Monthly Round-Up July

For some reason, this months round-up fea­tures a vari­ety of Japan­ese con­tent, start­ing with some bril­liant (yet dev­ast­at­ing) pho­tos of Hiroshima from 64 years ago thanks to The Big Pic­ture. We haven’t men­tioned The Big Pic­ture on Super­pos­i­tion Kitty before, but it’s a def­in­ite favour­ite in my feeds. Run by Alan Taylor, a web developer who pre­vi­ously worked for Amazon, it’s a photo blog updated thrice weekly with some of the best, most beau­ti­ful, and highest qual­ity images of what’s been going on each week.

Next up is the art­work of Toshio Saeki, the 63 year old god­father of Japan­ese erot­ica. You can find a rather large col­lec­tion of his work here and here (very not work safe). He stud­ied art at school, and after gradu­at­ing pur­sued a career in graphic design. At the age of 24 he left his homet­own of Osaka and traveled to Tokyo where, using the money he saved up, he ren­ted a tiny apart­ment and began work­ing as an illus­trator and erotic artist. Fam­ous for his images which revolve around both sex and death, Saeki says that he is not a viol­ent per­son but that he just loves to enter­tain and shock people.

Only in Japan would a res­taur­ant kit­chen be run by robots. You can watch them do their thing (serving up deli­cious bowls of Ramen) on You­Tube. Appar­ently the bene­fits of using the robots in such an envir­on­ment is that they can per­fectly time boil­ing the noodles, and are cap­able of pre­cise move­ments in adding top­pings, so that the tem­per­at­ure and taste is con­sist­ent from bowl to bowl. They also spin plates and carry out mock duals in the downtime!

Mov­ing away from the Japan­ese theme, we have some ter­rific inter­act­ive design in the form of these screen­shots of the Xerox Star 8010 inter­face. Intro­duced in 1981, it was the first com­mer­cial per­sonal com­puter to imple­ment a graph­ical user inter­face. Not to men­tion the mouse, Eth­er­net net­work­ing, file serv­ers, print serv­ers and e-mail! Screen­shots of the inter­face such as this one and this one show the level of detail required in design­ing a cohes­ive feel for the sys­tem. You can read about (and see) the pro­gres­sion the inter­face took here.