February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the...”
– From the first page of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (translated by Jay Rubin). His earlier books that I’ve read have been wonderful dream factories, but I’ve seen this one scoring some negative reviews. I don’t know what’s coming over the next 925 pages, but I have hope that...
6 tags
“Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay: in...”
– Stéphane Mallarmé
something i feel tumblr would do well to remember
(via jedgarhooverinararaskirt)
January 2012
9 posts
5 tags
5 tags
“Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in...”
– From What the Sumerians can teach us about data, a blog post noting that the predecessor of writing was the depiction of data, a concept that helped establish the hierarchical systems of power in the early city-states. (I like his comparison between the data-protecting curses inscribed on the...
5 tags
“The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it...”
– On the 75th anniversary of the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Suess’s first children’s book. Persevere, creative types!
Quote from the NY Times article Mulberry Street May Fade, but ‘Mulberry Street’ Shines On, which investigates the real-life...
3 tags
I like Pieterjan Grandry’s gif player, a novel way to play back your favorite short-form animations on your wall (it’s basically an updated, electric version of a phenakistoscope, but the use is certainly fun, and the wooden box looks nice!).
10 tags
8 tags
Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM's unpaid... →
Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)
6 tags
8 tags
9 tags
Marconi, Hacked in 1903
Want to expose a rival’s poor security implementation? What better way than to demonstrate the weakness in public, in front of a gathered crowd? From a New Scientist story of very early 20th-Century hacktivism:
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John...
December 2011
7 posts
3 tags
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
citationneeded:
Link (Thanks, Tim)
5 tags
“A lot of people who do Legos do large commission pieces, but that doesn’t...”
– In this New York Times piece about his LEGO taxidermy kits, David Cole really hit upon the thing I love so much about pixel art: each drawing is actually an engineering challenge. Whenever I start a new drawing, I think “what is the smallest number of pixels I can use to represent this?” (via...
2 tags
“If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d...”
– Edward Gorey on nonsense, quoted from “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense.” The New Yorker, November 9, 1992.
5 tags
“This tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island,...”
– The description of Queequeg’s tattoos quoted on the blog The Loom, the author of which has a new book out about science-inspired tattoos. It hadn’t occurred to me when reading Moby-Dick, but European sailors had only been decorating themselves with tattoos for some 80 years by the time...
4 tags
8 tags
“What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan...”
– Ice Cube, rapper and former architectural draftsman (“You don’t want to live in nothing I draw”), shares some advice in a NY Times Q&A as a followup to his recent Eames House appreciation video.
6 tags
November 2011
4 posts
7 tags
7 tags
“Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live. I have pursued them, sought...”
– From the farewell speech of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, translated and presented as the opening monologue of the recent biopic L’amour fou.
Based on what I know of Saint Laurent from only having watched this film, a comparison to Arthur Rimbaud would be apt, perhaps drawn out over a...
7 tags
5 tags
Door or less →
bobulate:
Want to remember an experience? Don’t move.
That’s overstating it, but a new study shows that just walking through a doorway creates what’s called a “new memory episode,” which makes it difficult to remember the experience in the previous room:
[M]emory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room....
October 2011
11 posts
4 tags
8 tags
“Game design is about crafting a micro-economy. Even in an action game, every...”
– From who killed videogames (a ghost story), an insightful essay on the addiction psychology of social games and the strange motivating forces that lure people into plunking down money on intangibles, the nefarious angle of so-called gamification.
“The players will come for the cute characters, and...
7 tags
4 tags
4 tags
6 tags
“Grape Nuts are the Neo Geo of cereals: everyone knows one guy who likes them,...”
– Marco Arment on Grape Nuts vs Grape Nuts Flakes. (this is the only videogame-related line from the piece, but I like the analogy)
(h/t to @fizzboy)
4 tags
7 tags
4 tags
The cannibal curse of corporate prose
From the NY Times review of the updated 2011 “digital” edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People:
The following sentence, which appears on Page 80, is so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and...
5 tags
4 tags
“Well, we’ve had a good time tonight, considering we’re all going to die someday.”
– Steve Martin, closing out a night of stand-up. (via)
September 2011
8 posts
6 tags
7 tags
7 tags
9 tags
“If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the...”
– Bill Cunningham (via). Warren Buffett agrees. (via mlarson)
// PS: Bill Cunnigham New York was a charming documentary. Well worth watching if you’re interested in photography, fashion, NYC, bicycles, the New York Times, or people-watching in general.
4 tags
6 tags
9 tags
6 tags
August 2011
19 posts
4 tags
WatchDo you enjoy newspaper comics? Want to learn more about their history and place in the world through interviews with a laundry list of comic artists? Then you might be interested in helping these guys in Kickstarter finish out their documentary: STRIPPED: The Comics Documentary
(Via The Comics Curmudgeon)
8 tags
6 tags
The visibilizing analyzer →
The Language Log on how science fiction often misses the mark with predictions of technology (the why is up for debate, of course):
Less than 50 years ago, this is what the future of data visualization looked like — H. Beam Piper, “Naudsonce”, Analog 1962:
She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was broken by a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated...
8 tags
On gunpowder, ice cream, and sound symbolism
From the post Language of Food: Ice Cream, a fascinating article linking the history of gunpowder, ice cream, linguistics, and even a bit of marketing insight:
Something similarly beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And...
3 tags
“Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something...”
– Steve Martin, from his autobiography Born Standing Up.
5 tags
6 tags
3 tags
“I had an urge to write. When I saw something that I thought might be...”
– From the NY Times obit of Daniel D. McCracken, who starting in the 1950s wrote books on computers and programming aimed at non-scientists, a true pioneer in the field. Spreading the word about good stuff is a noble achievement.
5 tags
Logically boring
From Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, which aimed to make logic understandable via quirky syllogisms and illustrated tables:
No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste;
No modern poetry is free from affectation;
All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles;
No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste;
No ancient poem is on the subject of...