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.

I want to read this collection of articles someday, but I doubt I will.

From Justin Ouellette. For future reference.

Another one of these "How to Be Productive and Creative" lists, but they're good as inspiration/affirmations.

What you get when you order Thai curry. Helpful.

A fantastic music blog, with expertly crafted thematic mixes, often centered around certain periods in music. A great source for inspiration and knowledge for the music-obsessive.

A gravitational space-time detector picked up extra noise, which has made some theorize that our entire universe is a hologram.

This is insanely fascinating, and I honestly don't understand it at all. "In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected." "We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram."

"Success is how many shining eyes I have around me." And that old chestnut about never saying anything to someone that you wouldn't want to be your last communication with them. Platitudes, yes, but very good ones. The second inspirational music-related video in as many days to have moved me to tears (yesterday's Sigur Rós MoMA concert being the first).

"I spoke to an economist friend about the city’s problems. 'We don’t make anything,' he said. 'We don’t produce anything. We're a service economy, and no one can afford the services.' What happens after that? I asked. 'Anarchy,' he said. 'Basically, Gaza. If only we had something to rail against except ourselves, as Arab peoples do. What a relief that must be!'"

This is a fine, fine performance, and very well presented. Wish I could have been there.

"And then the police came."

This must be the best children's show ever.

This bookmarklet makes reading things on the web very simple and thus enjoyable by removing all of the often-useless and often-flashing worthlessness surrounding the content.