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“A year ago, when nobody knew who they were, the demonic L.A. skate-rat rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All cranked out music at an alarming rate. And now that nobody will shut up about them, they’re still doing the same thing. Since 2008, Odd Future have released no fewer than 12 full-length albums, as well as assorted between-releases singles — all available free on their Tumblr. Some of those releases are brilliant, paradigm-shifting works of violent vision. Others are entirely forgettable. Almost all of them are worth your hard-drive real estate, and almost all of them will confound you in one way or another. Below, you'll find a guide to every single one of those albums, from their introductory 2008 ‘The Odd Future Tape’ to Frank Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra.’, the experimental R&B tape that the crew released just a few weeks ago.”

A chart.

A TextMate mod. Maybe check this out at some point; I think Dean uses it.

Copying a successful business plan is safe, and tons of companies are copying Groupon. The differentiating strategies of the more successful copycats are interesting, as is the arms-race and recursion of deal aggregators. I find it fascinating that people sign up for this stuff, because I find it wasteful. This is insane: “In just over two years, Groupon has accumulated 60 million subscribers, more than $1 billion in venture capital and $760 million in annual revenue to become the fastest-growing Web company ever. In December, it declined a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.”

Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk tells the story of his band’s jingle for Budweiser in the early 90s, and how he feels about bands and advertising then and since. A good companion to Matt LeMay’s ‘Art vs Content’ post from late 2010 (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content).

Statistician has a fifty-worksheet Excel file filled with numbers and ideas, mostly based on 'congestion pricing', that could fix the traffic problems of NYC. “Komanoff is a dyed-in-the-wool stats geek, and the BTA demonstrates his faith in data. By measuring the problem—the amount of time and money lost in traffic every year—we can begin to solve it, he says. We can turn the knobs on the entire transportation system to maximize efficiency. Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.”

FOMO is ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and it’s a major problem on the internet. “There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet.”

“A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code. Just put your image size (width and height) after our URL and you'll get a placeholder.”

“RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead. Good. Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.”

Prevent security risks from stuff like Firesheep. “When you connect to the Internet through an unprotected wireless network, such as at a coffeeshop or an airport, where you don’t have to enter a security key, you’re putting yourself at risk. Attackers connected to the same network can easily intercept your unencrypted traffic and log in as you to services such as Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn.”

The 'Live Audio' section in particular is nice, and is where the youarelisteningtolosangeles.com feeds are coming from. “RadioReference.com is the world's largest radio communications data provider, featuring a complete frequency database, trunked radio system information, and FCC license data. RadioReference is also the largest broadcaster of public safety live audio communications feeds, hosting thousands of live audio broadcasts of Police, Fire, EMS, and other associated communications. With hundreds of thousands of members, RadioReference provides the most comprehensive collaboration platform for public safety communications professionals and hobbyists.”

1. Understand the buyer. 2. Passion matters. 3. Charge money. 4. Experiment with tons of models. 5. Bootstrapping is the way to go. 6. Practice, practice, practice.

From the first EP to the soon-released LP, how it all happened.

By Matthew Perpetua.

‘Ian Roger’s presentation from New Music Seminar Los Angeles, February 2011.’ A great overview of how bands have used Topsin and online marketing to great success. Some good takeaways here: a) Don't sell anything until you have a few thousand people on your mailing list, b) Until that point, focus most of all on getting known, c) Do something small every week and something big every month, d) Communicate honestly and treat your fans well.

Charlie Sheen's history is full of abuse, as much of women as himself, and reality TV helps convince us that's fine.

Enablers. “If you didn’t hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he’s already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen? Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it’s Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight? Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.”

Combining hundreds of landmark snapshots into one ghostly, layered photo. “Series of photographic works entitled ‘Photo Opportunities’, from hundreds of snapshots of tourist locations found on the Internet. By collecting and then bringing together successive layers of around a hundred similar ‘photo souvenirs’, these images conjure up questions about representation and memory of places.”

Getting people to re-enact old photos. Wonderful. “I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.”

Why to make 'Gender' a text box, and why we should struggle against Facebook.

“In early January, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which is expected to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of noncommercial FM stations.” A good overview of LPFM and how the recent legislation happened.

For backgrounds and whatever.

“Tumblr2WP makes it super simple to transfer your Tumblr content to your own, self-hosted WordPress install. This tool will create a WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) file from your tumblr site which can be imported into WordPress.”

Makes nice little wooden voice recorders. “I am an artist. I like sound. I build things. I grew up in the country. I now live in the city. I believe everyone’s voice should be heard. I like wooden toys. I like electronics and technology. I hold hope for the future. I believe in experimenting. My interest in expanding how we experience and control sound has led to my developing prototypes intended to reinforce musical instruments as collaborative, sociable objects to be experienced in community.”

The creator of 'Passage', that life-story game-as-art Flash game.

For sending HTML email.

As of this writing, “6 on the International Space Station and 6 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.”

“Technology is not an abstract entity. Technology, like art or literature or music or mathematics, is a human endeavor. It is made by people and, as such, is imbued with their values, hopes, foibles, and passions.”

Perspective on the perspectives on the internet: those of the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. “…what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.”