June 2008
53 posts
delighting with data →
Notes & slides from a talk on the various ways different sources of data can be read and then broadcast and displayed. From Tower Bridge twittering to mashing up Fireeagle and Wikipedia to produce Wikinear, some interesting ideas.
(also, via)
WatchThere’s no such thing as New Wave - “you didn’t dare to say punk”.
(via)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-29) →
Girl Talk
Crystal Castles
Santogold
Malajube
Vampire Weekend
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
How I see Words in my Head →
Douglas Coupland on visual thinking, and in particular how it relates to the written word. Words in his mind are in Helvetica, his favourite word is Zulu Romeo Foxtrot and believes that his audience, as a writer, is ‘Mac Users’ as they’re most likely to be visual thinkers.
I don’t see words in my mind, but do like Coupland’s writing and I do use a Mac. Not sure if...
Closing Time for Tartan Films →
the people who have brought us so many blood soaked titles via their Tartan Asia Extreme and Tartan Terror banners have been shut down forever. The livelihood of the company has been hanging in the balance for several months now and it seems that the guillotine has finally fallen
This upsets me a little bit, as a large proportion of films I go to the effort of buying on DVD are part of the...
Skating in Kabul →
Skateboarding is the latest teen craze to hit Kabul. It was started by three Australians who see the street sport as a way to help young Afghans and redefine the way rich foreigners interact with them.
It might not be quite what the people asking for more press coverage of Afghanistan are after, but interesting and heart-warming all the same.
the story so far ... and beyond →
Cory Doctorow with 3 (very) short stories imagining the future of publishing and book-selling.
(via)
Interview with Eels →
The Sound of Young America, from the awesomely named Maximum Fun, recently interviewed Eels’ Mark Oliver Everett. It’s available to download on their site, and you can subscribe to the series, it’s pretty good. Eels released a Greatest Hits and a B-Sides collection earlier this year.
The Paper Version of the Web →
Sketches on paper of (amongst others) Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo.
(via)
Great Lyricists →
The Guardian have been giving away booklets with the paper this week, each featuring a ‘great lyricist’. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Morrisey have all been featured, and today’s focus is on Patti Smith.
Most interesting, I think, are the articles from the archives about the artists. This piece from 1976 looks like it was a preview to a performance in London, maybe her first...
"You can't arrange them 'by penis'!" →
Hilarious video, well made. Even if they do sound like chipmunks.
(via)
Team Fortress 2 Art Direction →
An interesting look at the work that goes into the look and feel of a computer game. Lots of pretty concept-art pictures, and details of the processes used by Valve to decide on how things should look and work.
Guitars and Graphics →
An article, adapted from a talk, on where guitar music and graphic design have combined.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-22) →
Sigur Rós
Bonde do Role
CSS
Sa Dingding
Girl Talk
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
Another Letter from Paris →
Madame Tortoise removed her glasses, peered down (paying no mind to the businesswoman), made sure the tortoise was fine, then went back to her bench. Twenty minutes later when he woke up, the office workers politely picked up their lunches and let him pass as he clomped his way home. The tortoise returned to his napkin, ate a few nibbles of lettuce, and then went to sleep.
The most recent of...
Songs as Games →
Probably more of a sub game for GTA than anything else…
Sneak around potential crimes with the mob and then when they’re about to commit the act, stick your leg out and make them fall over!
Fatboy Slim’s Gangster Tripping were it a game. One of many amusing suggestions in the comments.
"Grab and Go" News →
A Businessweek article on Daylife, a site that collects news from various sources and sorts and displays it in all kinds of interesting ways.
This summer, Daylife will launch what Shardanand calls a “grab-and-go” service. This essentially enables anyone, anywhere, to build and customize Daylife-powered pages on virtually any topic, be it bird-watching or basketball, and fold them...
More web-serialised books →
This time in the form of F. Scot Fitz Gerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, in nicely typeset PDF form, in anticipation of a film version.
(via)
Five Dials →
A downloadable magazine with nice illustrations and some interesting writing.
(via, who designed it)
“This is ITV - I want a recount.”
