Best Of StumbleUpon

This face melting preteen saved his and his sisters life with his mad MMO skillz! Srsly, how fantastic is that? I am guessing by the description in the article he plays a rogue, he taunted and then feigned death…so WIN! I hope he gets a guild promotion for having crazy RL skillz.

Hans Jørgen Olsen, a 12-year-old Norwegian boy, saved himself and his sister from a moose attack using skills he picked up playing the online role playing game World of Warcraft.

Hans and his sister got into trouble after they had trespassed the territory of the moose during a walk in the forest near their home. When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. ‘Taunting’ is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.

Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.

Dominic Deville stalks young victims for a week, sending chilling texts, making prank phone calls and setting traps in letterboxes.

He posts notes warning children they are being watched, telling them they will be attacked.

But Deville is not an escaped lunatic or some demonic monster.

He is a birthday treat, hired by mum and dad, and the ‘attack’ involves being splatted in the face with a cake.

‘The child feels more and more that it is being pursued,’ said Deville.

‘The clown’s one and only aim is to smash a cake into the face of his victim, when they least expect it, during the course of seven days.’

If the boy or girl manages to avoid the ‘hit’, they are given the cake as a birthday present. Well, that’s alright then.

The frightening fun can be stopped at any time, which is handy for parents who have second thoughts and don’t fancy the cost of child therapy.

Deville said: ‘The clown will never break into a residence or show up at work. ‘It’s all in fun and if, at any point, the kids get scared or their parents are concerned, we stop right there.

‘But most kids absolutely love being scared senseless.’

Deville set up his Evil Clown service in Lucerne, Switzerland, after being inspired by some of his favourite horror films – possibly including Stephen King’s It and Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

The idea is unlikely to be popular with sufferers of coulrophobia – the irrational (irrational?) fear of clowns.

But Stephen Vaughan of Clowns International, said scary clowns could be as funny as their red-nosed counterparts. ‘I think what Dominic is doing is a great idea,’ he added.

‘Bringing a little bit of life and laughter into kids’ lives is what we are all about.’

Sure… why not… You know your kid is going to grow up to be one of those weirdo people afraid of clowns right? This is actually a really funny prank to play on a “kid” that is 17 or older anything younger than that and I think it is down right cruel. I can think of more uses than kids birthdays anyway… how about that crazy ex-boyfriend that really is stalking you? Have a scary clown stalk his ass right back (would work especially well if he suffered from coulrophobia, lmao)!

This is one of the most impressive youtube videos I have seen in a longgg time. This kid is so pro it isn’t even funny. Say hello to a future Olympic athlete, no joke. Also, as much as I hate to belittle his excellence by making reference to his looks, the child is ADORABLE. I really love the end. I can’t get over how good he is.. its just mind blowing.

You will find a MASSIVE selection of hand selected (by Stumblers of course) heart images in the heart thread of the Awesome Pictures Forum on SU. That is where I snagged these beauty’s for you:

Pretty animated heart.

For the cards lover in your life.

Traveling to see that love one this year?

That is so cool looking!! This Vespa would look great in my kitchen! Don’t ya just want one? I do!

This is the most fantastic and versatile online tool for editing gif’s and png images because it supports the highest upload size available out of all of the online editors I have found, I am not even sure what it caps out at as I believe it has recently been upgraded but I will tell you it allows me to upload high resolution wallpaper images that other editors tell me are too large a file to upload. I use this tool every single day for a variety of things.

It gives you the option to either upload from your computer or DIRECT from a linked image on the web. You can convert jpg’s to png files upon upload by ticking a box when you upload and you can also choose to reduce the size of your file from the drop down. You can convert them later if you choose as well by going to Edit > Convert To > PNG, GIF, JPG BMP.

While editors that allow you to crop jpg’s are a dime a dozen (yes you can do that here as well) the ability to crop an animated image without losing the animation is a much harder tool to locate and you can do that here! In fact you can do just about anything to a gif you might want to do.

