A Flat White is an excellent coffee to start the day with – and just as you can identify a typography geek if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, it’s the real coffee geeks who know the difference between a Flat White and the more common Caffe Latte. Lokesh Dhakar put together a nice, simple graphic that demystifies these and many other coffee drinks.
Categories: Ephemera and links
Tagged: coffee
“In the future, if your children ask you, “Who would win in a fight? The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?” please refer them to this list, as it will save a lot of time…. Monsters are rated according to how dangerous they are against each other, and then according to how dangerous they are to all the other monsters on the list. Only if all other metrics are equal is the relative danger to the average human considered–because, let’s face it, they’re all dangerous to the average human. They are monsters.
“Now, here’s the thing about regular vampires: they’re fucking lame. They sneak around in the dark and drain blood from people. They talk a big game, sure, and everyone thinks they’re sexy. But is sexy going to protect you from the Wolf-Man? No. The Wolf-Man is going to tear your god-damn head off.”
Don’t miss the author’s follow up in the comments, addressing why Godzilla isn’t in there.
The only thing I would add to this is:
14. Chuck Norris.
Categories: Ephemera and links · TV and Film
Tagged: chuck norris, halloween, monsters
You might not think Twitter is a great place to go for grammar advice, given that every message has a maximum character count of 140, but you say that before laying eyes on FakeAPStylebook:
- “Always capitalize ‘Bible.’ You don’t want to get letters from those people.”
- “‘Arglebargle’ should only be used in the non-hyphenated form. “Argle-Bargle,” of course, refers to the infamous imperialist bloodline.”
Bonus points for spotting the writer uses Birdhouse, the semi-ridiculous iPhone app which allows you to save your draft tweets so that you can re-read, re-read and refine your work. If you did want actual grammar advice, you could always try following ThatWhichMatter, but it’s not quite so much fun.
Categories: Ephemera and links · Web
Tagged: grammar, twitter
By definition, dictators can do anything they like, so why wouldn’t the mad, bad and crazy men at the top of tinpot regimes want to write novels?
“Some recent examples have been Saddam Husseins’s last publication, Be Gone Demons!, sales of which suffered due to bomb damage, despite the author’s previous million-selling form; and Radovan Karadžić’s The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night, written while on the run from the UN’s War Crimes trials yet still nominated for Serbia’s highest literary prize, the Golden Sunflower. Neither, unfortunately, are available from Amazon.”
Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler’s List) wrote a novel about the literary ambitions of a dictator, called The Tyrant’s Novel, which I read in 2006. It’s worth a look, but I remember it being a little restrained and dry.
Categories: Books and reading · Ephemera and links
Tagged: dictators, novels
This video comprises “1,500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” It’s not particularly coherent in terms of theme, unless you call “8-bit games and music rule” a theme. Which maybe we should. Worth it for the chiptune soundtrack, the use of Lego as pixels and the particularly nice Pacman shots, which put you right into the maze.
Categories: Creativity · Ephemera and links · Games
Tagged: chiptunes, nes, pacman
The Guardian has a blog post up today reflecting on the radical/hippy/underground 60s newspaper The International Times, as an archive devoted to IT has just launched (although said archive appears to be down at the moment). Anyway, the Guardian blog quotes some notes I took at a talk by the founders of IT, which you can read in full here on The Wired Jester. There’s also a selection of scanned covers and pages to look through.
Categories: Ephemera and links · On Journalism and Media · The Sixties
Tagged: guardian, international times
In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched. The real world would simply be a home for the VR equipment: Star Trek imagines it holodeck as a big empty room, for instance. Moreover, since VR ran inside the computer, it only worked when you turned it on – and in movies such as The Lawnmower Man, the nightmare scenario was not being able to get out.
Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.
Categories: Creativity · Ephemera and links · Music · On Journalism and Media · Tech · Web
Tagged: beyonce, viral video, virtual reality
Another excellent set of photos on The Big Picture today, focussing this time on animals in the zoo. As always with The Big Picture, there’s a real (if subtle) sense of a narrative running through the post, thanks to the ordering of the shots. I couldn’t help but be grabbed by this one of a six-week-old North Chinese Leopard from Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany.
It makes a very strong impact thanks to the strength of the subject. At first it’s funny and cute, thanks to the disparity between the dinky little cub, doing his best to snarl, and the photographers. The wicker basket makes him appear all the sweeter, as if he’s a pet on a picnic or something.
Look at it longer though and there’s a toughness to it – there’s a predator’s cruelty in the leopard’s eyes. Cub or not, there’s no mistaking the fact he’s (supposed to be) a hunter and a killer, which makes the way he’s trapped quite poignant. Increasing this sense are the partially obscured faces of the photographers leering out of the blown, smudgy white highlight on the right. The super-saturated light gives a feeling, I think, of the outside forces shaping the cub’s life.
Other highlights from the post include shot 23, which features some very clever use of shadows and picture 26 which is a flat out super composition – the human hand makes it a much more interesting shot than 27, despite the fact that 27 is, on the surface, more action packed.
Categories: Ephemera and links · Photography
Tagged: animals
If you’re looking for a quick, concise summary of the rules for the 2009 F1 season, look no further than here. Let’s hope they don’t change them again before the season starts.
Categories: Ephemera and links
Tagged: f1
|
