I think.... there... 4am

Remnants of the Biosphere

2010-01-06T17:18:00.001-05:00

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Remnants of the Biosphere

via BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh on 1/6/10

Photographer Noah Sheldon got in touch with a beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a derelict sociobiological experiment in the Arizona desert.

[Image: Biosphere 2, photographed by Noah Sheldon].

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings"—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.

"The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure.

Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this winter threatened to mutiny if management did not repair a growing blot on the project's reputation.The entire site was sold to private developers in 2007, leaving the buildings still open for tours but rapidly falling apart.

[Image: Biosphere 2, photographed by Noah Sheldon].

Sheldon was originally inspired to visit and photograph the site after reading that "suburban sprawl" had come to surround the once-remote research site. Indeed, we read through that latter link, real estate development has "conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran Desert. The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart)."

[Images: Photographs by Noah Sheldon].

Now, like something straight out of J.G. Ballard, the site might someday be home to a development called Biosphere Estates.

[Images: Photographs by Noah Sheldon].

Sheldon's ima ges, reproduced here with permission, show the facility—the largest sealed space ever constructed—advancing into old age. A vast biological folly in the shadow of desert over-development, the project of Biosphere 2 seems particularly poignant in this unkempt state.

The fertile promise of the microcosm has been abandoned.

[Image: Noah Sheldon].

In this context, Biosphere 2 could be considered one of architect Francois Roche's "buildings that die," a term he used in a recent interview with Jeffrey Inaba. Indeed, in its current state Biosphere 2 is easily one of the ultimate candidates for Roche's idea of "corrupted biotopes"; the site's ongoing transformation into suburbia only makes this corruption all the more explicit.

[Images:Noah Sheldon].

Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth—the "2" in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate the complex from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere 1—slowly taken over by the very forces it was naively meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. It is a replicant in its dying throes.

[Images: Noah Sheldon].

In any case, these remaining images have all been taken from Sheldon's series; even more photos can be found on his site.

[Image: Noah Sheldon].

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50 Really Fantastic Desktop Wallpapers For Designers

2010-01-06T06:13:00.001-05:00

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50 Really Fantastic Desktop Wallpapers For Designers

via Dzine Blog by Deep on 1/5/10

Wallpapers can serve as a nice source of inspiration, The more beautiful and elegant they are, the better they can provide some fresh perspective and creativity in a rather tedious work flow, I bet most of the designers are a wallpaper changing addicts. Designers can never have enough wallpapers in their collection, However changing wallpapers frequently will give you a fresh feeling and thought, here i have collected 50 Really Fantastic Desktop Wallpapers, hope you like this collection

Now give your desktop a fresh and appealing look with this huge collection of fantastic Wallpapers.

1. )Saizen

2. )Disparity

3. )Bokeh

4. )Colorama

5. )Craig Shields

6. )Winners

7. )Winners

8. )Xpsam

9. )Lionel

10. )Beautiful Design

11. )Miracle in the space

12. )Horse on fire

13. )Fire flower

14. )Universe

15. )Aurora1

16. )Desk

17. )Colony

18. )Andy Gilmore

19. )HenkeART

20. )Feeling Blue

21. )My desktop has style

22. )David Mascha

23. )Anglerfish

24. )Jared K. Nickerson

25. )Jared K. Nickerson

26. )Jared K. Nickerson

27. )Jared K. Nickerson

28. )

29. )Save The Planet

30. )They Stole The Moon

31. )Toucan

32. )Zixpk

33. )Umbrellaguins

34. )Hunter

35. )Good Vibrations

36. )Maquita

37. )Kawaii Monkey

38. )Recycle

39. )Bull

40. )Chu Kiss Beso

41. )Gaia 09

42. )Rodrigo Zenteno

43. )Ecstasy

44. )Orple

45. )Redroom

46. )World brown

47. )Black Wallpaper

48. )Super Tight Stuff

49. )Chocolate dreams

50. )Jag

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David Ope

2010-01-05T22:01:00.002-05:00

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David Ope

via Changethethought™ by Christopher on 1/5/10

I am pretty sure I have posted animated gifs from David Ope before but there are some new and even crazier ones up now that are definitely worth checking out.

Cadillac 2011 CTS-V Coupe

2010-01-05T21:56:00.002-05:00

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Cadillac 2011 CTS-V Coupe

via Uncrate on 1/5/10

We told you it was coming, and now, finally, here it is. The Cadillac 2011 CTS-V Coupe ($TBA; Summer 2010) boast an impressive 556hp, 6.2L V-8, a six-speed manual or...

Visit Uncrate for the full post.

A sneak peek at the new technology in Adobe Photoshop CS5

2010-01-05T16:46:00.003-05:00

via Download Squad by Sebastian Anthony on 1/5/10

Filed under: Photo, Productivity, Adobe

There's a chance you might already have seen this 'sneak peek' video, in which case forgive me. For those of you that haven't seen it, read on and take the jump to view it.

This is actually old news, but I only just stumbled across it a couple of days ago. You see, news of Adobe's next Creative Suite is so hard to come by that this is still the latest Photoshop development! In fact, since October, the only news they've released was to announce the cancellation of their Flash CS5 public beta. But can I say, having just watched the the 'sneak peek', I am now very, very excited about the possible applications for Adobe's CS5. Give us more news, Adobe!

Do you see the 3D elements that have been thrown in? The wire frame, the joints (the kinematics!), the simulation of a paint brush's tip... it's really quite crazy. I know Adobe gets a lot of flak for the continuous milking of their cash cow, but after that video I could almost forgive them.

With no news since October, and their usual 18- to 24-month development cycle, we might actually see Photoshop CS5 and Flash within a couple of months. I'm positively eager to review both of them.

A sneak peek at the new technology in Adobe Photoshop CS5 originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe Systems - Adobe Creative Suite - Adobe Photoshop - Adobe Flash - Graphics

First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

2010-01-05T13:29:00.001-05:00

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First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

via Engadget by Tim Stevens on 1/5/10

Remember those 720p-capable webcams we mentioned yesterday, specifically positioned to work with Skype HD? We've got the details courtesy of In Store Solutions, which is launching a trio of models, two of which are HD and feature integrated video compression chips, so less than cutting-edge machines should be able to get their high-def on (though a 1.8GHz, dual-core processor is still recommended). They are the Freetalk Talk-7170 HD Pro and the Talk-7181 HD Pro Plus, both offering 720p sensors and H.264 video compression, the latter also packing quad cardioid microphones with a four meter range. The former gets by with just stereo. An 800Kbps connection (both upload and download) is needed for HD streaming, so if you're stuck on low-tier DSL you may be more interested in the Freetalk HQ Talk-7140. No specific details were given for this one, but most "high quality" Skype cameras are 2 megapixels, and at a price of just $40 this looks to be the cheapest. No MSRP mentioned for the two HD models, but you can read all about them after the break.

Continue reading First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed

First Skype HD webcams from In Store Solutions detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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e-Readers: Kindle goes global, iRiver plays catchup, and Hearst is just damn...

2010-01-05T13:27:00.001-05:00

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e-Readers: Kindle goes global, iRiver plays catchup, and Hearst is just damned crazy

via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza on 1/5/10

The Kindle is finally to get global wireless internet, spots Engadget. But a new challenger appears: iRiver, with a surprisingly unappetizing clone that'll have a hard time against Sony's Digital Edition and B&N's Nook. Myself, I'll take the Skiff, an 11.5" monstrosity with a 1600x1200 resolution display, just announced by Heart Publishing. It'll have 3G internet via Sprint, but no pricing details are out just yet. This Burj Dubai of e-readers also doubles as a baking tray and will be featured in a new remake of The Omen, sliding off a truck and decapitating David Warner.

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Tchaikovsky "The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet" MP3 downloads for $2

2009-12-14T09:32:00.001-05:00

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Tchaikovsky "The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet" MP3 downloads for $2

via 9to5Mac Toys by 9to5toys on 12/14/09

Today only, Amazon MP3 Store offers downloads of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker: Complete Ballet, for $1.99. That's the lowest total price we could find for this 24-track, DRM-free album, released in July. (iTunes charges $12.99 for a similar bonus edition.) Amazon MP3 downloader is required.

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Bloglines - PHOTO: Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by

2009-12-13T11:41:00.001-05:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Signal vs. Noise
Signal vs. Noise

PHOTO: Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by

By Matt

Camouflage Art by Liu Bolin: "Inspired by how some animals can blend into their environment, Liu Bolin from China uses camouflage principles to create amazing contemporary art." Ya gotta see the rest of these too.

Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum

2009-12-13T10:39:00.002-05:00

Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum detention centre

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 12/13/09

Santa Claus was prevented from giving presents to the imprisoned children of asylum seekers at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre by private security guards. Yarl's Wood is a privately run prison whose inmates are UK immigrants who arrived seeking asylum, but whose claims have been denied. They are dragged out of bed in the dead of night and stuck in mesh-windowed vans without their belongings and without the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, and then detained in terrible conditions that have been decried by human rights advocates, doctors, psychiatrists and other experts. Their "crime" is trying to escape torture, privation, and disaster.
The rent-a-cops at Yarl's Wood told the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas (dressed in a Santa costume) that he couldn't enter the centre to give the children presents. They also blocked the canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. Then they cancelled a later scheduled visit with detained families at the centre.
And the whole mess is on video.

But when the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas, dressed as St Nicholas himself, arrived with one of Britain's most distinguished clerics to distribute presents to children held at the Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire, things took a turn straight out of Dickens.
An unedifying standoff developed that saw the security personnel who guard the perimeter fence prevent St Nicholas, the patron saint of children and the imprisoned, from delivering £300 worth of presents donated by congregations of several London churches.
In a red robe and long white beard, clutching a bishop's mitre and crook, St Nick - in real life, the Rev Canon James Rosenthal, a world authority on St Nicholas of Myra, the inspiration for Father Christmas - gently protested that he was not a security threat, but to no avail.
Then as St Nicholas, accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey, attempted to bless the gifts, the increasingly angry security guards called the police. The resulting ill-tempered and surreal impasse between church and state was videotaped by asylum seeker support groups and could become an internet viral hit.

