not-so-interesting

Photo

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:49:49 -0700

npr: OOOOOooo I want one! — Tanya wetheurban: THE CHROMATIC...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:14:49 -0800

OOOOOooo I want one! — Tanya

wetheurban: THE CHROMATIC TYPEWRITER

What a lovely new use for an old gadget. Washington-based painter Tyree Callahan has modified a traditional typewriter and turned it into a painting machine, or “Chromatic Typewriter”. Callahan submitted the beautiful typewriter as part of the 2012 West Prize competition, an annual art prize that’s determined by popular vote. The keys on the vintage 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter have each been replaced with a different pad of color to give some rather interesting results!

timelordchild: See what a group of engineers did to...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:57:31 -0800

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

timelordchild:

See what a group of engineers did to encourage people to use the stairs in Stockholm.

Would’ve loved to have done my own rendition of “Heart and Soul” like in the movie “Big.”

ninakix: “Once Upon” are three important contemporary web...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:22:43 -0800

ninakix:

“Once Upon” are three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to the memories of Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied. They created a 1997 version of Google+, YouTube and facebook, all optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.03, running under Windows 95. Of course you can view them with a browser that still supports HTML Frames. I really love this little detail: the transfer speed of the server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed). (via Once Upon - today and tomorrow)

For Some Marching Bands, Hazing Means Brutality : NPR

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:59:00 -0800

For Some Marching Bands, Hazing Means Brutality : NPR:

WTH? As a former high school “bando,” I am completely shocked! Whatever happened to the good ol’ non-violent warm and fuzzy “geekiness” that was being in marching band?

npr: (via What children’s drawings would look like if it were...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:29:52 -0800

npr:

(via What children’s drawings would look like if it were painted realistically)

Been on hold with Virgin America for the last hour + and...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:43:57 -0700

Been on hold with Virgin America for the last hour + and I’ve heard this song at least 3 times.

At least the music is good.

Arni says I use too many commas. But that’s because I...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:16:38 -0700

Arni says I use too many commas. But that’s because I don’t want orange juice on my toast.

YES. Maybe I should print this on a T-Shirt, or better yet, a...

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 18:50:24 -0700

YES. Maybe I should print this on a T-Shirt, or better yet, a sticker on my forehead?

Song: Cinderella BeautifulArtist: Peter CincottiAlbum: East of...

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:24:23 -0700

Song: Cinderella Beautiful
Artist: Peter Cincotti
Album: East of Angel Town

I came across some Peter Cincotti files I had on my old Dell I forgot I had. I love the Pandora Station. Arni and I can’t help but croon along the chorus when it comes on.

Cinderella Beautiful
this one is for you
we almost made our fairy tale come true
happy ever after was
unavailable
now, two years after midnight
I’m still thinking of those yesterdays
when I was prince charming
and you were Cinderella Beautiful

A really reminiscent and beautifully written song.

Fact: Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:32:29 -0700

Fact: Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

pigeoneyeddevilwoman: Cat Gets Caught Barking and Resumes...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:42:25 -0700

pigeoneyeddevilwoman:

Cat Gets Caught Barking and Resumes Meowing

THE LOOK ON ITS FACE WHEN IT DISCOVERS ITS RUSE HAS BEEN DISCOVERED.

Lapidarium notes: William Deresiewicz on the meaning of friendship in our time Achilles...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:13:27 -0700

Lapidarium notes: William Deresiewicz on the meaning of friendship in our time Achilles...:

aminotes:

The more people we know, the lonelier we get

Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. “Reach out and touch someone” meant someone in particular, someone you were actually thinking about. It meant having a conversation. Now we’re just broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven’t just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

