Friday Videos - May 18th, 2012

Here we go again. I've had a week that was, primarily, offline so I may have missed some of the heavier hitters but I still think you'll enjoy the playlist. Dive in!

• How To Wake Up A Kid - even if this is somehow faked, it's faked incredibly well. That kid will grow up to be super awesome (because he is already).
• Cat Toast - if buttered toast always lands butter side down and cats always land on their feet - what happens when you combine the two? It's the Buttered Cat Paradox and it's an old science joke but the folks at Flying Horse Energy Drink (seriously) made it into a pretty amusing commercial.
• Sterling, Cooper, Bear and Pryce - you know about this bear right? Well, imagine if he worked at an ad agency in the 60's.
• It Slices, It Dices - does your computer do that?
• Tommypom's Magic Box: Episode 2 - I don't know what it is and I don't require a further explanation. It's just perfectly amusing.
• Teachers Dancing Behind Students - because teachers are goofy people too.

Still need more? Enjoy this, this or maybe even this.. despite it's over the top vulgarity.

Have a phenomenal weekend!

Firewall Of Sound (Full Length)

A couple of years ago I posted about a curious documentary called Firewall of Sound. Filmmaker Devin DiMattia had put together a film about the independent music industry, the impact of the Internet and the current state of things. Now, two years later, the entire film is available for viewing. So, add it your favorite queue for watching over the weekend and enjoy the differences you hear from the landscape as it was in 2010 to how it is now, in 2012.

The Facebook Offering

While it may not be quite as compelling as The Liz Lemon Hair Timeline, there's certainly something engaging about this Facebook IPO Infographic. Namely, it that it shows Facebook surpassing Google in terms of value and likely being valued around $135 billion by the end of day on Friday. If that number doesn't blow your mind you aren't thinking about it hard enough.

Facemath

It's entirely possible that you saw Facemath making the rounds yesterday but, in case you didn't, please check out the brilliance. It's the simplest concept but the examples that they use are hysterically accurate. Nice work Internet.

Thursdays

Hey, I was traveling all day yesterday and kinda forgot to browse to find you some quality links for entertainment. Sorry about that! To make up for the lack of legit blogging, here's some stuff I found real quick that you might like:

• Prometheus - "Quiet Eye" - another teaser for the forthcoming Ridley Scott movie. I refuse to watch this as I am embracing willful ignorance towards the movie (no spoilers!) but I can tell from the still frame that I would love it.
• WATERS - For the One - music video directed by Tim and Eric for WATERS album Out in the Light. It's good, you should get the whole thing.
• Real Shadow - a jQuery plugin that casts realistic shadows from your objects. Nerdy fun!
• A Dog Dressed as Two Pirates Carrying a Treasure Chest - you're welcome.

We Own This Town: Volume 53

It's that time again, another installment of the We Own This Town podcast. If you are, somehow, unfamiliar with this creation that I've been involved with for the past few years - it's a compilation of the latest and greatest music from around the Nashville area as skewed through the lens of my own personal interest. That is to say, it's a bunch of rock, indie, electronic, folk, etc songs all mashed up into a half hour for you to enjoy. So, please enjoy.

Sounds Of Aronofsky

There's not much to say about The Sounds of Aronofsky except for "awesome. rad. excellent. amazing." And then some sort of rant about the importance of phenomenal sound design and how it can have an unconscious impact on the impact of a film. Long story short, it's great.

The Books Box

While it's sad that The Books have met their demise (though, Zammuto fills the void pretty well) it is good read this positive note that they'll be putting out a box set with the entirety of their discography including b-sides, rarities, etc. They'll even be posting updates about the insight into each track over here, which I am officially recommending following along despite not having read a single thing yet.

Welcome To Life: The Singularity, Ruined By Lawyers

Big thanks to Waxy for the heads up on this video - Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers. It's a satirical take on a potential future that may exist once The Singularity emerges; merging technology and humanity. When people envision being able to download their brains into a new physical entity they rarely think about a situation like this that requires patent violation, copyright infringement and tiered monetary existence. It's scary but probably more accurate than anyone would like to admit.

Long story short, this is probably a believable version of the future and I, for one, will pass.

Charges

I'm a big fan of the work of Jay Leo Phillips - his latest being a band called Charges. I told you about them previously but looks like they'll be releasing a legit EP at the beginning of June. Consider this your official notification to mark your calendar to obtain the new goods. In the meantime, go listen to Cosmonaut Song.

VSCO: Kory Westerhold

Who's killing it lately? VSCO has, that's who. Aside from their rad camera app, software suite and portfolio builder they're also doing artist profiles. The first (that I've seen) is on Kory Westerhold - graphic designer and quality photographer extraordinaire. He's got good things to say about the future of digital photography and a great showcase of works in the piece. Go enjoy.

Related to: Instagram

Gifture is being touted as "Instagram for animated gifs." It's obvious that they're intentionally competing in the same space - the filters, the icons, the whole app pretty much copies Instagram from the top down but the end result is a manually created animated gif. Kind of neat actually. Though there's definitely better tools for this sort of thing, I can see this taking off to some degree. There are plenty of competitors in the "Instagram for the Web" space but Pinstagram is doing a rather nice job with their presentation layer. Is it better than Inkstagram or Statigram? It's debatable. But, regardless, it's something new to poke around and check out!

Mercy Lounge 2012

I've had this one under my hat for a long time now but I'm extremely pleased to announce the official relaunch of the site for Mercy Lounge. I've worked my butt off over the past few months to get this whole thing designed and coded. I'm sure to spend all day squashing down bugs that I didn't know existed but, on the whole, I'm incredibly proud of how it has turned out. It's fully responsive and should make for browsing on a mobile device much more pleasant. If I were to pick a piece of work that served as my crown jewel - this would definitely be it.

