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Another bloody “turn your avatar into a cartoon” thing went round Twitter today; I ignored it, because, you know, I’m above all that. Except obviously I’m not, because it was actually a rather jolly promo for the third series of Mad Men – the addictive, oh-so-stylised drama of quiet desperation in capitalism. It let you create a replica of yourself as you might look if you were in the offices of Sterling Cooper in the early sixties, swathed in wreaths of Lucky Strike smoke and misogyny. The designs are by artist Dyna Moe, who created this lovely set of fan illustrations for the series that were all over the internet a while back, and eventually got tapped up to do official work for the show.

So, yes, I’m not going to bother changing my avatar, but I will stick the results here for your amusement. No, it doesn’t look anything like me (and I wasn’t the worst off), but still, fun. Clicky for bigness:

Following on from the amusing sight of Twitter’s resident celebrities turning into detectives, verifying or debunking other supposed celebrity accounts by going straight to the source, I was mucking around last night and ended up making this t-shirt design. It proudly proclaims that you have been authenticated as the genuine article by the most prolific and successful fake-hunter of them all – Wossy himself.

Unlike previous designs, this time, I’ve actually bothered to make the t-shirt available from CafePress, on the off chance that it’ll please someone who really likes obscure t-shirt slogans that reference minor internet in-jokes whose topicality has a lifespan of about four days.

Geekier alternatives that I considered were “Jonathan Ross is my OpenID provider” and (thanks to Chris) “Jonathan Ross signs my PGP key”.

The only reasonable response to the BNP membership list leak: a LOLcats v Neo-Nazis image macro clash. In other words, LOLGriffin.

“If you are a pervert, turn to page 34. If you are not a pervert, turn to page 127.”

Always one to take a noble stand against onrushing memes, I steadfastly refuse to join the legions of people changing all their social network avatars to one of those ridiculous Face Your Manga pictures. For the past few days, it’s meant that loading up Twitter has been like stepping into a grotesque cartoon world. (I mean, even more so than normal.)

However, I know people are crying: “But Tom, we want to see what you would look like as a crudely patched together caricature that doesn’t really look much like a manga character at all!” Uh huh. I hear you. To sate that thirst, here you go:

Of course, as anybody who knows me on Flickr is aware, for many years I’ve been using a far more manga-like – and far more terrifying – avatar, based on a real photo that was manipulated with this amusing little tool. It looks like this:

You see? I was so ahead of the curve on the whole mangatars thing. All you other losers are just trailing in my wake. Yeah.

Causing a significant level of confusion in my mind over the past few days has been this bafflingly over-photoshopped poster for the London Red Bull Air Race:

(Bigger version on Flickr)

Now: what the holy hell were they thinking when they signed off on that? This is an event they’re selling to Londoners, right? Londoners who presumably know that Canary Wharf really, really isn’t in between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge. And who also know that The Dome doesn’t sit on that side of Canary Wharf even if St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge aren’t anywhere in the vicinity (as you can see in this picture, which is suspiciously similar to their source image for Canary Wharf, given that it’s the first image on a Google search for “canary wharf dome“.)

And this isn’t even taking into account the weird thing that the plane appears to be doing, where its tail and even its wings are clearly behind and to the right of the inflatable marker thingy, but its smoke trail has mysteriously passed around the marker to the left side…

I don’t get why they decided that they needed the sheer visual impact of setting their race in a twisted other-universe London with its crazed Escher-nightmare geography and baffling aerodynamic physics. Unless they’re planning something really special for the event, involving twelve-dimensional hyperspace and a carefully placed black hole, I don’t think that poster really sells it to me.

Update: Hello, StumbleUponers! Thanks for stumbling by.

I’m pondering putting this on a t-shirt:

If you want to know what it says, read on after the jump.
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Flickr is a popular photo hosting and sharing site. It is really quite good. Users can either have a free account, which has limitations, or pay $25 a year for an unlimited service. A few days ago, Flickr added video hosting to the site, for paid members. This prompted outpourings of absolute rage from the paid users, at the sheer affrontery of the company in giving them an extra service at no added cost. Also, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, which Microsoft is currently trying to buy, although Yahoo is trying quite hard not to be bought by them. This also added to the users’ anger, as they criticised the Flickr staff for working for a company whose parent company might be bought by another company.

The thread in which this all gets shouted about includes this wonderful comment from somebody called “mikeossur”:

This is the new America,

Health care for the rich – only.

Shite software by MS$

1000 year war.

George Bush thinks he is king.

Flickr is a photo site.

As Speak You’re Branes would say: you are a gibbon’s minge.

As a noted chef, I am often asked: “What are the basic principles behind great cooking?” While the art of culinary excellence is obviously a complicated one, experienced cooks know that much of the accumulated wisdom of generations of kitchen magicians can be condensed into a few core precepts and processes.

To that end, I have constructed an easy-to-follow flowchart that presents all the key principles of truly exceptional cooking, in a simple and comprehensible format that can be easily understood and utilised in your home:

Just because Chris asked.

For the past couple of months, my web obsession of choice has been FFFFOUND!, the no-you-can’t-come-in image bookmarking service. It’s really excellent, a consistently fun community-curated parade of imagery, with a strong art & design bias. But there’s just this one thing that’s been sort of bugging me.

All new frontiers in information recording, sharing and distribution can be assessed, I think, by their TTPO – Time To Porn Overload. The TTPO encompasses a measure of both the success of the sharing mechanism, and the point at which the greatest of its early promise dies a lonely, quiet death somewhere in a ditch.

FFFFOUND! is just reaching its PDTP (Porn Domination Tipping Point) – an impressive TTPO, given the site’s age. Over the past month or so, it’s become pornier and pornier; slowly at first, but now in a torrential deluge of artfully composed titty shots. The current breakdown, I estimate, is roughly as follows:

Within the month, I’d be willing to bet, the naked chicks will hold a controlling stake in the site. And it is only pictures of women – I can remember seeing maybe four pictures of naked dudes on FFFFOUND! Three of them were sex scenes, so there was a naked girl there too; in the fourth, the man was in the background, and ugly. I thought I’d spotted a fifth, but on closer inspection it turned out to just be a very androgynous-looking woman.

But hey, it’s art! No, it’s not. It’s a picture of a naked, baby-oiled chick with her hand up her bum. You didn’t bookmark that picture because you thought they were doing interesting things with lighting, or you really dug the leopardskin print bedsheets. Admit it.

I hasten to point out that I’m not saying this from a position of either prudish distaste or of the slightest surprise. Bookmark all the lady bits you want, seriously. It’s just an observation, accompanied by perhaps a sigh at most, that whenever I open Google Reader and see several hundred new FFFFOUND! posts waiting there, I know I’m going to have to press “J” a lot more to get past the sex people before finding that one bit of pretty but illegible typography that will totally change the way I look at the world. Ah well. That’s what having a stellar TTPO does for you.

Anyway, it seems I’m not the only one.

In the run-up to 2012, a cross-section of athletes, volunteers and disabled children will carry the Stratford bus garage disused Moss Bros warehouse through the streets of every country participating in the Games, its eternal flame a symbol of the noble Olympian ideals that unite humanity.

(Taking Chris up on his suggestion.)