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mefi
Technology/sex columnist
Violet Blue (
previously) has been
reporting from this year's Macworld trade fair for ZDNet; among her reportage was
a photograph of a woman sitting in a booth, labelled as "The Saddest Booth Babe In The World". Later it emerged that the woman in question was not, in fact, a booth babe (i.e., a model hired to smile, hand out flyers and appeal to the heterosexual male gaze) but rather an iOS developer presenting her products, hence her less-than-effervescent demeanour. Blue's
response was
somewhat evasive, suggesting that her (and, in her opinion, the average attendee's) expectation upon seeing a woman at a booth at a technology event would be that she would be there for decorative purposes.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:23 PM on February 2, 2012
(159 comments)
As the Occupy protests spread, the latest phenomenon to emerge is
the Stealthy Wealthy. Sensitive to negative perceptions of extreme wealth inequality in hard times, and concerned about the possibility of
history repeating itself, the super-rich have been
swapping their limousines for nondescript-looking yet luxuriously outfitted cargo vans.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 11:03 AM on November 29, 2011
(94 comments)
An article in the Guardian asks
why do so many Goths stick with their subculture through their adult lives, through career, parenthood and well into middle age.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:59 AM on October 26, 2011
(104 comments)
Joyce Carol Vincent, 38, died in her North London flat in 2003; her skeleton was found three years later, on the sofa; the television was still on, and a pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. The story was mentioned briefly in the press, but then forgotten. Now, filmmaker Carol Morley has tracked down and interviewed people who knew her before she retreated and
reconstructed her story, all the more tragic because of the deceptively promising life it showed.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 6:12 PM on October 9, 2011
(63 comments)
Over the past 13 years, Berlin resident
Klaus Beyer has
translated the Beatles' entire oeuvre into German, recording the translated songs in his home studio and releasing them on
CDs with titles like
Gummi Seele,
Kloster strasse and
Das Gelbe Underwasserboot, even recreating the cover artwork of the originals.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 10:39 AM on September 1, 2011
(24 comments)
Australia's federal Department of Infrastructure and Transport has
released an initial report into the prospects of building a high-speed rail link joining the eastern states. The report (which may be found
here) lists a number of potential corridors joining Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, and gives the total cost of building the system at AUD100bn. The resulting system would allow journeys between Melbourne and Sydney (currently the world's
fourth busiest air route) in just under three hours, and Sydney and Brisbane in a further three. Tickets between Melbourne and Sydney would be priced at AUD99 to AUD197, with Sydney-Brisbane tickets being slightly cheaper.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:44 AM on August 4, 2011
(50 comments)
Prison administrators in China have found a new use for forced prison labour:
gold-farming operations, in which prisoners play multiplayer games for hours on end, handing over the gold they acquire to the guards, who sell it online for real money.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:00 PM on May 25, 2011
(93 comments)
Slavoj Žižek on WikiLeaks
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:26 AM on January 14, 2011
(65 comments)
Depressing million-dollar London property. Even in the economic crisis, £635,000 doesn't get you much inside the M25: you can take your pick of
a worker's cottage near a football stadium,
an Australian backpacker-style apartment near Earl's Court,
a 2-bedroom house right near the ring road or various other similarly dispiriting residences.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 9:16 AM on October 12, 2010
(52 comments)
Good news for Nick Clegg, deputy Prime Minister of the UK and leader of the Liberal Democrats: he's more popular than the Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron. Perhaps not so good news for the Liberal Democrats' image: that's
with Tory party activists. Meanwhile,
Cameron has professed his love of Macs and iPads in an interview, undoubtedly causing Apple to become instantly uncool in much the way
The Smiths and Paul Weller did a few years ago.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 10:40 AM on October 4, 2010
(54 comments)
When a thief stole a backpack and a GPS unit from Amanda Enayati's car, he
picked the wrong target to mess with.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:02 AM on September 21, 2010
(222 comments)
On the 19th of October, a Deutsche Bahn
ICE3 train
will travel from Germany to London through the Channel Tunnel.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:30 AM on September 20, 2010
(60 comments)
Dark Patterns is a list of deliberately user-hostile web site design patterns typically intended to deceive or exploit unwary users. These range from the trivial and clumsy (
interfaces designed to impair price comparisons) to slyer tricks such as
sneaking add-ons into shopping baskets,
making specific options deliberately hard to find and
spamming all your friends, typically
after getting permission on a false pretext. Among the offenders listed are the likes of Ryanair, CreditExpert, various travel and electronics shopping sites, and, of course, Facebook, which has
its very own pattern.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:28 AM on September 17, 2010
(69 comments)
A man believed to be a MI6 employee has been
found murdered in a flat in Pimlico.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 5:00 AM on August 25, 2010
(84 comments)
American Apparel, the clothing company which became synonymous with the "hipster" look of the 2000s,
is facing bankruptcy.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:10 AM on August 22, 2010
(137 comments)
The Rap Guide To Human Nature is an album exploring the theories and controversies of evolutionary psychology through the medium of contemporary rap, by a guy named
Baba Brinkman. (
Previously.)
