In Case of Emergency...

Robin says,

...break glass.

It's, er, pretty high concept -- but I love it. Tools that remind you of decisions you've made are really valuable.

Reminds me of the trick with the giant wall calendar: First, you decide you're going to start a new habit. Then you buy a giant wall calendar. And on the first day you successfully do habit X -- maybe it's "floss" or "do 20 sit-ups in the morning" or "practice the electric violin before bed" -- you make a big black check-mark on the calendar. Then you do it again the next day.

And then the calendar takes over! The chain becomes impossible to break. As long as X is pretty easy to do, you do it -- because your decision, your discipline, is right there staring you in the face.

Iron Man Exploded

Robin says,

So I really enjoyed "Iron Man."

Almost better than the entire rest of the movie all on its own, though? The "Iron Man" end title sequence!

Perfect motion, check. Dust and scratches, check. Terrific colors, check.

Am now going to resist temptation to watch ten more title sequences in a row.

Musings on Twitter

Robin says,

After a year of defiance, I now meekly serve the 140-character box. And I just ran across the smartest take I've yet seen on what makes Twitter different, and good/bad, from ROFLconspirator Diana Kimball:

Okay, finally: I think what's so striking about this social signaling in Twitter is that it's imbued with intentionality. On Facebook, when you do something or friend someone or post on someone's wall, Facebook just reports it; the "hey, look at me" is automated. Therefore, the person who wants to be looked at is absolved of responsibility, vanity, or attention-seeking. Twitter is all about self-reporting, and so that all-important illusion of absolution is whisked away.

Mostly, of course, I just like the phrase "all-important illusion of absolution." So good.

'I Have No Designs on Your Camry or Your Hamster'

Robin says,

Slate still has some of the best writing on the internet. Loved this piece on vegetarianism by Taylor Clark:

Vegetarians give up meat for a variety of ethical, environmental, and health reasons that are secondary to this essay's goal of increasing brotherly understanding, so I'll mostly set them aside. Suffice it to say that one day, I suddenly realized that I could never look a cow in the eyes, press a knocking gun to her temple, and pull the trigger without feeling I'd done something cruel and unnecessary. (Sure, if it's kill the cow or starve, then say your prayers, my bovine friend -- but for now, it's not quite a mortal struggle to subsist on the other five food groups.) I am well-aware that even telling you this makes me seem like the kind of person who wants to break into your house and liberate your pet hamster -- that is, like a PETA activist. Most vegetarians, though, would tell you that they appreciate the intentions of groups like PETA but not the obnoxious tactics. It's like this: We're all rooting for the same team, but they're the ones in face paint, bellowing obscenities at the umpire and flipping over every car with a Yankees bumper sticker. I have no designs on your Camry or your hamster.

The Fatigue and the Remedy

Robin says,

That's it. I'm officially no longer interested in the primaries.

(One exception: I've been enjoying Current's Campaign Update by Mark Ganek and Brett Erlich. The "Real Story" segment in each episode is actually really good.)

Whoah, Clusterflock

Robin says,

Clusterflock was sort of crazy good today -- particularly the images.

Art, Saturday night, comics, zombie mass, fine chariots, and swing jumping.

I love it all.

Make Dance Here

Robin says,

My sister Lily, an amazing dancer working on her MFA in dance, just started the world's first dance vlog. She's going to make a super-short dance video every week based on her readers' input. I think it's a terrific idea.

Here's a longer dance film she made recently. And here's a recent performance.

Don't think of, like, break-dancing in music videos when you watch these. Think instead of using the whole range of human motion -- including motion we don't usually think of as "dance" -- as a palette.

Amano

Robin says,

I love Yoshitaka Amano. It's hard for me to think of him as really serious because, of course, I first ran across his art in conjunction with Final Fantasy 2 on the Super Nintendo... but no, he is super-serious indeed. Beautiful stuff.

Under Orders, Under Fire

Matt says,

Forgot where it was linked, but some blogger recently referred to a famous 1996 essay on the media by James Fallows that I had never read. The essay begins with a description of a public television broadcast called "Under Orders, Under Fire":

Most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school's famous Socratic style.

During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion. ...

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening's panel, better known even than Westmoreland. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.

Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, he replied. Any reporter would—and in real wars reporters from his network often had.

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.

What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?

HTTPCOLONSLASHSLASH, &c.

Matt says,

Jennifer Daniel's portfolio site is fun in all kindsa ways.

Stickr

Matt says,

Finally, a website where you can make small quantities of custom bumper stickers. Go nuts. (cf)

All Streets

Robin says,

Simple idea. Beautiful execution.

The Planet of the Dead

Robin says,

Loved last night's Long Now lecture -- actually a debate between Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz. It was historian vs. futurist, conservative vs. liberal, pessimist vs. optimist. Unfortunately it was also incredibly great speaker vs. merely good speaker as well, so I feel the futurist/optimists didn't quite get their fair shake... but so be it.

My favorite phrase, and image, from the entire evening was this one. Niall Ferguson countered the claim that the past is a foreign country, saying: No, it's a foreign planet... a planet of the dead... and its population far outnumbers our own.

And historians try to understand that strange place. Ferguson said, with no little glee: "I prefer the company of the dead to the company of the living. And it's a good thing, because I spend most of my time with them."

The counterfactual anthology Virtual History, edited by Ferguson, is great. I haven't read any of his solo books yet, though.

Don't Blink or You'll Miss Current

Robin says,

Made a flip-book style video based on Current.com items.

I realize others might find it barf-inducing, but personally I think it's mesmerizing:

Pooh Sticks

Robin says,

Behold, a luminous collection of Pooh sticks. (Pooh sticks?)

