"One thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own."
For Sophia Goldberg (98), Holocaust survivor, change has meant the end of a way of life.
posted by zarq
on Dec 1, 2011 -
34 comments
The A. V. Club has an exhaustive and revealing
four-part interview with Dan Harmon, creator of Community, in which he discusses the conception and production behind every episode of the show's ambitious and flawed second season.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Jun 10, 2011 -
88 comments
NationStates is a free political simulation game founded by author
Max Barry back in 2002 (
previously). Loosely based on his dystopian corporate thriller
Jennifer Government, the game
starts by asking players to provide some national trappings and answer a few civics questions, then generates a virtual country with a matching political outlook.
Periodic policy decisions like mining rights and compulsory voting allow players to further modify their country along
axes of social, political, and economic freedom, arriving at one of
twenty-seven colorful government types like Tyranny By Majority or Scandinavian Liberal Paradise. There's also a healthy roleplaying community -- players can discuss current events in the
General forum, practice wargaming in
International Incidents, form cooperative Regions to debate internal affairs (many of which form
their own communities), and elect Delegates to send to the
World Assembly (so renamed after
an amusing cease-and-desist from the real-world U.N.). Their collective history is thoroughly recorded in
the 35,000-article NSWiki, which provides a
detailed legislative record,
gameplay guide, and profiles on many of the
90,000 active nations,
8,000 player regions, and
countless characters that currently make up the game world.
posted by Rhaomi
on May 9, 2011 -
62 comments
TheFix.com is a new site targeting the more than 40 million Americans who are recovering from drug and/or alcohol addiction. It features Ask-An-Expert
videos, news, editorials and thorough
reviews of rehab facilities based on Zagat's system.
Founded by Maer Roshan, one of the founders of Radar Magazine.
(Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 7, 2011 -
36 comments
Pictory is a showcase for people around the world to document their lives and cultures. Anyone can submit one large, captioned image to each of Pictory’s editorial themes. The recent theme was
Infrastructure, where Japan’s near-simultaneous earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis has provided a graphic reminder about the centrality of infrastructure in our lives. Another theme was
Platonic Love Stories, about the folks who laugh at the same dumb jokes you do, have been there for you through thick and thin, and are still friends with you despite it all.
Pictory of the Day photo blog.
The Pictory Feature Archive. Here are the
presently open themes.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Mar 19, 2011 -
6 comments
Romantically Apocalyptic is a morbidly funny webcomic from Russo-Canadian digital artist
Vitaly Alexius (
interview,
gallery). Set in the
starkly diaphanous wreckage of post-nuclear Manhattan, it follows
an eccentric contingent of Soviet soldiers as they poke through the detritus of the past and contend with the mutants, cultists, aliens, and other horrors that inhabit the ruins. The comic's
striking art style is the result of an arduous process, using
"Photoshop, live actors, dead actors, sexy assistants, greenscreen, a camera, and a Wacom tablet" to composite "6 years worth of textures: 1 terabyte of stock footage, shot in real abandoned, forgotten places of our world." This multimedia ambition has burgeoned into plans for a
community-powered animated/live-action web series (
teaser video,
animatic,
fanart). While waiting for that to come together, be sure to spend some time on
Kimmo Lemetti's excellent
Gone With the Blastwave (
previously), a very similar webcomic project with a more subdued palette that turned out nearly fifty pages of richly-illustrated post-apocalyptic humor before going on indefinite hiatus.
posted by Rhaomi
on Mar 3, 2011 -
18 comments
The Mindful Eye is a photography community: "We are here to help and inspire each other in the pursuit of our passions, happiness and the unlimited potential of our dreams as photographers and as human beings. We believe that the simple act of sharing your joy with your camera can change the world for the better." It developed from its previous incarnation as Radiant Vista into a fuller, richer site including useful teaching tools such as the
Daily Critique,
Photo of the Week,
Digital Darkroom,
Foundation Concepts, and
much more. I visit the site daily for new content and recommend it to all my photography students as a positive support system as they develop their skills.
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Feb 10, 2011 -
2 comments
Labyrinths –
not to be confused with mazes – are being
rediscovered as tools for
contemplation,
meditation,
reflection, and
community well-being, as well as inspiration for
architecture,
music,
dance,
ritual,
business, and
visual art.
[more inside]
posted by velvet winter
on Dec 20, 2010 -
19 comments
plsr. — an international photography showcase with dozens of options for filtering, or sorting by photographer, country, best rated, or most viewed. With links to the photographer's personal sites.
posted by netbros
on Oct 18, 2010 -
5 comments
Every day, our world gets a little bit smaller and a lot more complex. So much so that even minor decisions can have major consequences. Not just for trees or frogs or polar bears, but for human lives, and livelihoods. At its core, sustainability is about people.
The Living Principles for Design aim to guide purposeful action. It is a place to co-create, share and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for enabling sustainable action across all design disciplines.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Sep 20, 2010 -
9 comments
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2010 -
18 comments
Michael Surtees latest photo experiment is called #walkingtoworktoday. The rules are simple and open to anyone—while walking to work take a photo. From there the photo needs to be pushed to Twitter via Flickr while containing the hashtag #walkingtoworktoday somewhere in the tile. But there wasn’t one dedicated space outside of Flickr to see the photos, and even then it was only seeing it through one medium—you didn’t get to see the tweets. So that’s why he decided there needed to be a site. Surtees created
#walkingtoworktoday using Daylife tools that contained Flickr and Twitter moduals. The main modual streams photos from Flickr while the right rail shows the tweets. It’s an interesting redundancy that works.
posted by netbros
on Nov 4, 2009 -
35 comments
Your new veggie garden. Early Saturday morning, you and about fifteen others turn up at a strangers home and get to work setting up a veggie garden using
permaculture design principles.
Once you've done this three times you can put your name on the list to have the horde come to your place.
Permablitz began helping people create home food gardens in Melbourne, Australia in 2006, and the meme is spreading, first to other Australian cities, then to France, Uganda and the Netherlands. The veggie gardens are great, but perhaps even better is the way it is rebuilding the community relationships of mutual support that modern urban dwellers could be forgiven for thinking were gone 19th Century practise of
barn raising.
posted by compound eye
on Sep 29, 2009 -
24 comments
The Revolving Floor is a curated community of writers and artists, focused on finding creative ways to share diverse perspectives through creating content around shared topics. Every month, a new topic. Several times per week, a new post, each time by a different author. [via
mefi projects]
posted by netbros
on Aug 31, 2009 -
11 comments
Spacehack "A directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Interact and connect with the space community."
posted by chrismear
on Aug 4, 2009 -
6 comments
Dude, wouldn't it be
totally cool if there was an
opposite microwave to cool tasty canned beverages in seconds? What if underwear had
pockets? They'd be called
Underawesomes! And don't you think
ketchup packets should be bigger? Oh man, speaking of munchies, what if you had
see-through fudge? You could see right through it! Dang, it would be rad if there was
smokable tape you could use to repair your busted spliff, huh? But I mean, dude, there should like really be a website where stoners could post and discuss the ideas they get when they're super high. I'd call it
highDEAS.
posted by carsonb
on Aug 3, 2009 -
99 comments