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:53 AM on August 5, 2010
(9 comments)
The Guardian has
an article on Pimm's, a traditional gin-based English summer drink. Invented by one James Pimm in London in 1840, Pimm's soon became associated with upper-class institutions and the British Empire; its popularity declined somewhat in the decades following World War 2 (apart from a few revivals as part of ironic constructions of "Britishness"), though it has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity. Recipes for serving Pimm's vary, though they typically involve mixing it with lemonade and/or ginger beer in a jug and adding oranges, strawberries, sliced cucumber and mint. While the formula remains a secret, knockoffs do exist (both Sainsbury's and Aldi sell their own substitutes, though Sainsbury's
had to change the label on its to look less like the original), or you could try
making your own.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 3:19 AM on May 19, 2010
(151 comments)
Where music geekery and typographical geekery intersect:
Rock That Font looks knowledgeably at the typography of notable album covers.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:29 AM on April 30, 2010
(7 comments)
Mattel are reportedly planning to
change the rules of Scrabble to allow proper nouns, to bring in younger players and "introduce an element of pop culture into the game".
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:35 AM on April 6, 2010
(146 comments)
Iraq gave us the heavy-metal band
Acrassicauda (
previously), who have recently relocated to the US and released
their first EP. In Iran,
indie-pop is a dangerously subversive underground phenomenon, with innocuous-sounding twee-pop bands hiding from persecution by the authorities. And now Afghanistan has
Kabul Dreams, a duo who dress in skinny jeans and cardigans and write songs inspired by British guitar bands like Oasis, Radiohead and The Beatles.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:54 AM on April 1, 2010
(6 comments)
In 1937, the London News Chronicle published a photograph of five boys at the gates of Lord's cricket ground; two stood aloof in top hats and tails, with their backs to a group of three working-class lads. The resulting photograph became famous as a metaphor for the class divide in Britain, appearing in newspaper stories about school reform, inequality and bourgeois guilt and on the
covers of books. The photograph appeared in the Getty Images archive as "
Toffs and Toughs", and even was printed on a jigsaw puzzle in 2004. The identities of the three working-class boys were unknown until a journalist tracked them down in 1998;
here is an article on the history of the photograph and the lives of the five boys in it.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 6:59 PM on March 23, 2010
(36 comments)
Those who have watched a lot of Hollywood movies over the past few years may have noticed a trend: many of these films
sport a uniform palette of teal and orange, a result of the availability of digital colour-grading. Originally derived from applying complementary colour theory to human skin tones to make them stand out more, the teal-and-orange rule has spread, and is now being lazily applied across the board, whether appropriate or not.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 9:57 AM on March 19, 2010
(125 comments)
A future history of the CD revival. In response to a piece on
cassette culture (
previously), music writer Tom Ewing reports from the 2020s' revival of interest in the compact disc format, and the interplays between hazy memories of growing up in the '00s, reaction against networked "social playlists", and a fetishisation of both the "glossy, uneasy sheen" of the CD sound and the constraints in working with physical artefacts.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 8:33 AM on March 5, 2010
(56 comments)
Veteran Australian pop satirist
New Waver, best known for covers of pop songs rewritten from a pessimistically neo-Darwinian point of view, has a new album out. Titled
Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody, it looks at the subjects of gentrification, the explosion of revivalist styles in "hip" music, contemporary white-collar culture, the ideology of the "creative class" in the post-industrial age and the resulting oversupply of cultural products, through the medium of cover songs and musical montage. The album is free for dowloading from
New Waver's web site; there is a more detailed explanation
here, and a video for the song "Hey Dude" (which explains the dynamics of gentrification through the medium of a Beatles cover)
here.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 5:21 PM on February 28, 2010
(14 comments)
Recently, a postgraduate researcher in journalism attended a talk about the challenges of Australia's aging population, given by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Afterwards, when a member of the group she was in introduced her to Rudd and mentioning the PhD she was completing, Rudd
rolled his eyes and remarked that that is the "excuse" that "all" young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 11:47 AM on February 16, 2010
(121 comments)
London's transport system has a visual identity instantly recognised (and often
imitated) around the world, of which a key part is
Edward Johnston's typeface, originally designed for the London Underground.
