August 1, 2012
Like a cargo cult to 50 Cent
A recent trend in the ultra-fashion-conscious world of Tokyo teen girls: B-Style, or "black lifestyle", that is, emulating the black women in rap videos. In the video you will see Japanese girls with weaves and incredibly dark tans to mimic black skin. Rebellious rejection of convention, or weird sideways racism (one girl says: "when we do it it looks vulgar, but not on the black women")?
Kink tour
A peal to authority
"Ryan Holiday is not an expert in barefoot running, investing, vinyl records, or insomnia. But he is a liar. With a little creative use of the internet, he’s been quoted in news sources from small blogs to the most reputable outlets in the country talking about all of those things." [more inside]
We read to know we are not alone.
American Photojournalist Steve McCurry has posted a series of photographs of people reading around the world on his blog. He also connects them with quotations on books and reading.
McCurry is the photographer of the famous photograph Afghan Girl on National Geographic's cover a few years back.
Earlier posts on Metafilter on McCurry include this and this
And here is some music to listen to while thinking about books.
Images from SF conventions of the past
SF conventions, and snapshots of SF conventions, go back a long time. Here's Midwestcon 2, put on by the Cincinnati Fantasy group in June 1951; shots include a haunting image of Henry Burwell, publisher of Atlanta zine Science Fiction Digest, and an already-old E.E. "Doc" Smith. From Retronaut, an unnamed 1980 con in LA. From the Mills photo archive, con costumes from the late 60s through the 80s. Forrest Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, in "futuristic costume" at the first WorldCon in 1939. This last from the endless compendium that is the MidAmerican Fan Photo Archive.
PSCYVOTV
Yeasayer: We have received a message that we are on the verge of embargoed information being leaked through the cracks of the digital universe. Once again an attempt to tell the story before our mouths can spit. In order to have the edge we have created PSCYVOTV standing for PREEMPTIVE SELF-COMMISSIONED YEASAYER VORSTELLUNG or TRACK VISUALIZER. [more inside]
The Business of Bond
Like James Bond movies? And box office grosses? And visualized data? Then today is your lucky day.
in Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on
Requiem for an Occupation: The New York Times visits Oakland, California, "the last refuge of radical America." Previously and previouslier. [more inside]
Tell The Man to get out of your Face(book)
Illinois (joining Maryland) bans employers from requesting applicant or employee social networking passwords. [more inside]
My First Prototype Post
Prototypes are usually the missing links in the evolution of human technology, the dead-ends of ideas that give way to the refinement of the final physical product. Prototypes aren't just for Darth Vader. While the legal back and forth between Apple and Samsung continues, a treasure trove of prototype designs for Apple devices has been released to the public, showing insights into various design approaches and feature enhancements, including larger form-factor iPads with and without kickstands and landscape ports and iPhones that parody the Sony logo, show a different layout for camera elements, and look remarkably like fourth-generation models, as far back as 2005. On the other hand, some have made prototypes into the end goal itself, such as the folks at Dangerous Prototypes, a site which features a new open-source electronic hardware project each month. Some are just gratuitous fun, while others are a bit more practical, such as one project that recycles old Nokia displays and another that provides access to infrared signal, useful for hacking together remote controls for all sorts of IR-based devices. Other prototypes of tomorrow's technology are less concerned with shrinking down the guts of the invention itself, to make it disappear, but rather on how we interact with and integrate physical representations of these ideas into our daily lives. Above all else, prototypes are always forward-looking and are therefore inherently optimistic expressions of human creativity: Even children are getting into imagining the world of tomorrow.
A Bottle of the Widow
In 1799, at the age of 21, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married Francois Clicquot, the son of a Reims wool merchant and vintner. After his untimely death in 1805, she was left, at 27, with a five year old daughter and became known as the Veuve Clicquot. [more inside]
You know decent people when you meet them. The Quinns are decent people.”
"The Quinns are decent people." At a rally in County Cavan thousands of people showed up to support local business man Seán Quinn. From local sports personalities to high profile priests to ordinary people, they came to support the man once known as Ireland's richest man. [more inside]
Syrian war in video
Watching Syria's War [Caution: war]. The New York Times is posting video coming out of the Syrian Civil War with context and background: Street Fighting in Allepo (related), Crusader Castle Becomes Rebel Redoubt (AFP report), Tank Stalking, Harrowing ride through the streets of Homs. The online video has "allowed the war to be documented like no other", according to the Times, presumably because of the ubiquity of video cameras among the fighters and access to the Internet.
