Doobybrain.com

This website is so awesome that it deserves its own entry: We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

Hmm, how do I say this? THIS IS THE COOLEST DATA COLLECTION WEBSITE EVER! It’s sole purpose is to showcase an amazing array of emotions from the internet community by searching through blogs, Myspace entries, and personal websites. How is the internet feeling today, you ask? We Feel Fine may be the only place where you may find that answer or at least come close to finding it.

You can view emotions randomly, which is great because it’s visually appealing with its floating colored circles (text) and squares (text + photos), or you can view them by choosing specific attributes (feeling, gender, age, weather, location, date). But that’s not all. The project is separated into 6 different “movements” that organize these feelings together.

From the website:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.

I just love how this project flows and is presented. It truly is, by far, the best looking set of data I’ve ever seen put together.
For the record, I feel happy, and yes, I do feel fine. :)

*UPDATE: No wonder! The guys that created this also had a hand in creating 10×10, Wordcount, and Justcurio.us! No need to introduce those sites since I’ve posted them before, but if you haven’t seen them, do check them out.

Man, Vic and I don’t hang out much these days, but she’s the type of friend that I can sorta just not see for a very long time and still manage to catch up completely all in one sitting. I appreciate friendships like that and I believe she does as well because we both know it’s hard as a rock to keep a lively correspondence going while busy with school, other friends, and just life. We know the facts, and we use it to our advantage so that us not being able to see each other often doesn’t completely rip us apart (not that it would). But last night, I hung out at Vic’s place and totally had a blast playing…SNES and Mario All-Stars. We attempted to play Street Fighter II Turbo and Ninja Turtles but nothing came close to the fun that Mario was giving us. Haha, I miss the SNES console games. They were so simple, yet so fun. Actually, I miss playing Mario games in general. Last night however, Mario kicked our butts but we had a good laugh at the unusual ways we were dying and also the luck we were having with matching those three-part pictures in Mario 3 for bonuses. Man, Mario All-Stars is fun. :)

Wow, fantastic that some folks at NYU want to build a real-life Ninteno Mario amusement park, where you can stomp on Goombas, jump really high, and collect “coins”. This is a cool idea, but it’s far from anything I would consider fun just yet. Check out the photo gallery for some preliminary photos.

Not quite the real thing, but this replica Batmobile (from the first Batman movie) is close enough to be somewhat cool. The front headlights are wrong and the hatch to get into the Batmobile is nonexistent. But who cares because this thing driving down the street is unique in itself.
For an even better replica, see this Back To The Future DeLorean for bid on eBay from yesterday’s post. *UPDATE: the bid has been removed, but last I checked it was over $45,000. I wonder why it was cancelled by eBay.

This is the best working color wheel picker I’ve come across online. I like how it instantly shows you results and changes. No more opening Photoshop just to get some random hex code.

Check out The Dumpster, a collection of romantic breakups from the web in 2005. These random visual statistics graphs really are cool.

Whee, Pimp My Model. I’m posting this because I think this Asian girl in it is extremely generic, but also because it’s a pretty decent spoof of the show (Pimp My Ride). Funny thing is, I know one person who could probably be of use to this service if it really existed.

This brilliant ad for Kilroy Travels (shown above) is an awesome outdoors visual for people to get going to Antarctica. Makes me want to go to Antarctica.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of card games. My cousin says that therapists and mental hospital workers often carry a deck of cards on them because a deck of cards can be phenomenally helpful in treating these patients. A deck of cards extends well beyond age, gender, and race, and that is one of the reasons why they are so useful to psychiatric doctors. Just a little something I learned.
Anyway, I’ve been playing a lot of card games lately and I’ve come to realize how much fun they are again. The other day, I played Heart Attack until 4:30 in the morning and then tonight I played Spades for 3 straight hours. If there’s a good way to pass some time, I think cards are the new old thing to get into. Haha, I’m totally talking outta my butt, but I do think card games are fun again! :)

I just put in my new power supply and video card. To test the two to the extreme, I installed Doom 3 and played it at the highest possible settings. Let’s just say that the two new hardware components work well, because for the first time ever, I was scared to play a computer game! Doom 3 is friggin’ nuts! Things pop out of nowhere and start clawing at you. My goodness, this new video card sure does render video games to the max. And hey, even though it’s scary, Doom 3 was fun to play because my computer can now handle the graphics. Nice.

Check out this visual representation of the most popular Flickr tags of each day, starting from June 4, 2004. It’s very nice to see this in such a format. When you click on a tag that’s rolling by, it opens up several images from Flickr pertaining to that tag. I wonder how hard it was to come up with this idea and to make it look as good as it does.
You can read more about the project at the Yahoo! research page.

I just came across this saved video link in my bookmarks and I laughed hard all over again. This little black kid talks like no other and I think it’s partially his accent that makes him so funny. Watch the Good Doctor video for Trigon Bluecross Blueshield.

Here’s an extensive look at Mario through the years. I recognized most of the games, but some of them were just completely new to me. Maybe it’s because I haven’t ever actually even touched a Gamecube.

Man, we sure do listen to stupid music compared to people in the UK.

Remember that Flickr set of transparent desktop screens? Those were cool huh? Well, now people are doing transparent PSPs! And pretty soon, transparent ______s will be out too! I can’t wait! [via]

samples from onethousandpaintings.

I was browsing Waxy and came across this link to see what web pages would look like as graphs (you can see any website as a graph by entering the URL here). From there, I saw a link to onethousandpaintings, a most unusual art project where the numbers 1 to 1000 are painted once in the exact same way on a canvas. Each painting (or #) is then up for sale and can be bought by anyone. I am so jealous of people who come up with such simple yet profitable art concepts!

Heh, I like the plant photo for May 27. Yes, I still update there too.

Of course, it’s Sunday, so that means new secrets are out!

What a weekend! Stay cool guys! It’s HOT out! :D