P.S. I just found this link on some other blog but accidentally closed the window. I can't remember where it was. I'm sorry, Via Gods.

Light and Sound from Far Away

Robin says,

Yeah sure, you've got a rad visualizer for your music. But what about a rad visualizer for your phone calls? (It doesn't hurt that Arik Levy sounds sort of like Superman's father placing an interstellar call from Krypton.)

(Via Design Observer.)

Trees!

Robin says,

Aaaack somehow it got to be 1 a.m., but the upside is I just found this slideshow about trees.

(Seriously, this is no joke. We are talking about a Magnum photographer on the tree beat. Ahh.)

Good night.

Hard Times

Robin says,

I'm quite enjoying the smorgasbord of alterna-web-formats over at We Tell Stories. The latest is sort of a narrative infographic argument. I like the last page best.

'This Place Had Raised Its Hands'

Robin says,

Jonathan Franzen on Shanghai:

"It was as if the gods of world history had asked, 'Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?' and this place had raised its hands and said 'Yeah!'"

I Love the World World

Robin says,

I feel that I should be able to muster a bit of meta-cynicism about this video. However... I cannot. It's Stephen Hawking at the end who seals the deal for me. (Remember?)

(Via Kottke.)

Overflow

Robin says,

Particularly lovely and evocative post from Nokia ethnographer Jan Chipcase on overfilling and overflowing. But totally bite-size, as always!

We're All Full of Advice

Robin says,

I am transfixed by Postcards From Yo Momma. Not just because some of them are funny. It's the pathos of it. This is like Chekhov in blog format.

My Excuse

Matt says,

I've been in St. Louis. So I pass you off to Mr. Carmody for canny political commentary.

Slow Days

Robin says,

Oof! Slow on Snarkmarket lately.

I realize a self-aggrandizing Current link isn't exactly the thing to remedy that... but I was surprised (and happy) to see one of our viewer-created ads promoted on the front page of YouTube this morning. It's clever.

More stuff soon.

Four Days in Denver

Matt says,

Delightful. Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr., a West Wing writer, serves up a little speculative fiction on a brokered Democratic convention.

Hillary’s car is pulling away from the hotel. She spots Oregon senator Ron Wyden getting into his car. She has her car chase Wyden’s car. At a traffic light, she jumps out with a gang of Secret Service agents and they surround Wyden’s car. She climbs into Wyden’s car and rides with him, working on him to vote for her. When Wyden finally says he thinks only Obama can beat McCain, Hillary is ready for that. She tells Wyden that McCain’s winning the White House is the best thing that can happen for Wyden’s reelection in 2010, because the president’s party always loses seats in midterm elections. A Democratic president is going to make Wyden’s reelection that much tougher.

Alligator Blood Beats Supergerms!

Robin says,

From EurekAlert, the wire service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (and one of my fave RSS feeds): Alligator blood may put the bite on antibiotic-resistant infections.

Turns out alligators have incredible immune systems:

Previous studies by Merchant showed that alligators have an unusually strong immune system that is very different from that of humans. Unlike people, alligators can fight microorganisms such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria without having prior exposure to them. Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles.

But the crucial thing is that this is obviously the origin story for The Alligator, who would probably be a Spider-Man villain. Brilliant scientist working on super drug, driven to experiment on himself, etc., etc., but then the alligator DNA takes overrrrrGRAHHH!

Or maybe, uh, it would go more like this:

[D]on't try to create your own home-remedies using alligator blood, as raw, unprocessed blood could make you sick or even kill you if injected, the researcher cautions.

Noted.

FYI, the Line Rider Dude's Name is Bosh

Robin says,

Terrific interview with Boštjan Cadez, the creator of Line Rider. I wonder: If you could somehow tally up the total cultural impact of something like Line Rider, what would it be roughly equivalent to? An indie band's new album? A minor hit cable TV show? Something smaller? Something bigger?

(FYI, Snarkmarket's TCI is approximately equivalent to a single mid-January stump speech by a third-tier presidential candidate. I just checked.)

We're in this weird phase where bizarre niche hits, powered by viral internet jet fuel, can be really huge... but still somehow invisible.

Re: Line Rider-as-technology, not Line Rider-as-web-phenomenon, I liked this bit of explanation:

Anyway, I enjoyed procedural animation because it didn't involve frame by frame 'slave' work, which I was always too lazy to do. But procedural stuff gets boring, monotone and predictive very fast. It especially bugged me with VJ-ing. Pre-coded stuff was too much like video -- too much in the past -- and even if it was reacting to audio in real time, it looked always the same. So I started thinking about how to find something which had the best of both worlds: something which I could change on the fly, some way of animating stuff by just drawing it.

I think there's a lot of potential in that "best of both worlds." Think: Spore, Crayon Physics, and things yet to come.

Johnny Bunko

Robin says,

Check out the trailer for Johnny Bunko.

Should probably note that:

• Johnny Bunko is a book, not a movie.
• Johnny Bunko is a career advice book, not a novel.
• Johnny Bunko is manga!

That makes this trailer both terrific, meta-terrific, and meta-meta-terrific.

Templated Creation Wizards

Matt says,

Couple newish websites make it easy to make formerly complicated things:

1) BitStrips offers a surprisingly robust tool for making comic strips. Fell in love with it a little at first, but the honeymoon's kinda wearing off. Why can't I save strips as drafts? Why don't I have access to *all* the characters other users have made public? Why can't I make characters based on those characters?

2) AniMoto makes wonderfully kinetic automatic slideshows from your images, synced to a song of your choosing. You can then export the slideshows to YouTube, or dispense with them as you please.

