Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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A Montage! I’m All Sewn Up.

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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.

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A more rabid month looms on the horizon. Oh, and vegetable percussion.

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In four weeks the second annual National Blog Posting Month will begin, wherein you pledge to post at least once a day for all of November for no reason at all.

This year participation is being managed through social network Ning, where I am curating a music bloggers group.

I also plan to offer some manner of prize since I won one last year, but I have not yet decided on anything suitably awesome.

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Ethicurean posted the truly brilliant Vegetable Orchestra, who perform music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Words escape me; please refer to moving pictures, below:

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When I saw Bettye Lavette @ Bonnaroo in 2006 I described her as a bloodthirsty Motown praying mantis whose goal it was to devour the entire audience before the end of her set. Yeah, Bonnaroo was weird, but it’s an apt description considering how long she was in industry exile; she came back hungry.

Read a great Stylus Magazine interview with Bettye about her new covers disc, wherein she is backed by Drive-By Truckers. Link via Largehearted Boy, who also offers a legal listen to some of the tracks from Scene of the Crime

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The Strand offers books by the foot, a service providing decorative book collections in any style and subject. Prices range from $10- to $400- per foot. A cool gift for your bibliophile friends, and a fantastic resource for set dressing; at $300/ft the Victorian era books are rather stunning. Via Kottke.

K-link part deux: Do you need 8 oz. of dehydrated strawberry powder? You can buy it, and other molecular gastronomy fixins, at L’Epicerie. After you’re done salivating, hit up this exhaustive blog post for info and resources.

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Then there were quick hits.

46 tax deductions for bloggers. Um, hells yeah. Via Akkams.

One time in college Elise did a whole photo project where she painted me with light. If she was here I could tell you the whole story about how her professor was friends with the originator of the technique. In any event, if you have a camera with long exposure time and a tripod you can do it yourself.

More photography: All panoramic pictures, all the time. Want to shoot your own? Read up on Gigapan, an automated robotic tripod. Latter two links from Contentious, former via Mashable; a great feed (if you can keep up with 20+ posts a day).

If your phone and internet errands are swallowing up your free time you should look into outsourcing to an offshore personal assistant; sounds like they’re worth the money if you have the right sort of tasks on your to-do list.

I don’t know that I realized New York City was quite so tall over a century ago.

Free iTunes Songs is a handy RSS feed that links you to all of iTunes free content, including the weekly free song downloads.

Second Rotation is an online pawn shop that pays you for your used consumer electronics up front, saving you the hassle of dealing with an actual buyer. As to where all the items go, the site is a bit cagey. I have one word for you: gnomes. Via recent daily fixation Unclutterer.

Finally, Torrez was very nearly my first favorite blogger (and, not only because he ran Power Bloggers). He’s back, and recently posted some simple advice on increasing blog traffic. After a month of following his own advice his Alexa rank is up ~200k. Probably advice worth taking.

A Wired Universe

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I habitually read Rolling Stone cover to cover the very day it slips through my mail slot, but when it comes to essential reading my lifetime subscription is being slowly but surely supplanted by Wired.

As of 2003 I had never read Wired – assuming, perhaps, it was a magazine for electricians – when my then boss bought me a subscription to commemorate the end of my tenure as a co-op. “This magazine,” she said,” is full of people like you.”

When I first started reading it I didn’t exactly catch her meaning – at a surface level I felt much more akin to the musicians in RS than the various inventors and whatnot that graced the pages of Wired.

Four years later as I read their Geekipedia and realized I already knew about roughly 90% of the 149 entries I finally caught her drift: I’m not like these people, I just think along the same lines.

Anyway, all that was to say that I was amused but also depressed by their smarmy Geekipedia illustration of the blogosphere, because it didn’t contain very many actual blogs, by which I mean blogs that are not just corporate or political fabrications of internet reality. And then I noticed a tiny satellite around the death star that is Boing Boing – Kottke.org. And, though I don’t actually know the man, and doubt he’s ever read CK, it was a comforting thing to see a name of an actual person who’s been around as long as me in the face of link aggregators and new media.

Blogosphere (small)
(click the above for a huge version)

This issue of Wired also featured my lead-off link topic, an interview with Ridley Scott, who 25-years after the fact has completed a final cut of Blade Runner. I adore that he was so committed to the narrative of his film that he refused to rest until it was perfected. If only we could all be so dedicated to our arts.

Oh, I can finally deploy this link: Ethicurean recently featured an essay on Wired’s catering.

Have you ever encountered a benign link that you know inexplicably-yet-instinctively you must click? that’s the feeling I had when Katharine Evan‘s name popped up in some random comment chain I was reading this weekend; I didn’t know why, but I had to know who she was. Imagine my delight to find the website of a talented illustrator who has worked on major films like Transformers and a household favorite Constantine.

