Google Street View

Rue Saunier, Toulon, France


26 Little St SE. Atlanta, Georgia


Berwick Rd. Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom


308 SW Rose Garden Way, Portland, Oregon


58 Lungomare 9 Maggio, Bari, Puglia, Italy


51 E. Claremont St. Edinburgh, Scotland

From Jon Rafman on Art Fag City. I think I came from something about Michael Wolf, who you can read more about here and here.

MYO New Yorker cartoon

Make your own New Yorker cartoon with The New Yorker Cartoon Kit.
Mine will be my facebook profile picture and then people will ask me or just themselves why I have replaced my face with something that is not funny beautiful meaningful or my face and I will have no real answer. That is the plan. Also maybe win a trip to New York, that would be pretty sweet.

Joe Moran

Slightly depressing satire-fail, reading through the comments section on Joe Moran's recent CiF post 'Society for Unread Authors'.

Anyways... Made me wonder who he was and that, and in perusing his blog came across this article about life and the meaning of twitter.

Pretty good. Presents some ideas about limitations to the value of nearer-instantaneous communications (and interaction v broadcast) other than the usual 'verbal diarrhoea' argument.

It does have a bit of unnecessary wrap-up at the end, but it would still be a great article if broke off on the paragraph ending,

"We could spend our whole lives texting but there will always be part of us that is infinitely remote."

music videos with (semi) naked people / keith scholfield

unconscious suggestion / derren brown

So Derren Brown comes across as a bit of a prick. That lottery thing - what was the point?

Some of his other stuff, though, is annoyingly impressive.

This is pretty good:
Subliminal Advertising
(embedding disabled)

Psych? Magic? I guess it'll be about 30 years til some secrets come out, if the former cameramen get desperate enough for cash to do some retrospective documentary or something.

In the meantime, this is a pretty good article on unconscious influences.(pdf)
[from The Psychologist - A research journal "in a form suitable for our wide-ranging non-specialist audience" (ie. pop psychology that's not bullshit)]

Just seen there's another one, with guys from Saatchi&Saatchi.
American Version

tender is the psych

F Scott Fitzgerald

Just finished The Great Gatsby.

Not read Tender is the Night, but like the fact that someone's done a bit of a psych-filtered analysis. And a bit of an insight into Fitzgerald.

From The Psychologist.

ethical offsetting?

Could I somehow offset my narcissistic fixations/admirations/desires for the disposable bread of capitalism (clothes and that) by just showing some kind of awareness of the back of the picture?









I guess probably not.



..pics from adbusters.

College Humour

4 Awkward Moments in Facebook "Likes"

more xkcd

but, i really like this one... ("I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.")

Hiiiiiiii

not had time to blog lately, ok, noone cares, but i'm just gonna post stuff now that was in draft or lying around, and backdate it. just so you know. there.

tech secrets revealed

http://www.xkcd.com/627/

update - Witches of Eastwick, True Blood

Just finished The Witches of Eastwick.



Wasn't sure what the point of Updike would be if it's not realistic small-town America, but actually found the heightened awareness of it as a fable meant appreciating more consciously the actual craft of his fiction (I'm gonna admit, something, somewhere inside of me, just wanted to assume Rabbit was straight-up documentary) - he's pretty good.


Back to Rabbit Redux now, maybe from a bit of a different angle.







Just watched the first episode of True Blood. It seems weak. However compelling it is to watch a blonde waitress with psychic powers that somehow turn her into a caricature of naivety rather than jaded and manipulative (I'm guessing the grandmother is something to do with that), that scene in the forest particularly killed it for me. the one with the confrontation with the potential vampire-drainers - kind of important, plot-wise. a hinging point. there needs to be this confrontation, and it needs to be resolved in a certain way, and that way is that Sookie and Bill temporarily defeat the drainers - with Sookie playing the main part in saving Bill's life - yet it still needs to be left open for retaliations or follow-ups later.



but the guy gets strangled by the chain in some not entirely clear way, the both of them look scared and give up and stumble off (with the obligatory "we'll be back"-type comments)... then do a bit of a wheel-skid in their truck. just to scare a little. could they not have just run them over?!



cheese or cliché is fair enough, but can it still not be a little tighter?



didn't Buffy do this better? (I'm actually not sure, just wondering)

half nelson

one reason i'm shit at reviewing* is that i feel quite a bit more comfortable criticising than appreciating.

this means that i could easily spend more time talking about things i don't think are worth any time than things i do, a contradiction that could almost cause me to combust if it really came to fruition and wasn't, as it is, held back by this other problem - that my criticisms, being relative to some ideal or supposed standard as if people had stood up and claimed that this work they'd just made was the greatest thing ever, or this, or that, which is generally not the case at all, end up seeming not worth much anyways.


