January 3, 2011
Historic New York Photo Collection
"The Museum of the City of New York is pleased to announce the soft launch of its online collections portal [where you can] view more than 50,000 newly digitized photographs by Berenice Abbott, Samuel H. Gottscho, Jacob A. Riis, the Byron Company, the Wurts Brothers, and many others."
Hillbilly idols
Winter's Bone director Debra Granik offers her 45+ minute documentary, Hillbilly Up!, as a free exclusive iTunes download. The film features several of the local musicians and actors from the film discussing Ozarks culture and history.
Kowloon Walled City
Dewey's decimals keep me company
Canine CODIS
Poo Prints: DNA Profiling for Pets; "... designed to help communities enforce their pooper scooper rules and give the pet owner tools that help them build a better relationship with their dog." [more inside]
Five Cent Seurats
Four Color Process is a blog which reposts magnified details from old comic book panels. The images become semi-abstract and very striking (and surprisingly non-Lichtensteinian). Some favorites: Ruined City, Steranko's Strange Tales, Ghouls, Swirl Lamp, Kirby's Silver Surfer, Romance, Novelty Magic, Ditko's Dr. Strange, Man at Conference Table, Homo Comicus, Easy to Do and finally a comparison of contemporary printing with the old four color process. [via The Front Section]
Mack Truck of Love
((( Groovy )))
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
"I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Your skills are complete. Indeed, you are powerful, as the Emperor has foreseen." The lightsaber prop to own all lightsaber props, complete with crystal chamber and a blade bright enough to blind with the lights switched on. TL;DR? YouTube vids - with the blade attached; the crystal chamber. [via Geekdad, via Make]
Ironic Sans: BUILD MONOLITHS ON THE MOON
The goal: Erect a monolith on the moon.
"An Illusional Intermission Between Invasion and Insurgency"
The Toppling: How the Media Inflated the Fall of Saddam’s Statue in Firdos Square.
A joint publication of ProPublica and New Yorker. [more inside]
A joint publication of ProPublica and New Yorker. [more inside]
Women in War: Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan
Since the spring of 2010, all-volunteer units called Female Engagement Teams have been doing what male soldiers can't: speak with women and children in rural Afghani communities, both to gain information and to foster trust. These soldiers may carry M4 rifles, but their toolkit includes sidewalk chalk and jump ropes, too. The FETs, trained for this specific mission grew out of more ad hoc programs like the Lioness program for traffic checkpoints in Iraq. "The FET mission to me is so critical that if I had to exchange blood for it, I would," said Sgt. 1st Class Sawyer Alberi, an FET team leader for the National Guard. "The FET mission is nested very closely in the COIN mission, and unless you do it, you're not doing the whole COIN mission." First Lieutenant Quincy Washa, platoon commander for the Female Engagement Team with Regimental Combat Team 1, describes the teams' role. Despite the apparent importance of the FETs' work, the program is still an experiment; it is unclear whether it will continue after the current teams' deployment.
felt cats
Decemberists gonna December
An identity so appealing, someone should launch a meat market just to adopt it
Why does Futura work here but Slanted Futura doesn't? Enter FONTS IN USE: A breakdown, explanation and appreciation of type design out in the real world.
Goodbye, RSS button in the location bar of Firefox
Do you use RSS? Not many do, apparently. Goodbye, then, RSS button in the location bar of Firefox 4 (Bugzilla entry). “RSS is dying,” a blog hyperbolizes in response, with retort from Asa Dotzler of Mozilla, who states the functionality is being moved to a menu item.
Detroit, post-apocalypse.
XO Movie Night
In 2006-2007, while Capt. Owen Honors was second-in-command of the USS Enterprise, the ship-wide closed circuit television was often used to broadcast videos to entertain the crew of around 6000. Not all of those videos were big budget movies. In fact, some of them were made by Honors himself, and depict simulated masturbation, female crewmembers showering together, and feature large amounts of sexual innuendo and homosexual slurs. (edited video included in link, maybe NSFW) [more inside]
Violens' (NSFW) funny and strange promotional shorts
Slapstick eroto-psychodelia-(NSFW) Violens is made up of former members of the now defunct Lansing-Dreiden, a band responsible for beautiful, confoundingly strange, sublime, and rocking art and music. [more inside]
Heart attacks from fireworks? Really?
First birds, then fish. between 4000-5000 blackbirds and an estimated 80-100,000 drum fish have turned up dead over the space of a few days around Beebe, Arkansas. [more inside]
Women Laughing Alone With Salad
Hyperpype -- a flash game
HYPERPYPE -- a strangely addictive flash game. It's easy to fill most of the pipes, but it's very hard to get them all.
Make some music!
Bram Bos, maker of easy-to-use programs for making electronic music, has released all his old software for free download. Get some free VST instruments and samples from KVR Audio and make some music, or at least download Hammerhead and make some beats!
Best Efforts
100 quirky things we didn't know last year
100 quirky things we didn't know last year, such as that pea plants can grow inside a human lung, mafia members unwisely use Facebook and swans occasionally get divorced.
Salman Rushdie, in defence of video games
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness
Unlocking money in pre-IPO companies
Employed by a startup? Working long hours for little pay but lots of stock options? When your company goes public you can finally realise the value of your options but what if the IPO is delayed or never happens? [more inside]
They came unto a land, in which it seemed always afternoon.
British actor Pete Postlethwaite has died at the age of 64, after a lengthy battle with cancer. A renowned veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company (he held the leading roles in both The Tempest and 2009's King Lear among others), Postlethwaite is perhaps best known worldwide for his roles in The Usual Suspects (trailer), The Constant Gardener and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg supposedly described him as "the best actor in the world", although Postlethwaite himself often denied this.
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