Wal-Mart has a new logo. They do not, as of yet, have a specific reason for or explanation of said logo. I hope this isn’t an attempt to man-up to Target’s identity simplicity.
Aside from the somewhat silly-sounding name, the teaser trailer for the next James Bond film Quantum of Solace looks extra tasty. I’m loving the renewed direction they’re taking the 007 franchise.
Season 1 of the AutoDesk-sponsored, PBS-produced, Brad Pitt-narrated series e2 - The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious is available for free viewing on Hulu. The series delves into a variety of case studies and interviews about sustainable architecture and building initiatives and it’s stellar.
Coda Hale put together a nice little Twitter/Quicksilver script. A few key strokes and, assuming Twitter is actually up, your tweet gets posted completely in Quicksilver. Only catch, no built-in character count.
After I master the unicycle, I intend to move on to Timbersports.
Five Things I Plan on Buying* with my Birthday Money
1. A helmet to wear while riding my unicycle
2. Some Tom’s Shoes
3. At least one Godfather sandwich with green peppers at The Corner Bagel Shop
4. A stainless steel water bottle
5. Part of my wife’s birthday present
*Truth be told, most of this money will go towards paying off debt. Such is the life of young married couples who have moved cross country twice in their first year of wedded bliss and been stiffed by a few clients.
Nine Inch Nails Lights in the Sky Rehearsal Videos
Pitchfork.tv has three clips of Nine Inch Nails rehearsing for their upcoming Lights In The Sky tour, all directed by Rob Sheridan who has done live visuals, motion graphics, videos, etc. for NIN in the past and is currently their art director.
This looks to be an incredible live band set-up for NIN, including a returning Robin Finck on lead guitar, Josh Freese on drums (he’s a personal favorite and that touchscreen drumloop interface he’s using at the beginning of the Echoplex clip is incredible!), former Beck bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Alessandro Cortini on keys and guitar.
You don’t know if a building is any good until you walk inside it. — Philip Johnson, architect
I wrote some thoughts on Logo Versus Brand (and How You Can Control One, But Not the Other) based on a blog post of “top church logos” I found this morning and the simple fact that I’ve been involved in the rebranding process for NewSpring Church for the past 6 months and it will soon be released into the wild to become whatever brand our people define it as.
Hey you, on the internet, you should read The Atlantic article Is Google Making us Stupid?
Andrew Pile reports that Vimeo recently played 1,007,116 videos in 24 hours. They’ve essentially quadrupled in size in the last six months. Vimeo trumps every other video sharing site in pretty much any category that matters.
This has been my desktop for a few weeks now. I miss cities. And I don’t. It’s complicated. On God, Country, Patriotism and Allegiance
I rolled across the following quote via Opus:
In the scriptures, I’m commanded to love a lot of things: my God, my neighbor, my wife, my enemy…I’m never commanded to love my country. In fact, if “loving my country” means that I demonstrate preference to someone based on their ethnicity, their nationality or, for instance, their loyalty to America’s foreign policies, I think I’ve pretty much undermined a very important aspect of Jesus’ mission on this earth — to make his temple a “house of prayer for all nations” and ours, to “make disciples of all nations.” And when I’m willing to value American lives over, say, Iranian lives or when I’m willing to promote America’s economic interests over the interests of the world’s poor simply because I’m American I may actually demonstrate my infidelity to the only Kingdom worthy of my allegiance. — John McCollum, To Love One’s Country
McCollum makes a number of great points in that article, and asks some tough questions (Quote, “Is patriotism a good thing? A bad thing? Both? Neither?”). These are questions I feel like are rarely, if ever, in the public discourse within the context of American Christians, where patriotism is such a hot button topic in the current Presidential campaign.
How unfortunate. If we’re to “…love the Lord your God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind…” I wish more Americans who profess Christianity would actually start using their minds and wrestling with some of these types of questions out loud.
I love a site that does what it says and says what it does. E.g. InstantRimshot.com
Five Designers I Wish I Could Work With Daily Again (or for the First Time)
In no particular order:
1. M.A. Turner
2. Derek Nelson
3. Matthew Wahl
4. Josh Boston
5. Aaron Martin
YoutTube is trying out full-length videos here and there in an effort to see if they’ll be more marketable for advertisers. If the content is compelling, sure, I might sit in front of my computer for long stretches of time (Hulu proves this consistently). But I certainly won’t watch a horribly compressed YouTube video for that long. Maybe I’m in the minority?
There’s only one artist on Barack Obama’s iPod: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY. — Christopher Beam, excerpted from The Truth About Barack Obama: Rumors Barack Obama’s Campaign Shouldn’t Try to Correct
I found an old Brownie Hawkeye camera last week and thought I’d try this “Through the Viewfinder” thing. I got some interesting abstract stuff that’s appealing to me for whatever reasons.
One-Man-Band Omnichord Cover of Back in Black
Things that might provide still yet more context for the complete and total awesomeness of the slightly NSFW video:
This is Matt Mahaffey using a drum kit, an old Suzuki electronic instrument called an Omnichord (here’s a PDF of the Omnichord84 user manual) and what I’m guessing is a Big Muff distortion pedal.
Matt plays in a band called sElf and, along with his brother, also wrote the Expedia.com theme jingle.