It’s the time of the leaves to turn ombre, the time when it’s acceptable to start drinking bicerins, and the season when the veil between this world and the next thins and you can see the ghouls on the other side.
Oh, and it’s time for links:
Rock Social, where you paint with rocks. Check out Geokash’s entire site, she creates refreshingly unique thinks and the photo-essay of how she made her “geodeck” computer is interesting.
I also recommend https://hallucinate.site, a massively multiplayer online rave. I won’t spoil the enjoyment for you – put on your headphones and get ready for a fun 3D experience.
Speaking of music, I’d love to experience this kind of party for once in my life. Hard hitting music in a crazy environment. This is a band called Locked Club, and if you like the sound of Russian hardcore electronica also check out RLGN.
Friend of the blog, Taylor Troesh, explains the process of writing his award-winning post “100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon“. It took a year and 80 hours to write.
I really appreciate when people share the process behind their writing: I’m not exaggerating when I say that if Steph Smith hadn’t shared how she writes her blog posts, I wouldn’t have been writing now. At the time, all I could think about was “something is wrong with the fact it takes me 4 months to write 1 blog post”. And then I saw that this is totally normal. This is the effort we never see as readers.
(Obligatory note: I disagree with anyone, like Steph, who says that “writing is thinking”. I write a lot. You’d be astonished at how little thinking goes on in that pretty little head of mine.)
Also in the “let me peek behind the scenes” section: VRK quit her job to follow her artistic impulses for a year and this is how the year went. This piece spoke to me personally because I am on a similar journey and it’s great to hear of others’ experiences in the same situation. I previously read Arun Venkatesan’s reflections on his yearlong sabbatical, but it was missing some of the personal details I crave (The fear! The uncertainty! He pretends like he’s a cool cucumber all throughout – yeah right, Arun.)
The post 11 Fixable Things that Make Life Harder for the Elderly, the Sick, and the Poor was really thought provoking. It lists things that have been disallowed in cities/health insurance in the USA as of ~100 years ago, that artificially create a hellscape for people. This is a good reminder for me here in Canada – the current lifestyle we have was intentionally created and alternative ways of life were shut out. We can remove certain barriers to make life better for all (for example: making it legal to camp in parks & to live in cars gives renters a better BATNA when negotiating with all landlords, across the board).
I’ve been listening to Toronto goth-rockers The Birthday Massacre recently. I’m perpetually surprised that such a large band had stayed together despite all the vagaries of life over ~20 years. The “Superstitions” album below is especially good. Listen to Diaries and Beyond:
Artist Takato Yamamoto (from S. Elizabeth’s blog):
Evelyn Pickering de Morgan
Evelyn de Morgan was a pre-raphaelite painter, and throughout her career she was the primary earner – sustaining her husband’s ceramics business. When William De Morgan finally perfected his craft he went out of business, lamenting: “All my life I have been trying to make beautiful things. And now that I can make them, nobody wants them.” The story has a happy twist: when William finally abandoned pottery, he became a writing sensation.
Enter the gently-animated meat forest of Heatslob’s Meatbag:
Last month, Matt Duggan wrote about how modern technology had stopped being enjoyable and has become a burden. It’s very exaggerated to heighten the feeling, and that’s what makes it such a good piece of writing.
A while ago I saw Peter Barakan petting this ridiculous tailed robot and I was hooked. But this robot was never mentioned in the show again. (Japanology Plus: Personal Robots )
I recently discovered that what it is, is a Qoobo cushion robot with a wagging tail. Made by YUKAI ENGINEERING, makers of creative little robots.
Global Village Coffeehouse Design
I’ve been collecting illustration books from the late 90s, with examples of the absolutely garish design of the time. It was the period when artists were putting down their airbrushes in favour of the clunkiest computer illustration software.
I recently found out that this style is called “Gobal Village Coffeehouse Design” and there’s even a Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/GVCDesign
You have to listen to Sade while you’re looking through these, though:
By the way, the above term was coined by CARI – the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. Their site is an amazing repository of nostalgia.
Click around and explore CARI while listening to the music CD that was released to promote Microsoft Office 2000 in the Netherlands:
That CD is from the wonderful time when “World Music” just came from “World” – that one homogenous place where exotic people are always having a famine or a war or something. It’s from a time when your favourite tune with the Native American chanting turns out to feature stolen Native Taiwanese chanting go figure!!!
That’s it.
Until next time, have fun surfing the World Wide Web!