Oh yeh, and also: This has nothing to do with templated creation, but Lifehacker's talking about the best IM clients. Pleasingly, I see they've chosen Digsby, which I've been meaning to blog about forever. Digsby is my *jam*. It connects not only to your IM service of choice, but to your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social apps. And it's got a slick, freakishly customizable interface. And it's fresh out of a private beta, so developers are polishing it up more every day.

Coins of the Realm

Robin says,

It's been widely blogged in the design-o-sphere, but just in case you missed it: The UK's new coins are stunning. Bold, attractive, and... er... clever? Who ever heard of currency that was clever? I am all awe and envy.

The New News

Robin says,

Hey, we just redesigned the Current.com homepage to reflect our new hourly news show, called (get ready for it) Current News. Check it out.

And, look: We're on TechCrunch!

Flip for Words

Robin says,

Totally agree with (my new colleague!) Ben: I want this to exist. The fact that it doesn't have wi-fi is a feature. (I've been doing a lot of good writing on planes lately -- the last of the inaccessible spaces!)

Anne Shirley Forever

Robin says,

Whoah, Anne of Green Gables is a hundred years old!

The Guardian celebrates with an essay by Margaret Atwood which includes gems like:

The book was an instant success when it first appeared -- Anne "is the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal Alice", growled crusty, cynical Mark Twain [...]

(I was going to quote more, but it won't make any sense if you're not an Anne-fan. And if you are, you'll just want to read the whole thing.)

The Seeker

Robin says,

Yeah yeah, I know, I'm biased -- but this piece on Al Gore and the election is good. And largely correct, it seems to me.

(This is my first link ever found via Twitter!)

The Art of War

Robin says,

New pod from my pal Tracey Chang at Current. Her reports are some of my favorite, mostly because she's so natural -- and frankly sometimes nervous -- that it feels like one of your friends in the field.

Watch for the guerrilla "family portrait."

Past Remastered

Robin says,

Check out the video for Justice's DVNO -- it's a mega-mashup of '80s tele-typography, except way more gorgeous than than stuff ever really was.

(Via, umm, Jonathan Hoefler? Awesome.)

OMG CSM ARG

Robin says,

Quoted a bit in Ben Arnoldy's Christian Science Monitor story about the new Olympics alternate reality game. "It was a regular Friday at the office..."

Lippman/Dewey

Robin says,

Latest elite magazine story on the Huffington Post and the death of newspapers: so-so.

Rex's identification of the dueling public philosophies of Walter Lippman and John Dewey as the most interesting idea in the piece: excellent.

(I'd write more about am on the road. Look for a follow-up sometime soon.)

But Can It Vacuum My Floor

Matt says,

Forgot where I ran across this, but I was reminded today of the typeface Champion Script Pro, "the most advanced and powerful script ever made. Developed over a period of two and a half years, each one of the 2 weights is loaded with 4253 glyphs (now 4280 glyphs)." What does that mean? It means the typeface is programmed to dynamically adjust glyphs to complement each other in a given word. All for just €175.

For a Limited Time: Actual Snark on Snarkmarket

Matt says,

I love this Ask MeFi thread listing retorts to common sayings. Among my favorites:

NMA Winners '07

Matt says,

HuffPo stole my candy: National Mag Awards winners for '07. (Fimoculicious.)

The Aesthetic of Us Weekly Can Be Yours

Robin says,

Kottke points out a crazy new kind of portraiture:

Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject. The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.

Why is this awesome? Because the real mark of status is no longer having a fantastic portrait taken, or even getting the massively-photoshopped magazine cover treatment. It's being surreptitiously photographed leaving Starbucks in your flip-flops.

This is definitely a corollary to the democratization of manipulation. The democratization of observation, maybe?

Maybe I Finally Get It Now

Robin says,

Ze Frank on media formats:

Twitter with its bizarre/random limitations and restrictions is a retreat for those craving fuzziness? A cave? Like in Plato's cave, maybe, but here the shadows are 140 characters long.

Margaret Mead Among the Managers

Matt says,

Grant McCracken offers an anthropological take on the recently-ubiquitous corporate reinvention session.

These Scenes Are Too Familiar

Robin says,

Crazy scenes from Tibet. Is that fog or smoke in the background?

Awareness Test

Robin says,

Watch carefully. Sort of like Brain Age in real life... with a twist.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Avian Overlords

Matt says,

OMG, Jessa's right: the birds are going to rule us one day. Article 1:

And article 2:

Bollywood Rising

Robin says,

Conor Knighton on Bollywood's new tricks. This video features Shah Rukh Khan and dancing robots. My prediction is that by 2026, every video will feature those two things.

Preved!

Robin says,

Meme alert! Is the Russian "preved!" bear totally old news? It's a cross-cultural lolcat! See? (Maybe mildly, weirdly NSFW.)

Someone needs to fuse them. This is the internet. Someone already has. But where?

(Via AFWW on IM.)

SXSW Moment

Robin says,

I've been a horrible SXSW blogger. In my defense, I've been having too much fun learning things and meeting people. But Snarkmarket pal Jane McGonigal's keynote was so remarkable, uplifting and super-great that it bears special mention. Especially in contrast to the meta-vapidity of the Zuckerberg interview on day one, the substance and spirit of Jane's presentation were striking.

Also... she did the Soulja Boy.

Samantha Power's Resignation

Matt says,

Such a bummer. I cringed when I read the remark last night. Now one of my favorite figures in any candidate's campaign is out. I don't know how these things work at all, but I really hope she'll still be his unofficial foreign policy adviser.

