I mean, sure, yeah, technically Rachmaninoff is classical music — but it’s easily more “Intense and Rebellious” than, god save us, Nickelback.

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2010/12/who_feels_chill.php

If bloggers and web designers become microcelebrities, with fun gossip blogs following them around, will they all end up addicted to meth and racism like real celebrities?

http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/bomb-the-ace-hotel-every-geek-and-blogger-now-a-microcelebrity

Too good not to blog. via frantic.

You pay good money to be able to cry in public.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/how-to-live-in-new-york-city/

"*dress like a slub", but yeah.

Facebook and Twitter are restoring some of the basic functionality of the early ’90s Internet, so now people are going, “Wow, people can share things in a peer-to-peer way, and there must be a way for highly branded, centralized corporations to exploit that, right?” But the trick is that it’s really hard, because if this is a peer-to-peer technology revolution, then it necessarily reduces our dependence on highly centralized brands for meaning and supply.

http://rushkoff.com/2010/12/04/me-being-mad/

Lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.

http://kylecordes.com/2010/standing-desk

A SOURCE news zine from 1988

via 40yearsofhampshirecollege.tumblr.com

Q: People say he killed the Newton – your pet project – out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge?

Sculley: Probably. He won’t talk to me, so I don’t know.

via www.cultofmac.com

This interview with John Sculley is full of eye openers & jaw droppers.

Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.

via www.vanityfair.com

randomwalks/sudama is a James Franco fansite.

Who buys copious amounts of unsalted, unbuttered popcorn? It's messed up.

via www.mcsweeneys.net

The truth about homicide is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people.

Homicide Blog Shows Who Victims Really Are, www.npr.org

These lyrics were just the same when we did them again in American accents. There was nothing different, and all of a sudden, people were saying, 'Oh, wow. They're just as good as Eminem.' But in the Scottish accent, they're saying, 'Oh, no. They don't have any talent.'

The Fake 'American' Rappers Who Fooled Everyone, www.npr.org

When this idea came to me, I was really excited and euphoric even. It’s not often you get a chance to say something new about Newton’s laws.

via www.nytimes.com

The way the story frames this, what we have been taught to think of as gravity may simply be probability: the universe settling into the most likely configuration. Think electron orbitals, think Scott Adams' God's Debris, Think Douglas Adams' Heart of Gold.

The most interesting thing I know about W. S. Merwin is that he once got into a terrible battle with Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg's Tibetan guru over an episode of forced nakedness at a poetry party (this weird history is chronicled in a previous Litkicks article, When Hippies Battle: The Great W. S. Merwin/Allen Ginsberg Beef of 1975).

via www.litkicks.com

 
 

this is a narrative based explicitly on Asian roots, and for a movie that lavishes in the history and beauty of Eastern culture its casting of White actors in the lead “hero” roles is racist and ethnocentric.

via splinterend.tumblr.com via Roger Ebert's tweeting

Drilling will resume in deep water. That's where the oil is… people all around the world are going farther offshore and farther into deeper waters. So we have to develop methods to recover hydrocarbons, and do it in a much safer way.... It kind of creeps up on you, but this tragedy is a wakeup call.

Energy secretary says 'top kill' should have been tried earlier, www.latimes.com, 22 June 2010

The Nobel-prize winning Secretary of Energy of the United States is on the case!

Those of you who know what a "switch" is may also remember what it felt like to be whipped with one.  Child abuse?  Probably.  But these were people who'd seen people they knew dangling from trees by ropes. ...They were deathly afraid that we would act out in the wrong place at the wrong time and wind up as dead as those long lost relations. It was the only way they knew of making it clear just how dire our circumstances truly were.

Raised on Racism...a survival story, Keka

One time we took out half of a Volkswagen. How did it end up there? We don’t know. One time we took out a fifteen metre roll of carpet that was obstructing a whole pipe. Really, anything you can think of, we can find it in the sewage.

via www.ediblegeography.com

Julio Cou Cámara is one of only two sewage divers in the world, working full time keeping Mexico City's trash streaming out of the city. Edible Geography is my new favorite blog.