Anglican 'Santa' barred from giving gifts to children at detainee centre

Previously:

Britain's deportee detention system subjects small children to ...

A spectacular view of the entire Milky Way... using open source!

2009-12-13T09:56:00.003-05:00

via Download Squad by Sebastian Anthony on 12/13/09

Filed under: Fun, Photo, Linux, Open Source

Do not adjust your computer screen: what you see here is a piece of genius. A labor of love spanning two years, two hemispheres, two countries and over 3000 images... I give to you, the All-Sky Milky Way Panorama -- version 2! And, you'll be glad to hear, it was stitched together with open-source software.

Well, not just open-source software: he needed a lot of processing power too, though nothing beyond a beefed-up home computer (it ran Linux, of course). And then there was the problem of actually stitching it together, and making sure every star and and entity in the visible cosmos looks correct, relative to everything else in the sky -- for that, he used catalogs of star data and sky background data from Pioneer 10 and 11. For the entire creative process, and a list of the programs he used, check out the creator's site.

The final image, which you can probably obtain if you're a student, and if ask the creator Axel Mellinger nicely, clocks in at an impressive 650 megapixels and 7.7 gigabytes.

But the best bit, which I dutifully saved until last, is that you can surf around the maximum-resolution image using another open-source application called IIPImage. Enjoy!

Deadly Truck Accident Spills Millions Of Nickels On Florida's I95 [Offbeat N...

2008-09-17T18:41:00.001-04:00

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Deadly Truck Accident Spills Millions Of Nickels On Florida's I95 [Offbeat News]

via Jalopnik by Ben Wojdyla on 9/17/08

Last night on Florida's I95 freeway a US Treasury truck carrying four million nickels was southbound on its way from Philadelphia to Miami when it collided with another southbound truck, spilling $187,000 worth of coins all over the scene. The passenger in the Treasury truck died as a result of the accident and Florida police are currently investigating the scene. Also on hand are Treasury officials attempting to clean up the mess and eager citizens trying to grab some coins and not get slapped with a Federal robbery charge. [Local6]

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Searching Google and Yahoo! Concurrently

2008-09-04T10:33:00.001-04:00

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Searching Google and Yahoo! Concurrently

via WebWorkerDaily by Samuel Dean on 9/3/08

I've written about alternative search engines here before, and because I spend so much time searching, I always keep my eye out for good new search ideas to try. Recently, I've been using SearchBoth, which has an interesting spin on the concept of searching multiple sites at once.

SearchBoth lets you search a few different types of sites concurrently, but the one web workers may find most useful is searching Google and Yahoo at the same time. At the site's home page, you can enter your search term once, hit Search, and get back a dual-paned view of the results from both sites. For some kinds of searches, your results won't differ all that much between the two views, but for others they will.

In particular, I have found SearchBoth to be good for searching for images. For example, if I enter Linus Torvalds as my search term and toggle SearchBoth to find images, I'll get back two completely different views of Torvalds images–both scrollable as they would be when using the sites on a standalone basis–and I get a mixed bag of photos that I might want to use.

SearchBoth can also be useful for comparing prices for technology products you may be in the market for. I entered Asus Eee PC as my search term in SearchBoth, and found the lowest prices on the Google pane on the left of my screen, but for other products, Yahoo! pulled up the lowest prices.

You can also use SearchBoth to pull up news stories and blog posts that both Google and Yahoo! find. This is useful when a particular piece of news is breaking and I want to see who may have picked it up.

If you like the idea of seeing your search results in ways that you're not used to, and you haven't tried it yet, you may also like Redzee. Redzee returns thumbnail graphical images of your results, and lets you drag to cycle through them. They cycle by very much like the Cover Flow feature works on an iPod, and this can be useful if what you're looking for is an image or graphic rather than text.

Do you use any alternative search engines?

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200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL [Supercom...

2008-09-04T10:28:00.001-04:00

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200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL [Supercomputers]

via Gizmodo by Kit Eaton on 9/4/08

Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM's future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta'd all over. It'll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It'll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around $208 million, which is even more 000s. All this power is going to be used for proper hard science like simulating the Sun's coronal mass ejections, studying black holes, and molecular biology. Probably developing on IBM's previous Roadrunner supercomputer power, it should be accessible nationally, at campus-level. And you can bet someone'll program it to sing "Daisy, daisy" pretty soon after it goes online in 2011. [NetworkWorld via Slashdot]

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Yuko Adachi

2008-09-04T10:25:00.001-04:00

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Yuko Adachi

via Changethethought™ by Christopher on 9/4/08

Interesting art in varying styles and executions by someone who no doubt must be an equally interesting person and that person is 'super fine' artist Yuko Adachi.

Artist statement:
"My work is about a celebration of human creativity and being alive in the present moment. I do not do any preliminary sketches for any of my works. I dive into the unknown and just follow where my energy and curiosity takes me in the given moment. Through the creation of my work, I want to become one with the universal energy and tap into unlimited well of my imagination and express it.

Art is love and it is my life.
-YUKO ADACHI"

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Arn Kim Ran MacRumors While a Full-time Doctor [Apple]

2008-07-22T02:33:00.001-04:00

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Arn Kim Ran MacRumors While a Full-time Doctor [Apple]

via Gizmodo by Brian Lam on 7/21/08

On top of running a bitchin' keynote liveblog, MacRumors owner Arn Kim was up until recently a full-time medical doctor. He's a friend who I've come to rely on as a sounding board for Apple rumors at 3am or any other obscene time of day, so I'm glad to see him being recognized with a profile in the NYT. [Photo by Jay Paul]

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2008-05-25T12:42:00.002-04:00

Blog of a Bookslut

The Guardian has an excerpt from travel writer Daniel Kalder's new book Strange Telescopes.

In 1997, not long after I had first arrived in Moscow, my friend Sergei told me about the Diggers. They were a group of sensitive, educated people who had turned their backs on modern life and retreated to the network of tunnels and secret bunkers beneath the city. There they had formed a new society that was fairer and more just than the surface one. It was dark, beautiful, surreal - precisely the kind of world I wanted to live in.

Permalink

2008-05-25T11:31:00.002-04:00

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News for nerds, stuff that matters

Cognition Enhancer Research

By ScuttleMonkey on what-happened-to-ginkgo-biloba

oschobero writes to tell us the Economist has a look at pharmaceutical research as it applies to cognition enhancers. While the research is obviously focused on things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia the resulting drugs may also have a benefit to healthy minds. "Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual's working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people's performance in tests of their ability to plan. Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

Bloglines - Teen Discovers Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria

2008-05-25T11:30:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters

Teen Discovers Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria

By ScuttleMonkey on here-comes-the-study-claiming-it-causes-cancer

ganelo writes to tell us that 16-year-old Waterloo Collegiate Institute student Danel Burd has made quite a stir with his plastic-eating bacteria discovery. For his efforts Burd won top prize at a Canada-wide science fair claiming a $10,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship. "Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bloglines - Blender 2.46 Released

2008-05-25T11:26:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters

Blender 2.46 Released

By ScuttleMonkey on lots-of-new-toys

The Penguin Man writes to mention the latest release of Blender, the popular open-source 3D graphics suite was officially launched today. You can download it from Blender.org. The culmination of half a year's work has resulted in many new features including a new particle system, approximate AO, the new cloth simulation system, and much more!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bloglines - Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man

2008-05-25T11:14:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters

Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man

By CmdrTaco on many-shades-of-evil

An anonymous reader writes "After a Google user posted a profane picture of the Hindu saint Shivaji, Indian authorities contacted Google to ask for his IP address. Google complied. He was arrested and is reported to have been beaten by a lathi and asked to use the same bowl to eat and to use in the toilet. Not surprisingly, Google is a keen to play this down as Yahoo is being hauled over the coals by US Congress for handing over an IP addresses and emails to the Chinese Government which resulted in a Chinese democracy activist being jailed." Readers are noting that these are 2 unrelated cases — the latter is several months old.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bloglines - Face to Face

2008-05-25T10:09:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

i love typography, the typography blog

Face to Face

By johno (iLT) on typography

An Interview With Stefan Hattenbach

Stefan Hattenbach started designing typefaces in 1996. In 2003, he established his own independent foundry and design studio, MAC Rhino Fonts (MRF). Proud A.S. Roma supporter and father of two, Stefan works his magic from a studio in the beautiful city of Stockholm.

What do you love about designing type?

Oh many things. One is the challenge of getting the details to work, but at the same time contribute to the overall style of the typeface.

Another pleasure is to see if your initial ideas will be suited for a final product. Sometimes the end result turns out just fine but not as you planned from the beginning. A third thing would be the fact that the same "basic pieces" are used over and over again, like notes in music, and yet the outcome can be so different.

Why do you design type?

Because I have to! It's both a drug and a passion combined into a weird "relationship". My passion for typography and the shapes of letters had been lurking for long time.

Then in 1996 I couldn't hold it back any longer. Ever since, it's grown stronger. The more I do it, the more involved I get. I have high expectations and am quite strict with myself, but overall it's fun, fun and fun.

How do you feel when you see your typefaces in use?

Of course I feel very proud to see graphic designers or others make good use of my own typefaces. It's like a personal reward and also a proof that they are worth buying. Sometimes they are used in a disagreeable way, but that's part of the game when you make your typefaces available to the public.

Actually I'm often surprised at how others can come up with so many nice solutions—solutions that I wouldn't have envisaged myself.

Do you see yourself more as an artist or an "engineer"?

