Tim Cook: my first-person impression of Apple's new CEO, article.
Tim sounds like a real mensch*. Not a Walking Suit. I've had some cool bosses in the past, all my major jobs actually. And if I ever had to have one again, I wouldn't mind at all if he was like Tim Cook seems in this report.
*"...a decent, upright, mature, and responsible person." Great definition, eh?
Origin:
1950–55; < Yiddish mentsh man, human being < Middle High German mensch ( GermanMensch )
Here is a discussion about the future of publishing and writers.
Already, in the world, on the Internet, there is enough free media to take a man from cradle to grave. We can watch non-stop free movies and videos, listen to non-stop free music, play non-stop free videogames, and NEVER run out of free content for our entire lives. And yet movies, TV, videogames, music, along with books and porn, continue to make billions of dollars worldwide. Even though all this free stuff already exists. While the future will no doubt offer more free content, the whole "race to the bottom" is fear-mongering BS. Newsflash: We're already at the bottom. And artists are still making money.
Granted it's a complex issue, but I think there are many good points put forward in this article. There's no evidence that advances by publishers is the only way authors can make a living. In fact I've already heard of many writer who have only gotten affluent after starting self-publishing digitally. I don't know exactly how many, and I doubt anybody have collected reliable statistics on it yet. But it's clearly enough to be at least strong anecdotal evidence.
We should not forget that also before e-publishing, it was only one book in thousands written which got published, and only one in thousands being published which made good money. I heard the statistic of 200,000 books traditionally published annually in the US, and only 300 of those selling more than 50,000 copies! That's less than one in fifty.
And while, if you were one of the few chosen to be taken under the wing by a publisher, sometimes they gave important support, they also take a big, big bite of the cake. And they often take 1.5 years to put out a book. All the while I'm told from many sources that these days, they don't even promote the book most of the time, they expect the author to do that.
If you really want to do something, you do it. You don't save it for a sound bite. - Liz Friedman
A friend of mine said something similar many years ago, as a realization he'd had: "I realized that you either talk about doing something, or you do it."
And it fits with my observations. I think we all know people who are full of great plans, and talk about them at great length. But ten years go by, and none of those things have actually gotten done. And then there are people who actually get things done, sometimes remarkable things, and you rarely hear them talk about these things a lot before they happen.
And of course the same divide can happen inside one person, not only between people. You talk or you do, but rarely both. I'm not sure of the causal relationship. Maybe either talking or doing gets rid of the energy of interest you have in something, so if you are doing it, the need for talking disappear, and if you talk about it a lot, the need for doing it disappear. Maybe. Or maybe if you want to do something and it just isn't happening, but you can't really face up to that fact because you have too many hopes riding on it, you start yapping about it to prop yourself up to yourself.
A sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series came out last year, by an Eoin Colfer.
Obviously for a series which is so intensely, almost obsessively beloved as THHGTTG, any book by any author which attempts to continue it, will be met with a storm of criticism. Heck, even if Adams secretly had written it himself and people thought it was somebody else, many would hate it from the word go. But in any case, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was inventive and funny. Okay, there were a few details in the middle I thought had escaped the editor's knife by mistake, but not a lot.
So in other words, don't buy or read it if you feel strongly about Douglas Adams, or feel that, for example, a Zaphod Beeblebrox who has had his left-brained head taken off to run the spaceship is sacrilege.
And of course you may also want to steer clear if you think that the idea of another author continuing a seminal work is simply Wrong. I'm not sure, I can see both sides of that one, very often it feels like it seriously dilutes the originals. For example the Asterix books have been weak since Goscinny died and Uderzo took over the writing on top of doing the art. Ah well.
Is anybody watching that current TV comedy in UK, "Trollied"? Am I getting slow, or is much of it pretty durn opaque humor? Is it a new advanced kind? Or just so much "English humour" that it leaves a poor Dane behind?
Ugress - Wulfhöken Spaceport Affairs, new kewl EP from Ugress. (And free too, unless you want to pay.)
Regular readers will know I'm a long-time fan of Ugress. Several posts and free songs here.
