Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Gorillaz - Three Hearts, Seven Seas, Twelve Moons
This is cool. Like an old movie. Pure instrumental song from the latest Gorillaz Album -- Plastic Beach.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
SMS cost 20x more than printer ink! via @Kottke
The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP's basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?
I still love SMS.
Monday, October 25, 2010
On book snobbery and other things - @PenelopeTrunk | Her writing often makes me smile.
I try not to be a snob. Because I think it just closes doors. For example, I have written before about not being a language snob. If you are, then you stop yourself from learning about language. And being a snob about copyediting perfection is terrible, too — you end up never writing anything because it takes too long. Even career advice snobbery is bad, because people who fail give the best advice. So it's no surprise that I find book snobbery self-destructive as well; when I'm a snob about books, they take over my house.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Why Facebook Really is Like High School - The Daily Beast
- A bias against newcomers
- “Most Recent” doesn’t tell the whole story.
- Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
- “Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
- Raise your visibility by getting people to comment.
- It’s hard to get the attention of “popular kids.”
"My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn't wanted to conserve." Confessions of a used-book salesman
My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn't wanted to conserve. And, of course, the number of actual objects the culture conserves is even smaller. If enough people want to read an older work, it comes out in a new edition. More often, I find the old editions, variably handsome or yellowed and trashy, which will almost all be tumbling in the darkness of a dumpster soon after I pass on them.
Friday, October 22, 2010
"Be aligned with a profit center" is great advice.
Be aligned with a profit center, not a cost center – tie yourself to revenue, where you can be measured...When times are tough, cutbacks come first from cost centers, and no matter how “valuable” you think your contributions are, if they can’t be measured and tracked against revenue, you’ll be hard pressed to justify your existence at some point;
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The Long Decline by André Alexis | The Walrus | July 2010
In other words, a book section isn’t only about letting people know that such-and-such a work has been published. It’s a place where consideration happens — and the nature of a consideration is important, whatever book or idea sets it in motion. Consideration, for me, isn’t so much a matter of determining the ultimate value of a work, but rather of allowing a community to participate in the evaluation of the work.
I finally got around to reading this meanderingly beautiful article on literary criticism and its previous semi-existence in Canada.
Personally. I liked books. I liked writing. I even liked "Anatomy of Criticism." But I always hated the BOOKS section of the newspaper.
I never understood:
1) what they are trying to convey.
2) who the intended audience is. (I can never see somebody reading TLS and afterwards say, "Wow, that was a riveting piece, I am going to buy the book." I always imagine literary critics seems to intend for the authors themselves to be the true audience.)
3) Is this a good book? Is this a book worthy of attention? Is this book relevant to my wants and interests? (Most review seems to be some kind of onastic, lit-crit, find-the-stylistic-flaw exercise that is better kept in private letters between friends. )
The whole thing has an over-inflated sense of the importance of criticism. I think it is a bit rich to call Book Sections "agorae." And why should the writer privilege the critic (who is only one reader in a mass of reader) in the determination of the meaning of a work over the mass reader? The quoted above seems to give all the weight of consideration to a bunch of people (community) that has access to be published in newspaper and no one else...
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
How to Pick Up a Hipster Girl – The Awl
Here’s the big secret about dating hipster girls: we’re just the same as everyone else, only cuter, better dressed, and know way more about music and pop culture than you do.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Stories from a Canadian in Holland
A good friend of mine recently moved to Holland. These are his stories.
Today I got a lecture from the security guard at the Canadian embassy about how you *must* speak Dutch if you live in Holland. The security guard was Moroccan, but I initially started with him in English because it was the Canadian embassy, and I thought he would be Canadian. My mistake was that I'm living in Holland, but nevertheless used English. He gave me the lecture in Dutch.Another story: A couple of days ago, I saw a little black girl who I didn't know in the elevator of the building where I live. We hadn't said a word to each other, but then she just looked up and said "Sir, I know I look like a foreigner, but I'm actually Dutch." I'm still trying to analyse this one. One potentially important fact is that I live in an immigrant neighbourhood - "the projects" of Delft - and I'm one of the only white people here.
