Archive for the ‘art/design’ Category

cleaning out firefox tabs:

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I’ve really got to clean out my browser tabs. I have about 3 times more tabs open then normal because I keep meaning to link to things here and not getting around to it for one reason or another. Yesterday I finished a book and today I spent a long time watching the Macworld Keynote along with the rest of the internet.

mildly weird shit follows:
Letters in folds of skin made with clothespins: here.
(Via Coilhouse)

Art in a few easy steps: 1. tattoo pig 2. kill pig 3. skin pig 4. preserve pig’s skin 5. PROFIT?!?!: here.
(Via Coilhouse I think…)

Letters From Johns: here. An interesting, if unsurprising, site that collects anonymous accounts of men soliciting sex workers. The editor is hoping to also do “Letters from Hookers” but assumes a lack of submissions there means most of the women are too busy working to write emails.
(Via warrenellis.com)

A project by xkcd author to stop repeticious chat in his IRC channel by way of forcing every user to write a sentence unique to the history of the channel. here.
(Via xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe)

USB GPS receiver for 50 dollars here.
(via a search on Amazon)

And finally:

Dark Winter is a net.label dedicated to releasing dark ambient, atmospheric, and unconventional music from around the world. All Dark Winter releases are available for free download in 192kpbs MP3 format.

(Link to the label here)

I downloaded this:

Formication’s Agnosia which I’m really enjoying. Track 1 from that album:

I think it’s an interesting layered piece that changes slowly and subtlety throughout. Regardless of my badly articulated reasons for liking it, it’s appealing nonetheless.

video in 2000+ frames

Monday, December 17th, 2007
 

everyday from Noah K. on Vimeo

Probably old news for most but it’s mesmerizing.

ah, New York!

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Great mecca of culture, the Arts, Fashion, Finance and in the burrow to the north, Brooklyn: a growing mass of hipsters. If there’s not a major Indie rock band straight outta the madd gentrified streets of the B.K. in the next 5 years then this Allston-based blogger will eat his shorts. (Read: Brooklyn : USA :: Toronto : Canada (soon) )

Only in New York will this occur:
Chelsea Clinton Floored at Starbucks
(via New York Magazine, the periodical the hipster dieing to get out wants to love. If I ever buy a pair of Converse High-Tops or someone elses tight pants at a thrift store I’ll be damned if i don’t do it with a copy of that magazine in my pocket when I do it and a subscription check in the mail. [unless hipsters don't have checking accounts?])

Also:
Sign Of End Times: Porn-y American Apparel Billboard Is Probably Fake. Not That Anyone Can Tell! NSFW, assuming line drawings of genitals in SOHO are verboten.

How I got onto the New York site in the first place:
New York profiles Ellen Page (A.K.A Kiddy Pride): Pregnant With Possibilities: Ellen Page is the next Molly Ringwald. And the next Johnny Depp, too.
Ellen Page + Micheal Cera + Teen Pregnancy = cutest thing at the movies this year? I’d guess so.

Time to stop this before I take on fully the grammatical form of a celeb-blogger or something equally hideous.

watch the humanitarianism trickle.

Friday, November 16th, 2007

“Don’t you wish there was a way you could feel morally satisfied about your internet time wastage AND make yourself feel smart? Today I discovered the most adorably efficient way to accomplish both goals: Free Rice.”
(Via here, thanks to Janie.)

“FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 10 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people…
The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Wherever possible, the World Food Program buys food locally to support local farmers and the local economy. We encourage you to visit the United Nations World Food Program to learn more about their successful approach to ending hunger.”
(Via here.)

Time to put my leftovers back in the fridge and start a novel I bought on impulse today, partly because the cover is great.

pleasent in being unpleasent

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Rending my desktop wholly unusable by tiling a 300×300 album cover over it’s surface is, somehow, nice.  I don’t get it really but neither do you since you can’t see it and shouldn’t (i hope) care.  Probably something to do with the contrast from the earlier mostly-solid colors background.  I’ll probably change it in a while anyway.
In other news: Ziggy Stardust is like pulp sci-fi + guitar solos + drugs which equals awesome.

Here, Bullet: the cover

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

The title of this post corresponds to a volume of poetry released by Brian Turner, a US Army infantry man who served in Iraq. He blogs at HomeFires at the NY Times.

Thanks to things like the BDR and my job bookselling, I took this book out of the Amazon box yesterday afternoon and can immediately count on my fingers the 4 or 5 Photoshop techniques used to come up with this…less than innovative cover. I can sort of see what the designer was going for, but it falls flat due to a complete lack of complexity. I think it would have worked better if we could discern details from the cover in the soldier’s face, isn’t detail from a shared experience part of poetry? Sure, the poet obscures to give an impression (hence the cover and ‘oil paint’ filter settings) but lets get a little bit more complex. I mean, I could do this cover, given stock photos, if about 30 minutes and that’s assuming I don’t already have Photoshop installed and I have to go look up the title because I lost the paper it was written down on for me. i hate to be disparaging but I think if I see exactly how the designer did all of this and that it would take me (not a professional designer) 5 minutes to complete it strikes me as at the very least lazy and more distressing, wholly uninspired. I just hope the poetry beneath this fairly crappy cover surpasses it. More on that later.