I would say more as an artist. The technical aspects of type design interest me far less than the "arty" ones.

I know both are important for the end result, but I often let other colleagues help me with kerning, format generating, etc. At this stage of the process my brain is often set on the next typeface in line.

Do you have any more plans for Anziano? A sans serif counterpart, perhaps?

I'm not sure about Anziano sans serif. For now I can't see it on the horizon. What I do know for sure, is that it will be upgraded in the near future.

My friend Peter Bruhn at Fountain Type Foundry has urged me to complete a full range of small caps. This is a part of the transformation which will eventually turn Anziano into an OTF Pro.

Anziano includes some beautiful ornaments. Where did you get your inspiration for those?

Thanks. I've always been fascinated by icons, ornaments, and patterns. So for me it feels quite natural to include a set like this for most of my typefaces.

I gather information and inspiration from various places. I usually take a lot of pictures when I travel. I know for sure that some details found on buildings and elsewhere inspired some of the Anziano ornaments. Others were found in old books.

Do you have a favourite period in type history?

I love the Jugend era in general and some of the ideas for my icons and ornaments have been found within that period. However, the typefaces of that period are very distinctive and therefore "marked by their time" and not wholly suitable for modern layouts.

Having done more text oriented typefaces over the past years, I've become influenced by the masters from the 17th and 18th centuries. I'm full of respect for the letter forms shaped back then, and how they still hold such a strong position even today!

Do you have favourite typefaces and type designers?

I assume every artist is influenced by others, for better or for worse. I see it as a part of one's "artistic evolution". Barry Deck, Neville Brody and Emigre were my early sources of inspiration. Also the Swedish designer Karl-Erik Forsberg (1914-1995) has inspired me.

Two of my earlier designs are interpretations of his work and sketches (Lunda Modern and Remontoire).

As for favourite typefaces, some "all-time picks" would be: Bello (Underware), Home Run Script (Doyald Young), Eidetic (Rodrigo Cavazos), Morgan (Mario Feliciano) and Proforma (Petr van Blokland).

Can you tell us something about how you design type?

Basically I do a lot of research to make sure it hasn't already been done. If It's an interpretation of some historical typeface, I study the existing versions in detail. All this is to be certain that I end up with a unique and personal typeface, while paying the utmost respect to designers of the past and the present. Another important thing to figure out from the beginning is how the typeface is intended to be used.

Different usage requires different approaches and needs—these factors will influence the design. I always begin with the "regular" weight. After that I usually let the typeface rest for a while. Usually some weeks but sometimes even months. That gives me a good perspective on the design. 9 out of 10 times, this will lead me in a new direction—one that I wouldn't have envisaged at the beginning.

I've found this process very "healthy" and it always moves the design forward in a positive direction. When the regular master weight is done (after a few rounds), I move on with the italic, bold, small caps, etc. I finish up with alternates and ornaments/dingbats if needed.

What are your plans for the future?

For the past two years I've managed to work almost full time with type design. My long-held desire is to be able to continue this way. I really enjoy designing logotype, identities and graphic design in smaller portions. This is an excellent way of testing my own typefaces in real projects, and also stay in touch with the "end user side". Regarding upcoming projects, I have a few custom type projects lining up. More designs are planned and in progress for Veer Inc. Also, some major upgrades for my designs at Fountain are just around the corner. Oh yes, the web site needs a major face lift as well, but that's another story….

You can buy Stefan's fonts from Psy/Ops, Fountain, Veer, and FontShop.

Image credits: Luminance, Sophisto, and Lunda Modern specimens courtesy of Stephen Coles.

Thank you for subscribing to iLT!

Buy and try Type from Veer

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Bloglines - Salamagica

2008-05-25T08:12:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Changethethought™

Salamagica

By Christopher on Salamagica

There is some amazing Photoshop work by Ricardo Salamanca at Salamagica. The really great part about his site is that he gives you behind the scenes shots of how he created his images.

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Bloglines - Useful Podcasts For Designers And Developers

2008-05-17T10:18:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Smashing Magazine
we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

Useful Podcasts For Designers And Developers

By Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz on podcasts

by Sean Hodge

Podcasting is an engaging medium that is available in both audio and video formats. Podcasts often refer to audiocasts, but now with iPods and other media players being able to play video, videocasts are just as popular. A handful of web design podcasters deliver both audio and video formats. Some do so through the same subscription, others separate the two.

Audio podcasts are a great way to stay informed about web design news, learn about emerging technologies, listen to discussions, and continuously learn about the ever-changing landscape of web design — on your way to work or before you go to bed. Videocasts are great at showing step by step tutorials, or delivering visually rich presentations. Many of the long running successful podcasts have communities built around the show. Forums and detailed show notes are usual for a podcast that regularly serves its community. The time span of how long a podcast exists often indicates its level of quality and professionalism.

We've amassed a collection of podcasts that are either directly about web design, or would be helpful to a web designer. If you're interested in more podcasts try searching through Odeo or iTunes. There are quite a few web development podcasts, and a few niche topic web design podcasts, not covered in this roundup. Following is a list of useful podcasts for web design professionals.

You may want to take a look at the article

Professional Web Design Forums which covers forums dedicated to web designers and developers.

Web Design Podcasts

Boagworld
Boagworld is a long running web design podcast. There are over 100 podcasts Paul Boag & Co. have put out. They have been covering standards based design from the beginning of the show. They do a lot of great interviews with experts from the field of web design. There is always web design-related news, a special theme of the show, and some fresh content covered. The content is well organized, nicely presented and it is funny, too. The banter between Paul and Marcus is often the best part; the podcast has a large community built around the show.
The Rissington Podcast
This web design podcast takes the format of answering questions from its fan base. Each subject that comes up is discussed. This show is informal and loaded with fun British humor. The fans tend to send in as many humorous questions as they send in questions asking for web design advice. The podcast is still young, with less than ten released so far. The hosts John Oxton and Jon Hicks are well versed in web design techniques and technologies. They are also well-known in the design community.
Audible Ajax
This podcast is hosted by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. These guys are technically savvy, passionate about scripting and run a professional podcast about Ajax. They discuss news on Ajax, related technologies, and the significance of changes in this field. They have been broadcasted this podcast since 2005. The schedule is irregular, on occasion it's monthly, though not always. The Ajaxian site is a great place to keep up with what's happening in the world of Ajax.
Web Axe
This podcast is focused on web accessibility. Hosts Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson are passionate about this topic. They cover web accessibility issues in detail. They review technology solutions in regards to accessibility, how WCAG guidelines can be practically applied in web design, and they present numerous interviews of working professionals that work with accessibility issues daily. The podcast has been regularly broadcasted over the last 2 years. Over 60 issues are available for free download.
Rookie Designer
The host of the podcast, Adam Hay, covers a variety of web design-related topics — colors, freelance, interviews, technical design and customer service — which are useful for both beginners and professionals. The podcast is updated weekly every Wednesday. One episode is 45-50 minutes long. Until now 98 episodes have been aired.

Web Design Conference Podcasts

Future Of Web Apps
This conference somehow manages to involve a variety of professionals and companies of all shapes and sizes that are actively involved in building innovative web projects. The most recent event was attended by Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), Kevin Hale (Wufoo), Leah Culver (Pownce), Tantek Celik as well as Digg, TechCrunch, Google and Twitter. All presentations are available as podcasts for free download. This page offers a large number of interesting and insightful sessions as podcasts.
@media 2007 Europe, @media 2007 US
This conference is held each year, both in Europa and in US. @media speakers are renowned web professionals, with experience, talent and passion for web design and web-development. Last conference in US was attended by Andy Clarke, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, Jeremy Keith; the recent European conference was attended by Jesse James Garrett, Jon Hicks, Kelly Goto and Jason Santa Maria. @media regularly offers podcasts and slides of all presentations for free download.
South by Southwest Podcast
These podcast have been recorded at the SXSW Interactive Festival Panels. These are professional presentations put together by this festival that is held annually in Austin, Texas. There are some interesting issues discussed. SXSW has released a handful of 2008 podcasts. For some topics, it may be worthwhile to review previous years podcast materials as well. Podcasts from 2007.
d.Construct Conference Podcast
This conference is held each year in September, and is located in Brighton, UK. The podcasts are recorded presentations from the conference. They have multiple podcasts of presentations on topics such as: experience design, graphic design, web design, microformats, and mobile design. The last conference was in 2007. Clear Left presents this conference.

Content Management System Podcasts

Lullabot Podcast
Lullabot releases a fairly regular podcast on the Drupal content management system. A variety of Drupal-related topics is covered in more than 50 podcasts. Hosts often discuss the significance of technological changes within Drupal: system release issues, new significant modules and documentation projects. Both subjects for beginners and advanced users are covered. In each episode usually 3-5 people participate, discussing Drupal and related topics. There is a videocast as well. Lullabot is an agency that is known for teaching Drupal and building large Drupal projects.
The Wordpress Podcast
This podcast covers all things related to Wordpress. Blogging, web design, hosting, Wordpress plugins, and many other topics. Charles Stricklin runs this podcast, and Jonathan Bailey is the co-host. They interview members from the Wordpess team and other professionals as well. For each episode there are follow-up-links and show notes.
Joomla Juice Podcast
This podcast is focused on the Joomla content managment system. It doesn't come out regularly, but it has been produced since 2006. The format for the show is an audiocast, though they mix in videocasts occasionally as well. The audiocast has a multi-media element that allows you to see what they are talking about. The links are embedded in the visuals. Pete Russell is the host. He interviews key influencers from the Joomla core team and Joomla community.

