Friday Finds

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Unfortunately I haven't had any free time lately to go on my usual blog rounds and see what everyone is reading so I haven't discovered any new books to add to my TBR list. Though if you know of anything good I should be reading please tell me about it in the comments below (and I'm also really sorry that I haven't been responding to comments lately. I promise to get back to doing so).

But even though I don't have any books to tell you about I have managed to stumble across some interesting stuff on the web that I think you will like.

1) The awesome Jenny Lawson of the Bloggess shares a link to some pictures of her haunted dollhouse, and if you are a fan of horror I'm sure you will want to take a look at these. While I'm not into horror I have to admit that this is one awesome looking dollhouse, though if I played with it as a kid I would probably be a very different kind of person than I am today.

2) Shmuel Hoffman, the producer of the book trailer for The Unbecoming of Maya Dyer (a pretty cool trailer which has even caught the attention of MTV) has an interesting post about what's involved in creating a book trailer.

Mara Dyer kind of lives two lives, one the unconscious one and the other a “real” one. I wanted to have this expressed in our style. That’s why I decided to go with black and white and using color to distort the reality. Michelle expressed that she wanted parts of it to look a bit like The Blair Witch Project. So we shot the asylum scenes on our phones and small cameras to have it look self-made and gritty. It was very important that we got a mixture of mystery and sexy across for the teenage audience.

I've really never given much thought to how book trailers are made, especially since most of those that I've seen haven't really impressed me, so I found this pretty interesting.

3)  Architecture students at MIT developed these really cool solar powered rocking chairs that allow you to lounge in the sun while charging your electrical devices. With a chair like this you never have to worry about your eReader suddenly running out on you (unless it gets cloudy, of course)

Plus the strip of battery allows it to light up at night for reading in the dark.

 4) I had just finished reading Ready Player One when I came across this video from Softkinect, demonstrating the possibilities that will be open to us with the use of gesture-recognition software, such as Microsoft's Kinect. It blew me away, coming right after the book I had just read.

It seems that it won't be long now before we can live within a virtual reality that won't require us to ever leave our houses. Kind of scary, though I imagine that with the cost involved in acquiring all the equipment necessary this isn't a danger most of us will be facing any time soon.