May 2006

My new favorite song comes courtesy of this Ask MetaFilter thread I posted. The identity of the song had been driving me crazy for weeks, ever since I first heard it play in a commercial for HBO Documentary Films before a movie at the Landmark Theater by my apartment. Ask MeFi to the rescue! Within hours, site members had it pegged — “Sparks Fly”, by Daniel Agust (mp3).

• Cheap 1GB mp3 player / recorder.
  (tags: tobuy audio tools media)
• Six new typefaces for Windows.
  via
  (tags: typography article webdesign fonts windows)

• Sidenotes: easy footnotes for websites.
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  (tags: css academia javascript html)
• Cool visualizations of global statistics.
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  (tags: cool google flash maps politics reference tools)

• Military ponders cloak of invisibility.
  (tags: cool future tech ideas science)

The e-mail forwards I’ve been receiving remind me commencement season is upon us. And that means one thing: great speeches. Here’s a list of some great ones from the past 70 years.

• Google Video – Tod Browning’s “Freaks.”
  (tags: video movies culture)
• $100 laptop prototype photos released.
  (tags: computer design future internet photos)
• Martha Stewart to launch MomSpace.
  via
  (tags: social gender internet culture community)
• Fantastic, overpriced wall graphics/letters.
  via
  (tags: art cool design furniture tobuy typography beautiful)
• Roger Caillois’ patterns of play.
  (tags: games geek academia culture toread)
• This is cruel but awesome.
  (tags: computer funny blog shopping culture)

File under Dept. of Effusive Praise: Larry Lessig calls Davis Guggenheim’s doc on global warming and Al Gore “the most extraordinary lecture I have ever seen anyone give about anything.”

I saw the film with a bunch of Current folks and it was great. Go see it this weekend if you can.

Added bonus: There’s actually some rise of the image fall of the word mojo happening with this movie; both it and the slide show it’s based on use images, moving and still, to communicate complicated ideas in an extraordinarily efficient way.

Roy Peter Clark quotes James Carey in a remembrance on poynter.org:

“Listen: You don’t feel well, so you go to see the psychiatrist. And the doctor listens to your story. And, if he’s a good doctor, he’s listening for the parts of the story that are making you feel sick. His job is then to help you tell a new story about yourself, especially one that will make you well. Newspapers are the same way. Journalists are telling each other stories about themselves that are making them sick. So the remedy is to tell a new story about journalism that will help make journalism healthy again.”

• Awesome picture-in-picture navigation.
  (tags: ajax beautiful cool shockwave photos slideshow)

“Well that’s the strategy our president picked. We try to act behind the scenes, and we follow our clients’ desires, instructions and everything, so our policy is not to have a vision.”

That’s Koichi Sawada from game developer Tose, in an interview with Gamasutra. Tose is like the video game equivalent of Flextronics: a behind-the-scenes partner to lots of big, well-known companies. The interview is weirdly fascinating.