Grey (Germany)
See what the grey means for design studio. Awesome navigation.

BOX Foundation (UK)
Very nice site and interesting navigation inside.

Leven Thumps and the Getaway to Foo (US)
Amazing site for the book by Obert Skye.

Lifevisuals ()
...where memories capture the spirit and beauty of life...

Worms World Party for Nokia N-Gage (?)
Crazy interface, nice work by Joshua Davis.

NOTSOSIMPLETON (?)
Creative portfolio of Myron Campbell.

Fish-n-Chips (France)
Mini-studio of 2 freelancers.

Massive Attack (UK)
You know their music. The site is suited to their own creativity.

Seriph (US)
Very good portfolio. Crisp and well done.

Ingreme (Portugal)
Impressive 3D work, nice concept.

Derrick Borte, Director (US)
Ex-designer, ex-painter.. Good and hard 3D.

Publicite & Communication Responsables (France)
Awesome windowed interface and nice theme.

Flash Designer (Hungaria)
Few rustic tales about one Flash Designer.

Vbrunetti studios (?)
Very interesting navigation.

The new Volkswagen Passat (Swedish)
You can change a lot of things.

In Morphing (Afghanistan?)
Clean, clean & clean. And nice transactions.

Kane NYC (?USA)
Very fresh and original. Try to find the entrance..

RedBull Creativity Contest 2005 (France-Nederlands)
Can you be creative?..

Calibre Pics (?)
They know what creativity is.

Demographik (USA)
Nice clean site, everything is smoothly in its place.

Bee Studio (Poland)
Taste the Bee!

BLITZ (USA)
Now they are BLITZ, just BLITZ.

Nine Spices (Romania)
Clean, modular and stylish.

Xenao (Russia)
Hard attention to details, nice scripting.

Thank God I drove home to my wife instead.

While I was quietly congratulating myself on avoiding what would've most certainly been a life-threatening threesome, I remembered that one of Bill Clinton's foundations had pledged $10 million to fight AIDS in Africa. Would Bill too succumb to the all-too-common fallacy that condoms actually help prevent the spread of AIDS? Would he acknowledge instead that condoms serve only to encourage unsafe sex, which is to say any sex at all, because all sex is unsafe? Or would he simply promote oral sex as a justifiable alternative to, say, anal?

And would he do it with posters in English, featuring white people?

Blowjobs! Why not?

Why not, indeed. Africa was doomed long before our pithy public relations teams started pushing anti-sexual-relations propaganda -- in English, no less -- so I can forgive the "abstinence" blitzkrieg as harmless moralizing by morons, the same way I forgave my grandma for arguing with me that Liberace was straight. No, it's too late to shed a tear for Africa.

It's America that I'm worried about.

I think what this country needs, this cunt-ry, this out-of-touch, fat, listless shell of a nation, is a few good blowjobs. Forget a few good men -- have you seen the pimply-faced high-school kids who pass for our "army" in Iraq? Those poor saps hardly know which end of the gun is the "firey" part, much less what they're doing standing in the middle of a sand-covered oil pond directing traffic and getting their legs blown off by nail-bombs. If some of the hale and hearty Republicans in my neighborhood -- over 50f the country, if the last election is to be believed, which it's not -- would start driving their "W 04" bumper-stickered Humvees over to their local army recruiting office, we could win this thing! Of course, they'd have to buy their own armor plating to reinforce the sides, just like our enlisted troops do, but I'm sure they could charge it. Unfortunately, just like our President, Republicans are all for the war but they don't want to fight. Though they sure do like shopping and driving giant gas-guzzling tanks, the better to play urban commando in the Costco parking lot and drive up the price of gas for the rest of us who bike, or drive motorcycles, or even "cars."