Here is a  list of a few of the things I most frequently use this tool for when editing gifs & png’s:

Resize or Crop:

This can be done 2 ways, by going to Edit > Resize / Crop or by clicking the tool buttons  –>

Gif Editing:

Removing every 2nd frame will speed up the animation of your gif, you can split it into frames if you wish to edit a specific frame etc.

The fun part is the Add Transparency bit. Once you select that you can click on the part of your image you want to become transparent, such as the background to your image. Although this is in the “Gif Only” section it works quite well on PNG’s also! If you find that it doesn’t turn out how you wanted, scrap it and try it again and if that still doesn’t work it could be because the image you are using is too low in quality.

Colors:

Edit > Colors >

Again, the great thing about this tool is everything you can usually only do to JPG’s you can also do to GIF and PNG images here. These are a few of the options you can use to alter the color. Ever really liked a gif but wished it was in black and white? Try Gray Scale, I like it far more than the actual black & white tool. The Sephia Tone is my other favorite. You will just have to sorta play around with the other options until you reach your desired effect. Isn’t this fun?!

Overlay:

Edit > Overlay Image

You can easily layer a image on top of a image like I have done here with the Best Of StumbleUpon Logo, you can also select the opacity of the layering which is a really nice bonus feature for when you would like the layered image to sort of blend in.

Mini Toolbar:

The good news is if you change something and it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted you can simple click  and play some more! The little toolbar has all kinds of great goodies to help you out.

Click the T to find a huge variety of fonts you can select from in many colors and sizes to add to your image. Click the green arrow to rotate your image or the last symbol to flip the image.

These are just some of the basic things you can do with this tool and I will add more of the fun stuff soon so come back and see.

If you know of any online tools that allow you to do even half of this stuff PLEASE leave them in the comments below:

StumbleUpon released official statistics for the most stumbled sites of 2009! How fantastic is that?!? I will have to go through them and pick out the best of the best to share with you guys but for now here is the full list for anyone who is interested!

Arts

• Jim Jarmusch Quote – 278K Stumbles
• Aled Lewis Illustrations – 253K Stumbles
• Pepsi Logo Response – 229K Stumbles

Bizarre/Oddities

• 99 Things You Should Have Seen On The Internet – 471K Stumbles
• Scary Good Facepaint – 374K Stumbles
• Slightly Warped Curiosities: Gibraltar Airport – 352K Stumbles

Food/Cooking

• 26 Cakes Perfect for Geeks – 290K Stumbles
• Pasta Pie Recipe – 231K Stumbles
• Hasselback Potatoes Recipe – 231K Stumbles

Environment

• Air Traffic in 24 Hours – 130K Stumbles
• Free Heat from Old Window and Soda Cans – 113K Stumbles
• Think About Your Morning Latte – 112K Stumbles

Humor

• Cheat Sheet for Travelling Back in Time – 472K Stumbles
• Life Summarized in 4 Bottles – 439K Stumbles
• As Luck Would Have It… – 369K Stumbles

Read the rest of this entry »

Sliimy “Womanizer” from ethandirector on Vimeo.

“This project was shot on video, over 2,000 frames were exported and effected in photoshop. Then we printed out each frame onto paper, cut them out, and had people all over LA hold them while we shot each one with a digital camera. Then we brought all the stills back into the edit and put them together again…”

This is cool for SO many different reasons, watch it and tell me what you think!

You can turn yourself into a dancing singing elf with “Elf yourself” a big hit from last year (with new and improved features), back to bring you holiday cheer! WAY too fun and a really cute way to make a personalized greeting for out of town family or just play around for the fun of it. Go become a break dancing elf… you know you want to. Just click the above image and elf away! Read the rest of this entry »

This is a collection of cool Stumbler pages I really enjoyed, its a good mix of excellent writers and people that just have interesting stuff to look at. Click on the picture to go to their blog, come back and tell me what you think of them.

Feel free to recommend other cool Stumblers you might know of in the comments below. This is a great sampling of Stumbler pages if you haven’t joined Stumbleupon yet and want to know what its all about.