Also: Why is it I love Samantha Power so much? First, there was her book, an exhaustive and exhausting account of the unchanging pattern of genocide, and why, despite our ability to recognize that pattern, we never stop it before it's too late. Then, there was hearing her speak about the book at the Nieman Narrative conference a few years back. Although she was young (34?) and vibrant, she had this weariness about her. Maybe she was just exhausted for reasons completely unrelated to the subject matter, but you couldn't help thinking, "God, the things this poor woman is cursed with knowing." To speak at length for years with the survivors of genocides all over the world, to see it happening again and be utterly powerless to stop it -- how do you have that kind of experience and not despair?

I was as excited as Robin about the prospect of Power in a major foreign policy position (which I really hope might still come to pass). When secretaries of state commonly can't bring themselves to utter the word "genocide," how amazing would it be to have a cabinet-level official with not only the experience to recognize the pattern of genocide, but also the moral will to call it by its name?

Of course, all these pretty things I'm saying about her shouldn't erase the fact that calling Hillary Clinton a monster was not only boneheaded, but really lowers the threshold given some of the actual, human-slaughtering monsters Power has known. But it really sucks when a mistake redounds to such an ill and public effect.

Update: Marc Ambinder cites anonymous sources from the Obama campaign who say Power was not asked to leave, in case you were wondering.

What's a Library For?

Robin says,

This Slate piece was apparently precision-engineered to appeal to me: Witold Rybczynski on public libraries in the age of Google, set to pictures of some new-ish American Alexandrias.

Some of the spaces are very appealing -- the new Denver Public Library and, of course, the Seattle Public Library -- but I wonder if anyone has tried a more distributed approach? I think of all the branches of the San Francisco Public Library scattered throughout the city -- most are pretty lame and outdated at this point. But they could become an archipelago of coolness with the right kind of design and attention.

I almost think the public library of the future has more in common with Starbucks than the stately fortresses of old: comfortable, accessible, intimate, omnipresent.

And of course, there is coffee and free wifi.

(Via the excellent Design Observer.)

P.S. As an aside -- and I might have mentioned this before -- librarians were the single group most fervently interested in sharing EPIC with their colleagues and talking about its implications. This is a group of people that's actually thinking hard about their -- and our -- future.

Algorithmic Craft

Robin says,

Etsy-love points to Nervous System, a two-person design team with an algorithmic bent. What other Etsy seller has Java applets you can play with?

Hallelujah

Robin says,

Wow, check out this titanic feat of pop archaeology: Michael Barthel on the cultural journey of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Don't miss this part, about a third of the way down the page:

What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time. Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement. But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places. In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."

Now, I could go into details about how exactly the "sad montage" is constituted, but it's more efficient and probably more effective just to show you a montage of the montages. You'll see what I mean.

The montage is pretty hilarious. And then, a bit more of Barthel's analysis:

The way Hallelujah is being used here is the auditory equivalent of a silent film actress pressing the back of her hand to her forehead to express despair -- emotional shorthand. It's sometimes called a needledrop, and it's an element of visual grammar that signals the mood of the scene loudly and unmistakably. In the Scrubs musical featurette, creator Bill Lawrence says, "How are we gonna make a show where a lot of the comedy comes from broad, silly jokes switch gears on a dime and suddenly be dramatic? What we found is we were able to make that transition quickly if we chose the right song."

Seriously, you've got to check this out. There are graphs!

Politics, Emotion, and YouTube

Robin says,

Henry Jenkins and Stephen Duncombe talk Obama, YouTube, and emotional politics. (Second video down.)

Duncombe on the will.i.am Obama video: "It uses a language of emotions which one couldn't articulate in a logical sentence." He continues with an extended analysis of the "rhetoric that's embedded in the video" that is quite smart and revelatory.

Heard a new term from Jenkins in this exchange, too: "collective intelligence culture." I like it.

Active Photography

Robin says,

I could not possibly like John Chiara's photography more. Quick description:

Chiara operates a hand-built, room-sized camera that is mounted on a flatbed trailer. He works inside the camera, physically becoming a part of the process. During the long exposures, he dodges and burns by passing his hands in front of the camera’s lens.

To my eye, his photos are a reminder of how crazy it is that photography works at all.

(Via Avenues via Conscientious.)

A Mystery Begins

Robin says,

So yeah, clearly this is the beginning of one of those alternate reality game sorta things. Made an important discovery just after I recorded the video above: There was something in the ball of yarn. There's a photo over on the Current.com page I'm using to keep track of all the media. Obviously this site is going to be important soon.

I have to say, getting a mystery box in the mail full of cryptic clues and artifacts is just about as much fun as you'd expect it to be!

Will keep you posted.

This Is Not a Music Blog

Robin says,

No links to MP3s next week, I promise. But MGMT is super-fun. Try "Time to Pretend."

Clouds

Robin says,

Neat bit of prose from Paul Ford. Here's my favorite part -- he's talking about his neighborhood:

My wife and I are visitors, tourists, not welcome or unwelcome. Sometimes the natives say hello--they wished us well after our wedding; they gave us some sparklers on the 4th of July; we gave them a case of beer--but just as often they do not. It's like being in a photograph of the Civil War. The subject of the photo is perfectly still, surrounded by ethereal blur. Online, the Google Maps "street view" of this block shows the men downstairs sitting in front of their club. They sit there every warm day. These people are the map.

You won't find another essay (story?) that jumps from street survival to server virtualization.

Snarkmarket Artistes

Robin says,

Track of the day: Santogold remixed by XXXChange. Just feels very Thursday-appropriate, you know?