Half Nelson basically runs through a tree of american indie tropes - school classrooms can be inspiring places as the kids are ultimately motivated but just waiting for the right teacher; black people are still ghetto but have strong families ; white people are still upset that their parents don't understand them; middle-class people can be fucked-up too, the most cool-looking people are the most fucked-up internally; life is a bit shit but human nature is beautiful and actually so is life really; fucked-up people, as well as being the most physically attractive, are also most likely to be associated with intelligent-looking stuff like some kind of fantasy maverick history lecture (for 12yr olds?), or a children's picture book on dialectics...

but it is lovely. nice music, nice colours.



*other reasons are that i'm just a bit shit, at thinking, and writing.

fantasy job of the month: 'something in advertising'

copywriter, maybe. or something similar.
(last month: magazine journalist. see the progression?)

just read how to get your first job in advertising by this Dave Trott, who's apparently quite well-known and that, and I feel like I could do it. Just need some kind of portfolio it seems. Just knocking one up of imaginary adverts that you'd imaginarily do - isn't that a bit GCSE? is that normal? Could totally do that though. It would be fun. And a better use of my time than wandering around blogs.



this is never actually gonna happen.

Concept Mining

Here

About as promising then disappointing as this dinosaur comic.

In the way that I'd love there to be NLP-related jokes that are really funny, it would also be amazing for there to be a breakthrough, effective, text-mining solution.

But whilst tech webcomics might someday hit on a decent pun, it's harder to see how this kind of thesaurus-inspired NLP is going to get around one of the very issues inherent in thesauri - the artificial formalising, breaking things up into this tree structure. Yes, in the predecessor it's necessary - how else would you organise things in a book? But is this really how we think, or just the closest possible model?

Ok, in translating something to computation, it needs to be formalised. But what's the point, really, in just continuing with this line of thinking?

And ok, I don't have any better ideas. But I'll work on the text mining jokes.

I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew.

600 person-strong Amazon review joke (ok I nicked this off some other blog but don't remember where now)


..ok just realised this might be quite a well-known 'viral' (but how well-known? how would we know? can someone not make an accurate chart of these things?! tracking cookies must be useful for something) there's a milk one too. the magic is now broken slightly. but i think the shirt still stands up on its own.

i think i should get a dog

paragraphs 2 - 4 -- appreciation

- not voodoo

fiction fiction fiction fiction cultural outreach program?

New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

I wanted to title this 'best-kept fiction secret*' with the asterisk conceding that it likely isn't much of a secret to anyone Stateside, or maybe just anyone outside of Jersey CI. But what was drawing me to such an uninspired phrase, a cliché even inaccurate? Hard to say. And I'm gonna blame it on island uninspiration in general. shiiiiit.

But this really is some kind of cross-atlantic -thrown lifebuoy, a voice over the airwaves, a beacon of if not hope then at least some kind of entertainment

Each week some (generally younger) New Yorker-published author chooses, reads and discusses a piece of short fiction from another (generally older) New Yorker-published author. There's Updike, Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borgess, loads of other people I haven't heard of but probably should have...

quite liked Jean Stafford - Children Are Bored on Sundays. 'Invalid Souls'.

