Cina is a new online design collective from Japan, and they've just introduced six gorgeous products. I'm particularly loving this sugary snowflake-styled 4GB flash drive.



You can buy one at Cina for ¥10,000, which is around US $90.

Sometimes I daydream about getting one of those neat prefab homes and a nice slice of secluded beachfront property and fixin' me up a nice and easy summer home. You know, it would be so economical. So green. So now. Anyway, it's not going to happen anytime soon but things like this pictorial list of 15 really awesome prefabs are not helping to disabuse me of this fantasy.

Just for fun, let me show you what some of my top choices would be...

kithaus



sunset cabin from taylor smyth



loftcube



See the whole (sickening, dream-killing, depressingly awesome) list at cribcandy.

Have you ever wanted to make a photo look like it's made of little mini-models? OK so I hadn't until I saw these pictures but now I TOTALLY want to.



See these here are normal photos that have been modified with a Photoshop effect called Tilt Shift. You can do this to your own pictures and play with the effect by following this handy-dandy 15 step tutorial.



And to all the nice folks out there who take the time to write stuff like this out and share it with the rest of us: YOU ROCK.

[via GeekSugar]

This chair, which can be found in Myopic Books in Providence, RI, is made from a bunch of paperback books mounted in a metal shell.



It looks fantastic, but as for sitting in it, it would really depend on what books are in there. I mean it would feel great to rub your butt on a trashy harlequin romance (ripped bodices!) or a John Grisham (all those books are the same, man!) But I'd feel bad cracking the spines with my booty if there were, like, good books in there.

[via Make:]

This kind of falls into the random WTF?!? category. Is it news? Is it science? Should I care? I dunno. All I know is that some Japanese scientists discovered a new protein and named it pikachurin afer the frenetic alpha-Pokemon character Pikachu.



They said it was because the protein and the 'Chu had similar qualities. Now I don't know that much about science but I really don't understand how a protein could remind you of a fictional yellow anime thingy whose power is storing electricity in his cheeks and having adorably tiny fingers.

You can read more at xorsyst but I've probably told you pretty much the gist right there.

There's not too much more to say than the title expresses. You can now get a pedicure in which you put your feet in a bucket of water with some fish that love nothing more than the taste of the dead skin on your feet. Yummy!



The fish are toothless so somehow that's the explanation for why they can't eat your real skin/flesh (like those gnarly tooth fairies in Hellboy II that gave me nightmares - and by the way, you should only click that link if you want to have nightmares too.) Thus far this is only available in the Washington, DC area but they referenced it on Ugly Betty about a year ago so maybe NYC too? All I know is when I saw that episode I thought they were joking... I didn't realize it was a real thing. My bad.

You can see pictures of Japanese women getting their whole bodies "cleaned" by these gnarly things here, or read the full USA Today article here.

For $160 some lady named Cyndi will make an action figure that looks just like you. She's got loads of examples, but to be honest some look way better than others. Still, this would be a pretty sweet and surprising gift!



Check out the website here, but BEWARE: The website is pretty busy, and brings to mind a cracked out 14-year-old's MySpace page. You've been warned.

[via Neatorama]

Grace from Design*Sponge does a monthly "things under $100" feature for Domino magazine. This month it's a special "under $10" edition. Thanks for keeping folks like me in your target market! $9.99 is a heckuva lot more palatable than $99.99.

You can see fun stuff like this cute candle holder (a mere 10 bucks!):



Or these restickable bird decals for glassware (only 6 bucks!):



See the whole feature, with 20 cool finds under $10, right here. Thanks for sleuthing these out, Grace.

I LOVE the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. They've got photos of signage, menus, and what have you that display egregious over-quota quotation markage.



The usage of unnecessary quotation marks is a plague much like the Comic Sans epidemic and it simply must be stopped. Why you would add quotation marks in these situations, I do not know. I do know that I enjoy laughing at those who make this error and I am not ashamed to keep on laughing until they figure it out. I think the funniest thing is that in nearly every case it undermines the sentiment the sign is trying to express.



P.S. if you're wondering, air quotes do count and can absolutely be inappropriately and over-used so watch it, bub.

Bert & Ernie try some gangsta rap in my new favorite video. Check it out.



Only Bert & Ernie could make the lyrics "Hand over the ring, take over the chain, gimme the f***in' watch before I pop one in your brain" look kinda cute.

The song is M.O.B.'s Ante Up, which was featured in the B2K breakdancing vehicle You Got Served. Now I'm as tragically hip as the next person but I will take a chance here and openly admit that I actually like that movie, mostly because of the dance-off scenes, and also because when one of the characters dies, in the next scene all of his friends are wearing hats and t-shirts emblazoned with airbrushed images of the dead guy's face that say R.I.P. and stuff. Also, who doesn't love Steve Harvey in a seminal mentor/father figure/breakdance umpire role? Anyway. It's annoyingly grainy but here's the YouTube video for the break-off to this song.