Playful and ironic photos and little installations.

"I wanted to high-five someone, but no one else was awake."

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

Everything is going to be okay.

Figure out how much money you *need*, and get there, and while you're getting there and once you're there, act like you're rich. Seriously. Thanks, @ftrain, for the link.

Why are so many women willingly giving up their identities and letting their children take over? And are our children being overly coddled as a result?

Full-text transcript of President Obama's recent commencement speech at Arizona State University. This man can be downright inspiring.

230 songs across ten discs, all from 1981. Free for download. Lots happening then.

A gallery of nice "large-format landscape and architectural work" photos by Guy Sargent.

"A collaborative music/spoken word project." A collection of YouTube videos of people playing various instruments all in the B-flat key. Start and stop and fade them each in any way at any time. This is awesome.

We do love trouble.

Yeah, it's a crappy linkbait gimmicky list of fonts, but these are good ones (not all of them, and relatively speaking). I didn't Delicious this last month when I found it because I thought I was better than that but I've since needed to find the link again four times, so HERE IT IS. Bite me.

A beautiful set of photos from a land artist. Leaves, twigs, stones, and thorns. This stuff is so excellent.

Anticon beatmakers Jel and Odd Nosdam have forty dollars to spend on records at a thrift store and an afternoon to make a song from them. Links here to a short video of them finding the records, taking samples, and piecing them together. The track isn't half bad, even though this is slightly akward and gimmicky. In fact, yeah, just skip the video and download the exclusive so that you have it forever.

"Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time." Only restarting can circumvent the time limit you've sent.

Obama's always been silent about copyright and bootlegging, but Biden's been, apparently, quite the industry advocate and technology ignoramus.

This is beautiful. "Mutsugoto is an intimate communication device intended for a bedroom environment. Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A custom computer vision and projection system allows users to draw on each other's bodies while lying in bed. Drawings are transmitted 'live' between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture." Thanks for the link, Ara.

On the place of an "innocent reminiscer" in today's indie pop-rock landscape, and how it all began with Jonathan Richman.

A standard report on the duo, but finally some news! "They're halfway done with a new album, which might be released this year, but they're not rushing it."

This! This is so good. This is what I want to be writing.

Sifting through HRO's sorta-haughty satire is worth it for the occasion post like this, where whoever Carles is gets tired of mocking teenagers and writes something true and intriguing about the state of the music industry and popular music culture (at least for the indie set).

A stylish, simple, infographical, curt, and summarily realistic at the world in which we currently live.

Basically: Publishing solves a problem that no longer exists, and we don't need newspapers; we need journalism. Amen.

This looks great.

The ones in the comments are better than the ones in the article. Laughed until I cr*ed y'all!

Worth consideration. "SXSW is an extraordinary and well-run event. I simply wish that it would give something back to the artists who have made its existence possible." On the other hand, shouldn't artists have to fight tooth-and-nail for attention and acclaim among thousands of others, be poor and go back to the drawing board sometimes? Getting to the point where one can play at SXSW is a feat in itself; shouldn't it be enough of a reward? But then, shouldn't SXSW help these bands as much as it can, as much as it claims to want to?

Not so much 'debunked', but this article calls out Krakauer on a number of conclusions and omissions from his book (and the subsequent movie). To summarize: the poison/moldy seeds theory doesn't hold water, and McCandless probably just simply starved to death. McCandless had money and a map with him on his final trek, but the book and movie omit this. Also, one of the final self-portrait photographs might have a clue as to the "injury" alluded to in his final note: one sleeve of his shirt looks armless.

A Flash game in the vein of Jason Rohrer's 'Passage'. It sort of picks up where Passage leaves off. Minorly challenging, stylish, and a dark, fun story to play.

Small MIDI controllers. Glorious.

Joshua Davis reports via hour-long communications with the jailed orchestrator of a multi-million diamond heist in Antwerp. Very exciting.