Link roundup

1. The Big Lebowski and Predator animated gifs by Paul Robertson.

2. UPS is testing out trucks partially made out of plastic to save on fuel costs.

3. Not quite as exciting as a new miniature, but there's now a card game based on the world of Smog.

Link roundup

1. Blade Runner cityscape animated gif.

2. From a long, somewhat rambling, but quite interesting article on the ongoing failure of Square:

it's no secret that seven out of ten game pitch documents here in The West are plastered with concept art pulled shamelessly from Deviantart.com, with asterisked captions under every tenth or eleventh image: "This art is copyright Some Talented Individual From The Internet—she or he is not our employee, though this is definitely the sort of thing we would want an artist to do; in fact, we might hire this person." I don't see anything wrong with this method. Well, in Japan, they do: You can't photograph your friend hugging a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders without a representative of Kentucky Fried Chicken theatrically weeping and groping his face at you. It's confusing and weird.

So what I'm driving at is this: they say Japan is on the skids—re: games, anyway—and they say that The West is on the smooths. I tell you what—the smooths are pretty smooth, up in here. And I tell you what again—in Japan, they wouldn't use some kid's art in their pitch document. They'd have to offer the kid a lifetime contract first. So, in this manner, I present you with a hypothesis that Square-Enix has accumulated—through numerous expansions, attempted expansions, and maybe-superfluous conglomerations, so many artists that a nuclear physicist wouldn't feel wrong assuming that they were probably—and definitely—the most important members of the company.

3. Fingerprint scanner that works from several feet away. Via.

Link roundup

1. Animated gifs of Kirsten Dunst reacting to Lars Von Trier declaring his Nazi sympathy at Cannes. Via.

2. Threadless has a Phineas and Ferb Design Challenge.

3. And speaking of t-shirt competitions, Timothy Lim (who I feature regularly) has a Transformers-themed tee up for vote at Qwertee.

Link roundup

1. Good article about Taco Bell and how much effort is put into getting reliable food to customers fast. For example:

Every Taco Bell has two food production lines, one dedicated to the drive-thru and the other to servicing the walk-up counter. Working those lines is no easier than wearing the headset. The back of the restaurant has been engineered so that the Steamers, Stuffers, and Expeditors, the names given to the Food Champions who work the pans, take as few footsteps as possible during a shift. There are three prep areas: the hot holding area, the cold holding area, and the wrapping expediting area. The Stuffer in the hot holding area stuffs the meat into the tortillas, ladling beef with Taco Bell's proprietary tool, the BPT, or beef portioning tool. The steps for scooping the beef have been broken down into another acronym, SST, for stir, scoop, and tap. Flour tortillas must be cooked on one side for 15 seconds and the other for five.

When I take my place on the line and start to prepare burritos, tacos, and chalupas—they won't let me near a Crunchwrap Supreme—it is immediately clear that this has been engineered to make the process as simple as possible. The real challenge is the wrapping. Taco Bell once had 13 different wrappers for its products. That has been cut to six by labeling the corners of each wrapper differently. The paper, designed to slide off a stack in single sheets, has to be angled with the name of the item being made at the upper corner. The tortilla is placed in the middle of the paper and the item assembled from there until you fold the whole thing up in the wrapping expediting area next to the grill. "We had so many wrappers before, half a dozen stickers; it was all costing us seconds," says Harkins. In repeated attempts, I never get the proper item name into the proper place. And my burritos just do not hold together.

2. Animated gif shows what's it like to visit 4chan.

3. New Last Exit to Nowhere film contest with 10 t-shirt prize. And here's the winner of April's photo contest.

Link roundup

1. Funny Portal 2 animated gif. And speaking of, it would be cool if Valve made a POTaTOS kit that attached to a typical Mr. Potato Head.

2. How to set up a green screen photo studio for $100. Via.

3. Gallery of beer league hockey jerseys.

*Buy vintage cameras at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Hugo Awards 2011 nominees. Via.

2. Classy collection of animated gifs.

3. Chris Battle is auctioning off two Quorra prints at eBay to benefit Japan.

Link roundup

1. LA Times:

Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction
Inked on the chest of a Pico Rivera gang member was the detailed scene of a liquor store slaying that had stumped an L.A. County sheriff's investigator for more than four years. It leads to a jailhouse confession from Anthony Garcia — and a first-degree murder conviction.

Via.

2. Animated gif featuring Jesse Venture and Old Painless from Predator.

3. A claim that Jim Shooter's blog is filled with lies.

*Buy Tattoo of Death (Choose Your Own Adventure #22) at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Exactly which career path is a good choice?

Since 2000, there have apparently been about 300,000 layoffs in the drug industry. It's important to remember that a good number of those people have found other jobs in the business - I'm one of them. But there are a lot of people who haven't.

2. Why Walmart is a case study for mishandling customer surveys.

3. Paul Robertson posted some new animated gifs.

Link roundup

1. Fashion photographs as animated gifs. (These are incredible.)

2. An assertion that Google could simply buy the entire music industry.

3. "Downward Spiral of Whole Foods House Brand."