January 31, 2013
words for snow
Yes. Yes it is.
B is for Beastie, that's good enough for me
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop learning: Oscar, Grover, and Cookie Monster rockin' the Beastie Boys' "Sure Shot." [more inside]
Arms Manufacturers <3 Game Publishers
Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers. An investigation into how real life weapons are licensed for videogames, and how those videogames market guns to young people, published by gaming news site Eurogamer.
Evol's tiny world of apartments
Street artist Evol paints little apartment buildings on utility boxes, concrete blocks, park walls, and art installations (completed, but nothing lasts forever). More on his Flickr collection, or you can see highlights on Twisted Sifter.
Maps of global telecommunications
telegeography.com has a nice gallery of zoomable maps of global telecommunications and IT infrastructure, such as submarine cables (1 2), and internet backbones.
When Mrs Cohen met Mr Peake
In 1939 Mrs David Cohen, president of the Industrial Arts Society of New South Wales, addressed a literary luncheon on the subject of 'her eleven months sojourn in foreign places'. Of particular note was her meeting with a 'twenty-seven-year-old painter-poet, Mervyn Peake'.
My Kingdom for a Beer?
Heineken's "Eurotopia" The theory behind Heineken’s idea is that a larger number of smaller member-states would be easier to govern within a single European framework than a combination of larger states competing for dominance.
Winner's History of Rock and Roll
Grantland's Steven Hyden writes the winner's history of rock and roll, in four parts (so far), and charts the death of rock music as a major pop-cultural force in the 21st century by looking at some (not necessarily well-loved) bands that helped to transform it into a Big Business: Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith (and coming up in the next installment, Metallica). Rock isn't dead, by any means. But for better or worse, it ain't what it used to be.
Balham, Gateway to the South
Peter Sellers, best known for The Goons, Inspector Clouseau and Doctor Strangelove, also recorded sketches in the 1950s in which he supplied all of the voices.
Probably best known is his spoof of the 1950s travelogue, the ode to South London's finest neighbourhood - Balham, Gateway to the South, but the rest is also worth a listen. [more inside]
I'm calling dibs on the top bunk
A 6* chalet in the ski resort of Oberlech, Austria, has recently opened. The cost to rent it for a week? £231,088 - around $370,000. [more inside]
Return To Knytt
Knytt Underground is the latest indie platformer by developer Nifflas. If its anything like the other Knytt games, Knytt and Knytt Stories, its a gentle Metroidvania that emphasizes exploration and movement over combat. Knytt Underground is out for the PC and, unlike his other games, for the PS3 and Vita.
Holland's 9/11 happened sixty years ago today
Sixty years ago today, a combination of an unusually heavy storm in the North Sea and springtide, led to disaster along the shores of Britain, Belgium and especially the southwestern part of the Netherlands, killing 1836 people in the largest modern day flooding the country had seen. [more inside]
"How do I shut down Twitter?
HMVs across the world have been closing and losing their business to online retailers so they have been letting a lot of people go. Recently, they fired someone who had access to twitter. They live-tweeted the whole event.
Guerilla theatre. May contain actual gorilla.
Founded in 1999 and quickly winning over theatre critics and audiences alike, Abattoir Fermé is an avant-garde collective that was awarded the 2008 Flemish Culture Prize for its "penetrating and ominous theatre." [more inside]
Tiago Hoisel is an exceptionally talented illustrator coming from Brazil
Tiago Hoisel is a cool illustrator from São Paulo, Brazil. his work focus on humorous illustrations. interview with him reveal a simple and talented character. examples of his work : 1, 2, 3, 4. more can be found here and here.
TIE Fighter: A Post 9/11 Parable
More soundtracks for 2013!
DJ Nirso explores the connection between Africa, North and South America with tasteful remixes and mixtapes.
Is this Volkswagen ad racist?
Jamaican's seem to have no issue with Volkswagen's new Super Bowl ad, others however are of a different opinion, going so far as to deem the content racist.
But, what if the user hasn't done anything?
Most UI/UX experiences seem to concentrate on a busy user, but what if they are not? Empty States addresses how applications handle no content.
Dolphin Stampede
Earlier this year, a California whale watching boat was pleasantly surprised to encounter a pod of about a thousand common dolphins who decided to check them out. Some fun footage, including from underwater cameras, was used to create this video of the experience. [slyt] [via]
"It's the biggest privacy breach in our time, and it’s legal"
Your employer may share your salary, and Equifax might sell that data. "The Equifax credit reporting agency, with the aid of thousands of human resource departments around the country, has assembled what may be the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal information ever created, containing 190 million employment and salary records covering more than one-third of U.S. adults.
Some of the information in the little-known database, created through an Equifax-owned company called The Work Number, is sold to debt collectors, financial service companies and other entities."
Nothing happens if you respect the snake
A ten-day trip to the Mato Grosso do Sul to take pictures of anacondas worked out quite well for nature photographer Franco Banfi. (Videos from a similar expedition in 2010.)
Modem Love
Remember the sound of dialup modems handshaking? Here's what was happening.
"I give God 10%; Why do you get 18%"
Waitress whose co-worker scanned uncharitable receipt from Applebee's customer is fired after story goes viral. [more inside]
Seven Short Stories About Drones
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s. The Disposition Matrix. Anti-Drone Camouflage: What to Wear in Total Surveillance. Drone City. Books Not Bombs.
