There's something just a little creepy about watching the animated forms on the Sodaplay site. (Watch me anthropomorphize shamelessly here.) One by one, they drop into the little oblong demo box and frantically try to make their way out of it, like bugs dropped into a jar. One long tubular form inches away like a caterpillar. A spoked wheel rolls smoothly off. A floppier cross between a Spanish Dancer nudibranch and a southern belle's enormous hat undulates awkwardly stage right. A well-designed four-footed walker marches off like some conquering machine from "War of the Worlds." A triangularly spiked wormy shape that reminds me of one of the fossils in the Burgess Shale in Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life creeps away in a strange rippling gait. A one-footed pyramid limps pathetically off. Worst of all is the oil-derrick shape that starts to dance madly, overbalances, thrashes desperately to stay upright, topples over and just lies there thrashing like a bug on its back. The whole thing seems like some cruel and weird evolutionary experiment in the shapes best suited to locomotion, run by some heartless bio-engineer.
Did I mention that if the animated shape fails to move quickly enough or "get away" in time, it's sucked out of the box, still struggling?
So, how was your day?
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