Web Design Videocasts

Web Design TV Videocast
.Net Magazine publishes the WDTV videocast. Before the format changes in March of this year, they had a podcast that was hosted by Paul Boag. Now it's a "tutorial-style" videocast. Each episode focuses on a different web application, and teaches how to create specific types of projects. The basics of using tools within each application program are covered as well. So far, mostly Photoshop and Flash have been covered. Each video podcast is about 15 to 30 minutes long. The new release schedule has been weekly so far.
Adobe Creative Suite Video Videocast
Terry White is the host of this videocast. Terry and guests follow a tutorial format. They teach you tools and features within each of the Adobe Creative Suite software products; some of them are used in web design. Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and other applications are covered. The videos range from short 5 minute tutorials, all the way up to more than an hour long sessions. It's a weekly series you can subscribe to in your favorite media player.
Lynda.com Videocast
The feature of each of these videocasts is a video from one of the training series available at Lynda.com. These videos cover a wide range of software, design, and programming languages. The podcast is published to promote Lynda's membership sales, but each weekly episode is informative and of course free. There is no obligation to buy, though it's tempting after seeing the quality of each weekly video.
Photoshop User TV
This show is hosted by Dave Cross, Matt Kloskowski, and Scott Kelby from the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). They cover shortcuts, tips and tricks, timesaving techniques, interviews, and tutorials related to Adobe Photoshop. The quality of the show is very professional. If you use Photoshop regularly, this is a very useful videocast to learn from experts and professionals.
Layers TV
Layers TV is produced by Layers Magazine, "the how-to magazine for everything Adobe". The show is focused on step-by-step video tutorials and tips on how to work with Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Dreamweaver, AfterEffects and Flash. The show is released every week and is 20 minutes long. So far 34 episodes have been aired. For all tutorials source code as well as further examples are provided for free download.
PixelPerfect
The host of this podcast, a professional digital artist Bert Monroy. presents tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The episodes are presented weekly and are often step-by-step-tutorials, each 15 minutes long.
Photoshop Killer Tips
This podcast presents Adobe Photoshop tips, timesaving shortcuts, workarounds, and undocumented tricks. The host is Matt Kloskowski, one of "The Photoshop Guys" from Photoshop User TV. New shows are posted almost each weekday.
You Suck at Photoshop
Of course, this list would be incomplete without narrator Donnie Hoyle and his dramatic, hilarious and always excellent podcast about professional Photoshop techniques. Unfortunately, the series has ended after the 10th episode. Hopefully, the show will come back. The podcast gained eight million page views and two Webby Award 2008 nominations (Best Comedy and Best How-To Series). For further Adobe Photoshop video tutorials check our recent post Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of.

Further podcasts

CreativeXpert Podcast
Alan Houser is the host of this podcast. He has a professional voice and a professional approach, with over 10 years of audio and video production experience. He also finds interesting people to interview and asks probative questions. The show doesn't stick to a regular schedule, as only one episode has been released so far this year.
The Web 2.0 Show
This podcast has released more than 40 episodes. It comes out sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly. The show centers around interviewing developers and entrepreneurs who create web projects and are invovled in interesting web ventures. This show provides you with a view behind the scenes of some of these innovative companies that are using and defining the "Web 2.0″ technology.
Geeks and God Podcast
Bob Christenson (Rob Feature on the podcast) and Matt Farina are the hosts of the show. These guys are both upbeat. They plan the show well, and it moves along at a quick pace. There is a community built around the forum of the site as well. The show is aimed at church ministries, but the information covered is often applicable to any website. Rob and Matt are well versed in website design and development. They give practical advice on the nuances of web design, building websites, and running web communities.
You Suck at Web Design Podcast
This is a comedic podcast put out by freelance web designer Matthew D. Jordan. He creates fictional stories related to web design. He describes the podcast as an attempt to deal with web acronyms, such as Web 2.0, WYSIWYG, and Ajax. His "disdain for the corporate world," as well as "micro management," permeates through his stories. You'll likely either love this podcast, laughing uncontrollably, or you'll hate it, and end up breaking iTunes. Mathew describes his humor as, "juvenile" and "not-baddish."

Sean Hodge is the creative mind behind AiBURN.com, a weblog about design, creativity, inspiration and graphics.

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Bloglines - British Imperial Pint Glasses

2008-05-02T12:46:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Uncrate

British Imperial Pint Glasses

In Drinkware

Drink your ale the way it was meant to be in one of these authentic British Imperial Pint Glasses ($7). These British style pub glasses, etched with the official European...
Visit Uncrate for the full post.

Bloglines - Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

2008-05-02T12:43:00.003-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

ReadWriteWeb

Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

By Josh Catone on Adobe

Adobe is today announcing the "Open Screen Project" which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

Previously, Adobe allowed developers to create tools that wrote to the Flash format, but not that played it back -- for that you had to use their Flash player program. Adobe will now remove all licensing fees associated with Flash and AIR -- effective for the next major release of each -- making them free on all devices.

The Open Screen Project "will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices, and set top boxes," said Adobe in a press release.

In addition to publishing the Flash file format specifications, Adobe will also publish specs for the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the Action Message Format protocol. They will also publish the device porting layer APIs for the Flash player.

What Adobe is doing with Flash -- making it an open format -- follows in the footsteps of what they did with PDF back in the mid-90s. Adobe saw a lot of innovation happen around PDF after publishing the file spec and is hoping the same thing will happen with Flash. "Only by making the [Flash file format] spec open and available to everyone will we see the universe of the extended web grow," said Dave McAllister, Director of Standards and Open Source at Adobe, who told me that proprietary communications formats "make no sense."

Since releasing the PDF file format in 1993, it has become an open standard for documents and recently took a major step toward becoming the ISO 32000 Standard. Facing increasing pressure from Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology, it seems Adobe is gunning for Flash to become the standard format for delivering rich media to the web and other devices.

Bloglines - Facebook Hacked Again

2008-05-02T12:43:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

ReadWriteWeb

Facebook Hacked Again

By Sarah Perez

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

The hack exposed by the BBC involves an application that, once added by an unsuspecting user, sends the hacker all that person's personal details and those of their friends in a formatted list. The details sent include things like full name, hometown, date of birth, and employer. BBC reporter, Spencer Kelly, notes that while this information on its own isn't enough to steal someone's identity, it certainly would help.

It's possible for a malicious Facebook application, like the one used in the news story, to masquerade as a game or a quiz. And unlike protecting yourself from phishing emails, it's not simply good enough for you to "know better" yourself - if even one of your friends installs the app, your details get stolen too.

Despite the severity of this potential hack, stories like this one are old news in the realm of those who follow social network hacking trends.

For example, white hat hacker "theharmonyguy," wrote on his blog Social Hacking back in March about an app he submitted to social media instructor, Lee Aase's, $100 hacking challenge. His app, once installed, would grab any available information from a private Facebook group. The app didn't win the challenge, however, since it required action on the part of the user to be successful.

However, theharmonyguy points out that although Facebook has a Terms of Use that restricts applications from storing most user data, "there is not a practical way for Facebook to enforce or even completely audit this requirement." And since these applications are third party code, they are essentially running on the honor system.

Facebook, especially, has been plagued by security lapses as of late, with the AP reporting news about a security exploit that exposed private photos on the site back in March. However as one of our own commenters pointed out, this hack was known as early as February, it just took the AP's coverage to bring attention to the matter.

Then there was a story in January about Facebook app Secret Crush that downloaded and installed spyware to your computer. However, it's not just Facebook under the gun - back in November, TechCrunch reported on an OpenSocial hack, this one involving the RockYou and Plaxo.

Reading these types of stories remind us that our security on these networks are in the hands of unknown developers, not just the sites themselves - developers who may be more concerned with getting their apps completed and installed than they are with security.

Facebook's response to this latest BBC story is that they have "an entire investigations team that watches the site and removes content and third-party applications that violate Facebook's Terms of Use." However, they advise users to "employ the same precautions while downloading software from Facebook applications that they use when downloading software on their desktop."

In other words, your security is left to the tech-savviness of you and your friends. (Considering my years in I.T./end user support, that's a frightening concept. Many users aren't smart, savvy, or careful when online.)

Even worse, if you do become a victim of an attack, good luck getting support from Facebook on dealing with it. As Lauren Cooney reports after her account was compromised to send out spam, she emailed the Facebook team several times, and spent the better part of an hour trying to track down a customer service number to no avail, noting "you would think that a company that collects that much data on their users would consider having a customer service number." In the end, it was nine hours before she received an email response.

What this means for the average social networker is that we need to be very careful on these networks, and should not entirely rely on them to keep us safe. If there's really a photo you don't want certain people to see, maybe it's best to keep it offline forever. We also need to be vigilante about the applications we install, on Facebook and elsewhere, and take the time to educate our friends to do the same.

Bloglines - Game/Space: An Interview with Daniel Dociu

2008-04-25T14:27:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

BLDGBLOG
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures

Game/Space: An Interview with Daniel Dociu

By Geoff Manaugh

[Image: Daniel Dociu. View larger! This and all images below are Guild Wars content and materials, and are trademarks and/or copyrights of ArenaNet, Inc. and/or NCSoft Corporation, and are used with permission; all rights reserved].

Seattle-based concept artist Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul. Most notably, Dociu heads up the production of game environments for Guild Wars – to which GameSpot gave 9.2 out of 10, specifically citing the game's "gorgeous graphics" and its "richly detailed and shockingly gigantic" world.
Dociu has previously worked with Electronic Arts; he has an M.A. in industrial design; and he recently won both Gold and Silver medals for Concept Art at this year's Spectrum awards.
To date, BLDGBLOG has spoken with novelists, film editors, musicians, architects, photographers, historians, and urban theorists, among others, to see how architecture and the built environment have been used, understood, or completely reimagined from within those disciplines – but coverage of game design is something in which this site has fallen woefully short.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

So when I first saw Daniel Dociu's work I decided to get in touch with him, and to ask him some questions about architecture, landscape design, and the creation of detailed online environments for games.
For instance, are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu's work? What about vice versa: could Dociu's own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today's architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing "real" cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments. The present interview focuses quite clearly on fantasy – and it does so not from the perspective of game play or of programming but from the visual perspective of architectural design.
After all, if Dociu's buildings and landscapes are spaces that tens of thousands of people have experienced – far more than will ever experience whatever new home is featured in starchitects' renderings cut and pasted from blog to blog this week – then surely they, too, should be subject to architectural discussion?

