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Profile/promotional piece from Gary Chun.

Beautiful, haunting, gigantic sculptures. “There are hundreds of them scattered throughout villages and rural landscapes in the former Yugoslavia. Once the site of pilgrimages by schoolchildren, military veterans, patriots, and mourners who had lost family in WWII, these Spomeniks (monuments) are today rarely visited. Often built out of concrete in a style dubbed Brutalism, these secular totems were meant to endure, impervious to the mere march of time—a testament and continuous witness to the new unity of the historically fractious Balkan states—the unity of all the Slavs, YUGOSLAVIA.”

Friend and ally Gary Chun gives COTQ and the Toro Y Moi show another shoutout in the Honolulu Pulse picks. Too kind. “Arguably the busiest indie rock band in Honolulu, Clones of the Queen had six shows lined up this month, and will be concluding their run this weekend and Thursday. Band member Matthew McVickar (also known as solo act Lapwing) is promoting his first club concert, and he got a great first mainland act in Toro Y Moi, the retro-pop-funk band led by Chaz Bundick. He and the band, along with fellow indie noteworthy band Painted Highways, will open for Bundick and company Saturday night at NextDoor starting at 9. Tickets are $20.”

Contrast put up the mixtape of MP3s I put together at Ara's request, and I think it helped a lot, because there were 122 downloads (!) of the .zip file. (I mistakenly hosted the ToroMix I made on Ge.tt, who, after that many downloads, removed the file, so the link doesn't work anymore. I was excited about Ge.tt because it's clean and allowed for hot-linking to files without interstitial 'Download This!' pages, but I should have known better to trust a baby webapp with vital data.)

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

Sarah Millstein on the lack of women speakers at conferences. “Because some of you aren’t like me in your choices, there are profitable conferences with speaker rosters that look like roll call for the signers of the Constitution. But conferences that want to be taken seriously by people who take other kinds of people seriously need more diversity among the speakers to thrive. And conference organizers, whose goals often include highlighting new ideas, cannot simply recycle the same short list of well-known speakers from show to show.”

A JavaScript that navigates a Facebook fan page and outputs all of the fans into a CSV file. Incredibly useful.

“The chillwave-cum-funk master gets a job he likes in Honolulu.”

“I am too lazy to expand my world view to include the possibility that I may have unconsciously treated women and minorities unfairly my entire life, and it wears me out that you’re trying to get me to understand this.”

Beautiful, fragile paintings by David Lynn.

I’m going to write about this post in a few days. “I don’t personally care much about finding ‘great unsigned bands;’ I am not in A&R or publicity. If I was going to spend all of my time focused on listening to the first four or five songs written by a series of unknown acts I would lose my mind, because I am increasingly interested in issues of style and craft that are usually lost on people who are just starting out. I’d rather have people at record labels deal with that and facilitate the process of making finished records. There’s a lot of great labels out there — if I’m going to find something new, I trust them more than anyone else other than my friends and colleagues.”

“I love entrepreneurship, and I love tech startups, but sometimes I'm struck by the lack of perspective that many tech entrepreneurs have about creating a startup. One of the most common things that entrepreneurs in the tech sector lose sight of is that most companies never get venture capital funding, especially outside of the technology world. That's not to say that VC hasn't played an important rule in the growth of many of the biggest and best companies, sites and apps. It's just not the only option.”

“1. Import your feeds. Enter the url for your feeds, import your OPML file, or use our bookmarklet — it’s up to you. 2. Set up your filters. You can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more. 3. Enjoy your new feeds. Your RSS reader of choice simply retrieves your clean feeds. It’s that easy.”

“Precision colors for machines and people.” “Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions.”

Jamie creates animated GIFs by selectively animating a portion of a photograph. These are wonderful and a little creepy.

‘Easy scheduling.’ Create a poll, invite participants, and everyone agrees on the times they can meet. Brilliant. Via Merlin Mann in the 'Back to Work' podcast.

“20-plus proposed rules for how to give away music creatively and communally.” This is great!

“The gallowglass were an elite class of mercenary warrior who came from Norse-Gaelic clans in the Hebrides and Highlands of Scotland between the mid 13th century and late 16th century.” “They were the mainstay of Scottish and Irish warfare before the advent of gunpowder, and depended upon seasonal service with Irish chieftains. A military leader would often choose a gallowglass to serve as his personal aide and bodyguard because, as a foreigner, the gallowglass would be less subject to local feuds and influences.”

“This Website was formed to promote the interests of all MacVicars (MacVicar, Macquaker, M'Vicar, M'Yvicare, Makvicar, M'Weckare, M'Wicare, McViccar, Vicarii, McWiccar, Makuecar, Makfikar, Makwicr, McVicker, McVicar, Vicar, M'Ayn Rawych, V'Gewycar and other fine families) who are descended from our progenitor, Mac a' Bhiocair. It is our intent to provide you with a history of our family, its origin, its struggles, and a site that offers you an opportunity to participate with suggestions, additions, and support.”

“Complain about the way other people make software by making software.” … “Worse is when the people doing the complaining also make software or web sites or iPhone applications themselves. As visible leaders of the web, I think there are a lot of folks who could do a favor to younger, less experienced people by setting an example of critiquing to raise up rather than critiquing to tear down.”

“The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.”

By Gina Trapani, head of ThinkUp. “What's not clear is how people who don't code contribute their skills and expertise to making OSS software. Because it's not clear, they don't, and the software looks and feels like it was designed by engineers, for engineers—because it was.”

Mike Monteiro, the head of Mule design, explains the importance of being confident, getting paid, and having contracts and a lawyer. An excellent presentation.

“Suffice it to say that Whois masking not only doesn't provide any real benefits to the domain holder but actually adds an unacceptable amount of risk.”

"A great Mac image editor built for humans." I would like to buy this at some point. Alternative to Photoshop.

Some actually useful stuff in here.

‘Sustainable, Compassionate, Resilient Communities’ “Kanu Hawaii is a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation that is overseen by a volunteer board of directors and administered by a small staff. In 2005, the founders of Kanu Hawaii asked each other three questions: 1. What do we love about Hawaii? Our connection to place, the strength of our communities, our diverse traditions, our island values. 2. What concerns us about the future? Shrinking opportunities, environmental degradation, the loss of communities, inequality, apathy, greed, intolerance… in Hawaii and throughout the world. 3. What can we do about it? This question had no easy answer. How do you build a movement when so many of us feel powerless in the face of huge problems? How do you demand change without compromising our island values?”

Good oral history. This quote is a good takeaway: "I think the thing I've really learned from James is a) patience, b) only work with people you love, and c) be very, very, very, very stubborn about everything. Because when you're capable and able to say no to stuff, when you're capable of writing your own story and being very adamant about the way that you're portrayed or the way that your records are made, people respond to it."

“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”

Where my ancestor is thought to have come from. “There are two Dalriadas: that of northwest Ireland, and that of western Scotland.”