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The Misfit Who Built the IBM PC
Pinning this long read for future enjoyment. Also did not know filmmaker Gareth Edwards had a regular column about forgotten computing pioneers
Every single internal alarm I have is ringing as I read through the Superpower site. I think it's fair to be skeptical of any startup that makes such claims like: "The world’s most advanced digital clinic to help you live longer, prevent disease, and feel your best." This is not an endorsement of their goals or manifesto (tho I do agree with anyone who says that the current American health system is a mess).
What I do endorse is the web design here. It's beautiful and immersive! Scroll your way through this thing and you'll encounter a transition from white to black via a very particular gradient that is incredibly memorable! How often does that happen?! Not very.
So, yea, be skeptical but enjoy the visual feast. via Chad.
What I do endorse is the web design here. It's beautiful and immersive! Scroll your way through this thing and you'll encounter a transition from white to black via a very particular gradient that is incredibly memorable! How often does that happen?! Not very.
So, yea, be skeptical but enjoy the visual feast. via Chad.
Dropout CEO Sam Reich talks with FastCompany about the massive shift that the company underwent in their transitions from College Humor to Dropout. I have not spent a considerable amount of time with either - just the occasional viral clip here and there - but I am impressed and refreshed by Reich's take on growing a business. It it absolutely bonkers that hearing a CEO say he wants to grow slowly and carefully is impressive but that's the world we live in. Dropout's commitment to employee owned equity and ensuring stability is exactly what you want everyone to be shooting for.
TIL that director Gary Hustwit - of Helvetica, Objectified, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - has a new documentary on Eno. Suffice to say, I'm quite intrigued. Brian Eno has done so much in the last fifty years, it will be a helluva feat to see how Hustwit weaves it all together.
There's some announcements on Facebook from various parties and an official Hustwit page. That's really all you need!
There's some announcements on Facebook from various parties and an official Hustwit page. That's really all you need!
The Oral History of Gremlins
I mean, how are you NOT going to read it?
I have one complaint about the portfolio of Nada Hayek - I want to see the images bigger! Way bigger! There is a stunning combo of striking simplicity and minute detail that makes you want to pore over each and every one.
If you're clever, you can do a little manipulation on the URL images to achieve those goals.
Obviously I'm kidding about the complaints. There are none to be had. This work is wonderful. I randomly stumbled across it from this Fake Fruit album cover and quickly discovered there are many other covers to appreciate. Follow them on Instagram @sloppyjohansson.
If you're clever, you can do a little manipulation on the URL images to achieve those goals.
Obviously I'm kidding about the complaints. There are none to be had. This work is wonderful. I randomly stumbled across it from this Fake Fruit album cover and quickly discovered there are many other covers to appreciate. Follow them on Instagram @sloppyjohansson.
MIT design would harness 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel
Current implementations only use about 7 percent. Always nice to see clean advancements!
I've been on a real Zook kick lately. This visualizer video for "Evaporating" is yet another treat to add to the pile. Made by Liv Cullison.
You know that thing that happens when you click on a YouTube video and then YouTube assumes everything else you want to see is exactly that same topic? Well, that happened to me with Ween recently and YouTube has, correctly, offered me a bounty of goods.
I was reminiscing about this public access performance of "Buckingham Green" - possibly the greatest (presumably coked out) performance of the band - which led to this performance of "The Final Alarm", a song they only play live that absolutely crushes here.
From there, I was led to Easy Listening Ween, a compilation of b-sides, rarities and high quality live tracks that capture the gentler side of Ween. Unfortunately, Volume 1 and 2 are blocked entirely on YouTube (tho you can see Vol 1 on Vimeo) but Volume 3 is a real treat!
May this unlock a Ween rabbit hole for you as well. Enjoy.
I was reminiscing about this public access performance of "Buckingham Green" - possibly the greatest (presumably coked out) performance of the band - which led to this performance of "The Final Alarm", a song they only play live that absolutely crushes here.
From there, I was led to Easy Listening Ween, a compilation of b-sides, rarities and high quality live tracks that capture the gentler side of Ween. Unfortunately, Volume 1 and 2 are blocked entirely on YouTube (tho you can see Vol 1 on Vimeo) but Volume 3 is a real treat!
May this unlock a Ween rabbit hole for you as well. Enjoy.
Big round of applause for this Ilithios video "How We've Faded." It's hard to pull off an engaging music video in 2024, much less one that uses a single simple trick - backwards footage. Others have done it but that doesn't make it any less fun to watch. I wonder how many times he practiced walking that path backwards before they filmed it?
