Following
I'm not clever enough to think of a name.
I wish there were string covers of every song I loved.
via jessiebarber
Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix (via waxy)
crickets
What’s Purim?
Street Fight (2005)
This documentary on Cory Booker’s 2002 mayoral campaign in Newark offers a different point of view on the campaign movie from what I remember about The War Room. There aren’t any incredibly colorful characters, like a James Carville, but the film is a great reminder of how exciting local politics can sometimes be.
Verdict: Watch it on Netflix online, or go out and rent it.
We do get bouts of irrational exuberance for some titles.
Spectrial →
The Pirate Bay trial is now underway, and they’ve put up a page collecting information related to the theater a.k.a. the trial against the largest cultural distribution ever present in history. Along with a trial schedule and other official business, there is also some info on parties and shows taking place in TPB’s bus.
My internet’s back!
My deepest apologies for not having read anything interesting today. Hopefully, this will keep you, dear and solitary reader, occupied until tomorrow
What I Read Today (2/9/09)
A Grateful Dead analysis: The relationship between concert and listening behavior
This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead’s live concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 Grateful Dead listening events by last.fm users from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they were listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their present-day fans.
Economists, meanwhile, have argued that Groundhog Day highlights the unbridgeable gulf between classic economics and real-world behavior. They point out that the first time Phil Conners lives out Groundhog Day, he knows nothing about how events will unfold, and acts accordingly—self centered, short sighted and rash. But by the time Conners lives out his last Groundhog Day, he has perfect knowledge of how everyone around him will behave. He acts accordingly—maximizing his happiness and the happiness of those around him. The metaphor gets pretty loose, but in this interpretation, Phil’s last day is analogous to classical economics, where people act with perfect knowledge and rationality. But we never know what’s going to happen in the future, or exactly what people will do, so instead, we live more like Phil does on his first Groundhog Day: We muddle through using half-baked assumptions and habitual attitudes.
At the Movies: Slumdog Millionaire
The show, in other words, provides the narrative structure of the film, but also something more: an atmosphere of chance and suspense, where the sheer tackiness of the trademark mode of presentation gives us a kind of parody of destiny. The vaguely threatening sci-fi music, the eerie lighting, the repeated questions, the long pauses, the parade of the four possible answers, and in this case the acting of Anil Kapoor as a wonderfully creepy Indian version of Chris Tarrant – it all looks like bad media magic.
“My passion was the introduction to my new community in U.S. of my film love,” he said. “This kind of passion is no longer welcome, due to the new technology of the Internet.” He looked off into the distance. “The future of the video rental business is really dying and declining so fast, so fast,” he added. “I realized this thing so late.” But he also knows that for his collection, bright days may lie ahead 3,000 miles away. Of the group from Salemi, which he described as “very serious and sincere,” he said, “I don’t have any doubt that they will have a great program with my collection.” And as for his former customers in the East Village, he added, “One day, I hope they understand.”
As we follow the reports from day to day, the feeling grows in us that we deserved something else, something bolder, something grander, something more thrilling, something bristling or fiery or fierce, something that might have represented a revelation or a destiny. We imagine ourselves surrounding the tilted spaceship, waiting for the door to open. We imagine ourselves protecting our children, slashing the tentacles that thrust in through the smashed cellar windows. Instead, we sweep our front walks, hose off our porches, shake out our shoes and sneakers.
Obviously, it was only a matter of time.
via waxy.
What I Read Today (2/8/09)
This is the first in a (hopefully) daily collection of links to interesting stories that I have read. I’m going to try to vary what I post in order to keep things fresh, but keep in mind that I am but a man, and as a man I can only have so many tastes.
Understanding the Paradox of Thrift
The result of this is an overall fall in the average level of income. And that means that even with the share of income being saved going up, the actual level of savings can be going down and we can truly end up in the toilet.
Twitter, Communication, and My Intermittent Inner Luddite
It’s one thing to take calls, check texts tweets, or the news when out and about by yourself. But it has become the norm to take them when meeting with others. That reduces the quality of the interaction and sends a message that the person you are with is merely an option, other options are ever present and must be assessed, maybe exercised.
Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is
Six co-workers joined them in another weight-loss competition. “I told them this was going to be dirty,” Mr. Ee said. There were weekly weigh-ins by an outside record keeper. Mr. Ee finished second in that bet, after losing an additional four pounds. Along the way, Mr. Ee’s officemates enjoyed taunting one another with comments like, “Are you sure you want to eat that bagel?” and “Why don’t you get a cheeseburger for lunch and I’ll get a salad?”
Is There Intelligent Life on Television?
No one ever needed a guidebook to I Love Lucy. If you couldn’t tell Fred Mertz from Ricky Ricardo, you probably couldn’t read in the first place. But with contemporary shows such as Lost, even devoted fans find themselves bewildered by Byzantine plot twists, abrupt character reversals, and dark thematic developments. Accordingly, they welcome whole books that try to sort out what is happening in their favorite shows and to explain what it all means. The fact that we now need books to explain our favorite TV shows suggests that the best products of the medium have developed the aesthetic virtues we traditionally associate with books—complex and large-scale narratives, depth of characterization, seriousness of themes, and richness of language.
Thinking With Portals: Creating Valve’s New IP
Our hope was that by the end of the Portal, players would know GLaDOS better than any boss monster in the history of gaming. Though we knew at some point the player would have to meet and destroy her, we thought it would be even more satisfying if players got a chance to cause her some emotional pain along the way.