The real volunteer army are people like my 70 year-old mom who drive Priuses instead of Lincolns; the people who refuse to overlook the fact that our leadership lied to, misled, and betrayed the public into thinking we were sending our sons and daughters to fight a war that would protect the United States, that would save us from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; the people who stick to their convictions by refusing to buy the Fox line that ousting a petty despot was worth the deaths of thousands of Americans, that shifting resources from the Afghanistan conflict to iraq was a responsible move in the "war" on "terror," that refusing to support this unwinnable Vietnam rerun somehow means that you do not support America's troops. What better support could you offer than bringing them home to be with their families, their mothers and fathers, their kinsmen, where they belong?

So, I say blowjobs. Blowjobs for all. Big, slurpy sac-suckings. Balling from dawn to dusk. Knowing the facts doesn't help you. Writing letters to your elected leaders won't help you. Giving money to the Greens or the Dems? You might as well roll your bills with a little flour and paste and make a papier-mache mold of your own buttcheeks. Or spend them on a wet, sloppy blowjob. Which is my plan from here on out.

Fuck politics. Fuck keeping up with the news. Fuck journalism that ignores the facts, fuck editors and newsroom producers who favor ratings over facts, and fuck fake journalists who smear the name of their supposed profession by making up fake stories or taking GOP money to peddle shitty conservative ideas. And a special "fuck you" to uncle Toms like Jason Blair, Armstrong Williams and my old boss "the Reverend," a black man who actually voted for Bob Dole.

Now where's my goddamn blowjob???

OS3 (Poland)
Probably the most creative media studio in Poland. Wery well done -- stylish and clean interface with an impressive body of work.

Incognito Studio
Nice, fresh, clean, original. Do you want to add a word or two?

CROMM CRUAC
Can you comprehend digital madness? Just visit the above for an answer.

h u e . v i s u a l a b
Crisp and beautiful. Must see after the madness above for mind relaxation purposes.

1. A recently posted report from the OSS (the CIA's maiden name) predicting Hitler's suicide based on his desire to "sacrifice himself and all of Germany to the revengeful annihilation of Western culture, to die, dragging all of Europe with him into the abyss." Damn, how I wish I wrote that sentence. A NYT article brings up the interesting point that the same proto-behavioral-psychologist who developed the report may also have been responsible for twisting the mind of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who unwittingly submitted to the psychologist's OSS-derived stress tests when he was his student at Harvard.

2. In Kurt Vonnegut's classic "Jailbird," a body-double of the wealthiest and most powerful corporate magnate in the world (forward-thinkingly inserted as a female) is found dead in a hotel room with her hands cut off, her handprints being the only form of "signature" recognized by her vast conglomeration of corporate holdings. In Malaysia, they'll cut off your finger for the much smaller booty of an S-Class Mercedes.

I'm not a believer in end-time paranoia -- there were programmers building bunkers in Oregon right before Y2K also -- but that doesn't mean I'm not justifiably suspicious. Stevie Wonder wrapped up in a roll of carpet could see that our current economic system is unsustainable and that the future of our society, human society, world society, is dependent on a fragile, poorly understood Rube Goldberg machine of debt and usury.

Here's the trailer: http://www.alchemyfilmsinternational.com

I have, however, resolved to buy an economics textbook on eBay as I never studied it in college and the more I learn about it, the more it seems like exotic chaos theory than actual science. (Is it a science? I'm so poorly informed on the topic that I don't even know.) A possibly equally ill-informed friend told me that the Federal Reserve prints money on a regular basis, thereby further devaluing existing currency -- but don't they also destroy old/crinkled/written-on bills?

Biz-partner Wendell is working on a social software called Meetro, a severely scaled-back, location-based version of our Matador project that I predict will be significantly more successful. Matador was a myspace-style social software network that also allowed encrypted, decentralized, BitTorrent-style file-sharing: upon upload, files broke themselves into individually encrypted chunks and spread themselves to unused hard-drive space on the network. A great idea but several years ahead of its time in terms of productive public consumption, something we never bothered to consider.

