Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Fighting Gifs
The Verge - "Exotic fighting game locales become animated GIFs in this tour of the 16-bit world"
"Reddit user RudeBootie has put together a collection of 125 retro fighting game backdrops depicting locations everywhere from training gyms, to the Serengeti, to hot springs — all as animated GIFs that recreate their bumpy 16-bit animations. The settings are pulled from nine different games, including three titles from the Street Fighter series."
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Cocoa Beach
io9 - "The writers of Mad Men are pitching a show about NASA in the 1960s"
"According to Florida Today, writers from AMC's hit period drama are working on a new TV series about America's 1960s space program and the journalists who covered it.
The working title of the show is Cocoa Beach, named for the small Florida town that became a full-blown city after experiencing a 1000% population increase fueled largely by the U.S. space program. Located just 15 miles south of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Cocoa Beach became a hotbed of economic, social, and technological activity as people swarmed to the city for jobs launched by America's burgeoning interest in space. Space Coast Film Commissioner Bonnie King tells Wired that the show is "far from a done deal;" but if it gets the greenlight, Cocoa Beach could begin airing as soon as this fall."
A.V. Club - "Some Mad Men writers might be working on a show about NASA in the '60s"
Wired - "Mad Men in Space? Writers Pitch Show About NASA in the ’60s"
Popular Science - "A Show About 1960s NASA From The Mad Men Team? We Hope The Rumor's True"
Complex - "Some "Mad Men" Writers Are Working On a Show About NASA in the '60s"
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Keith Haring - The Political Line
The new retrospective at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
Photos from Hypebeast.
More at The World's Best Ever.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Astronauts
New Yorker - "The Martian Chronicles"
Burkhard Bilger
"While I was at [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], I heard talk of a survey, perhaps apocryphal, which asked astronauts if they'd go to Mars on a one-way trip. Three-quarters supposedly said yes. ("The pilgrims on the Mayflower didn't hang around Plymouth Rock waiting for a ship to take them back," the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin later told me.)"
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Revisiting Daft Punk - "Discovery"
Daft Punk's second album "Discovery" was released in March 2001 to a mixed reception and lukewarm reviews. Since then it's been named Rolling Stone's eighth best electronic dance music album of all time and Pitchfork.com's third best album of the '00 decade.
Says Rolling Stone, "This is where a couple silly French guys in robot getups became one of the most insidiously influential pop acts of the past decade. Daft Punk spawned a zillion vocoder-pop wannabes, and their 2006 Coachella appearance is ground zero for the recent EDM explosion if anything is. On Discovery, they simultaneously parodied and honored radio cheese from the Seventies and Eighties and came up with jams to heat up your boogie nights and massage your waterbed soul. "One More Time" is as fun as a stay at the "YMCA," "Digital Love" gives Peter Frampton-style talk-box guitar a booster shot, "Aerodynamic" has astro-turf-shredding Van Halen guitar action and "Face to Face" (sung by New Jersey gospel-house wizard Todd "The God" Edwards) chops up ELO. As for "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," apparently, Kanye was a bit of a fan."
Says Pitchfork, "Discovery was simply the decade's best good-times record, with Daft Punk as pyramid-toting party wizards and the chipmunk Kraftwerk of "Harder Better Faster Stronger" their anthem. But this most celebratory of records has a bittersweet streak, too: Daft Punk know that a rush always carries the risk of exhaustion. Perhaps the album's most underappreciated track is the sad but gorgeous "Short Circuit", a three-minute robot graveyard of crumbled transistors and dying LEDs. But from Romanthony's first blissful, vocoded shout of "one more time!" the dominant emotion on Discovery is joy. A joy that wasn't afraid to be sentimental and funny as well as hard and futuristic, and is all the better for that. When a generation looks back and tries to catch a fuzzy hold of the music that made them happy this decade, Daft Punk's will be top of the list."
Carmelo Anthony's Opportunity to Rise
New York Times - "Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony Has a Point to Prove"
"It took Carmelo Anthony only 14 days as a Knick to script his first signature moment, to stoke the dormant dreams of an expectant city and make all things seem possible.
On March 9, 2011, with time running down and Tony Allen in his personal space, Anthony hopped to his left, lofted a 20-footer and beat the Memphis Grizzlies with a half-second to spare. As he backpedaled away, Anthony smiled wide and chirped, “I do this!”
He does this. This much, the entire N.B.A. knew when the Knicks sent a hefty package of players and draft picks to Denver to acquire Anthony two years ago. Anthony scores, brilliantly, from everywhere, with a showman’s flair and an adolescent joy. He dominates the game like few others in basketball history.
He thrills. He inspires. He wins. He does this.
The only thing Anthony does not do, or at least has not done, is win when it matters most — an asterisk that blots his otherwise enviable résumé. Anthony has led his team out of the first round once in nine years (and never with the Knicks), a fact that supporters and critics can recite from memory.
The postseason run that begins Saturday presents Anthony with his best chance yet to shift perceptions and shred tired narratives.
The Knicks open the playoffs at home, as the East’s No. 2 seed, against the aging, brittle Boston Celtics. There are no elite teams standing between the Knicks and an eventual conference finals showdown with the Miami Heat."
...
"If Anthony is exceptionally confident, it might be because this is also the best he has ever been."
Only God Forgives - New Trailers
Two new trailers for Nicols Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling's upcoming second film together Only God Forgives.
Here's the first.
Revisiting The Neptunes
This weekend marks renaissance man Pharrell Williams's 40th birthday. To celebrate Williams's "eternal youth" The Fader magazine re-posted their 2002 cover story on The Neptunes production duo when they were on the top of all music charts.
The Neptunes: Never-Never Land
"The Neptunes have gone from being faceless up-and-coming producers (Kelis, Noreaga, Ol Dirty Bastard) to the more public duo who make club anthems (Jay-Z, Mystikal, Ludacris) to the current perception of them as the hottest production team who make millions doing remixes and songs for pop acts (Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, P. Diddy) and aging hip-hop acts (Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J). And now there’s N.E.R.D., the producers-as-group outfit featuring Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo and their Virginia Beach buddy Shay, with their debut In Search Of…"
“Most thugs and models (and thug models) listen to the same shit. And a lot of it is produced by the Neptunes,” he writes me. “The Neptunes are the acknowledgement that hip-hop is pose. They say, ‘These days anybody can be hip-hop stars, even us.’”
Disclosure - "You & Me" (ft. Eliza Doolittle)
The young British electric duo released this new single, "You & Me," for their debut album Settle, set to be released June 3.
Another good Disclosure song, "Tenderly."
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Great Tumblr - National Geographic Found
The National Geographic recently launched their first Tumblr, natgeofound.tumblr.comhttp://natgeofound.tumblr.com/.
"FOUND is a curated collection of photography from the National Geographic archives. In honor of our 125th anniversary, we are showcasing photographs that reveal cultures and moments of the past. Many of these photos have never been published and are rarely seen by the public."
Another Tumblr worth following, The New York Times's Lively Morgue.
New York Income Inequality by Subway Stops
The New Yorker - "Idea of the Week: Inequality and New York'S Subway"
"According to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, if the borough of Manhattan were a country, the income gap between the richest twenty per cent and the poorest twenty per cent would be on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia, and Lesotho."
The New Yorker's interactive infographic shows the wide range in median household income based on subway stops. The biggest range:
$205,192—The highest median household income of any census tract the subway has a station in (for Chambers Street, Park Place, and World Trade Center, all in Lower Manhattan).
$12,288—The lowest median household income (Sutter Avenue, on the L in Brooklyn).
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2017, plans are for a "six-story, 290,000 square-foot museum attached to a massive 1,000 seat dome for movie events. There will a full red-carpet experience, an interactive moviemaking exhibit, and floors dedicated to the history of cinema."
Slashfilm - "The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Opens In 2017; See Photos and Plans"
Los Angeles Times - "Academy film museum to include 3 theaters, Oscar 'experience'"
The Academy Museum
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
The History of Blue Jeans
Vice - "De Nimes"
"Before we had low-rise, straight-leg, skinny, selvage, stretchy, resin-coated, lotion-infused, or mom jeans, there was simply jean—the fabric. The name likely originated from gênes, referring to Genoa, Italy, where sailors wore a twill blend of cotton, linen, and wool that came in a variety of stripes and colors.
Today’s jeans are made from heavier, all-cotton denim woven in a combination of indigo-dyed vertical yarn and natural horizontal yarn, resulting in the fabric’s white-speckled surface and pale underside. And although the original name for denim came from Nîmes, France—as in, de Nîmes—the fabric was most likely first produced in England.
Once the United States emancipated itself from British rule, the former colonists stopped importing European denim and began producing it themselves from all-American cotton, picked by slaves in the South and spun, dyed, and woven in the North. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by the textile trade, which almost singlehandedly upheld slavery. When the cotton gin mechanized processing in 1793, prices, already subsidized by slave labor, dropped dramatically. Cheap goods drove demand, and a vicious cycle ensued. In the period between the invention of the cotton gin and the Civil War, America’s slave population shot from 700,000 to a staggering 4 million.
After the Civil War, companies like Carhartt, Eloesser-Heynemann, and OshKosh slung cotton coveralls to miners, railroad men, and factory workers. A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling fabric and work-wear. Jacob Davis, an entrepreneurial Reno tailor, bought Strauss’s denim to make workingman’s pants, and added metal rivets to prevent the seams from ripping open. Davis sent two samples of his riveted pants to Strauss, and they patented the innovation together. Soon after, Davis joined Strauss in San Francisco to oversee production in a new factory. In 1890, Strauss assigned the ID number of 501 to their riveted denim “waist overalls.” The Levi’s 501 blue jean—which would become the best-selling garment in human history—was born."
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