BTW, I just wrote this to U, and it might have interest for other artists: I don’t know if it matters to you if you earn money on your music, but if it does: I think it would make the sets sell noticeably better if you put in an extra track in the set which you charge for. People like to pay for things they like, but they also feel good about getting a little something for it beyond what they got for free anyway, so they can justify the expense to the Inner Scrooge most of us have. On the other hand, I've heard that in some countries at least, if people pay fully voluntarily, without getting something more than they got for free anyway, it counts as gifts and is not taxed. So that may be something to ask your accountant about.
I put a Panasonic stabilized zoom lens on an Olympus Pen Lite body, and I wondered if the lens stabilization would clash with the in-body stabilization of the Olympus, and how much. Answer: yes it does, and a lot!
Here is both lens- and body-stabilization turned on:
... And here is only body-stabilization turned on:
... Here is only lens-stabilization turned on:
(This is the sharper of two, the other looked like the middle pic)
These are hardly conclusive, since these things vary from second to second. (It's always a good idea when using dicey shutter-times to takes several pics at once, preferably in serial-shooting mode.) But it's clear that having both turned on is a bad idea. ----- Below: cameras can look funny when fitted with a lens of a different size-ideal. :-)
I find it interesting that there are four monsters which loom far above all others in the Western phyche: Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein's Creature, and the Mummy. And they were all from Universal movies in the thirties (or close enough). You would think that somebody had managed to create a new one since then. Or rather, unearth one, for those characters were already old in myth or literature when they were put on film.
I wonder if the greatness is in the characters themselves, or if they had such impact due to the timing, the great depression and later threat of war giving them background emotional support?
Oh, by the way, the Frankenstein Creature makeup is just an amazing design, not the least in this classic photo. Fantastic. There is just no way this face doesn't smash its way to the back of your skull and stick. As the Creature, Karloff is just radiating "deadness". Paradoxically, he is alive with deadness.
A boy is sent to bed by his father. Five minutes later, he calls down. "Daaad...." "What?" the father says. "I'm thirsty," the boy says. "Can you bring me a drink of water?" "No," the father replies. You had your water already. Lights out." Five minutes later, the boy once again calls downstairs. "Daaaaaad....." "WHAT?" the father snaps. "I really want a drink of water. Can I please have one?" the boy asks. "I told you no!" the father asserts. "If you ask again, I'm coming up there to spank you!" Five minutes later, the boy calls downstairs again, "Daaaaaaaaad....." "WHAT?" the father once again snaps. The boy replies, "When you come up here to spank me, can you bring me a drink of water?"
Amateur photography was almost dead in the nineties, I guess because personal computers took up the time of most hobbyists. I remember asking in a kiosk in a train station for photo magazines. The girl looked helplessly around, didn't find any, and said: "... if you'd asked for computer magazines, then...", pointing at the wide range available of those.
Then, just around the millennium, good digital cameras began to be priced so amateurs could afford them, first with the Canon 30D, then even more with the Nikon D70. And amateur photography took off again like a rocket, to the degree that prices in most areas of professional photography have suffered greatly.
And now, just in time for the second decade of the third millennium (what cool timing), the iPhone 4 has put a really good camera in an affordable phone, and tons of apps have arrived, even more affordable (ridiculous prices even, one or two dollars a piece). And Internet apps like Instagram let people share photos worldwide in seconds.
Maybe most of the practitioners are not "real artists", but heck, neither was most people ever, no matter the technology. The iPhone 4 camera is about as good as most 35mm cameras were, in some ways much better, so I really don't see any reason to look down the nose at this new phenomenon. Who knows where it will lead. For example, for years much of the work in early desktop publishing was effect-happy, using all the fonts available in one document and such. But things mature.
Awesome. I'd say this is hardly "pop music". Certainly transcends the genre. But then Blondie often did, almost habitually. Blondie was always the band I thought of when I was reading Iain Banks' wonderful book Espedair Street. (Hmm, I think I'll re-read that again.)
A much later Blondie fave, from the end of last millennium:
Deborah is older, but then she is smiling, and what a smile! Pity she didn't do that so much in early days. (Didn't prevent me from falling for her like a rock in the seventies of course.) (Hokey sheet, she's 54 here! Good job.) I'll bet she had been advised by "her people": "Don't smile, dahlin', it's not the image we're going for."
I like this. I am much better with visuals than with numbers and such, so I suspect that such gestures would make it easier for me to remember the pass to sites.
And it's cool that after initial login, it remembers all the passwords for protected sites, but you can loan the iPad to others without concerns because they have to make their own initial pass gesture after you have logged out.