Superbrothers: After Effects Experiment

Superbrothers has managed to take their game, Sword and Sorcery into the social realm by creating an "audio/visual jam" where fans are challenged to create original works based on the game or remix the audio from Jim Guthrie. You can follow along with the results on Tumblr. One such example of these creations is the above video experiment - which pretty much flips all the right switches in my brain when it comes to enjoyment.

Modern Zamanlar

Admittedly, I haven't watched Modern Zamanlar in its entirety yet but I'm super intrigued by the look of it and the description from Vimeo:

Aykut Alp Ersoy has us pegged all of us. “Modern Zamanlar” is a short but potent critique of our 21st-century love affair with constant connectivity or the illusion of it, anyway.

At the very least, add it to your favorite queue for enjoyment at a later time.

Alice Bartlett Miniatures

The majority of images in the photostream of Alice Bartlett are slice of life photo documentation - someone documenting their life, as we're all want to do. However, there's a handful (pun intended) of great images featuring tiny miniatures on grassy fingernails that are worth checking out. Lets hope there's a lot more of this to come.

Foresight.js

Foresight.js, apparently, sends the appropriate resolution image to your browser based on the most needed media (i.e. low res for smaller screens, higher res for bigger screens.. you know, responsive media like). I don't fully understand how the JS is circumventing the original img src request but who am I to question such magic? If it works, it works.. saving bandwidth and getting the quickest response to the user is the end goal.

Friday Videos - May 11th, 2012

Since I'm out in California having a bit of a mini-vacation, the playlist will be a bit short this go around. Quality over quantity, right? Lets hope so:

• Memory Bank - this is, apparently, almost two years old but entirely new to me. Some sort of bumper for an MTV program I've never heard of. Frankly, I just love the look of it and could watch a good 10 more hours in this style.
• Life Advice from Twitter - I missed the boat the first time around when Ze Frank made his mark on the Interwebs but I'm really enjoying following along properly this time.
• Nick Waterhouse - "Some Place" - I've seen the vinyl and the live versions of this track but it's nice to see the legit official video. Looking forward to that album big time.
• Cyriak - Because - it's always good to watch a Cyriak video just to remind yourself that your nightmares could be way worse.
• Cat Puke Compilation - against my better judgment I share with you this fine compilation of cats puking up hairballs set to Deadmau5. There's actually very little vomitting on screen but the anticipation is totally killer.

Have a great weekend. Don't forget to call your Mom and remind her you love her.

Tumblr Storyboard

Tumblr recently launched Storyboard, a collection of features & stories meant to highlight different creative types from across the community at large. They've got a great feature on Michael Stipe and his blog, Peter Vidani and the thinking behind the Tumblr Dashboard and even a piece on Maddie the Dog - you know the one. Basically, it not only gives some quality content to read but it also shows how the Tumblr platform can be used to create more longform content than what you'd expect. It's a win all around.. go follow it and read all the existing articles.

WB Sloan Photography

I'm loving the photographic offerings of WB Sloan - a decidedly New York stream of imagery. I'm not even sure how one goes about capturing some of these things but I'm glad it's being done. There's also a Blog Version if you'd like to follow along there.

via Topherchris.

Plume & Ledger

I'm not even going to begin to act like I know a damn thing about ladies fashion but I do know that the offerings at Plume and Ledger involved a great deal of work from my friend Patricia and the results are well worth a peek. Give it a browse, check the blog and keep an eye out for new stuff for the forthcoming seasonal lines.

Handy Tools

While I don't have anything specific to use jQuery Knobs with at the moment I can definitely see it being an extremely handy tool to have laying around. I mean, I can't even imagine the headache involved with wanting to code such interaction from scratch. The web really does seem provide in all kinds of abundance these days. I tend to work from one or two locations only but I know several people that setup shop wherever they see fit. In such cases I'd have to say that Sidekick looks like an essential kind of app to have installed as it changes your work environment settings based on geolocation. Working at the office? Settings check. Working from your favorite coffee shop? Alternate settings in place! And even if you don't work from multiple locations, the site is very kind on the eyes and fun to scroll through.

A Day of Travel

I'm off to San Francisco today so not much going on in terms of having time to blog. I'll also be hitting up Los Angeles and San Diego over the next few days so, if you're in the area and want to meet up, drop me a line and we'll see about hanging out. It should be a good time.

To tide you over in my absence please enjoy:

• Super Mario Summary - classic SMB play contained to one-screen puzzler setups. Ridiculously fun. via WAXY.
• The Features - Still Lost - a b-sides and rarities type compilation from one of Nashville's finest. If you know anything about the band, this sort of thing is well beyond due.

AMA: I Am Steve Albini

If you're unfamiliar with Reddit's AMA series (Ask Me Anything), you're missing out on a rather great chunk of Internet content. Basically, people of interest are asked questions for a number of hours and they respond directly. Some are better than others but in the case of this AMA from Steve Albini there are some particularly great quotes. For instance (emphasis mine):

raffaellog:What is your opinion about music Piracy? Does it hurt you economically? Thanks for your music!

steve_albini: I reject the term "piracy." It's people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it's good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn't like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that's nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.

The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I'll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That's fantastic.

Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

Albini has always been a rather honest individual and he really seems to be in his element in this scenario. Read them all.

HT Mr. Baio.

Strange Geometry At The Edge Of The World

Do I have any background information on this wonderful video, Strange Geometry at the Edge of the World? No. Do I know much about the creator Ivan Safrin? Not nearly enough. Do I enjoy the seizure inducing animation followed by a trippy float through space? Yes, yes I do.