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

Further, at what point in the design process do architects themselves begin to consider action and narrative development – and would games be a viable way for them to explore the social use of their own later spaces?
What would a game environment designed by Rem Koolhaas, or Zaha Hadid, or FAT really look like – and could video games be an interesting next step for professional architectural portfolios? You want to see someone's buildings – but you don't look at a book, or at a PDF, or at a Flickr set of JPGs: you instead enter an entire game world, stocked only with spaces those architects have created.
Richard Rogers is hired to design Grand Theft Auto: South London.
Of course, these questions go far beyond the scope of this interview – but such a discussion would be well worth having.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

What appears below is an edited transcript of a conversation I had with Daniel Dociu about his work, and about the architecture of game design.

• • •
[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: First, I'd love to hear where you look for inspiration or ideas when you sit down to work on a project. Do you look at different eras of architecture, or at specific buildings, or books, or paintings – even other video games?

Daniel Dociu: Anything but video games! [laughs] I don't want to copy anybody else.

Architecture has always made a strong impression on me – though I can't think of one particular style or era or architect where I would say: "This is it. This is the one and only influence that I'll let seep into my work." Rather, I just sort of store in my memory everything that has ever made an impression on me, and I let it simmer there and blend with everything else. Eventually some things will resurface and come back, depending on the particular assignment I'm working on.

But I look back all the way to the dawn of mankind: to ruins, and Greek architecture, and Mycenean architecture, all the way up to the architecture of the Crusades, and castles in North Africa, and the Romanesque and Gothic and Baroque and Rococo – even to neo-Classical and art deco and Bauhaus and Modernist. I mean, there are bits and pieces here and there that make a strong impression on me, and I blend them – but that's the beauty of games. You don't have to be stylistically pure, or even coherent. You can afford a certain eclecticism to your work. It's a more forgiving medium. I can blend elements from the Potala Palace in Tibet with, say, La Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí's cathedral. I really take a lot of liberties with whatever I can use, wherever I can find it.

[Images: Daniel Dociu; view larger: top, middle, and bottom].

BLDGBLOG: Of course, if you were an architecture student and you started to design buildings that looked like Gothic cathedrals crossed with the Bauhaus, everybody outside of architecture school might love it, but inside your studio –

Dociu: You'd be crucified! [laughs]

[Image: Daniel Dociu; larger!].

BLDGBLOG: No one would take you seriously. It'd be considered unimaginative – even kitsch.

Dociu: Absolutely. That's probably why I chose to work in this field. There's just so much creative freedom. I mean, sure, you do compromise and you do tailor your ideas, and the scope of your design, to the needs of the product – but, still, there's a lot of room to push.

[Images: Daniel Dociu; view larger: top and bottom].

BLDGBLOG: So how much description are you actually given? When someone comes to you and says, "I need a mine, or a mountain, or a medieval city" – how much detail do they really give before you have to start designing?

Dociu: That's about the amount of information I get.

Game designers lay things out according to approximate locations – this tribe goes here, this tribe goes there, we need a village here, we need an extra reason for a conflict along this line, or a natural barrier here, whether it's a river or a mountain, or we need an artificial barrier or a bridge. That's pretty much the level at which I prefer for them to give me input, and I take it from there. Most of my work recently has been focusing around environments and unique spaces that fulfill whatever the game play requires – providing a memorable background for that experience.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: So somebody just says, "we need a castle," and you go design it?

Dociu: Usually I don't put pen to paper, figuratively speaking, until I have an idea. I don't believe in just doodling and hoping for things to happen. More often than not, I think about a sentiment or an emotion that I'm trying to capture with an environment – and then I go back in my mind through images or places that have made a strong impression on me, and I see if anything resonates. I then start doing research along those lines. Only once did I have a pretty strong formal solution – an actual design or spatial relationship, an architectural arrangement of the elements – before that emotion crystallized.

But do I want something to be awe-inspiring, daunting, unnerving? That's what I work on first – to have that sentiment clarify itself. I don't start just playing with shapes to see what might result. Most of my work is pretty simple, so clarity and simplicity is important to me; my ideas aren't very sophisticated, as far as requiring complex technical solutions. They're pretty simple. I try to achieve emotional impact through rather simple means.

[Images: Daniel Dociu; view larger: one, two, three, four, five, and six].

BLDGBLOG: Do you ever find that you've designed something where the architecture itself sort of has its own logic – but the logic of the game calls for something else? So you have to design against your own sense of the design for the sake of game play?

Dociu: Oh, absolutely – more often than not.

To make an environment work for a game, you have to redesign your work – and I do sometimes feel bad about the missed opportunities. These may not be ideas that would necessarily make great architecture in real life, but these ideas often take a more uncompromising form – a more pure form – before you have to change them. When these environments need to be adapted to the game, they lose some of that impact.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: I'd love to focus on a few specific images now, to hear what went into them – both conceptually and technically. For instance, the image I'm looking at here is called Skybridge. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?

Dociu: Sure. The request there was for a tribe that's been trying to isolate itself from the conflict, and the tensions, and the political unrest of the world around it. So they find this canyon in the mountains – and I was picturing the mountains kind of like the Andes: really steep and shard-like. They pick one of these canyons and they build a structure that's floating above the valley below – to physically remove themselves from the world. That was the premise.

I wanted a structure that looked light and airy, as if it's trying to float, and I chose the shapes you see for their wing-like quality. Everything is very thin, supported by a rather minimalist structure of cables. It's supposed to be the habitat for an entire tribe that chooses to detach themselves from society, as much as they can.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: You've designed a lot of structures in the sky, like airborne utopias – for instance, the Floating Mosque and the Floating Temple. Was there a similar concept behind those images?

Dociu: Well, yes and no. The reasons behind those examples were quite different. First, floating mosques were my attempt to deal with what is a rather obnoxious cliché in games – which is floating castles. Every game has a floating castle. You know, I really hate that!

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: [laughs] So these are actually your way of dealing with a game design cliché?

Dociu: I was trying to find a somewhat elegant and satisfying solution to an uninteresting request.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: And what about Pagodas?

Dociu: The story there was that this was a city for the elite. It was built in a pool of water and it was surrounded by desert. Water is in really high demand in this world, but these guys are kind of controlling the water supply. The real estate on these rock formations is limited, though, so they were forced to build vertically and use every inch of rock to anchor their structures. So it's about people over-building, and about clinging onto resources, and about greed.

That doesn't touch on the game in its entirety – but that's the story behind the image.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, what about the Petrified Tree?

Dociu: That was part of another chapter in our game. We thought that there should be some kind of cataclysm – or an event, a curse – that turns the oceans into jade and the forests into stone. We had nomads traveling the jade sea in these big contraptions, like machines.

So the petrified forest was a gigantic forest that got turned into stone, and the people who were happily inhabiting that forest had to find ways to carve dwellings into the trees: different ways of shaping the natural stone formations and giving them some kind of functionality – arches, bridges, dwellings, and so on and so forth. It was a blend of organic and manmade structures.

At that particular point in time, quite a few of my pieces were the result of my fascination with the Walled City of Kowloon. I was really sad to see that demolished, and this was kind of my desperate attempt to hold onto it! I was incorporating that sensibility into a lot of my pieces, knowing it was going to be gone for good.

[Images: Daniel Dociu; view larger: top and bottom].

• • •
Thanks again to Daniel Dociu for taking the time to have this conversation. Meanwhile, many, many more images are available on his website – and in this Flickr set.

[Image: Daniel Dociu; view larger!].

(Daniel Dociu's work originally spotted on io9).

Bloglines - Comcast disconnects Dave Winer

2008-04-18T10:28:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing Gadgets

Comcast disconnects Dave Winer

By Rob Beschizza

Superblogger and RSS pioneer Dave Winer got his internet cut off by Comcast. Why? Because he uses too much of his unlimited service. The story is good and deserves to be read, so there's no reason to abridge it here. A few points, however, demand a short-form recap:

• Comcast's robot menu choices at its legal department make you agree that you're at fault before you can continue the call.

• Comcast refused to put its service termination threat in writing.

• Comcast refused to disclose its bandwidth limits.

• It disconnected his service to get his attention after being unable to reach him on an old phone number.

There's no point 'fessing up if you can't fix it, Comcast. And let's be frank, here: you can't fix it.

A new reason to hate Comcast [Scripting.com]

Bloglines - RIAA Sues Homeless Man

2008-04-18T10:21:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters

RIAA Sues Homeless Man

By kdawson on just-leave-the-summons-on-the-heating-grate

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a Manhattan case, Warner v. Berry, the RIAA sued a man who lives in a homeless shelter, leaving a copy of the summons and complaint not at the homeless shelter, but at an apartment the man had occupied in better times, and had long since vacated. The RIAA's lawyers were threatened with sanctions by the Magistrate Judge in the case, for making misleading representations to the Court which the Magistrate felt were intentional. The District Judge, however, disagreed with imposing sanctions, giving the RIAA's lawyers 'as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt,' and instead concluded — in his 6-page opinion (PDF) — that the RIAA's lawyers were just being 'sloppy' and had not made the misstatements for an improper purpose.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

Bloglines - davefleet.com Â» Deliciously Revealing Bookmarks

2008-04-17T21:47:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

TwitLinks
Latest Tech News From Twitter

davefleet.com » Deliciously Revealing Bookmarks

By davefleet

Del. icio. us is an awesome tool, plain and simple. It lets you easily access your bookmarks from any computer, take advantage of other peoples' reading and even track topics over time. I've written before about six great ways to make your life easier with del.