Each of the balconies is held up by these fantastic wrought-iron dragons:

via www.scoutingny.com

You've got to see the close-up of the dragon. Magnificent.

via www.guardian.co.uk

"Orange Beach, Alabama"

i had no idea D.C. had their own "design your D.C." cupcake challenge. amateur cake decorators showed off their stuff at hello cupcake last week. how cool is that? i kind of wish i could have been there. the metro map cupcake below is my favorite. to see all the cupcake entries, click here.

D.C.'s Metro Map cupcake

Nom Obama cupcake

Ben's Chili Bowl cupcake

via taza-and-husband.blogspot.com

Unbearably awesome.

via tim.shey.net

via hello.typepad.com

If your users are activating Safari Reader on your site, this means that the default user experience of your site is so bad that your users first consciously notice that they have trouble reading an article on your site, then remember that they might be able to fix it using Safari Reader, and then actually activate that feature.

ignorethecode.net

"Boom"

The Song Decoders at Pandora - NYTimes.com

"‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’

Let's look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet', www.theawl.com, 10 June 2010

I respect the Times' position that "tweet" is colloquial, neological jargon to be avoided. But: deft?!

Saying something is so does not make it so.

Floss, you know, use salt, baking soda, get them professionally cleaned, you know, for a bit, take care of your damn teeth.

Patti Smith addressing Pratt Institute's 121st commencement ceremony, www.mediabistro.com

via @stevesilberman

The one internet privacy policy that really matters is your own. If you want it private, don’t share it. Because what’s private today might be public tomorrow. Period.

Are We Really Dumb Zucks?, tweetagewasteland.com

True.

We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. ...I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong.

The Origin of the Blink Tag, www.montulli.org

Oh. My. God.

Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content.

Understand the Web, benward.me, 2 May 2010

This is a time for children to explore the immediate environment (backyard, neighborhood, nearby parks) in a way that is hands-on and full of joy. It’s not a time for them to worry about environmental tragedies.

How to Talk with Kids About the Gulf Oil Spill, www.nwf.org

Ranger Rick speaks the truth.

Every now and then I see tourists standing outside looking at the building, wondering if it could really be the place where it all happened," said Huberto Suarez, owner of Krika's. "There are no statues or plaques, so I tell them that this is it."
On the Beatnik trail in Mexico City, USATODAY.com, 20 April 2010

Joan Vollmer Burroughs died and is buried in Mexico City.

The administrator who managed the Lower Merion School District's laptop security system says she asked her bosses at least three times to clarify the rules for activating the Web cams and tracking software on students' computers.

"I tried to get the administration to look closely and get a policy on several occasions," Cafiero said in her first interview since the district put her on paid leave.

School official says Lower Merion lacked laptop policy, www.philly.com, 30 April 2010

"This house is like a mullet: all business in the front and a party in the back." - design milk

I read a bit about Aquaman growing a beard and having a harpoon hand and living in a cave and talking to spirits or something, and thought, how can anyone not like this guy? This crazy dude living under the water. Anyway that is the only version of Aquaman that I am really into.

Aquaman, www.harkavagrant.com

It’s one thing for semantic and identity layers to emerge on the web, but it’s something else entirely for the all of the interactions on those layers to be piped through a single provider

"Understanding the Open Graph Protocol", factoryjoe.com, 23 April 2010

The problem with OpenLike is that Virginia has never heard of hunch, digg, reddit, or stumbleupon. But I bet you she's on Facebook before her 101st birthday.

[In your 30s] things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period, realizing that the human animal isn't changing for the better. In a way, I think I entered straight into my tragedian period, as my work is set against the stupid, destructive way we live on this planet. Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.

"It's a Joni Mitchell concert, sans Joni", www.latimes.com, 22 April 2010

A suburban Philadelphia school district says it secretly captured 56,000 Webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students.
NYTimes/AP: Pennsylvania: School District Took 56,000 Secret Photographs

This is a shocking story, whose second chapter is the deplorable reporting by popular media which fails to ask basic questions like: 

• Was there any indication to students that their laptop's built-in camera was on?
• What policies did the school district follow in establishing laptop security practices?
• What the fuck were they thinking?