Update: Hey, I have a question. What's the deal with these music blogs posting MP3s? Do they have special (unofficial) arrangements with labels? Or is it just sort of understood that it's okay to share MP3s as long as you practice restraint? I wouldn't mind dropping some tracks on Snarkmarket from time to time but it still makes my spidey senses tingle. Are my spidey senses stuck in 2004?

Becoming an Economist

Robin says,

Dani Rodrik, leader of the development economics program at Harvard, explains how he chose economics as a profession. It's a short, simple story, but I found it totally charming. I wish more professionals and academics would take the time to tell these stories and make them public. It'd make for a good book, actually...

Panoramania

Robin says,

Dan Tobin Smith. Click the "still life" section. Check out the super-wide images. They feel super zeitgeisty to me. Also, beautiful.

(Link via... my mom!)

Cold Country

Robin says,

Bleak images from North Korea in the NYT. The first eight or so pictures look like scenes from a science fiction movie. Which I guess they sort of are.

In Search of An Approach

Robin says,

Okay, I think I sorta want to get down with Twitter, but I haven't decided on a personal approach to it yet. My current favorite Twitter feed is Pat Walters' -- it reads like a slightly cryptic reporters' notebook.

Any other good examples? In general I like brevity and opacity in Twitter posts as opposed to well-wrought complete thoughts.

Stratastencil

Robin says,

Javan Ivey presents an animation unlike any I've ever seen. (Note the digital pre-viz demo he did before embarking on the real animation. It's posted at the bottom of the page, with note: "Computers are dirty cheaters.")

Vote Current

Robin says,

My colleague Dan wants you to vote for Current in the SXSW People's Choice awards. This might be one of those things where I find the video totally hilarious and charming only because I know Dan... but I don't think so.

P.S. I am going to SXSW Interactive this year! Drop me a line (or a comment) if you'll be there too.

Spore's Procedural Jams

Robin says,

Snarkmarket pal Aaron McLeran gave a GDC talk about his work on Spore's music system.

That link includes a small picture of the programming environment he used, but you've got to see Aaron interact with it live to understand how truly cool it is. It's this crazy hybrid of computer code and, like, circuit design, and the music keeps playing as he makes changes, so you hear it evolving and improving in real-time.

Bonus: Here's some video of Aaron demoing part of the game.

Is Etsy the Next Google?

Robin says,

Haven't even really processed this yet, but I like the boldness of the idea enough to pass it along: Is Etsy the next Google?

I will say I've heard more organic buzz about Etsy than any other company in the last several months -- from real people, not tech-nerd blogs -- and it's only accelerated lately.

Update: Jason Kottke thinks "Is X the Next Google?" headlines are dumb, and he is probably right. However, as part of the proud tradition of Google-based hyperbole mining, I have a soft spot for them.

Update: "Hyperbole mining"? I don't even really know what that means -- it's just the phrase that occurred to me, and it seemed right.

Lessig08

Robin says,

I live just a bit beyond the northern-most edge of his district, but I'm still very excited about the prospect of Larry Lessig running for Congress. If you think it's a good idea, too, stop by his site and drop him an email or something -- I take seriously his summons for a show of support.

Beyond Lessig, have you heard about any interesting congressional candidates? (Is "congressional" capitalized? No, right?) I'm super-curious to hear about interesting people and races.

Transformation won't come from a new executive alone -- he/she's going to need backup. And the legislative branch might be even more broken than the executive branch right now.

Update: Snarkmarket pal Sam Gustin interviews Lessig!

Game Remixes

Matt says,

I'm loving the clever remixes of old-school games at Retro Sabotage, brought to my attention by the fine folks at Grand Text Auto.

Sita Sings the Blues

Robin says,

Nina Paley made an entire animated movie herself -- and it looks amazing. The blurb:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana.

The trailer is terrific. Reminds me just a bit of We Are the Strange in its mash-up of styles -- except way more coherent.

Nina Paley's been documenting the process all along, apparently, on her blog. Too cool.

iPhone Users Get All the Love

Robin says,

Whoah, whoah, whoah -- wait a minute here -- why can't us normal boring computer users have wallpaper this amazing?

FreakAngels

Robin says,

Warren Ellis launched a new webcomic today. Too early to tell if I'll be a fan, but at first glance, the art is nice and the design of the site seems very correct somehow.

Update: So, the site was designed by Ariana Osborne, whose own blog design is sort of totally amazing. It's split exactly down the middle between her own posts and the murmurings of her community. Mostly Twitter stuff, which as always eludes my affection, but still. There's something really interesting there.

What Is Videoblogging, Anyway?

Robin says,

Cool little deal over at Umair Haque's Harvard Business blog where he replies to a comment in video. It's super-fun to see his face and hear his voice after reading his stuff for so long. Way too long at 4:35, but I like the idea. Somehow the fact that video is reserved for a thoughtful reply to a comment seems remarkably... respectful, you know?

What do you think? How might video fit into "normal" blogs in interesting ways? How might text and video work together? (And I am excluding the usual "hey look at this embedded viral video" model here.) Any crazy ideas?

Indiana Jones and the Whatever Whatever

Robin says,

Maybe it's just the nostalgic preamble that roped me in, but, okay, the new Indiana Jones movie looks great.

EveryBlock Confidential

Robin says,

Rex continues his recent run of awesome, kinda-sorta-long-form original content: Here's a nuanced interview with Adrian Holovaty about EveryBlock. (Matt, note the mention of machine-readable metadata for "news blobs"! EPICBlock, yo!)

Developer and Diarist

Robin says,

Wow, this is super-random, but great: a snippet of wonderful, atmospheric prose by... Blake Ross, cofounder of Firefox!

