innovative and pretty darn cool to boot. to boot!
AUDIO BULLYS - ONLY MAN - MUSIC VIDEO
via ravishankara
Declarative Statements, poem by Taylor Mali, animation by Ronnie Bruce
Around 6th grade I started thinking that skateboarding was just about the coolest thing in the world. I’d buy skate magazines from the local drugstore and circle all the skate gear I wish I had from the advertisements with a permanent marker. I could list dozens of brands of decks, trucks and wheels. I could tell you why Swiss bearings were better than Lucky bearings. But I couldn’t do an ollie to save my life. I eventually got my mom to buy me a Zoo York board from the BC Surf and Sport shop from the Park Meadows Mall down in Denver, on the condition that I would wear a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards whenever I rode it. Because of this condition I stayed away from the skate park, aka cool kid central. During my middle school years I skated a little bit in my driveway with my friend Matt and later in high school I skated in the King Soopers parking lot with my friend Scott. I even broke my big toe once trying to ollie over two steps. Pretty badass.
I imagine one day I’ll stop thinking that skate videos are rad and stop wishing that I could do a kick flip. But that day has not yet arrived.
(via auroraa)
How blipping helpful.
Two doctor visits today, the second of which was to an ENT who told me that I have chronic sinusitis. This makes sense since I’m currently enjoying my fifth sinus infection of the last eight months. Diagnosis was made after the doctor looked into my sinus cavities with a long tube camera. This was one of the more uncomfortable sensations I’ve ever experienced, heightened both by my inflamed nasal tissue and an anatomical idiosyncrasy of a, in the words of the doctor, “severely” deviated septum. Medical science isn’t exactly sure why certain individuals have the inflamed sinus cavities characteristic of this condition (possibly allergy related, which would make sense in my case), they just know that it prevents the sinus cavities from draining normally, leaving them prone to infection. “Just think of it as having asthma in your nose,” the doctor told me. “Great,” I thought, “I already actually have asthma in my lungs. Might as well metaphorically have it in my nose, too.” While there isn’t a cure, I can stave off my predisposition to sinus infections by using a neti pot EVERY morning and using a nasal steroid spray like Nasonex EVERY night. For the rest of my life. Or, at least, for the rest of my life that I would like to stave of my predispostion to sinus infections.
In conclusion, evolution wants me dead and had I been born, say, two? three? generations ago, cholera or typhus or something would have taken care of my sickling ass a long time ago.
On the plus side, I did get a 90 point word score in a game of online Scrabble earlier today, a huge personal best for me.
All in all, not a bad day.
awesome! check out the UCB video that Rachel Maddow mentioned: BP Spills Coffee
Did this make the site go down?
Yes.
(via ericscott)
The site also went down before this, but yeah.
WTF! (Sidenote: I got kicked out of a play directed by this moviemaker once.)
Inspired by Iceland
via stacyanne
via thadeej via themadeshop:
“It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice‐only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice‐only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio‐only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural‐only conversation — utilizing a hand‐held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi‐attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine‐groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone‐pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign‐language‐and‐exaggerated‐facial‐expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.”
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
mob justice for purse snatchers
“…recent research in evolutionary psychology […] suggests a hyperactive perception of intentionality in the brain that is adaptively paranoid about unknown causes and thus attributes quasi- or supernatural causation as an explanation.”
"Are cameras the new guns?" →
“In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.” — Gizmodo (via Matt S)
"...then again, it's better than any _____ I've ever made."
If I am ever appointed Gentle Philosopher King of Earth and/or Global Tyrannical Despot, I might make it a rule that after anyone says or writes a criticism of a creative endeavor of any sort, he or she must conclude that criticism with some variation of “then again, it’s better than any ____ I’ve ever made” (provided that this is true of course).
I know this is an extremely unenlightened view to take of criticism. It just really boils my goat when people so easily hate without creating anything themselves. Making stuff is hard! Making good stuff is even harder. And I wouldn’t want to impose this rule to silence criticism, I would just want to help people (myself included) to check themselves before they get all high and mighty with their snark-downs.
Here is an example/actual film review I might write following this rule:
Last night I watched The Lovely Bones on Netflix. It was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Despite the bad reviews, I went in eager to like it. This quickly proved impossible. The incessant and overly-sentimental throaty voiceover, the unbelievably underdeveloped character relationships, and the unskilled juxtaposition of disingenuous Hollywood cheesiness with genuinely dark subject matter made sure of that. What’s worse, this appears to be an unnecessarily expensive bad movie. Not even admirable performances from the majority of the cast could save this shipwreck-in-a-bottle of a film. In conclusion, although staggeringly bad, The Lovely Bones is better than any film I’ve ever made.
I would probably quickly abandon this rule.
Benjamin Apple: When a celebrity dies: →
- I can’t take jokes about it, even if I don’t feel attached to the person who died. It strikes me as extremely disrespectful and makes me depressed. I don’t buy the “You gotta joke about tragedy!” line, because unless the person who died was your friend or relative, it’s not really your tragedy…
More! More! More!
Very funny stuff from Dan Klein and Arthur Meyer at SeinfeldComedy.com
via williebhines:
Dan Klein and Arthur Meyer’s “The Jerry Seinfeld Program” web series is the best helping of strange to start off any morning. Seriously: It is perfect in its strangeness in every way.
Gizmodo Brasil mentioned my Choose Your Own Lost Answers site. Probably the coolest press I’ve ever gotten, although I don’t know what it says and it very well might be making fun of me. If only there was some sort of way to easily replicate and transfer the text into an online translation tool of some sort. Sigh.
via stacyanne
bored? need help with that boredom? →
this oughta help. discovered by stacyanne at work today. i didn’t get through them all, but i think the virtual smoking was my favorite so far.
I feel a fool
Couldn’t fall asleep last night. At 2am went to the bathroom to poop. Toilet clogged. This is a normal occurrence at our apartment. I poop about three times a day and the toilet clogs about once every week or so. Usually I’m able to plunge things right. Not last night. Not after thirty minutes of late night plunging which resulted in me having a quarter-sized blister on my hand. Not after twenty minutes of early morning plunging today. That thing was clogged. I peed in a bottle and headed off to work. The landlord sent a plumber over after I got home from work. About ten minutes ago the landlord, the plumber and myself marched into the bathroom to face the thing. The plumber confidently said that we just needed to plunge it. I assured him that I’d tried and that this was a more serious matter. He asked me if anything had fallen into it out of the ordinary. I said no. He again replied that we just needed to plunge it. I showed him my blister, now covered with two self-administered band-aids, as evidence that I had already made an earnest plunging effort. ‘Great’ I thought to myself as I showed my battle wound, ‘This plumber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m going to have to shit in a plastic bag tonight.’ At this point the plumber took the plunger, inserted it firmly into the toilet, made three firm pumps, and unclogged the toilet. He smiled politely as we waited in silence for the toilet to fill for a test flush. It flushed. What does this mean? That I’m not an adult? That I’m not a man? That I am an adult awkward fool man? Shame. Shame shame shame.