Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
William Hundley’s photos feature strangely disembodied cloaked shapes. They’re more pleasing if you don’t research how he gets the effect, assuming instead that they are the grim reaper, a dementor, an Aztec spirit, the ghost of Uncle Sam, Slimer from Ghostbusters, a force of nature, or, um, other.
On a related note: Nine (emerging) visual artists who will blow your mind.
Trent Reznor now free of record label. Given how white-hot-awesome the marketing for NIN’s last record was I can’t wait to see what he does in the absence of a label.
1-800-GOOG-411 is Google’s new, free, voice-recognition driven information service. Put it on speed dial, now.
What Should I Read Next suggests a next book based on your last.
Jason Lewis traveled around the world on his own muscle power. It took him 13 years.
Turn any regularly updated page you read into an RSS feed.
Predictify allows you to predict upcoming world events, and pays you for being correct.
Okay, before I can blog about anything else I need to address the pressing issue of a several-day backlog of interesting links.
Have at them.
I’m sure all of you savvy people have seen these already, but just in case you haven’t, via Debbie Millman: Dove has released two videos that play on the image of female beauty in media – first one that follows a supermodel from first call to final poster, and a second that’s a montage of images of feminine beauty. You could argue (as Kottke did) that Dove’s parent company Unilever is a major offender in the image war, but, regardless of whose on which side of the line, both shorts are fantastic.
Layer Tennis is a volley of increasing oneupmanship conducted in consecutive layers of a design file. Coincidental to my prior topic Debbie Millman explains in more detail. Ages ago Jett was the narrator of a round, but I’m not sure that old-skool layer tennis was organized by the same people as this newfangled one that’s drawing links from everyone and their mommyblogger – partially due to killer narrators like the above mentioned pair of Dovebloggers.
You know all those annoying distorted words you have to transcribe for highly discerning websites to prove you’re not a robot? They’re called captchas. However, you could also use the word “captcha” to describe a word or passage in a scanned book that is not definable by OCR software. Are you sensing some synergy? Well, a team at Carnegie Mellon University did – they’re farming out book captchas for websites to use as entrance captchas, logging all of the user generated solutions. The result? Recaptchas, which crowdsources its way to about 3,000 hours of captcha deciphering per day.
Everyday Goddess wants to break into episodic television directing, but she’s having trouble finding a foothold. The means of production for specific industries like this are all sewn up by the major players, and the entrance requirements are often paradoxical – she’s been told that she should direct an independent feature so that she gets noticed. But she doesn’t want to direct features, she wants to direct TELEVISION. So, if you know someone who knows someone, drop her a line.
DIY internet musician BradSucks is seeking volunteers to record themselves singing along with his new tune, “Out of It.” I’m going to try to find a moment to record myself this weekend.
Quicker hits:
The Rum Bar was nominated by several independent auditors as a location for our next upscale bar crawl.
Which of two famous Roger Fenton photos came first – one of a road without cannonballs, and one with? Errol Morris writes two fantastic NYT articles on the topic – one of journalistic inquiry via research and interviews, and a second featuring more direct investigative journalism. A final part pends. Via K.
I’m not a great fan of crying at work, but this article about a Pittsburgh professor with a limited time to live did the trick.
Three links from the unstoppable juggernaut of posts that is Mashable: WikiInvest is a wiki community for stock junkies. TIOTI is short for “Tape It Off the Internet.” YouTube + Bittorent = Virtual Tivo. Great for non-teevee owners who still enjoy a show or two (i.e. me) . For those trying to kickstart their blogging, 10 Free eBooks for Bloggers.
FriendFeed aids you in stalking your friends across multiple websites with social networking components, including FaceBook, Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, and more. Via Make You Go Hmm.
OCDblog: Meetimer tracks how long you surf each website, helping you manage your time (and decrease your procrastination).
How fantasy football is like business. A lot of people are probably going to use the former to inform the latter, but it’s the other way around for me.
Go behind the scenes building the Great River of China. From the same source: Animal Logic is a unique series of photos documenting the installation of animals into museum exhibits.
No more taking calls behind the wheel for PA drivers.
We know I love all things colorful and retro, so I love this set of color photos from World War II.
The Starburst Cluster in NGC 3603 is my favorite Astronomy photo of the day in weeks.
(fin)
It figures that I spend three days actually doing interesting stuff and by the time I drag myself home I’m too exhausted to try to explain any of it. That’s sort of the Blogger’s Paradox, isn’t it?
Apparently, being a bachelor involves a lot of drinking, staying out past last call, sleeping at other people’s houses, and being cheery and fully functional the next morning at eight.
In other news, riding around in a convertible does awesome things for my hair.
I could seriously maintain a blog just about Rolling Stone‘s declining credibility.
Despite occasional highlights, I usually have a hard time deciding on my least favorite element of each issue. Is the the bland new layout that completely eschews RS‘s quirky sense of design? Is it the complete lack of attention to cutting edge music or film, often in favor of a retrospective cover article that displaces a much better piece of writing? Is it the seemingly random array of irrelevant cover stars and the unimaginative photographs that document them?
Usually I go with “All of the Above,” but this issue was extra-special – RS’s annual Hot List (usually a summer issue, but I guess Guns & Roses was a more relevant cover topic at the time).
In general the Hot List was filled with boring stuff that I heard about three months ago, but one article especially made me laugh: Hot Scene – Philadelphia. (1MB JPG / 2MB PDF)
Riiiiight.
First of all, we’re certainly not the hottest scene in the country; I’d wager to say we’re not even in the top five. I could have maybe bought this designation if they focused on how World Cafe Live seems to have reinvigorated the city’s local concert scene over the past few years, but they seem to have chosen us based on the logic that our low rent allows musicians to craft their sound without having to hold down a day job.
Um, what? Maybe RS was mostly hanging out in the Great Northeast (thus the highlight of Johnny Brenda’s), but otherwise their low-rent thesis is pretty much an outright lie.
Also, though they ever-so-briefly mention AKA – a legitimate hot-pick – they prominently feature aphoto of The Last Drop coffee shop, which was already old and lame ten years ago when Gina stopped playing open mics there due to all of the creepy men that would flirt with her if she did a Neil Young cover.
Aside from the dozens of other shops they could have highlighted in Philadelphia proper, the obvious choice would seem to be Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore, which is as unavoidable at The Point was a few years ago, but with even more music.
In the 90s The Last Drop was full to the brim with pseudo-artistic posers and the trash (and high school students) who were desperately in love with them. As actual music fans we didn’t usually fit in.
Maybe that’s just the point; ten years later and that’s Rolling Stone’s target audience to a tee, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a magazine with Kid Rock on its cover.