The PassTouch site points to the free, ad-supported version, but there's also an ad-free version for five bucks currently. Sadly the browser seems to be lacking modern amenities like tabbed browsing and changing text size though.
Sadly not full-frame, but still: 12 frames per second with a 24MP sensor! I'm sure that's a record. It's achieved with a fixed, semi-translucent mirror, no wait (or noise or vibration) from the mirror flapping up and down like a bat caught in a clothing line.
What a brute. I'm guessing this is their first serious attack on the sports- and reportage pro markets.
24 megapixels in a reduced frame sensor... I hope they have made some more progress with noise processing, for that's some small pixel sites there.
It's nice to see Sony has not given up on the high end market. Although I have to wonder if there will be any more full-frame models. Full frame is a difficult market, because it's pretty small and you have to have big, very good, and thus very expensive and heavy lenses for it, in order to justify the very high resolution such cameras can produce. And two or three lenses are not enough, and of course they are not exactly cheap to research, design, and build. Even Canon and Nikon only comes out with maybe three new lenses in this class per year, if that.
City Jitters, report of the earthquake centered in Virginia. It was felt in a wide area. It was a 5.8. So far no major damage reported. (I liked the "boom, boom-boom" professor, Ms. Lohman, very nice presence.)
Photographer turns two relatives into one person, article/photos.
Cute idea, but I'm not really sure how interesting it is in the long run, apart from for the subjects. Does take some skill and work, of course, especially if the subjects have different relative distances between features.
(I guess this one was on the less difficult side, since they are twins.)
Sony tries bringing binoculars into digital age, article.
Very cool. Zoom. Image Stabilization. Auto-focus. Still- and video-recording, including 3D.
The only thing which makes me doubtful is that they have electronic "viewfinders" instead of a direct optical view. EVFs are much better than they used to, but I have not seen one which came close to the quality of a direct optical view.
Another one in the looooong series of "actresses I worship", Melissa Rauch as Bernadette(youtube)on The Big Bang Theory. If I were her, I'd wear those glasses always, she is so durn cute with them! Sure, she is clearly a gorgeous woman no matter what, but there is something about her Bernadette character's innocence and the glasses that I just adore.
(You would think it would be easy to find a good picture of her as Bernadette, but noo! This happens often, it's puzzling.)
The small but high-quality B/W magazine LensWork is now available in various digital versions. They do good work, and a lot of it. It's impressive that they have a lot of online work on the web, and also versions now for both iPad and Android.
The yearly price for subscription is only thirty bucks, highly reasonable, just like when founder Brooks Jensen sells his art photo prints. I have one of his portfolios (October Seas), and they are lovely prints. It was $145 for twelve prints, that's normally what you pay for one or two prints.
Look at this screenshot? Does it not seem like enough information if you know you want the book Just Kids?
... Sure seemed like it to me. So I bought it yesterday. And starting on the book today, I discovered... It's in Swedish! One can only see that if one clicks through all the way. I think the abbreviated titles in the search results on iTunes are a pest. For example, one always have to click through a couple of times when a video podcast is broadcast in three or four different sizes, to see which one is the desired one. Surely it could be done better.
And it seems only the Swedish version is out in audio, goldurnit. Well, I guess if I really want to hear it, I have to prop up my Swedish and go at it. I do understand Swedish pretty well (though I can't speak it well). Perhaps because my mother was Swedish, but I don't know. (When I was maybe nine or ten, my parents were pretty struck to see me read a book for my little sister, translating on the go from Swedish to Danish.)
Update:
Vineland said... The Swedish audiobook of Just Kids was the first one to be released. There is also a German one and an English one. Patti Smith reads the English one herself - it was published a few weeks ago by HarperCollins and is highly recommended.
eolake said... Ah, thanks for the info. I have a US iTunes account too, and when I checked there, hey presto, there it was.
I've just been recommended her autobio, which I'm looking forward to. She is one of those artists who you just know is a "Real Artist", whether you really know their work or not.
"It's just transfusions, don't worry about the words." - Patti Smith
Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz Form "Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League", article.
I think this is praise-worthy (Sher's face was like hard plastic last I saw (Will and Grace)). Though I wonder where they will stand on this in 10-15 years' time.