Heaven Honey - Moan
yet another Nashville artist that I feel just needs the right random chance opportunity for everyone to realize they are doing fantastic work.
Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does
I am embracing the POSIWID idea to better engage with how to enact change.
I don't recall where I ran across this but it's a fun one. The story goes: back in 1978, Stewart Copeland of The Police had written a song that Sting was having trouble connecting with. So, instead of scrapping it, Copeland recorded it with himself singing lead and released it under the pseudonym Klark Kent so as not to detract from any attention The Police was receiving. The track got traction and the "band" was invited to perform on Top of the Pops. Since the band was really just The Police, they all wore masks to hide their identities. Copeland's singing was too muffled, so he ditched the disguise and wore face paint instead. This pretty much gave away the secret of the band, tho Copeland denied his involvement for a number of years.
Most surprisingly, there's a Deluxe Edition of the Klark Kent material with 30 tracks of odds and ends. Quite a side project!
Most surprisingly, there's a Deluxe Edition of the Klark Kent material with 30 tracks of odds and ends. Quite a side project!
Utopia Must Fall V99
if you remember Missle Command but wish it was modernized, click on through
It's always an interesting case study when a giant company spends a year and a half developing a typeface. More details on the undertaking are here but really just watch the great promo video.
This 1984 animated short Jumping is bonkers. Creativity aside - of which there is plenty - the skill and time to illustrate these animations is hard to imagine. Forty years later, this would all be done in a computer with models and shading but in 1984 Osamu Tezuka did not have that option.
Take the 6 and a half minutes to watch the short and then take a spin through the Tezuka Wikipedia - he is considered the godfather of anime and by the time he made this short, he'd been working with manga and animation for nearly forty years. His career started at the age of 17 in 1946. If my napkin math is correct, that means Jumping was created around the time he was in his mid-50s. Sadly, he passed just a few years later. His last words to his nurse were "I'm begging you, let me work!"
Plenty of rabbit holes to dive into here but mostly just watch the 4K restored short. via Charlie.
Take the 6 and a half minutes to watch the short and then take a spin through the Tezuka Wikipedia - he is considered the godfather of anime and by the time he made this short, he'd been working with manga and animation for nearly forty years. His career started at the age of 17 in 1946. If my napkin math is correct, that means Jumping was created around the time he was in his mid-50s. Sadly, he passed just a few years later. His last words to his nurse were "I'm begging you, let me work!"
Plenty of rabbit holes to dive into here but mostly just watch the 4K restored short. via Charlie.
I'm a big fan of Zook in general and this latest EP, Cicada Cymphonie, is trippy offering fueled by everyone's favorite bug-eyed buddies. The presence of the Cicada song isn't used in an obvious way but it's definitely in there - manipulated and running through each composition. It's a damn good listen.
A few weeks ago I posted about my continued fascination with Toynbee Tiles, even after thirteen years! The impetus for my latest renewed vigor is that I was asked to be a guest on the Dizzy Spell podcast to talk about the phenomena. Today, the episode is released!
I am very happy with how it turned out and hope that you'll give it a whirl. Despite the tiles being a primarily visual happening, the story behind them plays well in the podcast format.
It's on their website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast and anywhere else you listen to these sort of things - including the embed above! Smack that play button, enjoy!
It's on their website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast and anywhere else you listen to these sort of things - including the embed above! Smack that play button, enjoy!
Calcarea Captures CO2 From Ships And Sequesters It Directly Into The Ocean
the sort of tech advancements you rarely hear about but love to seeEmoji Proposal, v16.0
Just a handful of new designs but always a fun little treat to see what will be added
If you're a long time reader of the site, you may recall that I built a site in 2009 for an endeavor called "Lake Fever Sessions." Some friends of mine ran a recording studio called "Lake Fever Productions" and some other acquaintances had a video production house called "Tugboat Productions" - together, they captured performances from a number of different bands and I helped get them on a nice looking site under the Lake Fever Sessions name.
While doing promotion for The Features Some Kind of Salvation LP that I reissued, I ended up posting some in-studio performances from their LFS session and realized it might be a fun challenge to revive the site. The recordings were all still on Vimeo, they were just kind of languishing there.
So, I unearthed an old Dropbox folder of PHP files for the site and got to renovating. The database that powered the site is long gone but the internet archive had all the missing pieces I needed. Many of the techniques used for web development in 2009 are unnecessary now (anyone remember sIFR?), so I modernized where I could. The site is responsive now and uses iframes for video, not objects. Other than that, I tried to leave it alone as a testament to what was.
