wednesday, july 04, 2007
Excluding my close-ish friends for fairness
While I settle into the summer I give you five other blogs to read, in alphabetical order:
- Jason Scott rants about geeky subjects.
- Joe Clark crushes the unworthy and takes pictures of type.
- Nasty Nets surfs the web and presents it for your enjoyment.
- Preoccupations thinks about education and technology.
- Raspberry Debacle is the most literate food blog.
comments (1)
saturday, may 05, 2007
I like this newspaper a lot
These are two of my favorite pictures from the New York Times recently:
A wolverine, part of “A Featherless Audubon Menagerie”.
An illustration for “The Brain on the Stand”.
These are three of my favorite articles, which are somehow all about food:
- “A Taste of Ghana” — street food that sounds delicious.
- “Thumb-Wrestling With Plantains Is Now an Optional Sport” — Edwin Rodriguez and the invention of the E-Z Peeler.
- “Native Foods Nourish Again” — “‘You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can’t eat indigenous foods native to the Americas.’”
comments (0)
wednesday, february 07, 2007
The art of procrastination
I made my first home page in sixth grade, so it involved an interesting dilemma: how could I balance telling the world all about myself with my concerns about internet stalkers finding me? The result is detailed yet vague, a portrait of my interests in 1999 — complete with animated clip art and stolen images — that does not include my name. Here it is. Note how I mocked the web-counter trend by including an applet that looked like a counter but gave you a random number instead.
Now, what if I was sent back in time to create my home page as a 12-year-old, knowing all my 2007-era web skillz? You might get something that still looks bad.
comments (5)
tuesday, january 23, 2007
Blah blah blah pictures
Following are some examples of what can be called “low-level” automation of media creation, in which the computer user modifies or creates from scratch a media object using templates or simple algorithms…Image-editing programs such as Photoshop…also come with filters that can automatically modify an image, from creating simple variations of color to changing the whole image as though it were painted by Van Gogh, Seurat, or another brand-name artist.
I don’t know if Lev Manovich understands anything he’s talking about in these long essays with titles like Principles of New Media, assigned as reading for my “Writing for New Media” class.
The citizens of net artistry understand, though:
Update 2/1/07 3:36: Recreating Seurat, put through the same Photoshop filter:
comments (1)
sunday, january 14, 2007
Find a “mashup” you think is interesting
Back in eighth or ninth grade, superbad shocked my mind; pokey the penguin educated it; why the lucky stiff told me that yes, this is neat stuff indeed. Then I grew up and got into web standards and traditional typography, and all the craziness was left behind in a flurry of straight lines and attempts at some classy minimalism. I got a little bored of that eventually, though.
So the year in the internet 2006 is full of things that I like now but probably would have ignored a year ago, including some of the people making and collecting these things. A few months ago, somebody told me that Cory Arcangel was cool, and he is — partly because he’s one of the few people besides me with a living Blosxom blog (along with Mark Jason Dominus and some others, yay). Then I sat on the carpet at my mom’s house and attended a nasty nets Internet Town Hall Meeting. Somehow I converted into a fan of Tom Moody, Guthrie Lonergan, Travis Hallenbeck, and maybe others on that list of people who picked links, full of the artistic potential of animated gifs and blog templates. I have always been fascinated by the liveliness of ancient personal websites, so that interest has become good and circular now that I have a secret name for it.
But for most of this past year, my favorite links were about typography and unicode and the glory of things like that. They began to receive a star tag, so you can find them there. My list of other kinds of best links from 2006:
- general carbuncle — making the general lee with a toy-car mosaic (“every toy car is individually glued to the surface of the capri”)
- using server response codes as text-message shorthand — “hows the sushi ovr there?” “200”
- wildlife sculptures made out of abandoned shopping carts
- animals cleverly morphed together with photoshop — a hippo-crab, butterfly-stingray, fish-cricket, etc. i totally want these as little toys.
- something awful does the aol search record thing — and they do it well
- this person made an itsy-bitsy edible hamburger — it’s real, with tiny french fries! cute.
- matching pantone color swatches to objects in the real world — a flickr gallery, oddly amusing
- a personal industrial donut robot machine! including pictures — “384 donuts per hour automatically” awesome-o
- yet more “i’m in ur” kitten pictures — pure laffs
- a novel method for the removal of ear cerumen — “trials are warranted to evaluate the utility of the super soaker max-d 5000 in clinical settings”