By the way, I find it odd that this Rachel Weisz makes the headline, but not Emma Thompson. I've seen a dozen good movies with Emma, but I don't recall anything at all with Ms. Weisz in it.
There's been talk about the severe trade-imbalance between the West and the East. In short, dollars are not real, and the East is producing most of the real artefacts of the world now by far, very little is being made in the west, and some say that has disaster written all over it.
William Gibson the writer commented about how we are living in the West in a "post-industrial" society. And that is clear, the bulk of the industry has moved out of US and Europe. And like he says: if we no longer make things, what is it we do, exactly? And whatever it is, is it sustainable in the long run?
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
-- Orson Welles
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
-- Milton Friedman
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
"I think I helped wipe out the sixties" - Iggy Pop
From Iggy Pop's most melodious and soft period, the Blah-blah-blah album in the mid-nineties. He had decided, he said an interview, that it sucked being an underground idol but not earning any money, so his primary goal with this album was there "not being any obvious reasons it couldn't be played on radio. Radio neglect has hurt me more than anything in the past." I think he succeeded, it's a very good pop-rock album, probably helped along a lot by David Bowie pitching in on compositions, as he did on two others of Iggy's best, The Idiot and Lust For Life in the seventies.
Very interesting interviews of both guys here:
Iggy said later that he didn't feel that further collaborations with Bowie would be a good idea, though he didn't explain why. I suspect that such explosive collaborations are very emotionally draining.
Oh, he's done good work without Bowie, a lot of it. But then some of his late albums, like Skull Ring and Beat Them Up, sucked dry cum from a dead hell hound.
Another good tune from Blah blah blah:
A pretty good live version I just now found:
It's interesting that a song like Fire Girl and one like Search and Destroy (Heart Full Of Napalm) can come from the same throat. Either vocally and emotionally/artistically. They just seem so incompatible. Although I'm one of those who like both.
Len Edgerly is one of my favorite podcasters, he's exceptionally intelligent, and almost always interesting, despite having many interests.
Audio Pod Chronicles seems to be discontinued. But I'm just listening to show 30, The Art of Interviewing (scroll down on the page), and it's very interesting. I've read and listened to many, many interviews, and I've done many interviews on both sides of the mic/keyboard, and I find it's an excellent form of journalism if done right. If done poorly it's meaningless, but if done well, it's entertaining and enlightening, it's less work for the journalist, it's fun and free publicity for the interviewee, and it's interesting to the reader/listener.
A little household tip: the best way I've found for removing stickers is lighter fluid, which seems to be the same as "cleaning gasoline" as it's called in Danish. Pure gasoline, though I'm not sure what ingredients are missing which are in the gas we put in cars.
If there's a lot of glue, I put a patch of kitchen roll paper on top, and squirt some lighter fluid on it, and then put a plastic bag on top to hold the volatile fluid in place while it works. After a couple of minutes, the glue can usually be wiped off easily.
And it does not seem to swell or damage cardboard like water would, so it can be used on books or paper DVD covers, for example. (What a pity it is to design a beautiful cover, just so the next step in the selling chain can put a brazen sticker on it.)
Alex said As well as purpose made solvents like "goof off" and "goo gone", the other one that works on plastics, china and glass is olive oil. Don't use that on your books though.
They have Goo Gone at Amazon UK, with great reviews, so I've ordered a bottle. Thanks.
I wonder why people hold joints different from cigarettes? Cigarettes are typically wedged between forefinger and middle finger, while it seems joints are mostly held securely between thumb and both other fingers. Is it because when people get stoned, they tend to drop it if they don't pay close attention?
Pardon my ignorance. I haven't smoked any cigarettes for many years, I quit when I was twelve. And I've never been stoned. I tried pot in tea once, and it didn't seem to affect me at all. Maybe I didn't do it right, or the dose I got was calculated to a smaller person, I dunno.
OK... I like to say "I quit when I was twelve", it's funny. But of course I'd only been doing it for a couple of weeks, in secret, with a friend. But when I felt that it could become a serious habit, I got so scared I quit right away, this was mid-seventies, after horror stories of their health danger were common.
It used to be cool. James Bond famously apparently smoked 60 a day! Very macho! I wonder how can you do that in his job? Being a secret agent must take a lot of hiding and being inconspicuous, and spouting smoke and leaving butts 15 hours a day must get in the way, one would think. ...But of course, being fictional helps. It also helps with the being in such great shape despite smoking that much!
