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The Chair
The Chair is a 24-minute NSFW short horror film with a strong sense of the uncanny which begins when a man picks up a chair from the street.
Helen Vendler, 1933 - 2024
Helen Vendler, perhaps the preeminent contemporary American poetry critic, has passed away at 90.
Rest in Peace Kevin O'Neill
Comic book illustrator Kevin O'Neill, best known for his work on Marshal Law, 2000 AD, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has passed away of cancer at 69.
SMBC to the rescue
The SMBC Covid-19 Book Pack is a series of PDF books by the author of webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (previously). Highlights include Shakespeare's sonnets and the Holy Bible, "abridged beyond the point of usefulness."
Hark! from those shadowy depths thy voice / Mournfully echoes, "AUTH".
Fair is the Lake, and bright the wood,Poems written by the GPT-2 neural network, with copious notes on methodology.
With many a flower-full glamour hung:
Fair are the banks; and soft the flood
With golden laughter of our tongue
We've really got to get back to writing about Back To The Future
Signs Of A Creepy Government Conspiracy At Standing Rock is a bit of investigative journalism from, er, Cracked, covering various cybersecurity attacks that have been launched against the protest camp at Standing Rock.
Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
This candid 2011 talk about the history of OpenSolaris fork Illumos doubles as a history of the late Silicon Valley giant Sun, its engineering and corporate culture, its disastrous acquisition by Oracle, and the rise of open source in the 2000's.
The ethics of Prison Architect
Is it possible to create a prison management game without trivializing or misrepresenting the issue of mass incarceration? So begins a critique by Paolo Pedercini, developer of "games addressing issues of social and environmental justice," of Introversion Software's upcoming game Prison Architect, currently in still in development but available as an early access beta. Prison Architect's producer, Mark Morris, and its designer, Chris Delay, respond in a lengthy youtube video.
Monster's Den Chronicles
Monster's Den Chronicles is a turn-based Flash dungeon-crawler RPG with combat mechanics reminiscent of turn-based strategy game stalwart Disciples II.
Broken Angel: architectural outsider art
"Broken Angel isn’t architecture - it’s outsider art." A profile of Arthur Wood, whose lack of formal training did not prevent him from adding six stories of wild additions to the two-story Brooklyn tenement building he bought for $2,000 in 1971.
Why they don't trust Devil Mountain Software
ZDNet(!) reports on a strange case of technology journalism malfeasance. It turns out that journalist Randall C. Kennedy has been posing as the CTO of Devil Mountain Software, purveyor of Windows performance data.
Tane
Tane. Happy friday!
Search me. Ezra liked foreign titles.
Des Imagistes is an online version of Ezra Pound's influential 1914 anthology of Imagist poetry, which includes work by Pound, James Joyce, H. D., and William Carlos Williams.
You may ask yourself, how do I work this? David Byrne on robots
David Byrne writes three thoughtful essays on robots, song, and the uncanny valley on the occasion of the creation of a robot which sings in his voice at a Madrid museum: Visiting the robot factory in Texas, regarding the uncanny valley, on machines and souls.
Sitting With Fire
Sitting With Fire is a blog running from Tassajara, one of the oldest Zen monasteries in the US. It provides information on the status of Tassajara's residents who have stayed behind to combat the Basin Complex fire.
"No fixed pushers, and no magnet skateboards."
These "track boards," or "fix push" boards, were initially developed to be raced in the velodrome, and differ from traditional skateboards in one major way: the rider can never coast.
A brief documentary on the increasingly popular fix-push skateboard culture and its roots in San Francisco's Mission district.
Daily photos from the SF Bay Area
So you'd like to see daily photographs taken in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area? You can start with What I'm Seeing and supplement your viewing with the following sites.
TV Pirate Tells All
Christopher Tarnovsky, smartcard programmer, gives a fascinating insider account of his years in the cloak-and-dagger world of satellite TV piracy. Tarnovsky began as a satellite pirate himself before being hired by a DirecTV contractor to develop anti-piracy electronic countermeasures; he was allegedly responsible for the "Black Sunday" attack on DirecTV pirates.
6 Differences
6 Differences is an extremely simple and oddly soothing Flash game with nice background music.
A Friend in Weed Is a Friend Indeed
"Try Legal Weed" is the slogan printed on bottle caps made by Weed, California brewer Mount Shasta Brewing Company's latest microbrewed lager. The ATF has ordered the brewer not to use the caps, as they may "mislead consumers about the characteristics of the alcoholic beverage."
We're all blue from projection tubes
UK band The Get Out Clause made their newest video by performing in front of 80 of London's approximately 13 million CCTV cameras, and then requesting the footage via the Data Protection Act. The footage was then edited together into this music video.
Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true
A Million Penguins, the wiki novel mentioned previously on MeFi, is complete, and a research paper about it has been released.
The Last Stand 2
The Last Stand 2 is a Flash game in which you play the survivor of a zombie apocalypse. During the day you search for supplies and other survivors; during the night you must fend off the zombies. Make it to Union City in 40 days.
(via)
Three screw-ups
"Now when I screw up, people from all over Charlotte mindlessly come to Belk looking for Magic Johnson." Thee entertaining screw-ups from author and sports columnist Joe Posnanski.
DO NOT WANT unless starving
Arthur Mebius, photographer
The photography of Dutch photographer Arthur Mebius includes personal and commercial work, and is often rather funny.
Overdub Tampering Comittee
The Overdub Tampering Comittee Manifesto. What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet? ... We set out to make that specific bewildering, annoyance a possibility.
Short dutch films
The short films of Floris Kaayk and Sil van der Woerd blend live-action footage and computer animation. Metalosis Maligna. Swim. Duet.
Order Electrum.
Very petite, like a potato
Weng Weng Rap is a musical tribute to the Philippines's beloved 2' 9" tall superspy, the star of such films as For Your Height Only (audio clips). (Some lyrics mildly NSFW.)
Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?
Prior to his critically acclaimed program The Wire, creator Edward Burns wrote the HBO miniseries The Corner, which also focused on the drug trade in Baltimore. Charles S. Dutton, an African-American Baltimore native and former convict probably best known to most as TV's "Roc," was chosen to direct the miniseries. Who Gets To Tell a Black Story?, part of a Pulitzer-prize winning NYT series on race in America, examines Dutton's take on how to make a TV program which portrays a mostly African-American cast of characters, the struggles and differing perspectives of Dutton and Burns, and how race is portrayed in Hollywood.
Indexed on US Politics
Jessica Hagy, author of indexed (previously) covers the 2008 Presidential Election for McClatchy's "alt.campaign" site.
Human Brain Cloud
Human Brain Cloud is a simple but addictive mutiplayer word association widget with a nifty Flash interface, brought to you by one of the founders of the Experimental Gameplay Project [previously].
They read the alt-weeklies so you don't have to
SonicLiving is a website which tracks live events (mostly shows) in your home town, and can read in tracks from your last.fm or pandora account to notify you of interesting shows coming up in your area, as long as your area is one of the currently-limited areas they cover. (vide intra)
"I wanted to tell the story the way I thought HE saw it"
Here's an interview with Richard Linklater about A Scanner Darkly and Philip K. Dick, in comic-book format. Also: the much longer transcript of the interview.
We are not lovin' it all that much, actually
When McDonald's Interactive recently gave a presentation at the International Serious Games 2006 conference, they made a startling announcement: "we can no longer stand by while McDonald's corporate policies help lead the planet to ruin. [...] So our team has decided to break away from McDonald's and do something about it." (more inside)
Claudia Emerson wins pulitzer for poetry
Claudia Emerson, a Virginian poet and English professor, has won the 2006 Pulitzer prize for poetry for her book The Late Wife. Here is an interview from 2002, and here is a podcast of Professor Emerson reading from The Late Wife in 2005. Some of her poems: "Bone," "The Bat," more.
Happy Friday
Orangutwang is a simple Flash game about a stretchy monkey (sadly, the monkey does not play banjo). Don't touch the spiders!
Opus Posthumous
Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most esteemed modern American poets, yet her Collected Poems, containing all of the poems published during her lifetime, runs to a scant 287 pages. Now, 27 years after her death, a selection of her unpublished poems has been published as Death and the Juke-Box by Alice Quinn, an editor at the New Yorker. (more inside)
Geru Geru Panic
Geru Geru Panic (Gel Gel Panic) - the Japanese flash game where you must fend off attacking (wait for it) jellies. Also by the same author: about a billion more flash games featuring Panzo the panda. Note: first link is to a game with background music.
Beware the vengeful shade of thingamabob
It Came from the Crypt of Whatchamacallit. Flash platformer, because Tuesday is the new Friday.
Data = Art
distellamap is a series of graphical representations of the code and data in Atari 2600 game cartridges, created using the Processing programming language. The results are rather pretty. Also by the same author: mario soup, a representation of the sprites in Super Mario Brothers. (via artificial.dk)
Stick figures must die
Stick Arena - mindless multiplayer Flash violence, because I can't frigging wait for it to be Friday already.
Star Wars as pomo metafilm
The Force. Some see it as a religion, some as an academic discipline to be studied. But what if it's really a manifestation of metatextual authorial intervention? Three decades on, the kids who grew up playing with Luke Skywalker action figures and carrying Princess Leia lunchboxes may be startled to discover that Star Wars is really just one big elephantine postmodern art film. (more within)
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