I'll be back
Visionaries
Revisiting Cinefex - a nostalgia wormhole into the golden age of model work and practical effects and the odd piece of early CG via backissues of the quarterly magazine of motion picture visual effects. The latest issues covered touches on Young Sherlock Holmes's Stained glass knight - mainstream cinema’s first fully-rendered CG character created by Industrial Light & Magic's Pixar group.
“A Republic, if You Can Keep It”
"[T]he corrupting influence of money is the first problem facing this nation. That unless we solve this problem, we won’t solve anything else... The Framers, Lessig says, had just one kind of dependence in mind for members of Congress: a dependence on the people. He quotes The Federalist (the then-anonymous essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay that are often used as a contemporary account of the Framers’ intentions) to make this point: number 52 describes the House of Representatives as that “branch of the federal government which ought to be dependent on the people alone” (emphasis added).
But in the last two decades, Lessig writes, members of Congress have developed a fearsome dependency: campaign cash. The total amount spent on campaigns by all candidates for Congress in 2010 was $1.8 billion. Fundraising has become a way of life..." (via 3 Quarks Daily)
The making of a swimsuit
How Speedo Created A Record-Breaking Swimsuit: After officials banned the swimsuit that caused records to fall at the 2008 Games, scientists are back with a new outfit that could break more. [more inside]
The gang spends an entire episode waiting for a Chinese restaurant’s website to load
Seinfeld 2012 Imagining the characters from the now-vintage sitcom dealing with current technology and social media. From the creator of the beloved Beartato.
The Greatest Films of All Time, 2012
Sight & Sound's prestigious Greatest Films of All Time poll is conducted only once per decade. The latest edition polled 846 film critics (up from 144 in the 2002 edition) and 358 directors. The results were revealed earlier today and, for the first time since 1962, Citizen Kane has not topped either the critics' or the directors' poll. It has been unseated as the Greatest Film of All Time by Vertigo and Tokyo Story. The magazine has also revealed the Critics' Top 50. [more inside]
"I hate myself."
The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater. All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.
What's that golden thing in the sky?
London Mayor and favourite for next Tory leader Boris Johnson has thrown himself into the Olympic spirit. This doesn't always go entirely to plan, leaving the blond mop-head hanging around for a while this afternoon. Fortunately, the Internet knows exactly what to do. From standing start to a country laughing its socks off - there's a #dangleboris hashtag - mere hours have passed.
Will it damage Boris' chances of taking over from the gaffe-prone David Cameron? Probably quite the opposite.
(((((O)))))
"Looks, feels, tastes, and acts like meat."
What do today's kids make of the Commodore 64?
What do today's kids make of the Commodore 64? BBC News invited Commodore enthusiast Mat Allen to show schoolchildren his carefully preserved computer, at a primary school and secondary school in London.
"It's strong, it's durable, it's cheap"
After reading about someone making a canoe out of cardboard, Izhar Gafni went to his shed and started cutting up old boxes. This eventually led to his absolutely amazing cardboard bike project. [more inside]
Taylor Mali poem, animated
Peter Cheyney, and the strange adventure of Lemmy Caution
Peter Cheyney was a prolific author of pulp thrillers, whose tin-eared appropriations of American hard-boiled detective fiction were nevertheless wildly popular in Britain and France in his mid-20th-century heyday. Among his creations were the cynical British detective Slim Callaghan; the debonair Belgian assassin Ernest Guelvada (one of the lead characters in the so-called ‘Dark’ series of spy novels), and the oddly-named, trenchcoat-wearing FBI tough-guy Lemmy Caution, played on-screen in a series of French movies by the American-born actor & singer Eddie Constantine, a role he would later reprise to striking effect in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 movie Alphaville.
"Our control is only to play as good as we can."
The Olympics are never without controversy and 2012 is no different. South Korea's Shin A Lam was held in the throes of perhaps the longest second ever of épée sudden death, as the clock was improperly reset with one full second remaining allowing her opponent to register a hit and knock her out of gold medal contention. Now the Badminton World Federation has accused four pairs of Olympic doubles players with "not using one's best efforts to win a match": essentially throwing their games to secure a better draw. [more inside]
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