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Through The Seesmic Looking Glass

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.

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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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Futuristic Food Printers

"Dad, we need more biota cartridges for the food printer!"

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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


‘Buy cheap, buy twice’

Beauty is skin deep, much like branding. If your brand is not founded on solid research and strategy it’ll fail you quicker than you can say cheapasslogo.com. You could probably head to your local beauty parlor and get a logo while having your nails done, but trust me, the shine will wear off after a few days especially when you see Trevor’s Trailers Company down the road has the same cheapasslogo.

So as I always say, ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’. Buy originality and experience, buy a story that has intelligence founded on solid research, it’ll serve you longer and pay for itself, why wouldn’t you want to shine?


'Buy cheap, buy twice'

Beauty is skin deep, much like branding. If your brand is not founded on solid research and strategy it’ll fail you quicker than you can say cheapasslogo.com. You could probably head to your local beauty parlor and get a logo while having your nails done, but trust me, the shine will wear off after a few days especially when you see Trevor’s Trailers Company down the road has the same cheapasslogo.

So as I always say, ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’. Buy originality and experience, buy a story that has intelligence founded on solid research, it’ll serve you longer and pay for itself, why wouldn’t you want to shine?


The Scale of the Bauhaus

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.

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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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