Bloglines - Techmeme: A new reason to hate Comcast (Dave Winer/Scripting News)

2008-04-17T21:44:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

TwitLinks
Latest Tech News From Twitter

Techmeme: A new reason to hate Comcast (Dave Winer/Scripting News)

By Techmeme

Dave Winer / Scripting News : A new reason to hate Comcast — As long as I've been a customer of Comcast I've been writing how much I wish they'd sell their Internet business to a company that doesn't hate its customers so much.

Bloglines - Comcast shuts down Winer

2008-04-16T17:52:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Download Squad
Download Squad

Comcast shuts down Winer

By Christina Warren on tweet-this

Filed under: Business, Internet, Features, News, Podcasting, Web services, DLS Interviews

Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what "excessive usage" really means?

Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn't alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won't tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.

Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, "excessive" in Comcast's terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Although Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.

We spoke to Dave earlier today (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he had to say:

"I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy."

Continue reading Comcast shuts down Winer

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Bloglines - 6 Web Apps To Get You Through A Slow News Day

2008-04-14T11:45:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

ReadWriteWeb

6 Web Apps To Get You Through A Slow News Day

By Guest Author on Products

Sometimes, news on the web is noticeably slow - especially in the weekends. It's ironic in a way, considering that millions of articles get written everyday and many go unnoticed. To address this need, here are six social media sites to help you find more great content.

This is a guest post by Corvida, from the social media blog SheGeeks.

StumbleUpon

Whether or not you're an avid StumbleUpon user, whenever news is slow and you're dying of web boredom, StumbleUpon is a great site to visit!

One way to optimize what you stumble upon is to add people who are active users of StumbleUpon, and who are stumbling your topics of interest. To do so, you can use StumbleUpon's search tool. Type in any keyword, or even a brand, and you'll get plenty of results to featured sites tagged with your keyword.

StumbleUpon Search

Afterwards grab the StumbleUpon toolbar, which is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once you have the toolbar installed, simply select the 'friends' channel in the 'Channel' area on the toolbar and click the 'Stumble' button to browse through your friends stumbles. From there, you're guaranteed to find at least three new articles or web services.

StumbleUpon Toolbar

Twitter

For some, Twitter may be just a bunch of noise. If that's the case, you're not following the right people. Some of the most avid web surfers are also using Twitter and it's not uncommon for great content to be passed along or 'retweeted'. Keep an eye on your followers for links, especially when news is slow. Someone is bound to tweet something interesting and newsworthy before the day is over.

Friendfeed

Early adopters of web services share some of the best content out there. This is content that may be a little harder for the average user to find. Friendfeed is a prominent new social aggregation service that quite a few early adopters are using - not only for aggregation purposes, but also for sharing great content that they find.

By using the highly recommend Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter Friendfeed by service, you can cycle through what's being streamed from blogs and Google Reader Shared items to find some great content.

LinkRiver

LinkRiver can be your personal Techmeme, because of the many articles that are being shared on it by the users of the service. Here, you can find some of the hottest articles being shared today or this week by 90% of the LinkRiver community. The "LinkRiver Popular" section is a great place to start your search for more content. There are more than a few gems in this section that can get you through a slow news day.

LinkRiver Popular

Techsted

Techsted is a relatively new memetracker. However, it's doing a great job of not only finding great content from the biggest networks out there, but also from various "B-list" sites and bloggers. A great thing about Techsted is that it's not limiting itself to strictly tech content. You can also find content about the latest topics such as deals, launches, announcements, how-to's, questions, SEO, web design, and more. All of this can be conveniently found on the Techsted Dashboard, a new section of Techsted that's reminiscent of the Alltop website.

Techsted Dashboard

Social Bookmarking Sites (Del.ico.us, Diigo)

Last, but certainly not least, social bookmarking sites can be a great source for finding content on a slow news day. Sites like Diigo and Del.icio.us feature everything from recently bookmarked sites to the hottest bookmarks at the moment, all conveniently located on their homepage. No need to add any friends or even sign up, although doing so can help your hunt for more content tremendously.

If you happen to have friends on these sites, pay attention to what they're bookmarking. Just like with StumbleUpon and Twitter, if you're following people sharing similar interests then go through their bookmarks. You'll never know what you'll find until you do. After all, isn't that the point of these services?

Optimization Tips

These 6 services are great additions to any network and valuable resources for everyone. For better optimization for most of these sites, remember to:

take advantage of the search feature
use keywords or tags when searching
add friends or people with similar interests (if possible)
check the site's homepage regularly

With these four rules to optimize your search results, you're guaranteed to get through those slow news day blues!

This is a guest post by Corvida, from the social media blog SheGeeks.

2008-04-13T13:11:00.003-04:00

Boing Boing

EFF fights for the rights of 3D modellers against bogus trademark claims

By Cory Doctorow on maker

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the case of 3D modellers, fighting for their right to produce and sell models of vehicles.

Last month, Mark blogged about the ongoing wars between Lockheed Martin and 3D modeller John Macneill over the right to produce digital 3D models of the WWII B-24 bomber. Lockheed Martin claims that this is a trademark infringement.

It's not.

Who owns the B-24, the bomber that helped win World War II? U.S. taxpayers paid for it, Consolidated Aircraft built it, U.S. military pilots flew it, but Lockheed Martin says it owns the bomber—or at least it owns the name...
It is perplexing that this mark was granted in the first place, given that the term "B-24" is nothing more than a U.S. military model number used to describe the plane itself (descriptiveness is a traditional basis for rejection; that's why you can't register a trademark on the use of the term "cyberlaw" in connection with the practice of technology law). MacNeill's situation is a perfect example of why we need that rule. If Lockheed had its way, no one could create 3-D images (or anything else that could be construed as a "model") of famous military aircraft—from the B-24 to the F-117 Nighthawk, also known as the Stealth fighter.
But Lockheed should not have its way, because MacNeill's images are protected by the nominative fair use doctrine. Nominative fair use means, in a nutshell, that it is OK to use a mark to accurately identify a product if using the trademark is necessary to identify the products, services, or company you're talking about, and you don't use the mark to suggest the company endorses you.

Link (Thanks, John!)

Bloglines - Space Mountain fan-poster

2008-04-13T13:00:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing

Space Mountain fan-poster

By Cory Doctorow on maker

Greg Maletic's added another poster to his collection of wonderful fan-made attraction art for Disneyland rides; this one's for Space Mountain. Link

See also: Fan-made Disneyland attraction posters (Thanks, Greg!)

2008-04-11T13:35:00.003-04:00

Many Scientists Using Performance Enhancing Drugs

By kdawson on redefining-abuse

docinthemachine is one of several readers to send word of a new poll published in Nature showing unprecedented levels of cognitive performance-enhancing drug abuse by top academic scientists. The poll, conducted among subscribers to Nature, surveyed 1,400 scientists from 60 nations (70% from the US). 20% reported using performance-enhancing drugs. Among the drug-using population, 62% used Ritalin, 44% used Provigil, and 15% used beta-blockers like Inderal. Frequency of use was evenly divided among those who used drugs daily, weekly, monthly, and once a year. All such use without a prescription is illegal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

Bloglines - Smallest Planet Outside Our Solar System Found

2008-04-11T13:28:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters

Smallest Planet Outside Our Solar System Found

By Zonk on hard-to-spot-with-all-the-space-dust

mikkl666 writes "Following the recent story about the discovery of the youngest planet outside our solar system, Spanish researchers now report that they found the smallest exoplanet observed so far. The planet, known as GJ 436c, was found by analyzing distortions in the orbit of another, larger planet, and its radius is only about 50 percent greater than the Earth's. The scientists are confident that their new method will lead to a series of further discoveries: 'I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth.' You can also reference the the original paper online for further details."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

Bloglines - Adobe launches Adobe Media Player

2008-04-09T13:07:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Download Squad
Download Squad

Adobe launches Adobe Media Player

By Brad Linder on online-video

Filed under: Internet, Video, Adobe

Adobe has officially launched its Adobe Media Player application which has been in public beta since last year. Adobe Media Player is a desktop application built on Adobe AIR that lets users watch streaming and downloaded web videos from content partners including CBS, PBS, MTV, Revision3, and Blip.tv.

The interface is slick, and it's clear that Adobe has put a lot of work into the media player since its beta days. Playback is no longer choppy and the content library is choc full of shows you might actually want to watch. Not as full as say, your cable box, but given the web video landscape, it's not bad.

Users can also add any online video to their player with an RSS feed. It took us a few minutes to find the "Add RSS" option, so we'll save you some trouble: It's in the "My Favorites" section.

Adobe has also launched Adobe TV, which is basically a web site filled with tutorials and other information about Adobe related products. You can either watch Adobe TV videos from the web or using Adobe Media Player.

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Bloglines - Tweet Clouds let you know what it is you can't shut up about

2008-04-08T11:53:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Download Squad
Download Squad

Tweet Clouds let you know what it is you can't shut up about

By Brad Linder on twitter

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

If you're obsessed with a TV show, musician, web site, or programming language, odds are you already know it. But wouldn't it be great if someone could follow you around all day and record every single word you speak and then plot the whole thing out in a tag cloud so you can see just how much you're annoying everyone who couldn't care less about your favorite subject?

That's not exactly what Tweet Clouds does. But the site does analyze all of the messages you send over Twitter to create a tag cloud. So it's almost as good, right? It will show you a list of your most frequently used words. And the more often you use a term, the larger the font will be. If you've set up an automated system to send out a tweet every time you write a new blog post, there's a good chance you already know the words that will pop up most often.

The site is pretty slow, especially if you've sent a lot of tweets in your time. You can suppress @reply messages if you want to filter your tag a bit.