The Morning After

Matt says,

It’s the morning after the election. The President-elect calls you up and says, “You know, after this grueling, absurd campaign, I now see that the state of our democracy is something we have to grapple with right away. What should I do?”

The PostSecret Valentine

Robin says,

Video made more or less like this is the future of human communication.

Sounds over the top, but I'm pretty serious. (Note especially 1:20 to 1:45 or so.)

Meet you back here in two hundred years and we'll see if I'm right.

Faster Than a Speeding Meme

Robin says,

Approximately forty-five seconds after the release of that will.i.am video for Obama, and the corresponding insta-backlash, comes the McCain version. It is hilarious and, content aside -- neither the original nor this parody offer much in the way of real policy argument -- worth appreciating for its meta-ness alone.

Welcome, Kiosk

Robin says,

Your new favorite band: Kiosk!

It's an Iranian indie rock band (I mean... sort of) that recently made the movie to America. Here's the full story, written up by Talieh Rohani.

And here are some sample lyrics:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the evil axis
Speed freaks in jalopy taxis

LOVE. IT.

Filtered Ffffound

Robin says,

Love Ffffound. Love the Ffffound RSS feed. Way too much to process, though. Thus: Ffffound filtered by AideRSS.

I feel like I'm getting the hang of this internet thing!

The Forbidden Fantasy of Utter Upeaval

Robin says,

This WaPo story by Hank Stuever is terrific, and weird, and a good example of that ripped-from-its-context thing the web does so well: I started reading it and had no idea what was going on. You'll see what I mean.

Even when do you figure out what you're reading, it never quite becomes normal. The story is totally fractured, almost impressionist -- but to good effect. Steuver is a terrific writer, and his subject matter is sublime: American culture as it's experienced in places other than New York and San Francisco. His book Off Ramp is terrific, and its subtitle says it all: "Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere."

Echo from Last July

Robin says,

Kottke just linked to an old Snarkmarket post, so of course I clicked back to read it... and you know what was way better than the post? The wide-ranging, discursive conversation that followed! What a delight to re-read. Nice work, Snarkmatrix. I wish there was a better way to save/highlight old conversations...

Ethikai Aretai

Robin says,

I'm a sucker for Aristotelian lingo, and a sucker for Zephyr Teachout, so that makes me doubly susceptible to her endorsement of Obama's "ethikai aretai."

Just Because We Can ...

Matt says,

danah boyd writes a typically thought-provoking post on the prospect of exposing users' "Social Graphs," a meme that's been heating up recently. Quick backstory in case you didn't know: Google and a bunch of techy types want to make it so you can easily port your identity and contacts to any application on the Web. The advantages include easier sign-ups for different Web applications, no longer having to maintain the same information in a bunch of different places, quickly finding any contacts who are using an application you just signed up for, etc. Those of us with MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/LinkedIn/Flickr/vita.mn/etc. accounts are planning to be, for the most part, happy.

But danah makes the good point that those stumping for this move are all tech-savvy people who mostly have no idea of what the repercussions will be for some of the most vulnerable heavy users of the Web -- teens. A typical argument in favor of more open data refers to what Tim O'Reilly calls "security by obscurity" -- i.e. we have the illusion we're secure just because all our data is usually tucked out of the way, but this is patently false, as any reporter could tell you. Exposing public data more commonly means fewer people will harbor this false sense of security, ostensibly making them more directly conscious of how they manage their personal data. But as danah points out, it could be an awfully risky way to make a point.

Key Decision-Making Data

Robin says,

As we head into Super Tuesday, don't you dare ignore what the leading paper in Belarus has to say.

Natural Magic

Robin says,

Reading "The Revolution in Science 1500-1750" by A. Rupert Hall and absolutely loved this line:

Quite how the authentic philosophy of Plato [...] became the father of natural magic -- magical operations without the aid of demons -- seems to be somewhat obscure.

"Magical operations without the aid of demons"! So awesome! "Hey, uh, listen, so if you want to do some magic... but you don't have any demons... try science!"

I'm enjoying the tone of the book. Hall isn't afraid to make positive value-judgments about the scientific worldview (because, he says, that view actually does provide more useful, more complete theories about the world) but at the same time, he doesn't fail to detail all the weird, religious, dogmatic, and/or occult motivations of many early scientists: Vesalius! Mondino! Paracelsus!

Augmented Driving

Matt says,

Things points to the fascinating idea of the "virtual cable" for driving directions in cars. There's been a lot of recent buzz about projecting data on car windshields. The virtual cable is a three-dimensional line drawn onto the road ahead showing you exactly where you're going. Trippy, probably distracting, but nonetheless fascinating.

Radio Lab, OMG, Just, Radio Lab

Robin says,

The new Radio Lab podcast is sublime. Honestly, they could just say "blah blah blah" -- but apply their amazing production methods to it -- and I'd be sold. (In this case they talk to a guy who was commissioned to create background music for... a morgue. Amazing.)

It's the cadences that I love -- musical, verbal, pure sonic. These people are geniuses.

Stark Oratory

Robin says,

Not his best speech ever, but I love the style and format Barack Obama's state of the union rebuttal. So stark, so plain -- all the dross of TV drained away. And then the lush, glowing animation at the end -- just a couple seconds long -- sort of seals the deal.

EveryBlock

Matt says,

Adrian, Wilson and co. have launched Everyblock, a mashup of several information sources down to the block level for different cities (currently Chicago, New York and San Francisco). The site is very pretty, especially the maps, and as you would expect, there's fun data hidden beneath every click. But it's otherwise hard for me to evaluate how cool it is, since I don't live in any of the included cities. How about it, residents?

Update: One surprise ... no RSS feeds? (Except this one.)