A very wired person, I’d say. I never expect to encounter these sort of people in actual internet life, which is ridiculous in light of the fact that I used to live with a girl who majored in exactly this sort of thing. Katharine lamentably doesn’t have much work online, but she does have an extensive list of links to industry colleagues and students.

Well met, Ms. Evans. And, while we’re on the topic, check out the charming animated short Clik Clak online for free.

Oh, and watch two robots play Gnarles Barkley’s Crazy. Real robots, mind you, not computer animated ones. Via Telescreen.

(And, while you’re on YouTube, watching the Sesame Street Pinball short, aka 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. Take that, Feist.)

Wow, way to connect all those links to each other in a way that seemed intentional. And now, the hits that are quick:

23 album covers that changed everything. Via LHB.

Ta Da Lists is an online to-do list-making tool. Via No One’s Watching.

Comm geeks unite: a periodic table of branding elements. I might seriously send this to my Vice President. Thanks Debbie Millman.

Unclutterer reminds us that a bigger HDTV means increasing viewing distance – not always a living room friendly combination.

Mighty Goods could alter the orbit of Elise’s entire home existence with everlasting LED tealights and handy wine wedges.

Smogr posted a great Flickr set of retro arcade photos.

Creepy-ass photo of the day from Pruned. Their past few posts have featured intruiging architectural elements from the fascinating Désert de Retz, a “romantic French folly garden.” If your high school French has a half-life similar to mine you can also learn a bit on French Wikipedia. All super-interesting; I’m pretty darn close to buying the coffee table book.

Finally, since everyone I know seems to be reading this lately, does anyone want to see Amadeus at the Wilma? I really like the movie, and would love to see it on stage.

fin

Radiohead & Rsizr

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Before I fall hopelessly behind the rest of the blogging community by four or five two or three hours, please let me make you aware of the following two things:

(1) Radiohead’s new album, the improbably cheery-named In Rainbows, is available for pre-order. It includes some of the tracks I heard them play at Bonnaroo in ’06.

The fascinating bit about this is actually three different bits:

  • (a) The pre-order is being conducted only through Radiohead’s web site;
  • (b) The album is available as a digital download (on 10/10) or a hefty-priced CD/LP set (on 12/3);
  • (c) You can pay what you please for the download.

Says the band, “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days”

Please stand by while the heads of the entire record industry explode.

Coolfer had some thoughts on that topic. Gorilla v. Bear has photos and specs.

(2) Last month I linked to a video of a jaw-droppingly smart image resizer that scaled images down not proportionally, but by eliminating areas with the least important data.

Well, per Mashable, now you can give it a test-drive in your own browser at rsizr.

The tool is a little unwieldy as a browser-based app, mostly because it’s extremely processing intensive, but it’ll give you a good real-time sense of its capabilities. I gave it a quick spin with our happy hour shots and came up with the following; notice how much slimmer the right side is on the second photo:

I don’t have the mental fortitude to put together an entire walkthrough right now, but the gist of it is that you visit the site, and load an image. You can do something basic like resize or crop, but for this exercise you want “retarget.”

When you choose that option you’ll get two sets of sliders. They represent how much of your total pixel width/height you want to slice out of the shot. For this picture I wanted to take out vertical slices to make it less wide while maintaining it’s height; it made a good example because the various lighting fixtures on the ceiling will be left intact by the slicing.

Witness a slice being removed as I nudge the slider up!

After you’ve calculated your allotment of slices you get normal-looking resizing handles, but as you move them you’ll resize by removing (or adding to!) slices rather than proportionally squeezing or stretching the image. Voila:

You can also get into identifying the areas of the image to avoid (like faces, or straight edges) or the ones to prioritize for slicing (walls and ceilings!), but you’ll have to figure that bit out on your own.

Good god, I’m going to sleep.

Intervening Warbly Quick Hits

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I skipped making a second link post this past week. I had every intent of compiling one, but then my birthday got in the way.

Looking back at the intervening week I give the impression that I’m a major rock impresario spending my idle time on my blog. In fact, despite appearances to the contrary it’s been just about the opposite – I’m more involved in the behind-the-scenes of blogging ever – reading more blogs, fixing more issues with my archives, and prepping more content, and it’s meant less work on my solo music as I spend my non-blog time focused on Arcati Crisis.

Really, it’s just that I default to talking about my music when my brain is too busy to talk about anything else.

On that note, let’s start with music links, for a change of pace.

XPN programmer at Some Velvet Blog highlights the best in Philly Indie Rock. No Polymer there, though they’re surely one of the area’s best (and, I say that having once written a really nasty song about their lead singer that I (coincidentally) featured yesterday).

