Wherein George, my colleague (of sorts), treats me to the discovery and deconstruction of Seesmic Look, conjoined to a treatise on Frederick the Great's contention that translating the appalling plays (die abscheulichen Stücke) of Shakespeare was a profound corruption of German culture. Okay, George was too drunk to say much about the Frederick/Shakespeare thing, but we did (sorta) review Seesmic Look.
New from Seesmic: "Look". No wait, "Seesmic Look" from Seesmic. No, it's "Seesmic Look", a flavor of "Seesmic Desktop" from Seesmic.
George strode languorously, rejoining no one in particular but loud enough for the room to hear. After settling on the preposterously plush yet visually modest throne upon which he spends most of the work day, he looked directly at me and sighed. Presently he spoke.
“Twitter feels like the inside of a television,” he mused. “Buzzing, busy cathode and anode. But no story! Some clever chap needs to put the gizmotrons behind the set and make with the drama. You know, do a Lewis Carroll and get us to the other side of the glass.”
George’s lineage is U.S. going back ten generations or more. They came here from Bottrop in Westphalia. This is what he claims. Of course he also goes on about how Germany is fiction and that Westphalia is rightfully Prussia.
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"Dad, we need more biota cartridges for the food printer!"
Printing food.
I don’t have much today, but I wanted to point to a post over at dornob. It’s about “food printers”. I suppose I could leave you to ponder that while the link loads, but here’s a quick excerpt:
Is computerized food production the final frontier for futuristic home design? Mass production has transformed virtually every modern domicile-related industry, from house building to furniture construction – and now, innovative technologies are promising use the finest gourmet culinary delights straight from a household machine we can keep right in our kitchens.
Read more: Try a Byte: 3 Futuristic Food Printers to Produce Fine Cuisine | Designs & Ideas on Dornob
"Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter." - Julius Comroe Jr.
Anitabling
I’ve often thought that what is needed is a lateral search engine. The search results would all be laterally connected to your query. I remember being disappointed that Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button didn’t do just that.
The reason I’ve always wanted lateral search, is that one of the joys of the web for me has always been serendipity. The web is simply filled with opportunities, when looking for knowledge, to find something amazing that you didn’t expect to find.
Chris Brogan has contemplated Twitter as a Serendipity Engine. I think there’s something to this, because today I happened across a tweet from Maarten Verkoren that contained a link to a blog post about a cursor kite. I originally saw the cursor kite at Beautiful/Decay, but Maarten’s link went to yay!everyday, a site I’d never seen. It’s filled with links to gorgeous and interesting art and design. As I perused it, I came across the link to the post at shape+color about anitabling.
You see, Jeremy Elder, the dude what runs shape+color stumbled upon the Flickr stream of anitabling, and came across the amazing work this anitabling has done with paper. The beautiful thing is, he can’t find anything else on this person. He assumes her name is Anita and that she’s a she. Beyond that and what appears to be Portuguese in her Flickr stream, he knows nothing else about her. It’s a gorgeous example of the serendipity I’m talking about.
Is Bauhaus—like so much of what informed 20th century ideas about design—fundamentally a condescension? Why do Ikea chairs seem an acceptable pithy beauty, and yet rows of concrete apartments seem an abomination? This post will not answer those questions, and what it does manage to state clearly will be self-contradictory.
The Bauhaus.
Just today I had the good fortune to discover Matthew Milliner and his blog, millinerd.com. He’s a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton. He’s also a graduate of Princeton’s Theological Seminary. Don’t let the visual aesthetic of his blog lead to you the conclusion that it is without beauty. A tendentious antipathy to Christianity would perhaps make it difficult to get at the beauty there, so, y’know, YMMV.
His recent post, The Largest Show on Earth, is what brought me to him. I’ve been trying to reconstruct how I found it but, sadly, I cannot. It’s a simple and clever little post about Bauhaus and MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibit. Part of what struck me about the post was a quote from Michael J. Lewis (whom I assume to be THIS Dr. Lewis).
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I thought Marc Ecko's Air Force One stunt was kinda unctuous, but these hoodies are teh awesome.
Zipping up your hood, you are. Yes. Hmmm?
I recently discovered hoodiepeople.com, which, I know, I’m slow. It’s a very smart hoodie etailer out of Petaluma, California. If you like hoodies—and who doesn’t—it’s definitely worth checking out.
Thanks to hoodiepeople and their excellent blog, I was pleased to discover Marc Ecko‘s got a line of Star Wars hoodies that are entirely too clever. I particularly like the X-Wing pilot hoodie (which hoodiepeople don’t seem to carry for some reason) and the Boba Fett hoodie. So, y’know, if you’re trying to decide what to buy me so as to curry favor, well, now you know.
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