Cory Doctorow and his daughter, Posey, have a regular sushi date. “Every week or two, we visit a different sushi restaurant, usually near our place in Burbank, and have a (usually) fantastic meal. We bring along a little notebook and take notes and keep scores on everything we try, and then (usually) we give the restaurant an overall rating.” They call it the Sushi Chronicles. What a cute idea.
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Chronophoto Is A Fun Game Where You Guess The Age Of Photographs
I thoroughly enjoyed playing a few rounds of Chronophoto. It’s is a game in which you guess the dates of five historical photographs. The more accurate your guess, the higher your score. Each photograph has its own set of clues that give away the era — film quality, subject matter, products, uniforms, fashion, vehicles, and colorization,
My scores are all over the board, but after about 5 rounds I got a high score of 3,315. When I was wrong, I was really wrong. I did get a couple of guesses right on the spot – resulting in 1,000 points each – but being wrong is almost more interesting.
Champagne OK
This is a random clip taken from “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976). Whether it’s the botched editing job between “oooo-owwww”, the palpable sense of self-satisfaction Robert Reed exhibits after he’s contained the chaos of bubbly eruption, or the final announcement that the disaster has been averted, this tiny element of film makes me feel ok…Champagne OK! After all, having had your child banished to the purgatory of a giant bubble, wouldn’t you-yourself feel that same sense of ‘victory’ having single-handedly contained an outright onslaught of smaller bubbles?
When I was a very young kid, I remember sitting on the couch next to my mom and loving this movie, yet probably not understanding it at all. I just added this to my netflix queue and can’t wait to see it again for the first time.
Maps of Dune
The First edition, first printing of the science fiction classic “Dune” by Frank Herbert has an unusual map of the stories setting printed on the dust jacket. The linked edition had an opening bid of $6,500 but didn’t sell. I haven’t yet read (or watched) Dune but I’m posting this here for when I do.
ht: Nelson Minar
After posting this at reddit I was pointed toward these:
- Original Map by Dorothy de Fontaine (missing center)
- Hi-resolution recreation
- Map of Arrakis (Martin Sanders, from the Folio Edition)
- Map of Arrakis (Matt Griffin, Dune Deluxe Edition)
See also: The Most Accurate Maps Of Panem
Sushi Infographic
I love sushi. But that is only part of the reason I enjoy Sung Hwan Jang’s wonderful sushi infographic. The graphic’s eye pleasing and cartoonish simplcity hit me right in the Chris Ware. Sung has put together all kinds of fun graphical posters detailing everything from pizza to constellations to camping to the Bauhaus art movement.
I’d love to get this poster for my kitchen but I’m unsure how to purchase it from the Korean websites.
Photographing Vertigo
Life On The Edge is a series of vertigo inducing photographs by Detroit based photographer Dennis Maitland. They are beautiful but they also kind of make you want to puke.
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The Top 100 Most Annoying Twitter Accounts
It’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise on twitter. Actually, it’s difficult to tell if there is any signal on twitter at all (but that’s a whole other blog post). There are literally hundreds of over-active accounts, mostly bots, that provide little to no value to your average twitter user. Here are a few of the most blatant abusers.
InternetRadio is the most often updated (with nearly 900,000 tweets), non-news related, active account. It’s a bot that simply lists songs being played on shoutcast.com. I’m not sure what use this is to anyone. Ill Street Lounge and Boot Liquor (almost 420,000 updates) do the same thing for soma.fm
Father Time (over 275,000 tweets) is a bot that updates every minute, on the minute, with the time. That would be 720 times a day. How could that really help anyone? But if that’s not enough for you Is It Now… (over 550,000 tweets) does the exact same thing. At least Big Ben is entertaining.
ThinkingStiff (over 430,000 tweets) appears to be an account the owner is using to climb to the number one spot on the Cursebird leaderboard. This is actually a somewhat interesting project but is still a very annoying twitter account.
Twitterholic keeps a continually refreshed list of the 100 most updated (annoying?) accounts in twitter.
Full disclosure: my incredibly annoying twitter account can be found @hubs.
Workin’ It!
These girls are WORKIN’ IT.
I created this video last night. The music is a song called “Zukunft” by the Estonian band Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot, which I also discovered while surfing around the web last night. Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot’s newest release “Compensator For The Accelerator” is available for download for free (as in beer) on their website, which, of course, is worth an additional 100 cool points. Their cover art states:
We praise the mp3 for giving the creative mind an opportunity to unleash itself from the established hierarchies of music distribution and bypass spoonfeeding by opinion leaders.
The website also contains a .pdf download of the cover and CD art that actually folds into a sleeve that will protectively hold your newly burnt disk. Anyways, cool music, nice design, and great attitude.
The video is of Gwen Verdon (Cacoon anyone?) shaking it to a dance choreographed by her husband, the talented Bob Fosse. The original dance was choreographed to a song called “Mexican Breakfast” by Pat Williams. As you can see Gwen really knew how to move and Fosse was way ahead of his time. Seriously, did Bob Fosse invent the bootyquake? Now go rent “All That Jazz” and “Caberet”, or just watch these videos.
As a bonus, here are three additional Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot songs:
Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot – Nina Robots That Shoot Laser Beams And Stuff
Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot – The Ride Ripoff
Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot – T.A.T.U. Remix
Raclette
The blizzard of oh-six has been more fun for me than hassle. We were finally able to get the cars dug out yesterday after three long days of being stuck and serious shoveling by both G and myself. The storm allowed me a few snow days from work that were rather lazily spent. On Wednesday night a few nearby friends braved the accumulating drifts and headed over to our house for Raclette. I had never had Raclette before and it’s wonderful, perfect for a cold snowy evening stuck indoors. How can you go wrong with cheese, sausage, potatoes, and onion? Yummmmm.
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