Now here's a guy who loves his guns! I'm not saying he's a violence freak or anything...
Though I wonder if this is faked? I find it hard to believe that any handgun can fire that fast, big magazine or not. Also the Glock 17 is said to be a semi-automatic, meaning that while it loads the next round automatically (I think with the recoil), it requires one pull of the trigger to fire one bullet, it won't keep on firing.
Googling around a bit, some claim that "fully automatic handguns are out there", but it seems to me that overheating and handling the recoil would make them dangerously impractical.
For many years there's been economical ways of copying color art or photos to decals and transfer to tee-shirts. It's very cool, but the issue is that those I've tried, including Cafepress' service, fade a lot after only a couple of washes. Does anybody know if there is any new technology/service which can copy a color photo/artwork to a shirt in just one or two copies with reasonable economy (like less than $50 for one) and have it be quite wash-proof?
Here's a type of scam which works well, beware of it.
The scammers present an apparent "investment", which sounds amazing. It's something that gives fantastic returns, and very few people know about it. In fact, it's preferably a bit hush-hush, which makes it even more attractive. The "powers that be" don't want you ordinary people to know about it, you know?
Early investors actually do get some returns! This is sometimes paid out via specially made cash-cards, making it even more believable. The returns make the scheme seem very convincing to the early investors, so they 1: get greedy and they invest more, and 2: they tell their friends about it, who believe it because they are friends and they've already got proof it's real. And of course they get a commission per investor they bring in, adding the pyramid scheme flavor to it.
As time goes on, some "problems" arrive though, like the scammers' bank account is being apparently barred by their evil bank or other evil authority who doesn't want people to know about this amazing investment form. Or the new kind of payout card is being delayed and delayed...
Over time, people get more and more apathetic about ever getting their profits, or even their money back, and the scammers disappear quietly with a few million bucks.
This can take many forms, but look out for the pattern. Remember the silver rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is no investment without risk which pays more than maybe 7 percent per year (minus inflation). Over 15% per year, big risk. If it claims fifteen percent per month, it's sure to be a scam.
It's called a Ponzi scheme after Charles Ponzi, thanks to A.
Here's an apparently free way to watch TV online, ads and all (though pretty low-rez). (Here in Europe we don't have Hulu and Netflix.)
I found it while trying to see if "Meego" was ever put on DVD. I remembered this sitcom from the late nineties. The writing was never better than OK, but it does have three good actors: Bronson Pinchot, "Serge" from Beverly Hills Cop (the hilarious art gallery clerk), Michelle Trachtenberg who later played Buffy's (Vampire Slayer) sister, and the little Jon Lipnicki, the kid from Jerry Maguire.
The show was cancelled after a half season, no great loss, but I do think that Pinchot and Trachtenberg are amongst the many sadly under-used actors.
Design an Ambigram,article. An ambigram reads the same upside down. Making one usually takes quite some skill and time!
Some of them I really like, though, take for example these two very different ones. They are good looking and eminently readable, something you can't say about all ambigrams.
Video: Hot Girl Pole Skills. What bod control! (Oddly, one time Firefox downloaded the file, and that video was a completely different one! I thought it was a "rickrolling" kind of joke, but then next time I loaded the page, I actually got the right one.)
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. -- Michael Crichton
The highest result of education is tolerance. -- Helen Keller
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength. -- Eric Hoffer
Bypassing the leap, Seth Godin post. It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.
Very simple: due to the hermetically sealed little alu pods, it delivers the same quality as a real cappuccino machine (I think it's better than most coffeehouse coffee actually), but it's super-compact, and there's much, much less mess to deal with. And it's fast. If you just want an expresso, it's less than a minute from turning it on til you have your coffee! Couldn't be simpler and quicker.
If you want milk, there's a few more steps. A steamer is pretty ridic for a home, so I just heat the milk in the microwave, and then froth it with a simple little frother. It's recommended to pre-heat the cup also, with hot water.
I'f you're used to "a cup of coffee" being like half a liter, maybe this machine is not for you, it makes pretty small cups. But there are two sizes, and I guess one could use two capsules in one go for a double cup.