Nokia N8 review by @engadget - Lag by design?
When we played with the N8 and its Symbian^3-based stablemates at Nokia World last month, we perceived the long delay between swipes and home screen changes as sluggishness; at the time, Nokia insisted it was a feature, not a bug. Pauses of any sort on a phone are rarely good, however, and Nokia seems to have taken the complaints to heart because the delay is nearly imperceptible on the production firmware. We'd note that there's still a minor learning curve here if you're coming from an iPhone or an Android device because the screens don't move with your thumb -- rather, you execute a swipe gesture, then the screen changes. Takes some getting used to.
?
So. The lag that everybody complains about is ... on purpose?
They designed the interface to look like there is a lag?
WTF
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Nokia N8 raw components cost $187.47 is too high. @intomobile
Isn’t Nokia supposed to get the best prices on everything since they order components by the millions of billions? If they’ve lost the 1 advantage they had, their size, then where’s the future of the company heading?
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Violent J of Insane Clown Posse is, like, the prophet of hiphop. @The_AV_Club
The only thing that’s different is that we don’t sell as many records because there are so many downloads and things of that nature, but everything else is the same. We seem to move the same amount of merch, we seem to draw the same amount of people. It’s just that now record sales are dead in the industry everywhere. You know you could sell 10,000 records in a week and you could be No. 50 on Billboard, and back in the day you couldn’t even make the top 200 with 10,000 copies.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy | The Guardian
"You know Miracles? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song everyone would have called it fucking genius."
Wow.
I love magnets too!
I haven't heard a ICP video for years. After this, I downloaded a whole buncha shit.
Yeah, that's right. Miracles. Books sucks.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
The Media Equation - Film Version of Zuckerberg Divides the Generations - NYTimes.com
“When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,” said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. “The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.”
I remember a few years ago. I asked a guy in a dorm room about the Scarface poster on the wall.
"Awesome," he said, "that movie was like, awesome."
Then he start gibbering like a monkey about his little friend.
I asked him if he understood that Tony Montana -- just like Michael Corleone -- was a tragic hero in the movie.
He looks at me and said, "you didn't like The Godfather? It's awesome. That's a classic."
Toronto Star's Murray Whyte on "Erik Satie's Vexation"
Over in Brookfield Place, my first contender for best of: Micah Lexier and Martin Arnold’s music-made-tangible exploration of Erik Satie’s Vexations; Satie intended the piano piece to be played 840 times in succession, which Lexier and Arnold saw to; they also had 840 pieces of sheet music folded identically into simple sculpture to mirror, materially, Satie’s discipline of perfect, sequential repetition. If it sounds dry, it’s not: the quiet tinkling keys, a growing plateau of blue paper sculpture, all under the equally disciplined steel wing by Santiago Calatrava made for the night’s first unmitigated moment of magic.
This was my favourite of the night.
It made number 2 on his list. I didn't see Nuit Market, which was his #1.
The Rules
1. Have talent. (Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don't like you have to admit it's good.)2. Understand how the world works. (Not just globally, but on a macro level. Understand what people need and don't need. Understand when to approach people and when not to. Develop social skills.)
3. Choose good friends. (There's nothing like an effective network.)
4. Be modern. (Don't do anything that looks like it's someone else's work. Stay on top of technology. Engage on multiple platforms.)
They are written as advice to young photographers.
I just realized that a lot people don't like me.
YES YES YES!! I am GOOD!!!!
Pipes and Telephones
Exhibit is called Naught here. The pipes are hollow and you have to figure who is talking to you.
Pipes and Telephones
Pipes and Telephones
Pipes and Telephones
Saturday, October 02, 2010
8 bit art at the Drake
Video game on a projector
8 bit art at the Drake
The drake kinda do the same thing at every Nuit Blanche
Facepainting at the Addis Ababa Restaurant
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Claustraphobia
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Blowtorch on canvas
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Knitting circle
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Balloo art
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Shred (encyclopediae)
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Lipstick on bathroom mirror
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Mural of Storm
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Lots of TV
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Peep hole
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Getting a massage
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
Gladestone Hotel: 2nd Floor