During the thick of development a year ago, the software's big idea, to us, was the encrypted file-sharing aspect. Social Software Networks such as friendster and myspace were old news -- to us. We ignored the fact that every time we talked to potential investors, they were stymied by the very idea of SSNs -- and unsettled by the potentially litigious aspects of offering the public yet another file-sharing software. Always looking at it from an engineer's perspective, we failed to account for the newness of SSNs in the public consciousness and the continued public mistrust associated with file-sharing (not an irony anymore in America, where our moral outrage is almost always exceeded by our lust for getting away with something). We failed to roll out the product in manageable stages that would have allowed us to build, post, promote, refine. We won't make those mistakes again.

The signs have been out there for the better part of a year now: it costs more and more to buy the same stuff. A gallon of milk is now over $3, where a year ago it was about in line with the price of gas. Pricing milk the same as gas or cheaper always shocked me -- how could a liquid continuously pumped out by cud-chewing cows worldwide cost more than a finite supply of liquified, refined dinosaur remains? It's like pricing urine next to wine. Apparently someone in the supply chain rectified that logic issue but now everything -- milk, eggs, wine -- is more expensive because the raw price of our major energy source, oil, has skyrocketed. It takes fuel to transport things from place to place and that transport charge gets added into the cost of every single item we buy. But that's not the only factor burning down the money in your pocket. Here's the rest of the inflation salad -- pile on the toppings!

- Our trade deficit is the largest it's ever been -- ever. That means our goods would be cheaper than ever for foreigners to purchase, if we actually exported any manufactured goods. Heard about any new manufacturing plants being built in America lately? Um... no. Well, there *is* a new Hyundai plant I read about -- with its profits going back to Korea. The same way we exported our manufacturing facilities and jobs to Mexico after NAFTA, we're now becoming a third-world cheap labor hub for our economic superiors.

- Other nations that are major holders of our debt notes (China, Japan, South Korea) have been publically contemplating dumping some of them on the world market because their value is sinking so fast. Of course, this would result in the value of the dollar sinking even more rapidly. Supply goes up, demand (and value) go down.

- Notice the names of those nations that hold our foreign debt: China, Japan, South Korea. Try to find a consumer item in your home that isn't MADE IN CHINA (or TAIWAN). I have a Krupps coffeemaker but that's no guarantee it wasn't made by one of our gracious lenders. Because foreign goods cost more to us now (because the value of foreign currencies exceeds ours, except for the Chinese yuan, which is pegged to the dollar), foreign products cost more also. And nearly every non-food product we buy is produced overseas.

- And the cherry tomato on top: Bush's tax break has effectively drained the nation's coffers so that states and cities have had to cut services and raise taxes in order to continue serving basic community needs like police and emergency services (the costs of which have skyrocketed in the post-9/11 universe). The Bush administration's goal is to reverse or destroy every social program implemented since the New Deal -- they'll only succeed in destroying the economic fabric of the nation.

Consumer prices rose .4% last month, and the Feds raised the prime interest rate to 2.75%. As interest rates rise, home ownership will slow. People who jumped into Adjustable Rate Mortgages will start defaulting on their loans within the next five to ten years as rates rise. They'll have fewer options for bankruptcy thanks to Congress passing "tough" bankruptcy legislation that makes it harder for individuals -- the ones with overwhelming medical bills, for example, one of the primary groups of people who declare bankruptcy -- meaning that more of the middle class will end up part of the poverty-stricken slave class, forever indebted to credit card multinationals, giant insurance companies and Lovecraftian medical bureaucracies.

Remember Jimmy Carter? The oil embargo? 20% interest rates? We ain't seen nothin' yet.

"Many of the protesters were draped in dry banana leaves, the symbol of the third term for the Museveni campaign. They held placards which read: 'Geldof sober up and shut up', 'No to drug addicts and Rock Homos'."

Why do people have turtles as pets? Anyone reading this have a reptile, or know someone who does? I can't emphathize -- are people drawn to them by a sort of scientific fascination, or because they think they're cute, or because they're an earthly conduit for Satan himself?

I hope nobody kills the little guy in some misguided effort to ensure the restoration of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube by eliminating what they think is Satan's Floridian form on Earth.