Fish & Monkeys

It’s finally live. Awesome Creatures is our latest project and perhaps our most ambitious.

Here’s the story we’ve been telling everyone:

About six months ago, we thought it would be fun to put cute animals on t-shirts. They wouldn’t be any cute animals though - they had to have some sort of twist. At first, most of the ideas we came up with were too obvious or too corny.

Then one day, we struck upon the idea of a friendly turtle that had a neat pile of poop on its back in place of its shell. We decided to call it “Turdle” and printed a few for ourselves and our friends. People seemed to like it, and we were encouraged. We even thought we could make a business out of this animal-on-shirt process. So that’s exactly what we did.

Enlisting the help of talented artists, we’ve put together a line-up of three designs to kick off our new brand. It’s called Awesome Creatures, and we hope to bring to life more interesting and weirdly funny animals.

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We’re oh-so-close to releasing Gobbl, a blogging social network for foodies and restaurant enthusiasts. This project is a collaboration with our buddy Andrew Lie, who originally conceived the idea and wishes everyone would take pretty pictures of their entrees at restaurants. With Gobbl, you can blog about your dining experiences and also comment on your friends’ blogs. If you don’t feel like writing a full entry, you can opt to add a Recent Eat, which keeps track of all the restaurants you’ve visited.

We’re still in testing mode, but we’re happy to extend invitations to people interested in checking the site out. There are numerous features and styles we hope to implement in the future, but right now, we’re trying our best to make the simple blogging experience as pain-free as possible. Shoot us an email at gobbl@barrelny.com and we’ll get you set up with access to our site. After the jump, we have a couple of screenshots to share.

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We’ve always felt good about making our own coffee at the office. Our Krups Coffeemaker gets the job done and saves us from paying $2+ each for a grande. We originally bought our coffee beans from Starbucks, picking from the various Ethiopian/Colombian/Mexican bean varieties and having them freshly ground. A 1-lbs. bag would cost us $10 to $12 and lasted up to 10 days. For about $35 a month, coffee was plentiful.

A Brewed Awakening
A couple of weeks ago, I stayed at home in the morning to wait for the cable guy. I desperately needed a coffee fix but couldn’t risk walking ten minutes to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. I instead went to the Korean grocer right across the street to see if I could find anything. On one of the shelves, I found rows of ground coffee in colorful tin cans. I had never bought coffee in cans because I was always under the impression that pre-ground beans were not “fresh” and somewhat inferior. But since I was feeling the onset of a caffeine-withdrawal headache, I quickly grabbed a can of Chock Full ‘oNuts and headed back. I paid less than $4 for a 13-ounce can. Continue reading…

From where we sit here at Barrel, we have a clear view of the new Bank of America tower going up in Bryant Park. We recently noticed some triangular bits being built on the top of the building, so we were curious to find out what the final building was going to look like. A quick wiki search revealed the mocked-up building, designed to be one of the most eco-friendly buildings in the world. We’re excited to see something fresh in our landscape of drab brownstones, but man, all those shiny windows are definitely going to blind us in the mornings.

Our view in 2009?

Through our buddy Jong, who recently came back from a trip to Korea, we were able to get a taste of gochu chocolate, a chocolate treat filled with red chili pepper flavor inside. It tasted like regular chocolate going down but left us with a spicy tingle in our mouths. It was pretty good. Not pictured is the kimchi chocolate, which I had a taste of and almost barfed. Seriously not a good combination, although Jong swears that the kimchi flavor I had was the bad one while the seven others were okay (8 kimchi flavors per box!).