Sort of duplicating, or triplicating, content here, but the text of an old blog post “IM babble: Lash La Rue, Twitter, Randy Travis and Tramp Stamps“ found its way to becoming an animated video via Xtranormal.
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I hate billboards. Trash advertising trash, blocking scenery. Interstate 70 in Missouri is particularly infested.
This art installation, Non-Sign II by Seattle-based art collective Lead Pencil Studio, is made up of small steel rods. It creates a blank/negative space, framing the natural landscape where it looks like a billboard should be.
It could just make people think about what billboards do and don’t do badly.
Jon Rafman is behind the 9 Eyes Tumblr, blogging strange, often exquisite images captured from Google Street View.
![NYC light [my own find "submitted" to 9eyes]](http://www.nearlyanerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_0509.png "NYC light [my own find \"submitted\" to 9eyes]")
Learned about cold-brew coffee sometime ago, but this Black Blood of the Earth stuff . . . whoa. Keanu Reeves moment just reading about it. It’s beyond most small-scale tech dealing with coffee caffeine:
By my calculations, I produced the equivalent of 145 cups of conventional coffee’s worth of caffeine in 5.7 cups of volume
Too bad the creator of BBotE only produces about 12 liters per week at the moment.
[via @warrenellis]
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Part 1 [Contains moving drawings of non-sexual, topless nudity, aka boobs.]
Gandahar, aka Light Years is a truly mindbendingly bizarre animated fantasy epic based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon‘s novel “Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar).”
The english language version is from Miramax Entertainment and according to Wikipedia there are currently no plans for a DVD release in the States.
The plot summary from Wikipedia:
The paradise world of Gandahar is threatened by a mysterious power, so Queen Ambisextra and the Council of Women send the warrior Sylvain to scout for this danger. He discovers metallic humanoids with a paralyzing ray who send the bodies of those they capture through a portal. Later these individuals return, also encased in metal.
Airelle serves as the love interest for Sylvain. He meets “The Deformed,” a group of mutants who Sylvain at first mistakes for the enemy.
The cause of this terror is traced to the giant brain Metamorphis, although Metamorphis is puzzled about how he could be the cause. The metal humanoids are coming back in time from the future, so Metamorphis offers to place Sylvain in stasis until that time. Sylvain awakens in 1,000 years as planned, and destroys the old, weakened, and now insane, Metamorphis.
Gandahar likely contains many political, religious, cultural, societal and technological thematic undertones I’d rather not attempt pondering for fear of my head spinning faster.
Watch the remainder of Gandahar after the jump.
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Something a bit different for Veteran’s Day. Something that cuts directly to the soul of what this day means. No flag waving. Just the raw humanity of it.
(Advise against watching the imagery is this “video” and let your mind do the work. Then get a decent quality copy of the song and quit paying attention to snobs like me.)
Lyrics:
Well I used to hang out down at the VFW hall
And stare at the photographs up on the wall
Of the neighborhood boys that died
in the wars we’ve been through
And the hand lettered sign that said
remember Jimmy McGrew
Well Jimmy went to Nam back in 1965
But there’s a lot of men here that think
Jimmy McGrew’s still alive
Though they carved his name
on a stone in Washington DC
His brother said that stone
don’t prove a thing to me
It’s veteran’s day and the skies are gray
Leave the uniforms home cause
there ain’t gonna be a parade
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew
[ guitar ]
There’s a hot rain fallin’
on the back streets of Saigon
There’s an old soldier stumblin’ down the alley
with his mama-san
Lord his eyes are cloudy
and his arms are black and blue
He’s just hangin’ by a thread
and he looks like Jimmy McGrew
It’s veteran’s day and the skies are gray
Leave the uniforms home cause
there ain’t gonna be a parade
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew
And keep it burnin’ bright
there may still be a lot of Jimmy McGrews over there
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew
Preview and buy Tom Russell‘s “Veteran’s Day” at http://www.amazon.com/Veterans-Day/dp/B0010SE8IQ or wherever.
Or if you prefer Johnny Cash belting it out: http://www.amazon.com/Veterans-Day-feat-Johnny-Cash/dp/B00265WH4E
Sphere: Related ContentWhile already ancient in Internet years, these three stood out after a recent video viewing catchup binge:
If this hasn’t been on repeat on ESPN can anyone really even utter the word “sport” anymore?
The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.
Video Projection Mapping for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock in Prague — it’s a video of video projected on the clock itself.
The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.
Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.
Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.
UPDATE: Enter Google ebooks
Accomplished with web service using the following steps in the user process:
Step 1: Provide login info for all your eBook accounts and/or upload existing eBooks.
Step 2: Choose where and how you want to read your eBooks.
Step 3: Read
UPDATE: Official and user created Read It Later apps for this.
ReaditLater lets you queue up words from the Internet to read later. When you find something you don’t have time to read now just click a bookmarklet button in your browser’s bookmark bar. Later, when you find time to read, you can tear through all your reading material at ReaditLaterList.com or from their app on your phone. And you do so with any ads stripped away and the text formatted for quick reading.
ReaditLater’s only qualm is its individual nature. Material must be added from a single web page. It needs an option to add RSS feeds or subscribe to everything on a site via Feedburner. The basic notion here is to enhance ReaditLater by also making it a bullshit-free RSS reader.
One way to accomplish this would be for ReaditLater to give its users their own unique ReaditLater email addresses to use when subscribing to mailing lists. For example, Twitpic.com gives its users an email — like username.3749@twitpic.com – to tweet photos via email.
No clue on how they’d do RSS. Perhaps a custom field on ReaditLaterList.com to paste in a site’s RSS feed?
Since storage for music is hardly still an issue, why doesn’t iTunes offer upgrading your music collection to true, lossless, CD quality tunes? Seems like many can’t tell the difference between a CD and an MP3, but some can and want better sounding stuff.
Or if Apple won’t do this, a web service could offer to scan your music library and upgrade your tunes with better sounding lossless versions like FLAC, Windows Media Lossless and Apple Lossless.
Any older folk remember the record store where you’d actually walk inside this place and buy music sans computer? When done proper, record stores still turn you on to great tunes and usually with plenty of patrons ready to engage in back-and-forth band banter.
Why can’t the local record store be revived and be revived with the help of the music behemoth that is Apple’s iTunes?
How? One big way would be for iTunes and music labels to offer exclusives and early releases available — for a set time – only at local record stores that partner with iTunes. Bring in your iPod/iPhone to load it up with this music.
And perhaps provide incentives to pack bodies in the music shops. One possibility would be offering credits to play 30 sec preview clips or full songs for everyone in the store to hear. Get more of these jukebox credits when you buy something from the stores.
Subsequent installments of “The Dreaded ‘Idea’” will address Computing/Internet/Telephony and various miscellany that eschews its own category.
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Jeremy Wood makes digital marks — drawings if you will — by walking around with a GPS.
From his site GPSdrawing:
Jeremy Wood is a multidiscipline artist and map maker whose diverse work is an expression of the poetry and politics of space and reflects upon how we treat our travels and interact with location.
The New York Times mentions Wood and his tech:
Mr. Montelongo shares his maps on everytrail.com. The iPhone is the fastest growing GPS tool of the site’s user base, according to Joost Schreve, the site’s founder. “But if you look at the quality of the maps, the best trips still come from traditional GPS devices,” he said, noting that the iPhone tends to draw less precise lines and to lose its signal under trees and near large buildings.
Jeremy Wood, an artist based in London, coined the term “GPS drawing” nearly a decade ago and continues to maintain gpsdrawing.com, a Web site compiling his and other GPS-produced images from around the world. Whenever he leaves his house, Mr. Wood takes his GPS device with him. He has mapped all of his movements since 2004 and views GPS drawing as an extension of a long-standing human tradition.
“People have been doing this for centuries, making big drawings so they could be seen by the gods,” he said, citing the ancient Nasca geoglyphs in Peru as an example.
The Glif is a small thingy that fits snugly onto the corner of your iPhone 4. It enables you to then mount your iPhone 4 on most tripods.
It also:
But the thing has yet to even be manufactured. Regardless, this future product fills such a need and want that at last check those behind The Glif are up to $95,120 — vastly exceeding their goal of $10K — with 21 days remaining on their Kickstarter project.
I recently called B & H photo, the massive Audio/Visual outlet based in NYC, to find out if their website was erring. How is there are millions of iPhones — with an OK camera and now capable of HD video — and no way to mount them on tripods? I believe B & H told me they don’t carry anything like this because there is nothing like this currently on the market worthy of their store.
Maybe the The Glif could rectify.
Looks like a $20 contribution to The Glif KickStarter project will snag you a pre-order of long awaited iPhone accessory.