I could make more of a list. I haven't listened to them all yet. I can come back.

jus sayin'

i know this looks a bit shit.... i'll get around to it, sometime. any suggestions appreciated.

radio on the tv

(this was in drafts from ages ago, so just thought I'd post it anyway)
not actually related to Tom's coincidentally recent TAL post (yeah i hear google likes superfluous linking)

This American Life TV shows *

I don't feel too guilty about watching this on streaming as it seems near enough impossible to buy on iTunes if you're in the UK. I wasn't sure if I was just being a retard so I've been trying anyways long enough to whet my appetite some - and the one I'd been most particularly looking forward to, just from the summaries, was 'behind the camera'.

instead of making tv in a TAL-style, this literally does just seem 'radio on the TV' - the images don't seem to add that much. I'm not sure what I was expecting. More stunts and explosions?

maybe just a more naturalistic, exposing, documentary-style. something taking more advantage of the visual... we don't need so much dialogue. we can just watch stuff.**


* yeah the sound is out of sync on these but hey, close your eyes and you can pretend it's radio again. or you can pretend that the rules of the universe have both inversed and exaggerated, and sound now travels significantly faster than light. y'know, whichever's easiest.

**to be fair, this might be quite related to the out-of-synch thing.

'scary' brain science

Sometimes I read psych/science stuff and it seems a bit weird or implausible, but I just assume that either I've forgotten to the point of incomprehension most of contents of my degree course already, or the field has really moved on in the last... 9 months.
Whilst the former is likely enough still true, it's at least slightly comforting that the ever-reliable Mind Hacks blog is around to confirm that often the case is just lazy/ill-informed journalism.

Dressing-down of Sunday Times article



(oh.... just realised I left a comment on the article, where I sound like a bit of a twat, and now I'm sharing the article link around..... (realised as in just connected these two things together... ok, well, whatever))

citation jarres

Story: Student (subject and level undefined) inserts fake information into Wikipedia and is thus, by searching on this information, able to see exactly which publications use Wikipedia as a primary, unverified, source.
The execution is commendable: a compelling but fairly plausible, inoffensive, quote inserted into the biography of a relatively low-profile, if obituary-worthy, composer - a prime target for frantic internet searching from same-day deadline journalists.

If the guy who did this (one Shane Fitzgerald) has a blog I can't find it. It would be interesting to see a list of major publictions that used the quote - I kinda feel like blogs don't count, and so far I've found The Guardian (who brought the story to public attention and so covered their backs slightly, and have since changed the original article) and The Independent (who haven't at all covered their tracks).

The guy emailed them all a month later to explain what he'd done, so I'm guessing other publications may have since done an edit. Or they didn't use the quote. Who knows. But this was a pretty good way of trying to find out.

John Updike - Rabbit, Run

Everything else was seeming contrived and this doesn't. That is to say - just that it's well done. It's small-town America and modern anxiety; how did we get here? what are we doing? Link (Amazon Sample)

Corinne

ok more salinger. I dunno what it is. sometimes he seems simple, almost clumsy, but by the end I needed a cigarette afterwards.

The Inverted Forest Originally published in Cosmopolitan, December 1947.

hubdub - buy shares in the news

seems like an interesting way of engaging with the world / dummy practice for market trading

hubdub

things I'm out the loop with - billboard advertising

originals and make-your-own

flickr pool

loop, wire, noose?

'cyburia' and war games 2.0

£2.69

For me, this feels like part of an internet fairy-tale.

docu-info-narratives / Burn on Goody

I'll admit - I was actually just going to steal all the references from this, hunt them down, and make some kind of Norman Mailer/Jade Goody mash-up* *(not got a better word) but actually, I can't find the Mailer text I wanted. So there's that. The problem of which at least left me the time for reflection, and to read the rest of the article. and come around to the fact that I should be doing better things than stealing people's ideas to make really second-rate covers. i dunno, basking in the sunshine or something. or writing my essay. article here I remember hearing something about Burn's book on the radio. it sounded a bit shit. i don't know whether it is. so anyways, here's some other mailer. I haven't read it. I've been being sleep-deprived and not writing my essay.

some thoughts

"

With girls, they're terrible. They can be terrible. I was in the school library, one time, now was a few years ago, I was in the libary, and there were these girls they were revising for their GCSEs, and this girl she was a stroppy kind of a girl, she said it's hot in here, and she took her shirt off - - yes she had something underneath, that - - so the librarian had to come, she had to come and she - - yes, cause I was there, and -