Let's see what we can come up with for the first question:

...It was discovered that the school had installed LANrev security software onto all of their laptops, in case of theft.  The software was set up to take pictures every 15 seconds or 15 minutes (reports are very mixed over which it is) from the iSight camera without it showing any indication of being active.
Thousands Of Images Of Underage Students At Home Taken By School Issued Laptops, www.insanit.net, 17 April 2010

Lower Merion high school students [reported] iSight cameras powering up, as indicated by a brief flicker of the LED light next to the camera. Some students even put tape over their iSight cameras to prevent them from operating, but most were assured by the district that the light was a “common MacBook glitch.”
School district faces lawsuit over Webcam spying claims, www.macworld.com, 23 Feb 2010

Kudos & credits: The story is being tracked quite well at Stryde Hax.

My sole aim is, come May, to have fools begging for February, sepia photos, and those "Black History Month Moments."

Ta-Nehisi Coates is honoring the hell out of Confederate History Month.

* iPhone and iPad applications are very different things
* most people use it widescreen most of the time. why?
* frustrated by being shunted to iPhone versions of websites, particularly Google Docs.
* where the hell is the apostrophe?

For each of the next 5 days I purchased a Happy Meal from the drive-thru at my two local McDonalds, alternating between restaurants, and always driving a car with a child's car-seat in the back.

Each time the attendant asked if I wanted a girl or boy toy, I answered, "Give me whatever is the most fun." 5 times out of 5 I received a Star Wars toy. Four women (all different employees I'm fairly sure) and one man all responded to my request in the same way. 

www.brainygamer.com

Get Lost: Francis Alÿs

I cannot exaggerate the degree to which Malkmus enjoys fantasy sports; he almost seems to like them more than music. His fantasy football team was devastated by the loss of Ronnie Brown to injury, but he's stayed in the playoff hunt by picking up Vikings wide receiver Sidney Rice. ("You could just immediately tell he was going to be Favre's guy.") The most productive player on his NBA team is under-publicized Pacers forward Danny Granger, but he's more satisfied about stealing the Nets' Chris Douglas-Roberts off the waiver wire. Malkmus does not watch the NHL, yet he still participates in a fantasy hockey league. He's that kind of guy. I don't even try to talk with him about rotisserie baseball.

Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever.: GQ

Japon-1886-14, originally uploaded by styeb.

Check out the triforce! What does it represent?

via www.sippey.com

Do not look at the audience as you walk out onto the set. Look only at the familiar face of Jon Stewart. Know that he will get you through this. Trust in him.

via therumpus.net

In designing a computer “for the rest of us”, finally, 25 years after promising to do so, perhaps the best analogy for the iPad, as a product designed for everyday people, is actually the AK47, or in car terms, the Mini, 2CV or perhaps Trabant.

via www.cityofsound.com

"A few observations" about the iPad, including the crucial question, "What's going on" with the horrible Notes, Calendar, and Contacts interfaces?

(Is it me, or does this "Blog It" format obscure the central link in these posts?)

Last night I dreamed I met Steve Jobs. We happened to be sitting near each other at a restaurant or something. I wasn't going to talk to him (I was sure I'd have the worst case of celebrity dumbstruck) but, for some reason I can't remember, he was interested in me. We ended up having a nice chat, expressing a lot of mutual respect. After that we hugged for a long time.

via www.adamrice.org

Check it out, I called the name two years ago.

Update: I had the name right in 2002!

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement.

Blogger’s FTP support enabled this web logger to move randomWalks from a subdomain at pitas to its very own dot com.

I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.” 

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

via www.tomdispatch.com

Apple seems to also view this as an accessory. What this needed to be was a computer. A new, better, more relevant computer, but a computer. That Apple expects people to sync this to another computer is either profoundly short sighted, or just stupid. Neither of which feels like the Apple I know. By positioning the iPad as peripheral, Apple took what should have been a really cheap, amazing computer in a world of terrible cheap computers, and instead positioned it as a really expensive toy.

via thisisviolence.net

Justin Spohn has written the best analysis of the iPad yet.

