Archive for February, 2008
This Is Not a Music Blog
No links to MP3s next week, I promise. But MGMT is super-fun. Try “Time to Pretend.”
Clouds
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
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
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
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
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.
Stratastencil
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
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
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?
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.