For the past several winters Art Shanty Projects has found its home on Medicine Lake.  This year our pals from Mount Holly, MN are participating and blogging about their experience.

One of the great pleasures in ice fishing is spending time in close quarters with your closest friends playing cards with a beat up deck of cards that smell like an eelpout and talking and laughing.

Nowadays, we hardly sit at the same table and interact face to face with each other. As families, we eat in shifts or on the fly. We communicate more through our phones and email than we do with our own smiles, eyes and touch.. With the increasing popularity of video game systems, gameplay has become less intimate as people sit on a sofa facing the television instead of each other.

By creating 5 tiny little dicehouses designed around 2-4 people sitting close together playing games together, we hope to rekindle the warmth and art of face to face interaction and gameplay for our visitors.

Each dicehouse will be heated exclusively by the warmth of conversation and the closeness of the people within it.

dICEHOUSES bLOG
Art Shanty Projects

Sometimes the trick to winning at The Price is Right is to bid one dollar over the last person bidding.  This woman must have had a major brain fart because she bid one dollar under the last bid.  I actually feel sorry for her because she thought she won not once, but twice!  Kim never made it to the stage.  Link.

The kids over at CollegeHumor put together a great video short called Minesweeper the Movie.  This goes out to all the procrastinators out there...  Yeah, you!

If you can't solve a Rubik's Cube you might as well make mosaics out of them, right?  Here is a photo gallery of Rubik's Cube mosaics a group of friends put together.

[via MeFi]

Search Engine Smackdown is a flash game in which you choose your player and your opponent among six computing big-wigs: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jerry Yan, David Filo, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. 

How do you play?  Answer a series of search-related questions in order to score hits, but if you answer wrong your opponent will pummel you. 

Give it a go and see if you can make it to the high score board.

[via The Presurfer]

This automated mah jong table may be the perfect birthday present for my mom this year.  Shuffling and building mah jong tile walls is so noisy you can't hear yourself think. 

Of the past 3 days since the Wii came out, about 15 hours of it have been spent playing or watching my friend's Nintendo Wii. Of all the systems I've played, it is by far the most innovative, intuitive, fun, and easy to use system by far. The controls are crisp and responsive, the graphics are exactly as I expected, and the functionality of it is tenfold what I thought it'd be. Even the defacto game that comes with it, Wii Sports, is downright addictive. Red Steel, a first person shooter is also hours of fun. But the best experience yet has been the new Legend of Zelda. I just finished the first temple of the game and I had to pry myself out of the chair to leave.

I never thought someone would actually create a Rock Paper Scissors online flash game.  I just don't see the point, but I still managed to play a few rounds.  I guess you could use the game as a way to make important life-changing decisions.

The game is simple -- Choose your ammo (rock, paper or scissors) and your opponent will fire at the same time as you.

Previously:
Levers, an online Flash game, Don't Yawn!,  This  one's for Jason (Balance), Planarity

[via digg]

Levers is an online Flash game where you have to balance the falling objects onto a mobile circling above water.  You must balance the objects so they do not touch the water.  When the objects do not touch the water for a certain amount of time a new object will fall that you must add to your mobile.

Give it a try!

8-year-old Victor De Leon III (or Lil Poison II in the gaming circles) is making big money by teaching grownups the ins and outs of Halo. 

Coaching from the littlest Xbox phenom - who has already won thousands in tournaments by beating people twice and three times his age - is booked through gaminglessons.com, where he's the youngest of the 12 instructors, who get paid up to $65 an hour.

Who said video games are bad for kids?  This kid could probably retire by the time he is 10-years-old. 

[Link]