Posts by matt

Philips Electronics bought the first page of Time and four other magazines (space usually reserved for ads) and will put the mags’ table of contents there. Taking off the journalistic umbrage hat for a moment, purely as a reader, I would love this. And the whole Philips “Simplicity” campaign is kind of genius.

People throw skeptical glances my direction when I say I enjoyed living in Fresno. But it’s true. I often describe Fresno as having been completely emptied of people sometime in 1943, and repopulated only in the last few years. That’s not how it was at all, but the city is filled with traces of incredible, abandoned Americana — gorgeous motel signs, classic theaters, dive bars, thrift stores. The city is phenomenally diverse, more culturally varied than even the rest of California, which itself makes the rest of the US look inbred.

When I interviewed for the job in Fresno, among the things that drew me to the city was coming across one of those old, beautiful motel signs. It was just sitting in a parking lot, leaning against a building in the middle of nowhere (it was downtown, but “middle of nowhere” still kind of applies). I figured the sign had to have a story, and I loved the thought of being a reporter there and getting to unearth that story.

Months later, I found out that the sign was leaning against the building that housed the H Street Collective, a space for some of Fresno’s most brilliant artists to practice and display their work. H Street was a beautiful nightmare. Its walls were covered to the last inch in the most grotesque, eyepopping, otherwordly art. The bathroom of the collective was the artists’ sandbox, stuffed with visual ideas and experiments, half-painted creatures, obscenities, paint on the floor, on the toilets, on the stall doors.

The H Street that was is no longer. But you can still find the work of some of the artists on many of the walls of Fresno. And one of my favorite H Street artists, Mehran Heard, has an awesome Web site.

Just to prove I can actually still write posts longer than five words for Snarkmarket, here’s an awesome New York Times article about mounted police. Enjoy!

• CP: Al Franken, Senator? Q&A.
  (tags: article interviews politics twincities)

• A decade of search engines.
  (tags: search article internet)
• TYFSmoking title sequence typography. (Kottke)
  (tags: animation design fonts movies typography video)

• Lifehack: Keep headphone wires untangled.
  (tags: lifehacks music tips)
• 3QD: Palm Pilot, Human Brain.
  (tags: essay science ideas philosophy toread)
• Sleep more, lose weight. (Wired)
  (tags: article science diet sleep obesity)

MetaFilter has long had one unbreakable rule: Thou shalt not self-link. Thou mayest e-mail thy link to thine fellow MeFites, but never, never must thou posteth said link to the front page of MetaFilter.

This rule kept a lot of crappy Web hobbyist sites from being posted to MetaFilter, I’m sure. But it also meant that MeFites who made something legitimately post-worthy often wouldn’t get their stuff linked on the site until it had already become popular somewhere else. So Matt Haughey created MeFi Projects, where members could pimp their own stuff to their hearts’ content. Other members could vote for the stuff they liked best, and post it to MeFi if they wanted.

It’s been wildly popular. Just yesterday, Adrian Holovaty posted about his databasing the tragic, excellent Washington Post “Faces of the Fallen” project.

And it just got totally better. Matt Haughey has made an archive of the most popular projects by month.

Favorite new discovery? Roundtuit: a community blog for posting the great ideas you’ll never do.

You guys rock. Can someone put this on a t-shirt? (From this post on MNSpeak. See also.)

P.S.: Gavin totally reminded me. Add me.

Ian promises to do for shoelace-tying what the Japanese did for t-shirt-folding. (Boing.)

This was on PBS last night.