Saved (Public Feed)

The lost art of laser-informed portraiture. Plenty to like here. Especially the guy with the ladder.

Life's a beach. No, really. There are loudmouth uglies in too-small beachwear, there are cigarette butts, there are jellyfish. But, there is warm sun, clear blue sky, crystal water and weightless oblivion. Life is also a bike ride. There are ups, there are downs, there are potholes, there are assholes. But there are also cool nights with the city sparkling around you, and you are singing into the wind at 30 miles an hour.

An excellent design update for the magazine. I shout this from the The Helvetica Design Is Also Great bandwagon.

"Gallows humor is a type of humor that arises from stressful, traumatic or life-threatening situations such as wartime events, hostilities, mass murder; often in circumstances where death is perceived as impending and unavoidable. It is similar to black comedy but differs in that it is made by the person affected."

"Animals are banned from the moon. House cats now kill more people than heart disease."

Very neat MIDI controller iPhone apps.

Palin and Perry, sittin' in a tree. "She kisses a girl—sure, okay. She likes it—um, and? Oh, and she hopes her boyfriend doesn't mind, because sexual autonomy is inextricable from the male gaze, and that's fucking awesome. 'I Kissed a Girl' is infuriatingly ass-backward: cynical adherence to outdated values made into titillation, snide calculation dressed up as the underdog, the same old bullshit disguised as rebellion."

Intelligently choosing the graceful degradation (size- and style-wise) of your web fonts.

From the guys who brought you the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment.

"Scan Toaster: the USB toaster that prints news, weather and snapshots onto slices of toast, by Sung Bae Chang, Sejong University, South Korea. One of the nine finalists of the Electrolux Design Lab competition 08."

On "shortening your workweek" in every way: outsourcing, clever promotion techniques, social engineering, and focusing on the right things.

Because I keep forgetting where this is.

"The first music video ever shot with a 360 degree panoramic lens."

Verse Daily, a quality online web anthology of poetry. A poem a day, along with our complete archives, and poem selections from the web.

Ten characteristics of creative people. (Basically, they're a beautiful mess of contradictions.)

With handy charts.

"letmein"

"Two Knuckles Deep in My Mathhole: Slowly Reaching Calculus”

Fantasy footage.

Why privacy persists. "Along with new visibilities comes social understanding of those new visibilities." "If the end of privacy comes about, it's because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. It's not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities."

Where will you be? I'd not mind being here. "I want this to end when I'm on top, so I'm planning my final show on December 21, 2012. It's when the Mayan calendar ends. It's the day when solids become liquids and liquids become plasmas." "I want it to be a stage production, but one where the lines become blurry between reality and complete stage me...I want it to be miserable and equally fantastic. I want the best of both worlds."

"2012 is claimed by some to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse)." And no more foie gras in California.

Beijing held its formal opening ceremony today for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The ceremony, held in the National Stadium known as the Bird's Nest, was attended by thousands, and watched by millions more on television. Below are some highlights of the nearly 4-hour performance.

Lots of videos of lightning in slow motion, which is awesome.

"Asako Narahashi’s series 'half awake and half asleep in the water,' at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (July 17-August 22, 2008), shows Japan’s coastal areas as seen from the sea. Using a waterproof camera and watching the tide instead of the viewfinder, Narahashi captures a vision of Japan—and of the world—that is at once calming, eerie, enchanting, and unsettling. She is only occasionally swallowed by waves in the process. "

"What you see when you die." (Yeah, so I had a list of YTMNDs on my computer and I decided to put them all in Delicious, but every single one except this one was Captain Jean-Luc Picard singing about cake and drunken ping-pong with Ronald McDonald.)

Honolulu friend Mish's model/artist/cosmology profile.

"One of the great features of Mac OS X has aways been the built-in spelling checker. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to see what words you've added. But with Dictionary Cleaner, a convienient System Preferences pane for Mac OS X, now you can."

Brilliantly dark, saturated, spotted, and moody paintings of animals, humans, and other creatures in dreams and danger.

On the characteristic lack of usability in open source projects, and why. "The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable."