I Vomit Rainbows

Every so often, I’ll hear about someone who doesn’t know who the Flying Spaghetti Monster is, and it makes me sad. It also makes baby Jesus cry. Flying Spaghetti Monster is the awesomest diety out there. He’s made of pasta and full of noodly goodness. He created Earth after drinking a lot. The Pope even likes the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The religion behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created in 2005 as an argument against the teaching of intelligent design in schools as an alternate to evolution. It was presented to the Kansas Board of Education. It became an internet meme.. and now appears in cupcake form (for Paul’s birthday). I made these last February and forgot to post about them.

Noodles = frosting
Meatballs =  hazelnut candies
Eyes = bits of Pocky mounted to chocolate chips
Marinara = strawberry jam mixed with thawed frozen strawberries
Stalks = Pocky (original flavor)
Cheese = shredded white chocolate chips
Cupcake base flavor = vanilla.

(Above: Rickmond and Paul enjoy FSM cupcakes at The Rustic Spoon)

I hadn’t been updating my blog as much as I should have. I’ve actually been doing lots of fun art stuff this spring, so I wanted to post about some of them.

Eliot’s Birthday! Me and my friends went over-the-top with strange and sometimes edible art projects. First, Erin (readiness) and I made hacker cupcakes out of fondant. It’s the first time that either of us had messed with it. First we sketched out wii-style heads of our friends:

Then we cut shapes out, either freestyling with a knife, or using cookie cutters, and ended up with these:

Dave’s idea was to make Eliot some Laser Boob Cupcakes, based on a business card design he’d been using lately. We took two cupcakes and jammed laser pointers into them, with the “on” buttons taped permanently to “on.” Then, I covered the cupcakes in pink icing and added some red around the center.

Which brings us to the last art project. Jeans Top Hat (though it looks like a Dr. Suess hat). This hat is in response to a twitter. It took me 2 hrs to make, out of jeans, a grocery bag, duct tape, a clothes hanger, and safety pins.

from sweetums:
Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!

Careful what you twitter around your birthday.

More pics and the hacker drinkup party at Rick’s Tavern are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157623602392806/

Dave got me into this crazy blog called Sleep Talkin’ Man. It’s about a British guy who talks in his sleep, and his personality does a 180. He says some really funny things. Since I first started reading the blog, I’d been wanting to draw some of the phrases. Here are a couple that I finished:

Chris (cnelson) showed me a video about augmented reality cookies, and I knew that had to be the next baking project. The premise behind this is to hold a cookie with a special mark on it, and a webcam would render a shape over the cookie, even if you rotated it. We were going to make it so that when you bit into a cookie, you’d get a silly mustache on your face.

Of course, I waited til last minute to make the dough, and was trying to measure out 1cm tall chunks at 2am. But the bigger problem was that the dough was defrosting fast as I was trying to build the cookies, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be smooth enough to scan.

But the cookie block did look fine the next day, and sliced easily. We laid them onto cookie sheets and baked them. In Chris’s sunny computer room, they did scan. However, the program was having problems with the contrast. Next time, add more blue and red food coloring, as well as more melted chocolate, to give your cookies more contrast.

Chris was in charge of making the code work with the cookies. He used Processing and NyARToolkit to make that happen.

I also made some onigiri rice balls with the trigger shape cut out, and some quick California rolls. The rolls didn’t trigger the software, but the riceballs did. We showcased these at Hacker Drinkup 100, at Rick’s Tavern.

I drew a bunch of mustaches that would display randomly. Here is what your options were:

Screenshots from Chris’s App: http://id.cnelson.org/augmented-stache

Eliot’s Blog Post: http://www.robotskirts.com/2010/05/27/augmented-reality-mustaches/

My Flickr Set of Hacker Drinkup 100: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157624155168304/

I think we’re a bit obsessed with augmented reality now, so expect more cool stuff from us soon!

When Chris mentioned that there was an animal out there called Toky0-X that is genetically engineered to be the tastiest animal out there, we knew we had to try it. Tokyo-X is a real, legit animal. It was created by cross-breeding Durok (US), Berkshire (UK), and Beijing Black (China) pigs together. It took seven years for them to develop this delicious animal. Tokyo-X has marbled meat, which is extremely rare in pork. It has 5% inter-muscle fat and costs twice as much as normal pork. Tokyo-X is to pigs as Wagyu is to cows.

At first, we were going to try to find Tokyo-X in Japan, but then Chris found a place in LA that served it, in Koreatown. Park’s BBQ. (955 S Vermont Ave)

Chris, Erin, Dave, Jules, Eliot, Strom, and I ventured into Koreatown to a nice BBQ spot. Each of the long tables had two grills. We ordered a few things, but were most excited about our Tokyo-X pork belly. They brought us a ton of sides and sauces, too. It was amazing. I’d like more of my food to be genetically engineered. Eliot, the vegetarian in our group, even tried it, but was oddly not impressed. Everyone else loved it, though.

Edit: we found some Tokyo-X curry. Does anyone know where to find this, in either Los Angeles or Japan?