It’s amazing how fast things have changed. Not only don’t we have Wordsworth and Coleridge anymore, we don’t even have Jerry and George. Today, Ross and Chandler would be writing on each other’s walls. Carrie and the girls would be posting status updates, and if they did manage to find the time for lunch, they’d be too busy checking their BlackBerrys to have a real conversation. Sex and Friends went off the air just five years ago, and already we live in a different world. Friendship (like activism) has been smoothly integrated into our new electronic lifestyles. We’re too busy to spare our friends more time than it takes to send a text. We’re too busy, sending texts. And what happens when we do find the time to get together? I asked a woman I know whether her teenage daughters and their friends still have the kind of intense friendships that kids once did. Yes, she said, but they go about them differently. They still stay up talking in their rooms, but they’re also online with three other friends, and texting with another three. Video chatting is more intimate, in theory, than speaking on the phone, but not if you’re doing it with four people at once. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A study found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there’s little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.

The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. (…) Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. There’s something faintly obscene about performing that intimacy in front of everyone you know, as if its real purpose were to show what a deep person you are. Are we really so hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?

But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I’d left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know. [Facebook] As for getting back in touch with old friends—yes, when they’re people you really love, it’s a miracle. (…)

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory. Carlton Fisk has remarked that he’s watched the videotape of his famous World Series home run only a few times, lest it overwrite his own recollection of the event. Proust knew that memory is a skittish creature that peeks from its hole only when it isn’t being sought. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this—all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.

Finally, the new social-networking Web sites have falsified our understanding of intimacy itself, and with it, our understanding of ourselves. The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or “25 Random Things About Me” can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of is based on desiccated notions about what knowing another person means: First, that intimacy is confessional—an idea both peculiarly American and peculiarly young, perhaps because both types of people tend to travel among strangers, and so believe in the instant disgorging of the self as the quickest route to familiarity. Second, that identity is reducible to information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid thing you did in seventh grade. Third, that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we’re all conducting market research on ourselves. (…)
So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture. But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one’s emotional generosity, that one’s moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third. Yet even those are just descriptions, and no more specify the individuals uniquely than to say that one has red hair, another is tall. To understand what they really look like, you would have to see a picture. And to understand who they really are, you would have to hear about the things they’ve done.

Good but long article on the history of friendships. (via Arni: via Michael)

De Young Museum gate

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:04:00 -0700

De Young Museum gate

Song: BarcarolleArtist: OffenbachAlbum: Life Is Beautiful...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:12:00 -0700

Song: Barcarolle
Artist: Offenbach
Album: Life Is Beautiful Soundtrack

Last night and this morning’s ohrwurm.

I used to always tear up when Guido plays this song on the record player and points it out the window for his wife Dora to hear.

Song: CrestfallenArtist: Smashing PumpkinsAlbum: Adore One of my...

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:04:00 -0700

Song: Crestfallen
Artist: Smashing Pumpkins
Album: Adore

One of my two favorite songs from the album. I loved the raw emotion of it—the longing to be with someone who you don’t belong to or doesn’t belong to you.

Weird to think that (hopefully!) I’ll never have to feel that feeling of non-reciprocation again.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is..."

Tue, 31 May 2011 14:10:06 -0700

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

- Aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Corona Heights view of downtown

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:23:22 -0700

Corona Heights view of downtown

52hearts: Voltron Star Shooter (by John Kratz) Made in 1985,...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:47:59 -0700

52hearts:

Voltron Star Shooter (by John Kratz)

Made in 1985, this toy starts out as a mild-mannered SLR (inset), but then converts into Voltron: Defender of the Universe!

The top part of his body is actually a working 110 camera, while the big “SLR” lens is a fake.

Made in Macau and sold by Impulse Ltd. of Missouri.

Even if it isn’t in existence anymore, the concept is pretty cool.

OMG, the best of both worlds.

True Story. Srsly.

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:49:36 -0700

Me: What?! Are you serious?!
Him: Will you?
Me: Are you really being serious?
Him: Of course, why would you think I was joking?
Me: I don't know... ?
Him: Wait, I guess I'm supposed to get down on one knee. Will you marry me?
Me: What?! Of course! Of course I'll marry you! I can't believe it! Are you being serious?
Him: Oh, I guess I should give you the ring.
Me: Are you serious?!