Update 2: Rex reminds me ... Poynter Online interview w/ Adrian (which is how I found out it launched).

The Ideas! The Ideas!

Robin says,

Clive Thompson remains the single journalist most perfectly calibrated to my interests, and his latest essay for Wired is no exception. It's about science fiction:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best -- and perhaps only -- place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting -- well -- bored.

I had a friend in college who, upon hearing a science-fiction book recommendation that cited plot, characters, setting, etc., would reply: "Yes, yes, but what about the ideas? The ideas?"

(P.S. So yes, it's probably me who is actually calibrated to Clive Thompson's interests, given the nature of media. That's fine, too.)

The Atlantic Rides Again

Robin says,

The Atlantic, favorite magazine of my middle youth, was kinda lame for a while there, but it's been getting good again -- a fact that had been bumming me out because, of course, I couldn't link to the subscriber-only stories.

Until today.

So let us celebrate the magazine's resurgence and web-savvy with a couple of pointers:

• The new James Fallows piece on China is exactly what got me into the Atlantic in the first place: Themes of politics and economics, hugely abstract ideas, giant global actors and their dilemmas, etc. I love it that there's none of the usual attempt to concrete-ize and personalize here: No narrative intro with a factory worker in China, for instance. The only narrative in the piece involves the voyage of a U.S. dollar to China and back. I could not love it more.
• Caitlin Flanagan's piece about Katie Couric was the last one I read in this issue, and I almost didn't read it at all. Thank goodness my train was slow, because it was a revelation, in large part because it's as much about Caitlin Flanagan as it is about Katie Couric. Beautifully written, too: Flanagan is a great storyteller and has perfect "tone control," if you know what I mean.
Comments (4) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:44 PM

Ghost of Flash Movie Past

Robin says,

You know how sometimes you read something you said or wrote a couple of years ago and, echhh, you just can't stand yourself? Well, I was surprised to see that I sort of still agree with 2004 Sloan:

"Choice and control are just too cool, too useful, and too satisfying to resist," Sloan said. "Add distributed creation and collaborative filtering, and you can come up with systems that are so much more flexible and efficient than anything happening in a modern newsroom."

"But unlike most newsrooms, these processes don't come with values baked in," Sloan added. The goal is that they are "executed by people who are dedicated to the notion of fairness, integrity, and truth-telling. On an individual level -- especially insofar as we are bloggers and media-makers -- we can decide we want to adopt those values for ourselves."

Not long ago I met Sam Gustin, who wrote this most recent Googlezon retrospective, and found him a thoroughly modern reporter: trained in shoe-leather fundamentals (in part during a stint on the New York Post metro desk -- yow) but also totally conversant in, and excited about, new formats (he writes for Portfolio.com now -- everything from blog dispatches to reported essays like this one).

Also: In the comments over at Portfolio, the editor of The Issue chimes in, which reminded me that I was going to link over there. Worth a peek.

Bang the Drum of Time

Robin says,

Here's another one from Current UK that doesn't make any sense when you describe it: People, ages one to one hundred, bang a drum. See? Indecipherable. But you have to go watch it, because it will put a little extra shine on your soul this weekend. (Those guys are on a roll!)

Portrait of the Language as a Young... Er... Tongue?

Robin says,

Brilliant photo mosaic of the English language. This is another one of those things that's hard to describe -- but see if you can guess where all the plant-related words are.

Not Safe For ...

Matt says,

I watched this ad three times. (NSFW, via Reddit.)

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Robin says,

Ah, remember how large the Newbery Award used to loom? It seemed like every other book in the elementary school library bore one of those golden foil badges. Was just reminded of this by a lovely Ypulse post about the latest winner, a book called "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" by Laura Amy Schlitz:

Originally written in the form of monologues to be performed by her students, the Baltimore librarian wanted to make sure every one could get a part in the production of this piece. And no one wanted a small part.

There are 17 roles, a substantial piece for every single person in her fifth grade classes. She said in an interview that she wrote it with all of her students in mind. She remembered being so disappointed and sad when she would get a token tiny part in the school plays of her own childhood. If for only three minutes, she wanted everyone to be big, to be a star.

I am so going to read this book.

Also, as long as we're talking kids' stuff: Check out Peter Sis. His picture-books Starry Messenger (about Galileo) and The Tree of Life (about Darwin) are over-the-top beautiful and good.

Machines and Style

Robin says,

The wow-never-thought-about-it-that-way comment of the day:

I'm hoping the muscle car style dies with the internal combustion engine just as the Edwardian style died with the steam engine.

From Steve DeKorte, he of the Platonic blog design.

Writing in China

Robin says,

Very interesting (and long) write-up of literature in China over in the Guardian. There's this whole burgeoning scene of new writers with (of course) hugeaudiences, totally invisible to (ignored by?) the English-speaking world. Wish I could download Mandarin reading skills.

This bit caught my eye:

The general manager of Penguin China, Jo Lusby, is even more emphatic. "All credible interesting writing in China begins online at the moment," she says. "It's given an added boost because it exists in a relatively free space outside of the tight constraints of traditional publishers."

Super-interesting, right?

(Crossposted to Current.)

What's All This Fancy Stuff For, Anyway?

Robin says,

My favorite MacWorld analysis of all comes from Short Schrift:

At any rate, if Jobs' vision of Apple is an increasingly large number of devices on which we can watch Zoolander, I find myself much less enthusiastic about that vision or that world.

Agreed. Let's use technology to disrupt old formats and invent new ones -- not just deliver the same ol' stuff more efficiently.

