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

Over at Hackszine Jason writes:

This Guitar Hero mod posted by Youtube user Egyokeo blew my mind. A MIDI drum kit and some custom software on a PC send button-press input via the Xbox Input Machine (XIM) hardware to an Xbox running Guitar Hero.

Watch the video and prepared to be amazed as Egyokeo drums to "Through Fire and Flames".  Link.

Original posts:
MIDI Hero: Play Rhythm Games using any MIDI Instrument
Building your own Xbox 360 Input Machine (XIM)

Check out this NES controller groom's cake:

Neatorama reader Chris Marshall aka Bix got married on July 12th (Congrats, Bix!) and got this awesome re-creation of an old school NES controller as a groom’s cake.

The cake was made by Anika Kline from "Cakes by Anita" and the photo was taken by Maria from IQFoto.

Link.

[photo: taken by bixwastaken, link]

Previously:
Cake Wrecks, Optimus Prime Cake, Mario birthday cake, Nintendo! It's a cereal... and a wedding cake?, Mac Mini Birthday Cake, iPhone Birthday Cake, Optimus Prime birthday cake

Skinny Coder over at flickr put together some Lego stills of popular, classic NES games.  Gallery.

Previously:
Grand Theft Lego

Mother's Day is this Sunday and what I would really like is a working giant NES controller coffee table.  As if a working giant NES controller isn't cool enough, the table opens up to provide ample storage for all of your stuff.

The NES coffee table was built by Kyle Downes of the "Ultra Awesome" blog.

Link [via Boing Boing]

Watch Zack Kim play the Tetris theme song with two guitars, simultaneously.  Link.

Other Zack Kim videos:  Zelda, Super Mario, Simpsons

Over at Waxy.org I found a very cute Tetris Valentine that all of you will enjoy this Valentine's Day.  The Valentine was originally created by Mitch at 4 Color Rebellion.

Happy Valentine's Day from BlogCadre!

Tetrical is a 3D Tetris Flash game that you can play in your browser.  Link  [via BoingBoing

Rock it out with hand bells and play Handbell Hero.  Choose between "Jingle Bells", "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer", and "Frosty the Snowman", and see if you're good enough to join the VML Handbell Choir.

Previously:
The Tale of the Fourteen Christmas Ringers
Flute Hero

Information on the new version of Mario Kart for the Wii platform is starting to crop up, and folks are now reporting that it's going to support a 16-player online multiplayer mode!

It's been killing me that there aren't any great online titles for the Wii yet. The whole Wii experience is so driven by a friends-in-the-livingroom multiplayer mindset, it seems only natural that people should be able to goof around with friends online as well. I'm psyched that Mario Kart will have this capability, but just imagine if Wii Sports had shipped with this functionality.