The capsules by the way, are expensive many places, 70 pence (a buck) per shot. But I buy directly from Nespresso.com, that's half price, much more in line of what home-brewing oughta cost.
... For business at least. I wrote a similar post a while ago. I just found that every time I let myself be talked into taking a phone call, it lasted over an hour, and didn't convey more data than I could have absorbed in 3 minutes from an email.
Jan found this page of new Russian Pinups. They are photos, but quite stylized, may be processed a bit. "Because of the devastation of World War II, Russian "girls" in the '40s and '50s were taught to be tough and work hard. I am saddened by the fact that Russia never had the chance to enjoy the happy pin-up times of America's postwar period. In fact, cheerful American pin-up art was considered in Soviet Russia to be politically incorrect, decadent and flat-out immoral, the product of a culture that could never understand the true nature of the human condition."
Rango, warmly recommended. With every new CGI (Computer Generated Images) movie I see (and I see them all), I get more impressed with what they do. It's astounding. Rango is funny and avant garde. And the reality, the rendering of this super-grungy Western town and the hard-boiled critters of all kinds who inhabit it, it's amazing.
The character designs are outstanding too. Every character, even minor ones, is different and a work of art. "Beans", for instance, the love interest: she's definitely a lizard, and definitely alien to a human, and yet, durn it, she is pretty somehow.
Update: And then there's the lighting. Just look at these, dat ain't no cartoon.
(clickable)
... I love the subtle variations in size and color of the scales.
Not to mention the Acting that the animators do with computer-created faces these days; a host of little subtleties bring over the emotions.
I like movies/stories which have time for some abstraction. This has a bit: for instance in the underground sequence, there's a gigantic eye, the size of a circus dome, which opens in the side of the wall while the villagers walks by. It's beautiful, first of all. And then, nobody pays it any attention, and a moment later, someone says half to himself: "that was a big one". And it's never explained! Love it.
Update:
You always see, in the making-of's of CGI movies, the actors standing alone with a microphone, saying their lines. I've always wondered "why don't they bring them together so they can act off each other? It would have much more energy and be much more fun for them." Lo and behold, that's just what they did in Rango, and that's exactly what happened.
Reader Anna found this interesting article about caffeine and drugs. In February 1936, in order to pep herself up for a party, she took several of the grain-and-a-half caffeine citrate tablets. "Shortly afterward she became silly, elated, and euphoric. As hours passed she consumed more and more of the tablets until before the party started she had taken the contents of the box-forty tablets, sixty grains," equivalent to 1,800 milligrams of pure caffeine. "She became confused, disoriented, excited, restless and violent, shouted and screamed and began to throw things about her room." Despite her deep religious feelings, "she became exceedingly profane.
There is a widespread tendency to see strong and illegal drugs as "drugs", and legal and common drugs as "not drugs". Yet caffeine and alcohol are about as dangerous in large dozes as other drugs (a lethal doze of alcohol is less than twice that of a strong drunken effect). Education and relaxed control would be much more constructive than hysteria and heavy-handed control of selected (by lord knows what criteria) drugs.
Two sites with lots of info on a wide range of drugs: Druglibrary.org and Erowid (user experiences, first-hand).
Sort Sol (early on: "Sods") was (and is) a Danish band which was huge amongst a central core of rock lovers for Denmark in many years (late eighties til early naughties), though of course that didn't exactly make them rich.
[If you prefer the more melodious stuff, try Elia Rising, near the bottom of this post.]
(The first one sounds a lot better in Hi-fi and loud, but you get the idea. It might be recorded off a TV.)
The one below is old. A bit special.
... Good Lord, they're playing again! Kewl. (Danish.)
Hey, this one I didn't even know, but I like it. (I was otherwise a bit estranged from them after the mid-nineties, where they changed style.)
Interesting tidbit from wikipedia:
Sort sol is a nature phenomenon in the marshlands in southwestern Jutland, Denmark, in particular the marsh near Tønder and Ribe. Very large numbers of migrational starlings gather there in spring and autumn when they move between their winter grounds in southern Europe and their summer breeding grounds in Scandinavia and other countries near the Baltic Sea. Sort sol takes place in the hours just after sunset. The birds gather in large flocks and form huge formations in the sky just before they decide for a location to roost for the night. The movements of the formations have been likened to kind of a dance or ballet and the birds are so numerous that they seem to obliterate the sunset, hence the term "sort sol" (Danish for "black sun"). Sort sol in the marsh near Tønder can occasionally comprise a formation with up to one million birds. Usually flocks break up when the number of individuals exceed about half a million birds due to excessive internal disturbances in the flock.