[via WebWare]

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Aqua Bottles

2008-04-08T06:01:00.001-04:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Light Blue Bottles

2008-04-08T05:59:00.001-04:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Untitled

2008-04-08T05:58:00.001-04:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Untitled

2008-04-08T05:57:00.001-04:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Untitled

2008-04-08T05:53:00.001-04:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bloglines - Data Rescue II 1.2

2008-04-08T05:30:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Downloads - Mac OS X - Just Added
Mac OS X downloads provided by Apple.

Data Rescue II 1.2

About Data Rescue II
The best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning. This is the safest, most powerful software to recover your hard drive. Data Rescue II is the same software used by many data recovery services.

- Quick Scan: Shows files currently existing in Hard drive.
- Thorough Scan: A comprehensive scan which returns all possible results from hard drive. Deleted Files (Files in Freespace) + Existing files.
- Deleted File Scan: Searches only free space for files. Reconstructs files as best as possible.
- Clone: Make a clone of a work and/or failing hard drive.

Bloglines - The Tools of Cool Tools

2008-04-07T14:52:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Cool Tools
Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted. Tell me what you love.

The Tools of Cool Tools

In Consumptivity

Eight years ago Cool Tools started out as short email messages containing my personal recommendations for cool stuff. I occasionally emailed these quick raves to a very small circle of friends. Several of my friends asked me to add their friends to my list. Soon there were several hundred readers. In the winter of 2000 I published 90 or so of my tool reviews in an issue of Whole Earth Review. This was not much of a surprise since I used to edit the magazine, and the reviews were clearly written in Whole Earth style -- short, always positive, useful. I kept reviewing a tool or book when I thought of it, but after several years of adding folks to the list (which is still going) it occurred to me that with a small amount of extra work I might as well post my recommendations on a blog. On April 17, 2003, five years ago, I posted the first review on this site. (It was the Utili-Key, a sharp blade built into a key, a tool I continue to use and get past airport security.)

Originally the blog was not called Cool Tools but Recomendo (you can still get to Cool Tools from Recomendo.com). I added only one new tool a week since I wrote most of the reviews. In either a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck I asked anyone who wanted to join the list to submit a cool tool recommendation first. (To join the list now, go here.) These reader-supplied reviews were so good, and so frequent, that I was able to post a review per day. While the reviews are primarily written by reader/users each one was edited, checked, polished, researched, packaged and designed by me. When it worked, none of that effort was visible. As the site's traffic grew the name Recomendo was needing too much explanation so after a few months I changed it to Cool Tools.

After years of editing/writing this blog myself, I found relief in Steven Leckart, who has been doing the hard work of researching, double-checking, editing, and presenting the reviews written by readers. Before Steven began editing the site in January 2007, Charles Platt guest edited Cool Tools for four months. And for the past two years Camille Cloutier has been posting entries and managing the blog's health, stability, technical improvements, while adding new features and extinguishing bugs, all behind the scenes. She is this site's vital webmaster. (Thank you, Camille.)

Now that Cool Tools is five years old, it is ready for its next stage. In a month or so I will be turning on a redesign of the site. The idea is to acknowledge the community of readers who have developed Cool Tools, and in the spirit of the times, harness more of that collective wisdom. So version 2.0 will have member's comments, discussions, and more direct means of feedback. It will look a little different, too. I am very leery of messing up something that works, but change is your friend. There is a lot more traffic to the site, so just to keep up with that load requires new tools.

To give you an idea of where Cool Tools is right now here are some stats from February, 2008:

Number of readers on email list: 2,829
Number of RSS subscribers: 187,000
Number of unique visitors per month: 225,000
Number of page impressions per month: 492,000
Technorati rank: 2,824
Amazon's Kindle blog rank: 7

This is a readership that is larger than Wired when we first started it, and 10 times as large as CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Review at their peaks. And Cool Tools is run by three part-timers, instead of a staff numbered in the scores. To do that it uses a lot of cool tools.

What follows is the kit of webtools that powers Cool Tools. You could think of it as Cool Tools' cool tools. This is the stuff we use everyday to make the site run. As we like to remind readers, if you know of something better, please let us know.

From day one, Cool Tools has run on Movable Type. MT has handled this traffic easily. We recently upgraded to version 4.0. We also have installed Movable Type's new Community Pack, which will provide the community functions such as member profiles, forum areas, ratings, etc. MT has been a very reliable workhorse. I don't believe we've had any down time due to the software.

However while I eagerly recommend Movable Type it has one fault that is shared by other non-hosted blogging software such as WordPress: it is lousy in handling images to be posted. I am a drag-n-drop guy, a spoiled Mac user, who refuses to code HTML. I also post a lot of images from all kinds of sources. I don't want the extra step of having to upload images to the blog. I feel I should be able to simply drag an image copied from wherever and have it land in the right spot in my blog entry. MT doesn't make it that easy, but the Boing Boing crew turned me onto a tool that I use for all 9 blogs I contribute to: ecto. They call it desktop blogging for Mac and Windows.

I compose all my entries in ecto, (I am typing in it right now), then I drag my image icons to where I want them to appear in the text and then hit publish. I can switch between blogs fast, and very importantly, I can also post to other blogs, including those on other platforms, from ecto as well.

A recursive moment. Here is the page I am composing in ecto. WYSIWYG.

This allows me to cross-post entries to Wired's GeekDad, or Long Now's Long Views. (There are other blog composers that have fans like MarsEdit, and Abode's Contribute, but I haven't found them superior for what I do. I should also clarify that hosted blogging systems like Blogger and Typepad have much better interfaces and don't require the friendly composers that way industrial-level blogware hosted on your own server does.)

Other tools: I use EasyBatchPhoto to resize my images to a proper blog-specific size. It's a little Mac utility. I don't know if it is the best, but it works. I drag an image into it and it resizes it and dumps it in the right folder. It'll also add a watermark for my Asia Grace images.

For outbound RSS feeds we use Feedburner. It has a pleasant management interface, and gives me handy stats about readership and what items are read. It has a lot of other tools, which we don't use out of laziness.

Half of Cool Tool's income comes from ads, as served up by Google Adsense and FM's ad network. The other half comes from Amazon purchases. We are enrolled in Amazon's Affiliate program. That means that when a reader clicks on a red link to Amazon, and actually purchases the item, Cool Tools gets 8% of the purchase price. We don't have an affiliate relationship with other vendors, except Netflix. But Amazon's deal is interesting because Cool Tools will get a fractional cut of any thing else a reader purchases on a visit initiated by a link in Cool Tools, whether or not they purchase the linked item. If you go to Amazon to check out a pair of tweezers listed in Cool Tools but end up buying a $24,000 tractor for the backyard, we get a fraction of the tractor purchase.

Cool Tools and all KK* blogs are hosted by WestHost, who are headquartered in Utah. Over the years we've outgrown the small-time web hosters we once used. Because of our traffic is hefty enough we have our own dedicated dual processor machine at WestHost, although they offer many options for lower traffic sites.

Their minimum package starts at $4/ month. We are happy with them. Prices are reasonable, downtime negligible and service excellent. They claim 99.9% uptime and that matches our experience. We can reach a capable human on the phone or via chat any time 24/7 almost instantly. We also run our mail through them, and they also handle our domain registrations. And they include AWStats for monitoring traffic.

For web stats that we really think about, that is, for keeping track of the number of visitors, what is being read, and all that, we use Google Analytics. This is a wonderful free service. There is so much power and depth in this tool, and Google Analytic's interface is so elegant that one could mine it full time. You get what the web has always promised publishers -- an exact picture of how your content is used. But frankly, I hardly delve into it because I am not really trying to optimize traffic. (I am trying to optimize usefulness of the content.) I dip into once or twice year just to see what's going on. Sign up is quick and painless. You simply need to insert an invisible pixel on all your pages.

Google Analytic's results for Cool Tools.

I need to search Cool Tools all the time. I am constantly trying to find a tool in the archive, or researching similar past tools. The standard blog search function included in Movable Type was pretty spotty and never worked very well. We've found that Google's search of Cool Tool pages was far more responsive and practical. So now we use another fantastic service from Google, Google Custom Search. Google offers this as a free custom search box which you can install on your blog. This tool will provide readers with very fast, excellent search results of just your blog. You can install a free dedicated search for as many blogs or sub-groupings of pages as you wish. (In fact you can gin up your own "search engine' for any set of websites you want.) The free version of Custom Search displays Google branding and ads and has limited design possibilities. We use a pro (paid) version on most of the KK* blogs (but not Cool Tools yet) which removes the ad and allows us to style the results in line with the rest of the site's design.

I still maintain the original Cool Tools email list. Members of the list get a weekly email with the 5 cool tools that week before they are posted on the website (usually). To get on the list you sign up here and provide a cool tool you love. I've been using a bare-bones email list manager called Minimalist. It really is minimal. You can only interact with it via email (!!), it is currently unsupported, and it was written eons ago. But it was free and worked. However lately we've had a few hiccups with it, so we will be moving onto a new mail list program, Dada Mail.

-- KK

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

KK* Lifestream

Peopleware

Money for Nothing

Bloglines - Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy

2008-04-07T09:58:00.000-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Smashing Magazine
we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy

By Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz on typography

Handwriting seems to have lost some of its attraction over the last years. Nobody writes beautiful handwritten letters, and uses digital means of communication with smileys, abbreviations and standard lettering instead. And that's a pity. Since handwriting is unique, it has a tremendous expressive power a standard lettering isn't able to achieve.

More than that, handwritten text can be incredibly gorgeous. In fact, there is nothing more valuable than a beautiful handwritten letter sent to your beloved ones. And this post attempts to prove just that.

In the overview below you'll find excellent examples of beautiful handwriting, creative lettering and professional calligraphy. It's really amazing to see what one can create out of simple letters drawn with a pencil on a small piece of paper.

