- The Face of Tomorrow. Via Take one hundred people and create a composite face from their faces. The result makes me think that the ideal of human beauty is not particular but average. The composites are all good looking, so take one hundred people strip the unique characteristics or oddities and you have a good-looking person. Strange.
- Boring game? Outsource it. A sure sign of cultural decadence
- The democratization of advertising revenue. Google lets Blogger users in on a piece of the ad game.
- Analog meets digital. A typewriter (yes!) that collects the input you use while typing into a buffer then sends as an email. Via.
- NYT on Team America.
24
Aug 04
Average is beautiful
19
Aug 04
Letting go and holding on
Havelock Ellis once said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” It seems like the further you go in life the more you are faced with the decision of what to hold on to and what to let go of. It becomes more and more important to consider what you need to keep and what you need to change.
Maybe it’s part of getting older, but lately I’ve been trying to put more effort into getting along well with my family. It can be a lot of work. It’s been my experience that your family knows you in a way no one else will ever know you. In family there is an intimate knowlege born out of spending your most important and difficult years with the same small group of imperfect people. It is not a comfortable intimacy by any means. You love your family yet they are the ones who know exactly how to get to you and how to move across your boundaries. You cannot fool them with your different costumes and personas. They will not buy into your reinvention. It’s almost as if they preserve an original image of you, which you are unable to change. This is frustrating if you’d like very much to change who you are.
Your family can be an anchor, yet it can also be a smothering sea of quicksand. I’ve found this to be this case with relationships in general. What happens when you start to change who you are and the people around you do not welcome the change? What happens if you realize that you no longer want the same things as the people around you? This is a difficult realization. In the end you have to do what you need to do and hold onto the belief that everything else will fall into place. The people who love you will always stick by you, in one way or another.
19
Aug 04
In blogging news: Six Apart hires Brad Choate
Six Apart, the blogging software business founded by the creators of Movable Type, has hired one of their most productive and talented volunteers, Brad Choate. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the upcoming releases of Movable Type. The more people they hire the more important it will be to keep growing the business and begin selling a lot more MovableType and TypePad subscriptions. The addition of Choate may increase their capabilities in the direction of supporting more dynamic content in MT and that in turn could lead to the development of additional products. We will be watching with interest.
19
Aug 04
RSS Feeds
I’m the king of missing important details, so I noticed a while back that the RSS feeds for LNS were not working then I promptly forgot this. Today I noticed it again and it took me all of two seconds to fix. The point is, the feeds are working now, which means you can just view the feeds without coming to the main page of the site.
To that end here are some cool RSS/XML tools that might help you.:
- Convert eBay searches into feeds with RSSAuction.com
- Create a calendar and share with friends in RSS
- Sage News Aggregator extension (plugin) for Firefox
18
Aug 04
The trend toward commercial blogs
I’ve been watching Boing Boing pile on the ads and cluttering their front page for the past few months. They need a fresh redesign of the site if that’s what they want to do. The Boing Boing people have some ties with Denton and the Gawker Media crowd and it seems like they’re trying to do something along the same lines by placing prominent advertisements along each side of their page. Boing Boing shoots for a more eclectic and general subject matter, whereas most of Gawker Media’s sites are based on targeted themes (most likely to concentrate on a target ad base), for example: their gadget site, Gizmodo, and their porn site, Fleshbot. Is this the start of a trend toward more commercial blogging? With the proliferation of so many personal blogs is there a demand for strict content-based blogging? Do more blogs need editors to be successful? Will more blogs jump on the ad bandwagon?
Update: Most of the editors at Boing Boing are also contributors to Wired or Wired Magazine. Back in June, I speculated on the link between BB and Gawker Media because of all the gratuitous cross-posting and mentionitis going on at the time. Back then, Wired/BB contributor Xeni Jardin denied a link or deal between Boing Boing and Gawker, yet now at Nick Denton‘s website it describes Gizmodo (the gadget blog) as: “Gizmodo, a blog for the gadget obsessive, recently partnered with Wired Magazine. ” Interesting?
Edit 19:56 CST: Maybe, but Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, points out in the comments below that there is no money changing hands between Gawker/BB/Wired and that the relationship could be best characterized as that of mutual admiration:
“I’m a big fan of Gizmodo (and Nick’s other projects), so when we launched Gadget Lab, our weekly email newsletter, we agreed to highlight some Gizmodo content in exchange for a link on their site. Just a trade, with no money changing hands.”
This may all be true, although I would argue that since all three groups derive most of their income from advertising revenue that this amounts to a de facto business relationship as items of value are being exchanged as part of an agreement. It goes without saying that I do not have a problem with business of this type, only that it is important to know that such relationships exist.
Related:
18
Aug 04
Targus mini-mice
I went to Office Depot on my lunch break yesterday and found a good deal on a Targus mini optical mouse for my laptop. It’s petite and winds up into this little button-shaped, spring-loaded coil dealy. It even comes with its own velvety bag for protection in your laptop bag. I like it a lot, a lot better than using the touchpad on the laptop. After using it for a while when you switch back to your desktop mouse it feels like you’re pushing a giant brick around. You can pick them up at Office Depot for $9.99 after rebate. The retail is $19.99 with an instant rebate of $5 and a mail-in rebate of $5. That’s the best deal I’ve seen anywhere.
18
Aug 04
Wes Anderson: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
There’s a new trailer out for the upcoming Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Judging from first glance it looks like typical Wes Anderson, which means it should be good. His films are uniquely quirky in a full and complete style, brimming with a trademark sense of humor and nostalgia. His films have always seemed to me to be monuments to innocence and imagination. (List of songs in the trailer, most of them will be familiar) Parts of the trailer reminded me of Fantastic Voyage (the movie where they explore the human body in a tiny submarine) and all those ocean movies of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Did you spot the vampire squid in the trailer?! It’s my favorite cephalopod.
I recently saw Napoleon Dynamite. It was enjoyable and very funny at times. There seemed to be a discernible influence of Wes Anderson in its sentimentality. Napoleon Dynamite seems to lack more substance, plot and character-wise, than Rushmore or The Royal Tannenbaums, but it was impressive as a debut.
Here are some pics from The Life Aquatic, and here are some cast photos.