Please support tiny flower sparkle princess fairies in hip hop.
The new Kitty (formerly Kitty Pryde) EP, D.A.I.S.Y. Rage is out today for your free streaming/download. If'n you wanna tumblrize and girlize and otherwise coyly subvert yr hip hop. ☠DEAD❤ISLAND☠ video. Previously seen on MetaFilter for her Okay Cupid and Orion's Belt videos which sparked heated debates. Noisey has an interview with her, and she's also taking over their twitter for the day. "If her new EP feels like the work of an artist coming into their own, that’s because it is: It’s as cohesive a body of work as the rapper has ever put out, showcasing the crooked self-assurance that it takes to cop to shit like bed-wetting and making a song with a guy who rejected you."
VR Valiance
Dr. Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and expert in the psychology of superheroes, has conducted a new study showing that having people fly like Superman in a virtual-reality simulator makes them act more heroic in real life.
"Cemetary Baby" winning video
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
"De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves." (SLNYT)
Life without the hassles of living
Is being cool too much work? Enter CouchCachet, which checks you in to the hottest locations on Foursquare whenever you get home (after checking to make sure your friends have never been). And that is not all: among its other features, it will "tweet lyrics by indie bands that people haven’t heard of, wax poetic about local microbrews that you just discovered at some cool speakeasy and... upload low-fi pictures of 20-somethings in skinny jeans to your Instagram.”
The death of bricks-and-mortar retail
Marc Andreessen predicts the end of traditional retail.
Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative. You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model.
Don't fail your New Year's Resolution!
A Daruma doll will always remind you of your goal. First read it here then watched it here. Nana korobi yaoki!
Not pictured: British people
Lego riddles anyone?
Nuts
Yesterday, the Nielsen Company released a report showing that same-sex partnered households in America shop about 16% more than the average US household. Broken down into categories, Nielsen observes that gay couples drink a ton, while lesbian couples eat an awful lot of cottage cheese.
Mascot Bonanza!
Japan attempts to set the world record for the greatest number of mascots dancing at once. [more inside]
Cool for cats
James Bowen is a young man for whom life hasn’t always been kind. But a chance meeting on the streets of London where he was selling The Big Issue with Bob, his ginger cat, and Mary Pachnos, a literary agent, changed his life forever. Also Bob has a twitter like all the cool cats.
Duncan Jones to Helm Warcraft
Hollywood Reporter: "Duncan Jones is taking on Legendary Pictures' adaptation of the popular video game universe" [more inside]
NSFW: We like to entertain… ourselves mainly...
NSFW
We like to entertain… ourselves mainly… and it’s a comedy show much of the time, with little more than white walls and floorboards for a stage.
''Old Master'' shoots with just a cell phone or ipad. His compositions are definitely outside the norm, all with a cast of volunteers, no models.
This is amateur dramatics with a difference. (NSFW. BDSM, bondage, fetish).
Some of this work is included in this online book.
''Old Master'' shoots with just a cell phone or ipad. His compositions are definitely outside the norm, all with a cast of volunteers, no models.
This is amateur dramatics with a difference. (NSFW. BDSM, bondage, fetish).
Some of this work is included in this online book.
A Lifetime of Happiness, Part 2
Ada Laurie Bryant, 97, and Robert Mitchell Haire, 86, were married last Saturday. The two met in 2007 at their retirement community and were widow and widower. They began going on regular lunch dates after they both realized they hate going to dinner alone, even though they knew it meant they might be labeled a "couple" by the other residents. The bride is keeping her name.
The stuff of fairy tales
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is the first major video game to be developed by the legendary animation house Studio Ghibli (previously). Reviews are mostly ecstatic, with praise for its music and graphics. And Brainy Gamer speculates that, like Zelda and The Elder Scrolls before it, the game will be remembered because of its connection to the "perilous realm" that J.R.R. Tolkien described.
Pledge Now!
Got an extra wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, but that NPR fund drive doesn't start for another two weeks? Run out of useful Kickstarter campaigns to back? It's Pledge Weak on the internet!
How the 808 got its cymbal sound and inspiration - a brief NAMM tale.
Rhythm King - "Don had been hired by the Hammond organ company to demo its products on the show floor. He was using an Ace Tone rhythm box (which was distributed by Hammond at the time) as his percussion section. "I had modified my Ace Tone to death, changed all the rhythms because none of them fit my style of playing. I also wired it through the expression pedal of the Hammond, so I could get [percussion] accents, which no one was doing then. After the show this man from Japan came up and the first thing out of his mouth was ‘that looks like my rhythm unit but it doesn’t sound like my rhythm unit! How did you do that?’" It was Ikutaro Takehashi, the president of Ace."
Storyboard: Make video files into PDF books
Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them. Normally that would involve putting the TV on in the background and ignoring the video while listening to the audio, but what about the reverse? All visual without the audio. On my kindle. via waxy [more inside]
Essay: Moral Shortcomings in the Technology Debate
Digital and genetic techniques increasingly influence life. Our belief in progress through technology stands in the way of a moral debate on this development. ~ by Rinie van Est
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