(
Previously.) However, this may not be the case for much longer; the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has revealed
plans to give all official London bodies a unified identity, based on that of the
Visit London tourism campaign. There is already
a Facebook group protesting the proposal.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 3:45 PM on February 13, 2010
(36 comments)
Originally developed for military tasks,
amphibious buses have found a niche running
tourist services in various cities around the world. But now, Scotland is about to get
the first timetabled amphibious bus passenger service, replacing a ferry route in Glasgow and extending it inland to a nearby town and a shopping centre.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 10:26 AM on February 8, 2010
(49 comments)
The British government has announced plans to
make Ordnance Survey map data freely available online. The
Ordnance Survey is the government-funded agency which maps the country at high resolutions. Unlike the US Geological Survey's public-domain data, Ordnance Survey maps are proprietary, and licensed only under restrictive terms and for hefty fees, including to local governments; setting the data free is said to produce a £156 net economic gain. (
Previously)
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 6:31 PM on November 17, 2009
(37 comments)
US Crude Oil Production vs. Rock Music Quality, by year. Is
Rockism the cultural equivalent of
Hubbert Peak Theory?
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:20 PM on November 11, 2009
(41 comments)
Juan Cabral, the commercial maker behind the
Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad has completed a new piece: this time, he and collaborators, including Múm, Richard Fearless (of Death In Vegas) and the people behind Sigur Rós' live concerts,
transformed the Icelandic town of
Sey∂isfjör∂ur into an ambient sound installation, placing speakers throughout the town, playing music (from folk to electronica to ambient orchestral) and filming the reactions of the locals as they went about their lives.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 10:54 AM on October 12, 2009
(17 comments)
The
British postcode system, one of the things which Britain arguably does better than anyone else,
is 50 years old. The system divides the entire UK into alphanumeric postal districts organised in a hierarchy, with the first one or two letters denoting a postal area (typically a city or the environs of one, though London has several). Unlike systems elsewhere (such as the US, Australia, and most of Europe), it doesn't stop at the neighbourhood level, with each 5-to-7-character full postcode denoting a segment of a street. This makes it useful for applications other than addressing mail, such as navigation; as such, you can enter a postcode into
Google Maps or a satellite navigation unit and be shown exactly where it refers to.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 3:40 PM on October 3, 2009
(126 comments)
An article in an art-related blog
recently mentioned a new installation by a Columbus, Ohio conceptual artist named Richard Whitehurst: an exhibit reachable only by a tunnel, growing progressively narrower,
with the artist waiting to rape anybody who attempted to pass.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 5:30 PM on October 1, 2009
(41 comments)
Film director
Roman Polanski, who won numerous awards for films like
Chinatown and
The Pianist, has been
detained for extradition to the US, whilst travelling to Switzerland to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zürich Film Festival.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 6:55 AM on September 27, 2009
(581 comments)
Love
Helvetica and modernist typographic design? Seen the
film? Now, with the power of browser userscripts, you can have the 20th-century high-modernist experience in your favourite web applications. Scripts exist to Helveticise
Gmail,
Twitter and
Google Reader, and work with a variety of modern browsers.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 3:19 PM on September 15, 2009
(69 comments)
How Wal-Mart's values are shaping America's economy -- and why this is a very bad thing:
Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law.
Walton was furious. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure. Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:00 AM on September 14, 2009
(259 comments)
Roxy Freeman was born into an Gypsy family. For years, her family travelled around Ireland in a horsedrawn wagon, without electricity or formal schooling, getting by on picking fruit and selling horses they bred, before settling in Norfolk. Roxy taught herself to read, devoured books, and, after travelling the world for a number of years, decided to go to university, a move which would require her to completely change her way of life. Living in a flat in Brighton, a way of life which she finds bizarre and alien, she
has written about her childhood, her family's culture and the difficulties and prejudices she encountered, for the Guardian.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:37 PM on September 7, 2009
(14 comments)
A new documentary by a Swedish-based Italian filmmaker examines how media mogul turned two-time president Silvio Berlusconi's 30-year grip on Italian television has shaped the country, its politics, its culture and society. Erik Gandini's
Videocracy, which screens at the Venice Film Festival, starts 30 years ago, when Berlusconi introduced a quiz show whose female contestants stripped for the camera, and charts 30 years of showgirls, celebrities, reality TV shows and Berlusconi's rise to political power, and interviews characters of the system, including a talentless but fame-hungry TV contestant, a fascist-sympathising media fixer, and a paparazzo/extortionist turned celebrity. More details
here and (with a trailer)
here.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 2:11 PM on September 5, 2009
(14 comments)
A teenaged graffiti artist in London has been arrested after
stealing a box of pencils which were part of a Damien Hirst sculpture. The purloined pencils have been valued at £500,000, making this potentially one of the highest value art thefts in modern Britain.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:25 AM on September 4, 2009
(142 comments)
Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish puts forward
five principles of good social software design, and five anti-patterns, or ways to get it wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 1:32 AM on August 9, 2009
(59 comments)
The Guardian ran a series of articles looking at the state of high-speed rail travel today. France intends to
double its length of track over the next decade, and China is planning
a massive rail-building programme, including a high-speed line which will halve the travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to 4 hours.
