The Photobooks of Amy Laptad

Posted on May 21, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter | 4 Comments

A woman named Amy Laptad, adjunct professor at George Mason University, really wants to publish a book of her photographs, this is the second time she’s run this exact kickstarter after the first one tanked with zero pledges.

Amy Laptad : I find the most peculiar, outlandish and curious places, and then capture them for everyone to enjoy.
Sounds good, let’s take a look!

Wow. A weather-worn teddy bear left at the grave of a child. That’s a very memorable image.

In fact, I do remember it!

Amy Laptad didn’t take that photo at all! She totally stole that from some random lady on Flickr!

Ok, so she stole one photograph, but what about that stunning image of a Ferris wheel completely overtaken by kudzu?

The cover photo is the most important image in a Kickstarter campaign! It’s what shows up in searches and links! It’s what entices kickstarters to learn about your project!

Surely that image must belong to Amy! It would be super dishonest to steal your lead image.

Stolen again! This time from Kyle Telechan (aka “City Eyes”).

There are two other example photos in the project, and as far as I can tell they’re both original. However, they both suck. The exposure is wrong on both of them; one is too dark and the other is too bright! (And one of them is just an ordinary parking lot anyway!)

Amy Laptad : This First Edition Photo-book will include photos of curious sightings I have found along my travels. The goal is to create a diverse set of photos that grab the viewers attention and most of all, curiosity.
I guess when she says “my travels” she means “my browsing of Flickr”

But we aren’t finished yet!

Last month she tried to kickstart this.
Another book of “her” photographs.

The cover image of the infamous Carnival Triumph is blatantly scanned from a book. I’m pretty sure it’s a tourists’ pamphlet for Halifax.

Up next is this lovely shot of the Disney Dream stolen from Christian Lambert Photography

And finally a photo of three more cruise ships ripped from the blog of Aaron Saunders.

Not one photo in this project page is hers!

How much you want to bet she didn’t ask for permission either?

Catch a ghost with special paper!

Posted on May 17, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter | Leave a comment

Fantastic! I love Bill Cosby.

Oh wait.

The idea that cold-spots can be used to prove that ghosts exist is kind of an exercise in circular logic, but let’s ignore that for now. The TV ghost-hunters use cold-spots, so that must be how you find ghosts!

These are just sheets of paper that change color with the temperature. You may remember this technology from the early 1990s when Hypercolor t-shirts were really cool for about two weeks. (or “totally radical” as we used to say.)

The problem with these sheets of paper are about the same as those stupid shirts. In order to see something cool, you’ve got to press your hand against them for a few seconds. How the heck are you going to get ghosts to do that? Maybe your house is haunted by ghosts who like cheap novelty items?

Of course, I say “cheap”, but actually it’ll set you back $38 for a 17″x12″ sheet of this stuff. And let’s be honest, 17×12 is far too small to catch a ghost unless he’s haunting a doll house, so you’re going to want a bunch of these.

That’ll add up fast. You should have just backed this Kickstarter and gotten yourself a thermal imager that plugs into your iphone for $150!

Mason Jar Upgrades

Posted on May 16, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter, Successful, Unsuccessful | 1 Comment

So, I guess it’s become stylish to drink out of a mason jar like you’re some kind of backwoods moonshiner.

Ok, fine. Why not. They’re solid, they’re glass, they’re cheap. There’s worse things you could be drinking from. The problem is, nobody actually wants to be mistaken for some Appalachian hillbilly or a hippie with a science experiment.

What’s the solution? Accessorize your mason jar!

That’s right. Add a handle, add a lid, (Of course they already have lids, throw those away.) maybe even add some insulation and a plastic shell so you can drop it!

Of course, like a bamboo iPad case, this is entirely a fashion statement, but they always have to come up with an excuse why it’s more than that. Some say it’s “sustainable” somehow, others say that plastics are full of mysterious “toxins”, some specifically mention BPA even though they took that out of mugs ages ago.

Jars of Air (Really!)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter | Leave a comment

This man wants to sell you a jar of air.

99 jars of air one from each of Iowa’s counties. I know he’s got some kind of artistic statement he’s supposedly making, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is trying to sell jars of air!

A hundred and fifty dollars!! Don’t worry though, he gives you a discount if you supply your own jar :

He was also going to make an “Ultimate” jar of air by opening the jar in each county. Personally, I don’t think he’s thought that through. Doesn’t it just become the jar for whatever county he visits last? It’s not like these jars didn’t all have air in them before he opened them. How is opening it in 99 different places any different than opening it once at the last place?

Maybe it’s a mistake to try applying rational thought to this project.

Haven’t we seen this before?

Mel Brooks is a prophet.

Projektor – Because Poor literacy is Kool.

Posted on May 14, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter | Leave a comment

Hey, hey! The blog is telling me that we’ve passed a milestone, and this is my 101th post!
I’m not going to count them myself, I’m just going to assume it’s true!

Hooray! 100 Posts!
So Follow @Kickstarter on twitter and Tell your friends on Facebook, because we’ve hit the big-time now!
Woo! 100! Let’s hear it for round numbers!

(We now return to our regularly scheduled post about a stupid Kickstarter project.)
Projektor plugs into your mobile devices headphone jack, in order to project your screen onto wherever you wish with limited wires.
This project needs $125,000 to make projectors that plug into the headphone jack of your iphone.

Of course this is impossible for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that the iPhone’s operating system won’t allow you to install that kind driver, and the last time I saw video compressed as audio was the infamous Fisher-Price PXL 2000.

He also claims it’s going to be running off your iPhone’s batteries, which simply isn’t possible through the headphone jack.

But forget all that. Look at this picture. Look at this picture!!
This guy wants us to give him $125,000 and this is the best he could come up with?
It’s just the front half of a flashlight copy/pasted over one of Apple’s publicity photos!

How did he possibly think this piece of crap would be good enough to get him over a hundred grand?!?

Anything you can do I can do better!

This is probably a good time to unveil my own new invention!

That’s right. It’s a coffee maker that connects to your iPad Mini! It’s really useful. You can use the touchscreen to select different types of brew, or how much cream and sugar you want. You can even set it to your alarm, so the coffee is ready when you wake up. The possibilities are endless.

As you can see from the photograph, I already have a working prototype.

I’m going to need $500,000 to develop this, so keep an eye out for my Kickstarter.

The Time Travel Experiment

Posted on May 13, 2013 by kickfailure in Kickstarter | Leave a comment

“The idea of the time travel experiment is simply using notes to contact the future.”

Time Travel Experiment - Documenting efforts to contact the future using "notes" made of stone and steel etc. Asking time travelers to visit a specific time

The idea behind this project is to “Send messages to the future” by carving a date and GPS coordinates into rocks or metal plates, and leaving them to be found by future archeologists. That way when time travel is invented, time travelers will all go back to that point in time to see what the fuss was about.

Then he can film the time travelers and make a documentary about them.