A few months ago, one of the missions of ImproveEverywhere went viral, the now famous Frozen Grand Central. The stunt then had iterations around the world in several cities.
It was about time that Lisbon had such a prank, and with Rodrigo as the organizer, we managed to get 65 agents downtown Lisbon.
Rua Augusta is one of the busiest streets, with lots of tourists, and this last Saturday was particularly crowded with people getting ready to watch Portugal-Turkey for Euro 2008. All went well, with no police intrusion or harassment of the agents, but i’ll let the video (in portuguese) speak for itself:
I found myself freezing for 5 minutes, while carrying the book Groundswell. Oh, the irony.
If you want to to be on the next mission, join us at our Ning group..
That’s right. A fully animated Dilbert with his own channel.
You can know stop pretending that you’re working, and have a good long laugh watching the videos below:
(RSS readers might have to visit the site, for a change)
Soul-O-Meter and Catbert, Evil H.R. Director
Drunken Lemurs and Payroll Management
Catbert, Evil H.R. Director and Spooky
The Key to Happiness and Top Performer
Any resemblance of the videos with your own corporate culture is pure coincidence.
Now it’s just a matter of time until a circular comic strip shows up, with Dilbert on YouTube talking about YouTube and Dilbert. Ok, my bad joke. Blame it on Catbert.
But speaking of dead-tree comics, is there any character or strip that you would love to see animated ?
Time for a music post, right before a weekend break.
The Belgian electronic duo David and Stephen Dewaele, aka magnificent Soulwax, premiered their documentary “Part of the Weekend Never Dies” at the Royal Festival Hall yesterday.
The first time i saw the video at Adverblog it felt somehow familiar, and as i browsed the website it became clear that the real-life snake game was indeed shot in the always beautiful and sunny Lisbon.
The Get Out and Play website features the full HD frame-by-frame video and a impressive behind the scenes involving 1000 people playing life-size Snake at a popular Lisbon square, Martim Moniz.
The mobile gaming concept is further brought to life with a chance to also play Blocks with real people and highlighting the Nokia N-Gage game service for models N81, N82 and N95.
For long have i’ve been a regular reader of Pitchfork, along with last.fm, Hype machine,MetaCritic and ubber-cool Stereogum, that nurtured my musical tastes, while bypassing traditional music media moguls like MTV or NME.
Even in Portugal i’m a regular at remixtures, Palco Principal or Bodyspace, great web projects that help me keep up to date with Portugal’s music scene.
Pitchfork and other web based projects are taking a real dent in TV music channels, with loyal fans and delivering breaking news. Pitchfork has even achieved a successful spin-off, with their Chicago Pitchfork Music Festival.
Take for instance Stereogum, who has just released a tribute disk to download, honoring Post, the 10 year old record by Bjork, something possible thanks to the loyalty of both fans and artists to the music weblog. Not to mention other major online players like MySpace, that has just closed the circle with a deal to sell DRM-free music, further establishing the site as a social music destiny.
A website that gets a band like Radiohead to premiere their video service, premieres exclusive demo tracks or shapes an album’s success with their review is surely a menace to MTV or VH1, companies that are increasingly more distant from music fans with their programming choices influenced by major record labels, and miss the huge long tail of music that MySpace, Pitchfork and thousands of music blogs have now filled.
Or quoting The Buggles:
In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far.