Arcati Crisis is still several months off of the list. As opposed to a band cemented on the list – the A-Sides – who are now a national. I gave their album a cursory listen, and it’s more of the usual for recent trends in indie pop – ornate arrangements, middling tempos, incessantly warbling vocals.

Seriously: I know I’m a snob and not the most terrific singer, but why don’t we ever expect indie rock men to sing well? Of the however many new tracks I’ve heard this month – let’s arbitrarily call it 50, although I’m sure it’s more – I’ve only purchased one by a male singer. ONE. It’s embarrassing. At least when people refer to me as folk music I don’t hear an implicit knock at my vocals in the categorization.

(Ben of Polymer sings way better than any of the fifty, and is one of major reasons why I am always obsessed with improving my singing, which is why you should go listen to them.)

(On a similar note, Gina could sing a fucking circle around the whiny vocalist behind the otherwise catchy Limes.

Indie rockers, PLEASE LEARN HOW TO SING. kthnxbye.)

Wired‘s Listening Post blog highlights the fantastic (and friendly) Daytrotter, a Rock Island, Illinois studio podcasting all manner of free music from major indie artists. (Previously blogged here.)

To close out the music topic: Largehearted Boy has so many special journalistic features with artists and authors that I really could spend the entirety of my music topic covering them. This week his brand new Soundtracked feature has the director of the otherwise excruciable Good Luck Chuck discussing the music from the film’s soundtrack.

Here’s the most amazing, fantastic, scary-useful link of the week, from telescreen.org: Jott. What is it? A toll-free number you can call up and dictate to, which subsequently transcribes your ramble into text – punctuation and all.

Urban(e) blogger Smogr posts about a real life Atlantis – called Seuthopolis in Bulgaria. Seriously. For real. More detail at archi-blog Pruned, or, if you still think this is a hoax, at WikiPedia. The entire project will cost an estimated €50mill, which seems like a bargain to unwet a freaking underwater city.

(ps: I keep reading that as Seussopolis. Like, OMG, an underwater city filled with one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.)

MN blogger Stefani claims that absinthe has found renewed legality in the USA. This is actually a lie. one brand of absinthe has a low enough Thujone content to be legal.

Bonus points: this is my favorite classic advertising print.

Pennsylvania’s CHIP is one of my major clients, so I found Akkams Razor’s illustration of CHIP funding v. Iraq funding to be morbidly fascinating. Because a day of ambiguous freedom-promoting military services is totally the equivalent of keeping a quarter of a million kids healthy. Totally.

Via 18,000 different blogs, 20×200 peddles high quality, limited edition artist photos and prints at acquirable prices, as curated by blogger Jen Bekman.

Also, via approximately a third of the blogging community: Rotten Neighbor, a site that helps you avoid the neighbors that other internet denizens have found distasteful. You know the type: well-adjusted people without blogs.

Okay, my stamina is declining. Here’s my quick hits:

Hexiom is like reverse Minesweeper, via Fresh Arrival. And: they have a sister photo site that recently featured panoramic UK photographer Will Pearson.

Mighty Girl is interviewed by 9-yr-old blogger @ In the Air. Matt’s a great journalist for being a third of my age!

(And, I know this is not really something you can appreciate the enormity of via the internet, but M.G. blogged about a production of Sweeny Todd where the chorus doubled as the orchestra. Can you wrap your mind around that shit? Crazy.)

Highways of the Nation are changing their fonts. Via Kottke. Also via K: I love tennis, but I’ve never really understood the difference between clay, hard, and grass courts. NYT to the rescue! Check out their high informative animatics. Also, strangers cross the Brooklyn bridge.

Unclutterer tells you what to do with your old cell phone(s).

Iggy Pop’s hilarious tour rider.

20 ways to make great icons.

Chirky posts an amazing cake.

Learn the basics of foreign languages online with Mango. Via Make You Go Hmm.

Adventures in San Francisco land (fill) Albany Bulb.

Philly blogger Ninth Street Records posts a nascent blog, Laceo Art, which features submissions from imprisoned juvenile offenders.

Also from Philly, we finally have public access television, via PhillyFuture.

Animated GIF map of the NYC subway. Via Harvard Avenue.

Freakonomics NYT blog takes on the future of the music industry. Certainly not warbly indie bands, that’s for sure.

Rilo Kiley has some pretty great videos, including the new ones for “Moneymaker” (with real live porn stars!) & “Silver Lining,” and last disc’s great “Portions for Foxes.” I think I just like watching Jenny Lewis sing.

For reference, she is of the same approximate talent level as Gina ;)

Do you see what happens when I don’t blog links for an entire week? Pandemonium! Smogr has my photo of the week.

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