Meta-Tilley

Robin says,

Eustace Tilley is that be-monocled dandy who you associate with the New Yorker. He was on the cover of the first issue in 1925, and now they're having a contest celebrating his foppish visage. (Not a fan. I think he's freaky.)

Mark Chadwick's entry definitively and preemptively gets my vote: He took the algorithmic approach and created a mosaic out of every single cover of the New Yorker.

The Old Cement Bridge

Matt says,

With ample and heartfelt apologies to Franklin Christenson Ware. (Bookslutty.)

Inside the Black Box

Robin says,

The best thing about it only being January 10 is that I can say, without reservation, that this is the best thing I've read all year: n+1's interview with a hedge fund manager. It includes a useful window into a little-known, but super-interesting, component of modern markets: quantitative trading driven by computer programs!

n+1: And so the computers themselves are making these trades?

HFM: You build the models and the computer does the trading. You actually do all the analysis. But it’s too many stocks for a human brain to handle, so it’s really just guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way.

n+1: So the computers are running the...

HFM: Yeah, the computer is sending out the orders and doing the trading.

n+1: It’s just a couple steps from that to the computers enslaving --

HFM: Yes, but I for one welcome our computer trading masters.

People actually call it "black box trading," because sometimes you don’t even know why the black box is doing what it's doing, because the whole idea is that if you could, you should be doing it yourself. But it's something that's done on such a big scale, a universe of several thousand stocks, that a human brain can’t do it in real time. The problem is that the DNA of a lot of these models is very, very similar, it's like an ecosystem with no biodiversity because most of the people who do stat-arb can trace their lineage, their intellectual lineage, back to four or five guys who really started the whole black box trading discipline in the '70s and '80s.

If you read on from that point in the article you'll learn about "ten-sigma events" -- if that doesn't sound like something from a dystopian anime series, I don't know what does.

There's also some really great discussion -- and explication -- of the whole sub-prime thing. It's long, but the conversational style makes it pretty digestible.

(Thanks to PoN for the link.)

News on a Shirt II

Robin says,

FYI, I am loving my t-shirt about the falling price of the U.S. dollar.

Pundits: The Eyeball Monster

Matt says,

There's a giant eyeball monster in Super Paper Mario that tracks you in every direction as you move around a room and shoots laser beams at you. To defeat it, Mario has to flip into 3D mode and run around and around it until it tries to shoot, gets confused, and implodes.

Eyeball monster = media pundits. Mario = '08 Presidential candidates. It's fun to watch.

Oh, and btw: Speaking of life imitating Mario, Andy Towle's right. The video for Janet Jackson's new single "Feedback" is so Super Mario Galaxy.

Let Us Now Praise Famous... Er... Bowls

Robin says,

Funniest thing ever, five minutes ago: Patton Oswalt doing his riff on KFC Famous Bowls.

Funniest thing ever, now: Patton Oswalt writing about actually eating a KFC Famous Bowl for the first time.

(From Marc Andreessen's blog, of all places. Weird!)

Self-Consuming

Matt says,

Infocult points to a Texas bride who had her cake made in her own image.

How Do You Look?

Robin says,

Here's a quirky, innovative piece from Current UK. I just spent five minutes trying to describe it, but kept deleting what I wrote because it didn't make any sense. You'll see what I mean. Odd, simple, recursive, riveting.

Shaw's Shelter

Robin says,

Philip Pullman used to write in a shed in his backyard. Roald Dahl did, too. But here is my new favorite story of a writer and his lair, from Witold Rybczynski's heart-bendingly good book The Most Beautiful House in the World:

George Bernard Shaw was largely indifferent to his physical surroundings -- his house at Ayot Saint Lawrence, where he lived during the last forty-four years of his long life, was a nondescript Victorian rectory. But Shaw too was a builder, and the writing room that he erected in his garden was a Shavian combination of simplicity, convenience, and novelty.

He called it "the Shelter," but it was really a shed, only eight feet square. It contained the essentials of the writer's trade -- a plank desk, en electric lamp, a wicker chair, a bookcase, and a wastepaper basket. Beside the desk was a shelf for his Remington portable -- like [Mark Twain], Shaw was an early amateur of the typewriter. There was also a telephone (modified to refuse incoming calls), a thermometer, and an alarm clock (to remind him when it was time for lunch).

Inside the door was a mat where the fastidious writer wiped his shoes. The shed was austere -- a vegetarian's workplace, one might say; the pine boards and framing were painted white on the inside and left to weather on the exterior. The door, which was placed in the center of the wall, included a glass pane and had a fixed window on each side; a small window on the rear wall opened for ventilation.

The Shelter incorporated an unusual technical feature. Shaw wrote in the morning, and it was to warm the unheated interior that he had located almost all of the glazed openings on one side. To increase the effectiveness of these windows, he devised a curious solution: instead of resting on a foundation, the floor was supported on a central steel pipe, which permitted the entire room to be manually turned, like a revolving Victorian bookstand. This way, Shaw could benefit from the morning sun at different times of year. According to his secretary, however, the hut was never rotated; once it was loaded with furniture and books, it was probably too heavy to move.

I love the one-way telephone.

And seriously, this book was terrific -- not just quirky housing anecdotes (though there are plenty of those), but deep, accessible thoughts on what houses can and do mean to us.

Into the Fold

Robin says,

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson on Obama and Iowa:

Obama's been drawing record crowds from San Francisco to Des Moines -- but there was always the question of whether he could produce a similar effect among real live voters.

He did so in a way that no one predicted. 57 percent of the caucus goers tonight had never caucused before. Most impressive: As many people under thirty showed up as senior citizens.

That's fucking nuts is what that is. That's the Rock the Vote political wet dream that never ever comes true... act