Aside from the deeply flawed introduction, I haven't heard a single legitimate complaint about the device that can't be solved in software. Even Justin's concern about iPad as peripheral, which I share, can be solved by moving the hub of the digital lifestyle into the cloud.

I suggest you stop what you are doing and go read Axe Cop.

[I hope for] an app that, when clicked, will snap off every television in every restaurant, lobby or waiting area within a mile. I will trade my children for this. Is that what you meant? Or did you mean PhotoShop compatibility?

via voices.washingtonpost.com

Very funny, Mr. Breathed! I want that, too.

Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.

When Kathie Lee Gifford said “night blogging” on the Today Show, we knew that Party Rats had altered reality and nothing would be the same again.

via zoomar.tumblr.com

With the exception of those in the “dock” area (Phone, Mail, Messages, and Safari) which I consider crucial to the entire point of even having an iPhone, I am going to clear everything from the home screen. Any apps that get accessed more than once in the course of the next week will be allowed to come back.

via minimalmac.com

This is great. I am going to do this right now. I wish the Dock worked this way. I wish iTunes worked this way. I wish my bookmarks worked this way. I wish my email worked this way. I wish everything worked this way, automatically. They promised us adaptive systems!

I made a modest amount of money telling old media companies how they should approach the web, then a similar amount of money hanging around while they didn't do it.

I spent days at a time sitting at home alone, getting high or drunk, playing videogames, watching television, ordering delivery falafel, and wasting time on the internet.

I shared some ketamine with a lesbian who proceeded to get up from my bed, vomit into my sink, and then pass out. I scooped the thick vomit from my sink to my toilet with my bare hands. Hours later, after I passed out, I woke to find her playing with my genitals. She told me the next morning that she'd "had a nice time."

The End of the 00s: Made in New York, by Joel Johnson | The Awl

"dirty and nerdy", "Joel Johnson's '00s look-back for the Awl is the white hot core of narcissistic, wasted-decade hedonism".

1. What would Martin Luther King Make of Twitter? Tee, hee. 
2. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Story, published in 1957, was a dangerous comic to own in the segregated American South: "People were told to read it, memorize it, and destroy it because if they were caught with it, they could be killed."

We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.

via www.state.gov

Call me naive but I always figured "cyberwar" was a lot of hype. I'd been sitting on this post because I wanted to dig up a crazy discussion I'd come across where an IT guy at a human rights organization in Washington DC described an amazing series of attacks that seem to be connected to this, featuring pixel-perfect phishing emails and toxic PDFs attached to emails with spoofed senders, timed to coincide with expected communications. Really intense. But I can't find it.

Note: this is bigger than Google:

At least 34 companies -- including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical -- were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources. Security experts say the attacks showed a new level of sophistication.

We are naked beings and nothing has any meaning. We only fabricate things to help us be more removed from nature. Humans are like the prodigal sons of Earth – moving away from their mother to spend her fortunes, only to return in death as the stripped down and barbaric beings we once were. So to get closer to true nature? Burn your clothes and belongings and money, have a sharp chiseled stone to catch food and a grass hut to keep shelter! Or realize we live a world that is consumed by false beliefs and agreements and try to live your life without taking it all too seriously.

coilhouse.net via Renegade Futurist

The right way to do it is to hold people accountable, to really restrict the number of things that you say to them, and to decide on the one or two things that are the most important. And then when you meet with them, you always bring back the conversation to that one thing. You have to do that consistently for over a year before you start having an impact.

via www.nytimes.com

Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10” on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.

You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.

While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time.

Think about how a user interface would have to incorporate those observations. Now imagine that you’ve been doing this experiment for four years and not four minutes.

via www.suntimes.com

It seems to me the hardest thing about doing great industrial design is having sufficiently high standards and taking the time to meet those standards. Which honestly doesn't seem that hard. How come no one can compete with Apple?

I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I exalted: "Finally!"

No longer able to eat or drink, Roger Ebert remembers.