It was a fun exercise but I hope people do take the time to actually watch the sessions. There are loads of local Nashville bands on there that probably have less broad appeal but sessions from St. Vincent, Cursive, Travis, Brendan Benson, Those Darlins, Sondre Lerche and more should appeal to plenty.
I was proud of it then and I'm proud of it now. Please enjoy Lake Fever Sessions Archive.
While doing promotion for The Features Some Kind of Salvation LP that I reissued, I ended up posting some in-studio performances from their LFS session and realized it might be a fun challenge to revive the site. The recordings were all still on Vimeo, they were just kind of languishing there.
So, I unearthed an old Dropbox folder of PHP files for the site and got to renovating. The database that powered the site is long gone but the internet archive had all the missing pieces I needed. Many of the techniques used for web development in 2009 are unnecessary now (anyone remember sIFR?), so I modernized where I could. The site is responsive now and uses iframes for video, not objects. Other than that, I tried to leave it alone as a testament to what was.
It was a fun exercise but I hope people do take the time to actually watch the sessions. There are loads of local Nashville bands on there that probably have less broad appeal but sessions from St. Vincent, Cursive, Travis, Brendan Benson, Those Darlins, Sondre Lerche and more should appeal to plenty.
I was proud of it then and I'm proud of it now. Please enjoy Lake Fever Sessions Archive.
Brood XIX Movie Trailer
posted TWELVE YEARS AGO - a trailer for a Cicada fueled sci-fi series. It looks like a cross between Starship Troopers and backyard fun. Maybe with the return of the creatures they can finish itThe Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet
intrigued by this brand new Wolinsky book. It hits shelves in mid-August.
Randomly stumbled on this talk about Non-Euclidean Doom or "what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159"? The basic gist is that programmer John Carmack used the "wrong" value for Pi when creating Doom. That's in quotes because he nailed it up to the tenth digit - not too shabby! Look, I don't know what non-euclidean means in the slightest but the video is quite entertaining as they try different values for pi to see what happens.
When you're done with that, dive deeper into the May Contain Hackers Conference. There are so many intriguing topics - What AI can learn from your face, No Permissions Needed (Android Data Privacy), Electric Vehicles Are Going to Suck; Here's Why. That's barely the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!
When you're done with that, dive deeper into the May Contain Hackers Conference. There are so many intriguing topics - What AI can learn from your face, No Permissions Needed (Android Data Privacy), Electric Vehicles Are Going to Suck; Here's Why. That's barely the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!
Absolutely loving this retro tech supercut. I know next to nothing about anime but it's impossible not to appreciate the style and detail in every single one of these shots.
via.
via.
There is plenty of (justified) hand wringing over AI and how it will shape the future but sometimes you just can't help but be blown away by an implementation of it. The Louisiana Law Enforcement Accountability Database (LLEAD) is a big data dump of law enforcement information from across the state of Louisiana that is being leveraged to extract evidence of wrongful convictions. This Human Rights Data Analysis breakdown discusses how they parse all of the data and use an LLM to work through it (including psuedo code).
The technical breakdown may not be for everyone but it's exciting to see these sorts of problems being worked on. Accountability for law enforcement is a huge problem and if we can use LLMs and data analysis to keep track of their behaviors, that's a win.
The technical breakdown may not be for everyone but it's exciting to see these sorts of problems being worked on. Accountability for law enforcement is a huge problem and if we can use LLMs and data analysis to keep track of their behaviors, that's a win.
An excellent read from Cory Doctorow on AI "art" and uncanniness. The art is in quotes because Doctorow does not believe AI creations qualify as art. I'm disagree with that sentiment but that's not the point of the article! It discusses the misunderstood legalities of training data, the threats to creative workers that AI poses and what protections could be put in place to prevent those threats. This excerpt appears near the summation but it bears repeating:
I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.It's going to be a slow climb to reaching that goal. In all likelihood it's also going to be very sloppy one too - technology moves a helluva lot faster than changes to law. I'm optimistic we can keep heading in the right direction.
— Cory Doctorow
Gaspard Auge is half of Justice. In 2021, he released a solo album entitled Escapades. This is a one minute teaser using the track "Hey!" featuring some fantastic cinematography.
These are all facts I learned today that improved my day. Maybe it'll do the same for you.
These are all facts I learned today that improved my day. Maybe it'll do the same for you.