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.

This months links round up has been delayed by Mar­garet Atwood’s The Blind Assas­sin of which I still have roughly 30 pages left to read. The only reason I am not read­ing it right now is because I’m expect­ing a phone call some time in the next hour and don’t want the end ruined by not being able to think about it properly.

I’ve also read The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake this month. The former was a good as I remembered it being when I first read it as a teen­ager. The lat­ter you would have had to pry from my cold dead hands to stop me from fin­ish­ing it.

So June 2009s sum­ma­tion comes fueled by Mar­garet Atwood. Who is amaz­ing. You should all read her books right now.

Con­tinue read­ing: Monthly Round-Up: June

Wel­come to Edi­tion Two. I haven’t done one of these in a while because I’m lazy, so I sup­pose I bet­ter get right into it.

THEM THANGS is the photo blog of Justin Blyth. There are rarely any words, and def­in­itely no explan­a­tions, so I’m going to have to make some assump­tions here. THEM THANGS is a col­lec­tion of cool photos/designs/pictures/lyrics/words that Justin has found in his travels through­out the inter­net, and there is cer­tainly a lot of them (over 10 pages now). Make sure to wait for the long load times, and beware of the slightly NSFW con­tent that lurks within.

Scott Pom­mier takes cool pic­tures of cool things, there really isn’t much more to be said than that, but make sure to click on through to his inter­view with fea­ture shoot and read about how he got started.

The Beard­more Bros are legends in auto­mot­ive circles. Hav­ing worked for dec­ades, and with an almost unhealthy obses­sion of Mor­ris Minors, they have cre­ated some of the coolest cus­tom cars and sleep­ers in the UK. Make sure to read about their latest pro­ject: A space framed, 2000cc 16v Fiat engined, 178mm widened, Mor­ris Minor con­vert­ible that they use for hillclimbs and sprints.

Win­dosill is a beau­ti­ful point-and-click adven­ture from Vec­tor­park — cre­at­ors of a bunch of bril­liantly simple down­load­able games for the Mac and PC. You can play the first part of the game online here but will have to pay US$3.00 to play the remainder.

And lastly I’m going to intro­duce you to the way that I’ve been spend­ing the last 3 days: read­ing Full­metal Alchem­ist. A manga about two broth­ers who are try­ing to restore their bod­ies after an attempt to bring their mother back to life went very wrong. Full of ter­rific action, great com­edy, and an enthralling plot, it will suck you in. I’m sure that if you search hard enough you’ll find a vari­ety of ways to read it online.

It doesn’t mat­ter that we’re halfway through June already — there’s still time to gather up all the stuff we’ve been look­ing at at SPK and throw together a post of to let the inter­net know about it. So to make up for our extreme late­ness, we will be doing two edi­tions, one from each of us.

For the most part the reason that this post is late has a lot to do with com­ics. Spe­cific­ally Seinen Manga which I can’t seem to get enough of right now. Since there are so many of the things out there it’s proven dif­fi­cult to stop

Luck­ily (or unluck­ily) for me, as I am not Japan­ese and some­times find it hard to tell which title will be what I’m look­ing for, recom­mend­a­tion sites like Anime Planet exist and their easy to use data­base sys­tem, though small right now, makes it very easy to pick out some­thing new.

Just to get you star­ted here are a few of the things it’s poin­ted me towards this month:

Dragon Head is post-apocalyptic, dark and creepy but oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult to cater­gor­ise but def­in­itely worth a look.

Ber­serk requires a word of warn­ing: there are just over 20 years of it to read so it could take a while to trawl through it. It’s also a fairly bru­tal read focus­ing as it does on evis­cer­a­tion and sexual viol­ence towards almost everything so if these things are not to your taste it may be best avoided. How­ever it is a bril­liantly drawn, engross­ing and stun­ning in it’s scale and ima­gin­a­tion. There are also a lot of draw­ings of horses.

Hotel is a short but beau­ti­ful one-shot comic. If it doesn’t make you cry a little you are prob­ably not human.

If you’re inter­ested in any of these titles, or any manga at all and you’re look­ing for a place to try them out for your­self then you can head over to Manga­Fox which is eas­ily the best site of it’s kind I have found so far.

Con­tinue read­ing: Really Late Monthly Links Round Up