lovelorn' to the first 400 guests who arrive at the opening this Saturday, September 3rd (doors open at 7PM)."

READ MORE - Link roundup

Ken Block's latest insane driving video is a tour through Universal Studios. (I posted a few of his older videos here.)









Video shows how recycled paper is turned into toilet paper. Via.













The latest advertisement for Rock of Ages takes a tour through video game history.









Face forms in the clouds (starting at 57 seconds). Via these sites.









Baseball player collapses/slides into home. Via.

READ MORE - Video roundup

1. Great writing about living in China at the time of the Beijing Olympics. Sample paragraph:

Our son had asthma. There was no use pretending it was the squeaky-clean, sensitive, upper-middle-class kind of asthma. He had the asthma that ghetto children come down with, because they live in the dirt. He was wheezing because at last, today, on the morning of the Olympics, the filth of the city where he was born had gotten into his tender lungs. He was sick because we had let him live in Beijing.

2. How to market to old people. For example:

Marketing to the elderly is tricky. The direct approach—say, calling your product “the soap for the over-70s”—does not work. And traditional advertising fails. “You can’t use TV adverts: they forget them,” groans the 30-something executive. “We show it again and again and again—and they still can’t recall it,” he sighs. Word-of-mouth is the only way.

3. "The governor of a prison near Moscow has lost his job after photographs emerged of his inmates holding a toga party complete with caviar and a McDonald's fast food delivery."



*Buy Olympics posters at eBay.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Free download of a 13-track tribute to Nirvana's Nevermind. (In Bloom by Butch Walker and the Black Widows is my favorite.)

2. Tips on making photos look better on Blogger.

3. "The lost wreckage of a ship belonging to 17th century pirate Captain Henry Morgan has been discovered in Panama, said a team of U.S. archaeologists." The expedition was funded by Captain Morgan rum.

4. Colleen Coover's looking for commissions.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. How to remove yourself from various background check sites.

2. Good article about the history of DDT. For example:

The German army purposely triggered malaria epidemics, such as in Italy in 1944. Drainage pumps on the Roman marshes ordinarily pumped excess water out to sea, desiccating the land enough to make it malaria-free and thus habitable for thriving cities and towns. By stilling the pumps, the Germans could have flooded the region and effectively impeded the Allies' progress. But German malariologist Erich Martini had studied the habits of the local malaria vector, Anopheles labranchiae, in depth, and he knew that inundating the region with the Mediterranean's salty waters would allow A. labranchiae, which can thrive in brackish water, to flourish. And so rather than simply stopping the pumps, they reversed them, salinating some ninety-eight thousand acres. Then they confiscated local stockpiles of antimalarial drugs. As the German soldiers departed, they left behind "clever sketches," The New York Times reported in 1944, "of the plague of mosquitoes that would follow the flooding of the farmlands." More than 100,000 of the 245,000 locals sickened with malaria.

3. Today's economic news (aside from the stock market's freefall, and the continuing slow motion collapse of the Euro) was about protests in Israel. This was the most interesting analysis. (Hint, their economic problems don't really look anything like the USA's.)

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. How to make a Princess Leia cinnamon bun headband.

2. Gizmodo's latest must have iPhone and Android apps.

3. Want to tell if someone's lying? Skillfully question them (rather than looking for microexpressions).

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. How to use Amazon to self-publish.

2. FYI, it's free shipping plus 30% off everything at American Eagle this weekend.

3. Creepy tree wallpaper.

READ MORE - Link roundup

Roger and Tetsuo by Michael Dialynas.




How to make oatmeal wrong (i.e., the McDonald's way) by Ben Mullins.




Santánico Pandemónium (Salma Hayek in From Dusk Til Dawn) by Jason Levesque for an upcoming Tarantiono/Coen Bros-themed show. You can buy prints from the first show here.




Alice by Joseph Fox - - the winning entry in Dark Horse's Alice: Madness Returns art contest.




In this video tutorial, Todd McFarlane shows how to draw "dynamic hands."

*Buy Akira toys at eBay.

READ MORE - Illustration roundup

1. Todd McFarlane gives a video lesson on drawing hands and fingers.

2. Long article about the Portal 2 ARG. For example:

Even a player who chased after a red herring had a good story to tell. One guy got the idea in his head that he was supposed to find a clue at The Couch Potato, a furniture warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Team Meat learned about this by monitoring the IRC channel, so Edmund McMillan of Super Meat Boy fame intercepted him at the warehouse and surprised him with a signed copy of Super Meat Boy.

And also:

The second big mistake we made was pulling the ARG champions away from their communities too early. Based on contributions in various games, on the fan wiki and in the IRC channels, we hand-selected a few individuals who had contributed disproportionately to the ARG and offered to fly them to Valve.

In order to give sufficient time to notify them and make travel arrangements, Valve contacted them a few days before the start of the crescendo. We didn't require them to sign any NDAs, but to maintain the fiction, we encouraged them to take a step back from the ARG and claim that they had been kidnapped by minions of GLaDOS.

We failed to realize just how influential these few individuals had been in keeping the ARG running like clockwork. The wiki stopped getting updated, leaving other players confused as to what was going on.

Via.

3. And speaking of ARGs, "Duff Goldman offers a lifetime of birthday cakes to anyone who finds his stolen Corvette." Via.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Instructions and template for making a paper bird mobile.

2. Instructions for turning off in-app purchases on your iPhone to prevent your child (or yourself) from racking up massive charges.

3. "Google's head of research, said the main reason they launched [Google Voice] was so they could better learn how to transcribe human voice to text."

READ MORE - Link roundup

I previously posted the cool book covers for Simon Morden's Equations of Life series. The video above shows how to create book covers with similar optical illusions. Via.

READ MORE - How to make an optical illusion book cover

1. Comment and win a miniature.

2. That was fast, someone claiming to be a former Olive Garden employee responded on Reddit:

I was a manager at Olive Garden and was sent to their culinary institute in Tuscany back in 2007. It was more like a hotel, during the off-season, with restaurant on site. They would let the Olive Garden come and stay in all the rooms (small place-maybe 20 rooms) and they would use the restaurant (closed to the public-again off season) as a classroom for maybe an hour here or there and talk about spices or fresh produce for a minute before going site seeing all day. The only time we saw the "chef" was when she made a bolognese sauce while taking pictures with each of us to send to our local newspapers. Basically, yes, they send people to Italy every year. As a manager I still got paid my salary and didn't have to use vacation time, it counted as "work." They paid for everything from meals, sightseeing, flight, everything except souvenirs. But in return, they sent pre-written articles to out local newspaper with fake quotes from me and a group photo. Also every year when they would run the promotion, I was supposed to wear a special "chef" coat and make conversation with guests who ordered the promotional meals.

3. Gizmodo: Rip, Watch and Organize Everything: The Ultimate Media Guide.

*Buy flash drives at Amazon.

READ MORE - Link roundup

First, enjoy this funny, over the top Metal Gear-inspired gunfight featuring one stunt after another by the Action Factory:



This lengthy video shows how the stunts were done:



And finally, here's an ad for an Action Factory t-shirt, featuring a largely undressed stunt girl on fire:



Via Reddit.

*Previously: Wrangler's "Stunt" campaign.

READ MORE - Action Factory

Todd McFarlane shows how to draw a face:



and how to draw eyes:

READ MORE - Drawing lessons from Todd McFarlane