July 2008
47 posts
Quite costly in T-shirt lettering →
Sunday Times subeditors reply to Giles Coren’s rant.
Top Ranking →
Where PFT [Piracy Funds Terrorism] was authoritative, electric, and undeniably of its time, Top Ranking feels less immediate, and less like an attempt to surf any one particular wave. Spanning hip-hop, reggaeton, new wave, classic rock, indie rock, club, reggae, and dubstep, it’s far rangier than its predecessor. Whether that actually helps or hinders it is up for debate (the mix...
No, Mom. Not like in Quadrophenia →
If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that’s fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there’ll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons....
Winning the War of Words →
A website in the name of the former regime – the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – is used as an international distribution centre for leadership statements and inflated tales of battlefield exploits. While fairly rudimentary, this is not a small effort; updates appear several times a day in five languages. Magazines put out by the movement or its supporters provide a further source of...
The best Wikipedia page ever. →
ohmygodimonfire:
No seriously, it’s better than “List of problems MacGyver has solved.”
Quack.
Watches →
19 Cool Watches that require a PhD to tell the time.
Not so sure about that, but some of them are awesome. Includes a Nooka, naturally.
(via)
Mercury Nominations →
Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid
Radiohead - In Rainbows
British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
Burial - Untrue
Estelle - Shine
Adele - 19
Laura Marling - Alas, I Cannot Swim
Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns
Neon Neon - Stainless Style
Portico Quartet - Knee-deep in the North Sea
The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of...
The Urgent Bowline →
The rabbit comes out of its hole and, while it’s circling the stump, a 4-foot swell crashes into the bow. The rabbit pulls itself up and leaves the hole again, but now it’s rattled. Hours practicing on that piece of wood with two ropes last night while Dad was in the bar hitting on that tollbooth operator and still the rabbit freezes up when the pressure’s on. It’s like...
WatchJon Stewart on last week’s New Yorker cover. Hilarious.
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Ideas →
A list of ideas that Y Combinator, a ‘new kind of venture firm’, would like people to bring to them for funding. They’re all, purposefully, vague, but an interesting read.
He also has a way-cool facial scar →
Barack Obama recently named Omar Little as his favourite character in his favourite show. “That’s not an endorsement,” the presidential hopeful added carefully. “He’s not my favourite person but he’s a fascinating character.” Barack was right. Of all the brilliantly drawn, authentically complex and relentlessly captivating characters in this show’s...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/17/televis... →
Dominic “McNulty” West talking to the Guardian about his time at Eton with David Cameron; joining the circus and how he ended up in The Wire.
Can cartoonists go too far? Yes. Should they? Yes. →
Irony is a difficult beast to control. Your intention as a cartoonist may be perfectly clear to you, but how some psycho in Toadsuck, Nebraska, is going to read your cartoon is anyone’s guess, and the psycho’s privilege, and you can never second guess a psycho, as was demonstrated in the Coen brothers’ film No Country for Old Men. Psychos tend to take things very literally and...
On Patterns →
If you ever meet two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, chances are they share a pattern language. When one says “lightbox it”, the other knows exactly what he means. At some point, the two agreed on what a “lightbox” was and what applying that to something meant. It might have been a project in their past, or a conversation they had over drinks. Either way, some...
Icon Progression →
Interesting look at the process that went into the icons for the NYTimes iPhone app from the designer. I’m not sure a flower does work that well for Obituaries, but can understand why a gravestone or a coffin wouldn’t be wanted…
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No cameras. No lights. Just data. →
No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-7-13) →
Girl Talk
Bloc Party
Santogold
Radiohead
The Rapture
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
WatchWall-E Down To Earth - “Saw the movie, loved it, made this”.
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Blog House? →
Current TV with a quick explanation of ‘blog house’ as an introduction to the nearly-always-amusing Hipster Runoff with a very comprehensive list of which artists are and aren’t part of the genre.
Google as the new pressroom? →
Frankly, I think that would make a great deal of sense. Heck, an online paper isn’t much more than a complicated Blogger.com. If Google can provide free hosting to the “citizen journalists” who are making life difficult for the newspapers, Google should be able to host the newspapers for free as well. The newspapers would certainly generate more revenue than cat pictures! The idea would be to have...
Third-party iPhone apps make great fertiliser →
It’s like the evolution of a rainforest: you can’t have the soaring canopy of trees and the rich wildlife below without first having all the compost at the bottom.
Charles Arthur, for the Guardian, on the App-Store’s first-day offerings.
Happy Birthday Sub Pop →
It’s a slightly odd sensation, discovering Sub Pop is about to turn 20, akin to discovering that eternal teenager with the lank hair and torn jeans is finally, well, a grown man. But that’s what’s happening. On Saturday, the label is gathering past and present bands from its two-decade run for a mini-festival in Marymoor Park just outside Seattle, with old-timers like Mudhoney...
Summer's Last Call →
The writer behind the fabulous Mood and Conscience Strike Again video writing on, amongst other things, a summer spent working in an Oxford pub. Entertaining reading.
After 'The Wire' →
NYTimes article on what David Simon and Ed Burns have planned for life after The Wire and Generation Kill (which starts on Sunday). Includes the back-story on how they met, and how The Wire came about as well as some glimpses of what might be coming next:
His next projects include a feature film about a true but unlikely romance between Donnie Andrews, a Baltimore holdup artist who robbed drug...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-7-6) →
Girl Talk
Crystal Castles
Radiohead
Santogold
Spiritualized
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
Elliot Smith (not that one…) decided he was...
Mood and Conscience Strike Again →
A more than slightly surreal video starring an eyeball, a pink bear and a depressed doll, set to moving and haunting music. Fantastic.
Books in Places →
The Observer gets writers to describe how to choose the perfect book for a variety of situations. (c.f. Field Tested Books)
Believe Me, It's Torture →
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not...
The Itch →
She felt it mainly on the right side of her head. It crawled along her scalp, and no matter how much she scratched it would not go away. “I felt like my inner self, like my brain itself, was itching,” she says. And it took over her life just as she was starting to get it back.
An article from last week’s New Yorker on itching and in particular the plight of one woman, M., to find the cause...
Show us a better Way →
The Government are running a competition to get ideas of how the masses of information that’s available on, well, just about everything (non-personal, naturally) can be better displayed and made available to the public.
There’s a lot more already available than I realised, from NHS Webservices that allows you to find out what services are available where (this doesn’t seem to...