I went for this job, I just had this tryout, like I went along, but it was this bunch of 4 year olds, like 15 of them. and you have to do everything with them. you have to ask them if they need the toilet before you start the class, and you have to take them to the toilet, and at the end you get all their coats, and make sure they put their coats on, the arms, I mean, I've never even had a kid brother or a cousin or anything, I have no idea, like, everything. and you're just in this classroom, the middle of nowhere, eight at night,

and I came back, and I'd been away, and they didn't know where I'd gone, and they came up and hugged me! they came up and hugged me, and they said, Miss Helen Miss Helen, at some schools you know, sometimes they're funny with that, but they're ok, they with the principle too, but you notice, if they come and hug her that's ok, but she would never initiate it. never initiate it. but she comes up and she hugs me and she says, Miss Helen! I've moved up TWO reading levels! Some teachers, they don't even like kids. Some teachers, before they go in the classrom they -

I'm not even sure I like people

...you know, you can't let them get to you. they can just tear you apart -


...

some unrelated things

( ...)


oh, i was just looking for advice on reducing cassette noise but now i realise that was actually an embodied metaphor for my life

st malo

cheap leather suitcase made in Korea makes me feel like Graham Greene

(this is complete projection, I don't even know Graham Greene that well)

secrets from the pre-drafting

new favourite hobby: stalking authors online to track down pre-final versions of their work, for that elusive glimpse behind the magician's cloth - just like back in A-level English.

Amazon Read-Inside gives you the first 7 pages of Shared Patio, the opening story in No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July.

To be honest, I don't really know who she is any more than happening to catch something on arte, a kind of docu-date with David Shrigley, in Paris, with both seeming as kind of awkward in the situation as you would imagine they would be, though Miranda maybe less so.

After Amazon leaves you tantalisingly before the crux, you can find the rest here... play spot the changes, if you're that way inclined.

She does that kind of sunnily misfit over an awkward, almost anal, introverteness -type of kooky american indie, and you might have heard of her from directing Me and You and Everyone We Know, which is another one to add to the list of films I haven't seen.

and she has a couple of cute ideas for websites.

(today is also a day for gratuitous hyperlinking)

New Favourite Magazine

I think The Believer might be a bit like daytrotter for literature. Well, not at all really. Not in terms of custom graphics, or writing mostly on the up-and-coming, or inviting the featured artists to come and make something in-house each time. It's just reviews and interviews. But in the sense I wanted to mean it, which is looking at great stuff from a kinda-indie aesthetic, from a kinda left-of-sideways point of view leading to long riffs taking the personal as universally metaphorical, like this musing on John Updike by John Freeman. (I don't know who either John is right now, but I might go check them out)

I came across via The Guardian recommending this interview with David Simon of The Wire, interviewed by Nick Hornby. And David Simon knows who Nick Hornby is, and everything. (Of course he knows Nick Hornby! He still reads books, doesn't he? But if you, at 15, were so stoked to 'discover' High Fidelity, sometimes it's just some kinda strange that other people like David Simon can be familiar enough to casually drop in references ("three chords and the right guitar solo..." - I'm pretty sure that's just lifted right out) as well)
More importantly, anyways, it includes a quick guide to recognising Dickensian/Shakespearean/Ancient Greek literary styles, and their respective influences on some pop culture elements.
I learnt stuff, and that.

le grand content

we all love indexed (right?)

bit of visual representation to get things in perspective.

maths geeks

Thought This American Life #88 - Numbers merited a mention for touching on the possible psychology behind a desire for formalised representation, though just treating it as something 'unemotional' is kinda one-dimensional.

for all your satirical needs

this handy chart (from wired.com)

blinkered and happy, but still hopeful

article in The Economist the other day looking at the interrelating effects of competition and bias in the media.