One million birds! I'd like to see that. I wonder if the band had heard of this phrase? I always thought they simply took the name from their second LP "Under En Sort Sol" (Under A Black Sun). Earlier they were named Sods, but they no longer played punk and didn't find the name fitting anymore.
Update: It seems I missed out when I never bought the album "Snake Charmer". Here's a sample. The female vocal is awesome.
Update: TCGirl found this Interview/music video (Danish). I don't know how, cause I had used search for interviews, didn't find that one.
I have a friend by the way (hej Zadis!) who used to play with Peter Peter, who played guitar for many years in Sort Sol. Brilliant hard guitarist. But in a bit of a state, it seems from this interview (Danish). He says that all the years he played with them were completely wasted time, but that he has managed to almost was away all memories of it in drink! The interviewer points out that for the grateful audience/listeners it was hardly wasted, but PP says that he don't know about that, for he doesn't hang around and socialize, so he only has his own experience to judge from, and from that it has been *waste*. Geez. What a pity, such an ultra-limited viewpoint.
It seems the news now is full of visions of the whole Western World (at least) standing on the edge of an economic abyss of imposing proportions. If that happens, I wonder what that looks like. Update: it seems that this could be part of the answer to that question.
"A year ago, we were staring into the abyss. Since then, we have fortunately taken a huge step forward."
Have you heard of the old Hitch-Hiker's Guide To the Galaxy text-based game? There is a beautifully illustrated version of on BBC's site. Two versions, actually.
Almost makes me wish that games did not bore me so quickly. It seems to be one of those addictions I just can't seem to acquire, like alcohol. Probably a good thing.
New wifi standard coming up, up to 22Mbps over 12,000 square miles.
In the context of the push for gigabit fiber, 22Mbps doesn't seem that fast—and remember, that's a theoretical maximum speed. However, 802.22 will have a huge impact on areas without access: the standard would make it very easy to blanket rural areas in wireless broadband and could also see use in developing countries.
The bandwidth is coming from the "white space" left over from the dumping of analogue TV a couple years ago. This seems like a potential good use. Might partially make up for all those durn broadband satellites we were promised over ten years ago but which never arrived.
Have you noticed how most storytelling, particularly TV shows (which may be the most important form of storytelling right now), all consists of people trying to break free of something, and they never do. That's why I enjoy the rare story like Office Space, where they actually succeed.
How about a story about an office girl who decides that she'd rather be a lesbian and a rock basist in Manchester, she goes and it actually works and she's a lot happier! Sure, there'll be problems along the way to keep the story interesting, but none of that banging-the-head-on-the-wall forever stuff. It's stale and unproductive.
This article is just one of many who circle around the speculations about whether we really are in an economic recovery, or whether only half the house has fallen yet.
I like infographics (which are all the rage they say), and I'm beginning to think about them in artistic terms. 'Cuz they start with interest in looking closer, something the artist is often hungry for. And since a graphic can be almost anything, you can build in your art right there. Your text too, humor, whatever.
On the right is a fun one. (Needs to be clicked to be readable, obviously. And clicked on again in the new window, unless you have a 5-feet high monitor.) (Apropos the humor, it does not even have to be made up: "Men are 28% more likely to seek medical help for a rectal foreign body".)
Oh, and here's a pretty one for the Apple Fanboy Zombies like me. (Unless they had a source to all those simple-graphic representations of all those products (and I doubt it), then making this one was a lot of work.)
See what I mean? One which one likes just begs to become a poster.
Terry Pratchett press release: To coincide with the paperback release of I Shall Wear Midnight, Transworld are making the first Tiffany book The Wee Free Men available to read for free on their website. You can currently read the first 104 pages here.
I love Terry's books, and I think the young witch Tiffany Aching, who we follow growing up over several books, is one of his best characters. So that's why I promote this link, even though I think the publisher is being rather stingy by spacing the book out over months. Five years ago, it would have been extraordinary to give away the first book of a series for free, now it's practically standard. Just give it in one full, free file, folks. (Aliteration not intended, but accepted with thanks.)