– Joan Rivers on being told that 48 people had complained about her swearing live on-air. From the Guardian.
Wall.E →
Wall.E is first and foremost a love letter to science fiction, though. Its epic, post-apocalypic vision of an uninhabited Earth set hundreds of years into the future, thick with dust and towering stacks of rubbish, looks wonderfully real. “We wanted it to have the feeling that it had actually been filmed,” says Morris. Using subtle details such as barrel distortion and lens flare, gave...
Pride & Prejudice, 140 characters at a time? →
Ok, not quite. It only sends you notifications via Twitter that the next installment, of around 800 words (4500 characters), is available online but it’s still an interesting idea. It started a couple of days ago, so I’m going to have to read 3 installments to catch-up, but I’m going to give it a try anyway.
MIA Retiring? →
To devote more time to fashion and art, apparently. Examples here, in much the same style as the music. Both of her albums are excellent, and with the most recent getting a reasonable amount of mainstream airplay I was quite looking forward to a third. I suppose naming albums after your parents does limit how many you can release…
(via)
Why Me? →
Me. Everything used to be ‘i’, remember? After the 1998 intro of iMac, that adorably anthropomorphic little revolution in personal computing, the brand of ‘i’ took such a strong hold in digital culture it has since been reappropriated both inside Apple (iPod, iTunes, iTools, iDisk, iPhoto, iMovie, iWork, etc.) and endlessly imitated outside Apple [examples redacted under legal advisement]. ...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-15) →
Cut Copy
Hot Chip
Eels
M83
Digitalism
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
A Different Planet →
The Observer’s monthly music magazine is normally pretty good, but it excelled itself this week with a focus on what it hesitates to call “World Music”.
From an in-depth piece on the fairly well known CSS, to introductions of a number of lesser known acts from the rest of the world (that is, not the UK or the USA) including Tinariwen’s southern saharan desert-blues,...
White Glove Tracking →
On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. […] It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be...
Generation Kill →
Was wondering about this just the other day, but David Simon’s new series will be starting in the US on July 13th with 7 episodes in total. No timetable for viewing in the UK, so might just have to find ways of getting hold of it…
The wallpapers on the site are quite pretty.
(thanks)
Compass
John Harris wrote yesterday in the Guardian on how he believes that the leftwing pressure group Compass are the best hope for Labour to get back on the left-facing track they’ve departed from over the last few (11?) years.
Today Neal Lawson, the group’s Chair, writes on escaping “the Neverland of market fundamentalism”.
They have a conference this weekend, which the...
Crossing Zebras →
If we had these I would cross the road far more frequently.
“Volunteer Zebras” help people cross the road in La Paz, Bolivia.
(via)
Good News? →
“China withdraws from Tibet, with apologies” is the page’s top story. Lower down there’s “Music publishers: DRM has been unprofitable” and “Serenity sequel tops box office six weeks running”.
A page of nothing but good news, very well thought out and put together.
Consoles I have Known →
Owner of one of the best domain names ever, Jennifer Daniel, has put together an illustration to accompany the interesting and amusing “Consoles I have known” series of articles.
(via)
Advertising is like Porn →
I’ve come across Blank is like Blank before, but they seem to be sticking with a single intro-line at the moment, “advertising is like porn” and completing the sentence in many ways:
The Internet took it to a whole new level.
(via)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-8) →
Crystal Castles
Cut Copy
Dizzee Rascal
Why?
¡Forward, Russia!
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
Trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest →
Most people who look at the winners of the caption contest say, “I could’ve done better than that.” You’re right. You could have. But that doesn’t mean you could’ve won the caption contest—it just means you could’ve done better. And if your goal is not to win the caption contest, why bother entering? There is one mantra to take from this article, worth its...
Jim Davis on Garfield Minus Garfield →
Jim Davis, the cartoonist who created “Garfield,” calls himself an occasional reader of the site, which he calls “fascinating.” He says he is flattered rather than peeved by the imitation.Some of them really work, and some of them work better,” Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview.http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-1) →
Crystal Castles
Vampire Weekend
Spiritualized
Santogold
Cut Copy
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr