Quote, “An opera singer moved in next door and our dividing wall is thin. Subsequently, my life has become unbearably dramatic. While I’m making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he seranades me as his lover betrothed to another man.” — Zach Klein
5 of the 10 best-selling novels in Japan last year were written on cellphones using web apps that allow works-in-progress to be uploaded and commented on. The times they are a changin’.
Kent Rogowski’s Inside-Out Teddy Bear Portraits
Artist Kent Rogowski takes teddy bears, turns them inside out, re-stuffs them, and then photographs the results.
His artist statement is a bit much: “They are at once hideous yet cuddly, disturbing yet endearing, absurd yet adorable, while offering a metaphor for us all to consider. These bears, which have lived and loved and lost as much as their owners, have suffered and endured through it all. It is by virtue of revealing their inner core might we better understand our own.” But the portraits themselves are worth a look.
Chris Harrison’s Visualizing the Bible takes a bunch of cross-referenced data and makes various diagrams and charts from it. Pretty stuff. (via Adam Spooner)
Sean Sperte talks about ExpressionEngine in an introductory sort of way. EE is one of the content management systems I’m considering for the new NewSpring Church website and for an overhaul of this site. Bye, Wordpress!
New FaulknerBrowns Architects Identity
Creative Review Blog has an interesting case study on the recent and equally interesting FaulknerBrowns Architects rebranding. It’s certainly bold and different, but I can’t imagine what a nightmare to implement it is for certain applications.
(You can also see it in context on the FaulknerBrowns website or view more work by A2/SW/HK, the firm responsible for the rebranding.)
[Talking to Jack Nicholson is] fun if you can hang with that stream of consciousness. It’s like reading [Bob] Dylan’s book “Tarantula.” I bought it, and by page 15 I go, “Did I just eat mescaline? This is unbelievable.” — Michael Keaton, excerpted from this MTV.com interview
Five Songs I Wish I Could Summon at Will to Highlight My Entrance into a Room
1. The Boys Are Back in Town — Thin Lizzy
2. Spanish Joint — D’Angelo
3. Call My Name — Prince
4. Stay — Chaka Kahn
5. Use Me — Bill Withers
“It is said that gifts persuade even the gods.” — Euripides Every dance move is the Robot if you can imagine an advanced enough robot. — Demetri Martin
Longbrake directs me towards the Flickr photos of Jose Javier with good reason (and copious amounts of well-utilized negative space.)
[year-d] — noun
1. a beard grown for the span of 12 consecutive months: “I think Mr. Eades is growing a yeard.”
2. a one-year beard
[Origin: 2008, coined by Lee McDerment at lunch while discussing facial hair]
Are We At War With Iran? Website-as-political-statement. I like it.
Using Fluid to Make Gmail Its Own Application
I recently made the switch back to a laptop fulltime for all my work and communications. It’s awesome, and much better than trying to keep machines synced like I was doing previously. Coinciding with that switch, I also moved all my email to Gmail (and my calendar and office documents to Google’s Calendar and Docs web apps) and completely ditched using any desktop email clients. I’m more portable now, but I’m also less tied to the machine, too.
The issue I kept running into was trying to separate Gmail from the rest of my browsing habits. At any point in any given day, I’ve probably got a Safari window with at least 15 open tabs. These might be articles for me to come back to, potential links for this blog, or any variety of other things. While I’m glad that all my email is easily accessible online in a central location now, I still felt the need to have some separation between “browsing” and “communicating.”
Enter the free app Fluid. Fluid lets you create Site Specific Browsers to run a URL as a separate desktop application, dock icon, menu bar, etc. It provides that logical separation I was looking for. Fluid works in conjunction with Safari (sharing cookies) but if Safari crashes, your Fluid app doesn’t, which is mighty useful.
A.V. Club (no, not that one) interviews There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson about the filmmaking process.
Here’s what we used to do: Create → Edit → Launch. Here’s what happens now: Create → Launch → Edit → Launch → repeat. — Seth Godin, on how just about everything works now
Anna Melcon Illustration
Anna Melcon has been quietly, rapidly growing as an illustrator over the past year.
Pieces like this alphabet poster and bizarre bear have incredible vibe and color, not to mention great conceptual foundation.
You can view more work on Anna’s Flickr page.
The shopping cart functionality on the new Apes and Androids site is pretty incredible. If buying things online was always this easy, I might be tempted to part with more of my money. I’m just sayin’ is all.
Murders & Mysteries is a solo electronica effort from Naz Hamid. You can listen to a couple of tracks on Virb. (I wish I could embed a single mp3 on my blog via Virb’s player. That would be slick and useful.)
A Constitution may agree with Sacred Scripture, but it should not impose that specific revelation on the commonwealth. This takes matters of personal faith and the Church into the public square where they do not belong. — John Mark Reynolds, excerpted from The Scriptorium Daily article Is [Mike] Huckabee Confused About the Proper Role of Christianity and Politics?