Katy showed me this hilarious Monty Python sketch on the DVD’s I got her for Christmas. It’s called the “Silly Job Interview.” I like how the guy starts hyperventilating with “Oh dear, I don’t think I’m doing very well!”
John Cleese’s facial expressions are extraordinarily well done, too.
Trading Yesterday is a great take on uplifting alt rock. Very major chords — which I’ve been known to love. They’re changing their name soon and releasing an album in the next month or so.
I’m not sure why they are changing their name… I wonder what they will be called in the future?
Here’s a great write-up from blurbomat.com about “How to Turn an Ordinary Photo Into an Extraordinary Photo”. I really like his masking technique - I never got around to figuring out how to feather the edges of a selection properly. Good stuff.
You may have all read the mainstream media blip two years back about an extensive thread on a message board simply called “i am lonely will anyone speak to me.” In fact, over three years after it’s creation, you can still read the thousands and thousands of responses to one person’s plea for a human connection. The stark reality is that three years ago, many of the most active citizens of the internet were technologically minded, shy individuals. So, from this preponderance of socially awkward people, there was bound to come a post like this, with a corresponding outpouring of responses. Naturally, as the demographics of the internet have evolved, the responses have also diversified. However, the central point remains: the cold online world still feels lonely to many people. A 2004 article in the New Yorker, called, “Hello, Loneliness” put forth a good summary:
Visitors from around the world logged on with personal expressions of solitude, ranging from the adolescent (“Spring break really fucking sucks”) and the temporary (“My wife is gone for the night”) to the involved (“I’m in the final year of my Ph.D., I have no life, and I am broken up with my gf because she joined a cult”), the confused (“I typed: ‘why is abc bittorrent not working’ and I got ‘I am lonely.’ Not too hilarious”), and the existential (“I feel like a floating piece of dust in outer space”).
The only thing I disagree with in that quote is that “visitors from around the world” are still logging on with their own thoughts to add. After all, the most recent post on this loneliness thread was yesterday. The interesting thing to note here, is that one of the largest trends in the online world is directly related to this loneliness post: Facebook, MySpace, Virb, etc. are the internet’s response. That is, when somebody thinks “I am lonely,” they type in a social networking address and hit the enter key, hoping for a human feeling of connection to the world around them. That’s not to say that people always visit for this reason, but the desire to feel interconnected with a community is undeniably a central reason for the growth of social networks.
The concept of connectivity is going in new directions, too. For example, there’s Twittervision, which shows you a map of the world, and updates live as people microblog their lives. Updates ranges from:
“jen - i made a cafepress sale - but it was Bingo related - so it wasn’t a penguin”
- billykay
to:
“Sometimes it is good to spend some time doing nothing at all”
- betobeto
You can just sit there and stare at the monitor, watching people’s lives (worldwide) flow by in real time. Could this make a person feel any less lonely? I don’t know. Could a message board make the original poster 3+ years ago feel less lonely? Hard to say. It is undeniable, however, that each new disruptive technology (automobiles, the internet, personal computers, digital photography, telephones, etc.) impact our social fabric in ways we can not predict.
Great comic: “man it’s great to be able to fly!” It actually took me a while to figure out the location of the scene… I doubt you’ll have the same problem.
In this short article and accompanying movie clip, “Tokyo Summerland wave pool manages to fit in some water,” we find that the pool was packed really really closely because the wave mechanism was broken. Then, said mechanism begins working. I’ve never seen so many people floating in such a small space.
Yesterday, just before the late-night power outage at Mykala’s apartment, we discovered that she is the same age as cookie dough ice cream.
Jason Kottke writes, in a caption of a picture of the inside of Ikea: “The Ark of the Covenant is in there somewhere.” A commenter replies: “And you have to build it by yourself.”
This is the Twin Cities band my uncle Chris is in: Metro Jam Band - Classic Dance Favorites Plus Today’s Top Hits. I dig the sound, and they’re great live! Oh, and Chris also teaches guitar lessons.
In the Instructables article “Bias lighting on the cheap,” an extremely inexpensive way to backlight your monitor is described. These backlights (also called bias lights), cast a pool of light behind your monitor, significantly reducing eyestrain. I’ll have to try this sometime. The interesting part that makes this all so cheap: “Most expensive bias lights are 6500K (which is the colour tempature of white on nearly all LCD and plasma screens) Fortunately, most daylight simulation bulbs are that, too.”
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