I'm sometimes left pondering the fact that I love The Guardian so much even though in the main it only reinforces my views and opinions - this comfort pleasant, but is this the reason we read the news?
well... if you replace 'follow the news' with 'consume the news media' then it's a lot easier agree that pretty much so, yeah.

anyways, so the study this was looking at is particularly notable for its relatively simple but kinda innovative use of natural language processing to extract information (first processing transcripts of Congress to identify partisan phrases, then measuring their occurrence in newspaper dialog - the innovation being that even relatively subtle differences can be objectively, effectively, used in this way to identify rhetoric)

the conclusion drawn - that it is exactly the slant that each media has that leads to its profitability - is not astounding, but it is interesting that apparently even small deviations from this optimal slant have observable effects on circulation. also new to me is the finding that there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between the slant and the newspaper's ownership - being totally market-targeted does make sense, but it's still at least a little surprising.
ok, so this kind of capitalist democracy of information is naturally blinkered in each individual instance, but as they say better than I do in pointing out the advantages:

None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented.

(we knew most of this already, right? but it's nice that someone's done some stats on it)

genre-mapping venn

almost forgot, I went along for one night of the trans musicales de rennes festival and it was pretty good times.

almost as excitingly, though, at 3 in the morning burger-time, is finding this (pdf) being used as table place-mats.

I wouldn't do her either, but.

( ^ Repulsive, but still) Bit of an article on media sexism ..can't say I paid much attention til recently, with the whole presidential race and the amount of sex/attractiveness/womanliness-judgement comments thrown at the candidates going past the point of irony. ok, this is not going to go anywhere near a discussion of inherent gender differences, arguably innate perception and still quite relevant character judgements... but still. there were just so. many. better. reasons. to criticise Palin or Clinton than ones relative to our ideas of femininity. why do more male writers not get called out as being vapid when they come out with those kinda things? not that female journalists get it thrown at them too much either... umm.... update: women/media/perception of relationships ..but I'm hoping that the slights at Will Young (handbag / 'vanilla sex' - c'mon, everyone says vanilla these days, and I didn't know it came from that...) are some kinda irony. or is she just trying to even the balance? not sure this is the way to go about it. ok, I'm not gonna talk about sexism again. for a while.

any song, any time

http://www.justhearit.com/ appears to be some kind of searching conglomeration of youtube, and.... I'm guessing mp3 blogs. except apparently they've paid up all the licence fees. weirdly enough, it doesn't have random stuff that's very unlikely to be on the internet, and other stupid questions i think of asking it... but it does have Flotation Toy Warning... and it seems to be crawling myspace too.. ...which makes it different from Deezer in that they're not actually hosting the content - probably not a bad idea. unfortunately, it does fall into the Deezer preference of a flash-only interface - which I maybe don't hate as strongly as this guy, but kinda, all the same.

ASCII spy..... half a post

Y'know, happens sometimes, you've got some contraband data you want to sneak out and spread worldwide, but under the radar, as it were. More importantly, wouldn't it be nice if this could just... be presented nicely, too? Is that too much to ask? These things make such a difference... We all already know and love ASCII art (right?) but most generator-type programs just populate the field with a bunch of random characters. This, new from Vincent Chu on googleapps will encode the data file of your choice (albeit at present with size restrictions) into an image, for example: ....this would be a lot better in every way if I hadn't been foiled by blogspot's stylesheets of course overiding any I tried to put in (to make text really really small, to render the image) ....I haven't been able to think of a straightforward way to do this ....something to come back to, maybe. (there was a hidden encoded file and everything!)

Une Attrape-Salinger

Unrelated to anything, except maybe as a late Christmas present (though kinda wrecking my ideas about this maybe being an employment recruitment-friendly blog by pointing to what I'm guessing is copyright-dubious material), stumbled upon what looks to be the complete published short-story works of JD Salinger. Covering 1940 - 1965, Catcher in the Rye's there, too, if you reckon you can handle reading the whole book from the screen.

25 years is a short while, out in the world as well as in somebody's life, and it's pretty cool to be able to see not just his development as a writer -- technically, as well as in his perspective -- but also the wider social themes and fashions in social interaction; and in-between a few different first-person characters, one voice coming through now and again with the kind of over-thinking under a cover of casualness instantly recognisable in its similarity to Holden Caulfield. Which is one of the most pleasant, most comforting voices I know. If you've read Catcher, one in particular - This Sandwich Has No Mayonaise - is bittersweet.

Some other favourites so far:

The Long Debut of Lois Taggett

The Heart of a Broken Story

(later edit - forget the others, this one especially: ) For Esme, with Love and Squalor