Posts by matt

Yet another testament to the infinite remixability of Jane Austen:

First, it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Seth Grahame-Smith novel due out in May that intersperses Austen’s familiar prose with scenes of “bone crunching zombie action,” which reportedly already has Hollywood studios vying to acquire its rights. Now comes the news that Elton John’s Rocket Pictures intends to produce Pride and Predator, “which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.”

Pride and Predator! Genius! And yes, I know, Northanger Abbey is already sort of a horror story, or a send-up of one. If you’ve got a better title idea, put it in the comments.

How is it that it’s been four whole days and nobody’s alerted me to BuzzFeed’s Wikipedia Band Name Generator? My band is called Newport Historic District, and our first album is titled, “Cooling Influences of the World.” The album cover will be an artful crop of this image.

One eyebrow raises: The Minneapolis Star Tribune published an original article about the Singularity.

Both eyebrows raise: They illustrated the story with this image, by Mark Boswell.

I sort of love this. Thanks, Taylor.

Seriously?? When asked, 34% of Americans say they want to live in Orlando, making it the fifth most desirable city in the country? Are these people talking about the same Orlando I grew up in and now assiduously avoid? The country’s preeminent symbol of suburban suck? In what the New Yorker recently nicknamed “The Ponzi State”?

And my beloved Minneapolis, with its resplendent lakes and parks and great restaurants and arts and culture and evenforPetessake the Mall of America, is one of the five least popular?! That’s just messed up.

Discussions around the consequences of a truly connected planet have been going on for some time in our organisation, and maybe also in yours. Fivedollarcomparison.org is a small step to broaden the discussion and explore how the impact might vary across cultures and contexts by asking a simple question: What can you buy for five dollars?

For five dollars, you can buy a giant bucket of potatoes in Peru, park a bike in Montreal for two hours, or get a pound of licorice in California. On the one hand, this is a vivid representation of costs of living across the world. On the other hand, I’m hungry. (Via Bruno Giussani.)

We can agree to disagree about Sasha Frere-Jones. David Remnick and I like him, and I’m increasingly convinced we’re alone in that regard. But few critics derive as much pleasure from discussing pop trifles, or do it with as much pizzazz. Clearly I was not about to let his paean to Beyonce go unremarked. Best observation: “‘Single Ladies’ is an infectious, crackling song and would be without fault if it weren’t the bearer of such dull advice. The wild R&B vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What’s next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low sodium soy sauce?”

Low-sodium soy sauce! Swish!

Oh, why not. She had me at the paisley fire. This video for this movie was shown at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishers conference today:

A synopsis might help:

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. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

An intriguing aside from a long Silicon Alley Insider article:

I do wonder whether Twitter’s success is partially based on Google teaching us how to compose search strings? Google has trained us how to search against its index by composing concise, intent-driven statements. Twitter with its 140 character limit picked right up from the Google search string. The question is different (what are you doing? vs. what are you looking for?) but the compression of meaning required by Twitter is I think a behavior that Google helped engender. Maybe Google taught us how to Twitter.

I’m not sure if there’s enough evidence to make the claim that Google taught us how to Twitter (did it then also teach us how to text?). But I wonder what else Google might have taught us. Has the nature of our Google queries changed over time? Do we type fewer words? More? How does our use of Google compare to the first generation of search engines?