In Germany, domestic air travel is rapidly going extinct, and Spain's network has made
day trips between Madrid and Barcelona a possibility. The USA, which has long neglected its rail network, is
planning up to 10 high-speed lines. Meanwhile, Britain's only high-speed line goes to France, but there is talk of
a 250mph line from London to Birmingham and beyond, possibly by the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the CEO of France's rail operator, SNCF,
weighs in on what the UK should do.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:12 PM on August 7, 2009
(49 comments)
The latest tool to challenge homophobia:
same-sex hand-holding. This past weekend, a
same-sex hand-holding relay was held in London, to coincide with Olympic-related events. It's not just for gay and lesbian couples; sympathetic heterosexuals are
encouraged to join in and take a stand, or rather a stroll, for tolerance.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 9:52 AM on July 31, 2009
(71 comments)
The latest craze among yobs in Amsterdam seems to be
Smart tossing.
Jeremy Clarkson would undoubtedly approve, were he not busy
urging Britain to invade France.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 9:30 AM on July 27, 2009
(47 comments)
The
author of a
new book on how rising oil prices will change America makes the claims that
higher gasoline prices will make the country healthier and safer. Christopher Steiner asserts that, for every $1 that gasoline prices rise, obesity rates drop by 10% (as people walk more and eat out less). As for "safer", that comes in when high gasoline prices force police out of their cruisers and onto bicycles and foot patrols, where they can interact more closely with their communities.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 3:58 AM on July 22, 2009
(61 comments)
He lives somewhere in LA,
looks like Michael Jackson and
Barack Obama, loves
rap, chess,
nachos, movies and pizza, has some
comic books to sell, and
wants to meet white, Asian and Latina Ladies with big butts to give him money, be his sex slaves, or just help him with Things. Performance art project or genuine kook?
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 5:49 PM on July 16, 2009
(44 comments)
UAE phone company pushes BlackBerry update with embedded spyware. The United Arab Emirates phone company
Etisalat recently sent out a firmware update to its BlackBerry-using customers, billed as a “performance enhancement patch”. After customers reported the patch degrading their handsets' performance and draining their batteries more rapidly, a programmer examined it and found that it contained spyware from
a US company, which could be remotely activated to forward all emails and text messages to a third-party server.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:55 AM on July 15, 2009
(31 comments)
A new US study, recently published in
Social Science Quarterly, has shown that
the more uncommon or feminine a boy's first name is, the greater the likelihood that he will end up in prison.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 7:37 AM on July 14, 2009
(103 comments)
The 10 smartest and stupidest iPhone apps, according to British technology website The Register. The smartest apps include things like personal databases, information tools and music streaming and identification apps. The stupid section is a morass of farts, poop, pickup lines and badly rendered, vaguely creepy pictures of girls.
Idiocracy, it seems, has come early to the App Store.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 9:48 AM on July 9, 2009
(54 comments)
The New York Times commissioned Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to travel around the United States and take
photographs of abandoned construction projects left in the wake of the housing and securities market collapse.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 8:14 AM on July 7, 2009
(263 comments)
Controversy has erupted in Britain after it emerged that Prince Charles
used his personal influence with Qatari royalty to sack modernist architect Richard Rogers from a development in London. Charles has been an
outspoken critic of modern architecture and advocate of neo-traditionalist styles, and even
created a model village to showcase his ideas about "proper" architecture. Charles' preferred replacement for Rogers is Quinlan Terry, known for his neo-classicist leanings.
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:39 AM on June 16, 2009
(95 comments)
Lullatone are a half-Japanese, half-American duo based in Japan who make music that can probably best be described as twee folktronica; a recent EP of theirs is titled "Little Songs About Raindrops". And now, you can make your own with
their Raindrop Melody Maker Flash web toy, which looks a bit like a pastel-coloured
Tenori-On:
posted to MetaFilter by acb
at 4:35 PM on June 4, 2009
(9 comments)