For further typographic inspiration you can browse through our previous posts

Breathtaking Typographic Posters showcases over 50 breathtaking typographic posters designed by artists across the globe. We feature Oriental, Iranian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Russian typographic posters.
Typography in Motion with excellent examples of typography embedded into movies and videos,
Hand-Drawing Style in Modern Web Design demonstrates excellent examples of hand-drawing style in modern web design.

Calligraphy

1800s Lettering Sketchbook:Journal 14
Beautiful calligraphy from 1800s.

Experiment with photographic paper_03
Written by Marina Marjina, a type designer and letterer from Russia.

Claredon Press, Flower
A book cover from 1987. Published by Claredon Press.

Cronica de los reyes catolicos, XVI century.
A Spanish manuscript from Berkeley, University of California, The Bancroft Library.

Extra: Natasha Mileshina
Natasha Mileshina's work. Moscow, Russia.

Daily Type
Calligraphy by Vera Evstafieva.

Pool Word

Tom Gourdie's gallery
Shakespeare's Sonnets by Tom Gourdie. Handwriting master's pieces from 1980s.

French Notarial Handwriting
From Michael Twyman's 26 November 2007 presentation.

Scripture and Calligraphy
By Denis Brown.

Handwriting, Doodling and Lettering

British Ariways B/W Font
Alex Trochut's work for British Airways. Sexy, sweet and beautiful lettering!

Panasonic Advertisement
The design by the agency Lowerporta from Chile. An advertisement for Panasonic digital devices.

Art and Life
Joei Lau's project. Beautiful curves.

all the best
Wishes from Ale Paul.

Estrella Levante Posters
Tasty typography!

Digeridoo Festival

Extraverage x The KDU
Karoly Kiralyfalvi, graphic designer from Budapest, Hungary.

Typography
Jeff Finley's work.

Split in Two
Created by Pawel Janczarek.

Doodles!
Beautiful doodles from Austin, TX.

Handwriting
By Yury Ostromentsky.

takin' it
Lettering design by Jon Contino.

"R"
By Zeptonn, an illustrator from the Netherlands.

1961 William Mitchell Pen Catalog

inspiredology.com | inspiredology.com

Zapf Games 2005
By Alexander Utkin.

on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Rolling Stones: Rolled Gold +

timeless

on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Marian Bantjes: Yale Alumni Magazine

When Love Dies

Libertyland grand selection

Funeral of the Heart by Leah Hayes - front cover

Experiments with type

Typolight
Type with light.

Feliz Natal | Merry Christmas
By Marina Chaccur. "The 2006 online christmas card started being very real. In the beginning the letters were drawn by hand, then after the final layout was chosen, the white beads were arranged onto a paper with a very pale outline of the lettering. In the end, the paper was photographed, the image was altered in Photoshop, and the beads went back to the package."

Flickr in Lights 2

Arabic Poesie
Type and light.

Caligrafia na pele
Calligraphy on the body.

Daily Type
Hmmm, tasty!

Stephanie DeArmond - Gallery
Typographic sculptures.

Handwriting Videos

Sources and Resources

Jalalaspages Calligraphical Album
The Gallery of Calligraphy
In Russian.
DailyType.ru
The showcase of Russian typographers.
Handmade Typography Flickr Pool

Comments

The Flock Web Experience in a Mac

2008-04-06T10:48:00.002-04:00

Flock, can be downloaded from here

2007-12-25T16:55:00.000-05:00

King William College Quiz

By biffa on quiz

The King William College Quiz, apparently now my only FPP in a year (since the last quiz), hopefully as hard as ever, but unlikely to reward my brand of laziness. Merry Christmas! See previous posts for laying out answers, I'll post the Guardians' answer sheet in January.

from metafilter

Bloglines - "He saw the type designer as a kind of public servant"

2007-10-11T12:55:00.001-04:00

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The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

"He saw the type designer as a kind of public servant"

By tepidmonkey on marksimonson

It's easy to talk about Adrian Frutiger in the past tense, since his most influential fonts – Univers, Egyptienne, and the eponymous Frutiger – are all at least thirty years old. But he is still alive, and in the summer of 2006, as he was presented with the Society for Typographic Aficionados' annual Typography Award, type designer Mark Simonson gave a presentation on how Frutiger [pdf, 18 MB] affected, and continues to affect, him and all others who benefit from good typography.

Bloglines - Image Seam Carving, Online.

2007-10-11T11:24:00.001-04:00

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Image Seam Carving, Online.

By flibbertigibbet on imageediting

Remember this? It's content-aware image resizing. Well, now it's ~~alive~~online.
Links to plugins, the paper, etc. So far there's only one plugin, for GIMP, but it also has the link to some actionscript about it.

Bloglines - The Broken Column House

2007-09-29T09:13:00.001-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Pruned
On landscape architecture and related fields

The Broken Column House

By Alexander Trevi

(The Broken Column House at Désert de Retz, 1988. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

The Broken Column House is so named because it takes the form of a ruined classical column.

Truncated nearer to the base than the capital, jagged and riven with fissures, it was created by the aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville who made it his main residence during the years immediately before the French Revolution.

Nestled within the confines of Monville's private pleasure garden, the Désert de Retz, it "stands like a solitary beacon, signaling the visitor to prepare for an encounter with the bizarre."

And what bizarre encounters!

(The Broken Column House at Désert de Retz, 1993. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

Visitors to the Désert would have seen not just the Broken Column but also the Chinese House; the Tartar tent "cut from tin and gay with painted stripes" and sited on an artificial island in an artificial lake; a grotto as a main entrance to the property; and a peasant-chic thatched-roof cottage. There was even the false ruins of a Gothic church.

The gardens itself was rather eccentric. Set within a natural-looking park were a model farm, a dairy and an orangerie. But since Monville had no need to earn income from agriculture, they were more of an affectation than a working landscape; they were more for leisure than production. Indeed, one shouldn't be surprised if one learns that some of Monville's guests, most of whom were members of the aristocracy, may have role-played as farmers or milkmaids for an afternoon.

And perhaps stranger things may have happened inside the walls of a garden presided over by a monied gentleman who was said to have been "built like a model," had "superb legs" and bedded a different woman every night, either in the house or in the various fantastical follies.

One might think Monville had suffered mentally, the Ludwig of the Ancien Régime, and that his gardens were but the whims of one with too much money on his hands. But the Désert was a robust testing grounds for new forms and theories of landscape and architecture. Perhaps not unlike the Nevada Test Site and other military training facilities, it was an experimental terrain within which alternative systems to, say, Le Nôtre and Vitruvius, were dreamt up, cultivated and then promoted.

And for these and other reasons, Diana Ketcham, in her slim but copiously illustrated book, judged it accurately as "one of the glories of the architecture of fantasy."

(The Broken Column House viewed through a 450-year-old linden at Désert de Retz, 1993. Photo by Michael Kenna.)

To a more modern visitor, meanwhile, fed with a steady diet of science fiction movies and literature, the house may evoke a distant Age of Titans, when giants roamed the land, and the epic conflagration that ushered in the era's end, and then in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Lilliputian survivors made shelters out of the ruins and waited for Nature to return and erase the evidence of the disaster.

As absurd as that may sound, it is the sort of reaction Monville and other contemporary designers and patrons of irregular gardens in the English style intended to elicit. With their carefully composed views, such gardens were meant as the "stage sets for the enactment of fantasies of a pastoral or mythic character" or "the stage for terror."

Ketcham elaborates: "The sight of the fragment generates a [...] superhuman dimension in the mind of the viewer. A corollary response is the realization that giants are at hand. Coming upon the Column, a human visitor feels the fear of a the fairy tale hero stumble up against the giant's boot."

For the viewer who identifies with the giants, on the other hand, or with the old Testament God who struck down the Tower of Babel, the conceit of the colosal temple is exhilarating. In our unbelieving age, it is easier to respond to the purely spatial implications of the imaginary real. According to the Doric formula, height equals eight times the diameter, the full-scale column would stand at 384 feet. The architectural footprint of such a temple would extend beyond the borders of the garden.

Scale, then, becomes a technique with which Monville could create "a mood of altered reality."

Ketcham again: "In the conventional picturesque garden, the presence of follies enhances the viewers' sense of physical and intellectual power, placing them in a controlling relation to the architecture of all times and all places, which has been scaled down to the comfortable proportions of the rural everyday landscape." But here at the Désert, "it is the viewer who is reduced, rendered small and bewildered before the mysterious bulk of the Broken Column."

(A cross section of the Broken Column House as recorded in Jardins anglo-chinois by George Le Rouge, 1785.)

Comparable contemporary architecture -- the ones that you might expect to see in Las Vegas and RoadsideAmerica.com -- may be ridden with gaudily clad tourists unknowingly suffering from post-modernist angst or architecture students, with copies of Baudrillard stuffed in their backpacks and gallons of ennui, seeking self-consciously ironic experiences.

The Désert, on the other hand, welcomed guests of a different sort. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, while serving as a minister to France, paid a visit to the Désert and "used elements of the floor plan of the the Broken Column in his design for the University of Virginia rotunda. Other illustrious persons who made it a favored retreat included Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV; the Duc d'Orléans; and Queen Marie Antoinette, who found inspiration there for her English gardens at Versailles.

(Members of the Frédéderic Passy family, who owned the Désert from 1856 to 1936 and lived in the Broken column, showing their addition of fourth-story windows and flattened roof, c. 1910.)

There are so many interesting things to be said about the Broken Column House and the Désert de Retz, but we'll limit them to two here.

Firstly, the Désert is the only folly garden of France's eighteenth century that still exists close to its original state. Some of the grandest were leveled after the Revolution while others now exist heavily renovated or in fragments, leaving little sense of the original schemes.

But "decades of neglect saved the Désert de Retz from this common fate. Forgotten or ignored by a series of absentee owners, the park and its architectural contents were permitted to decay undisturbed and were taken up only in the 1980s as the object of restoration."

The result is that what the eighteenth century devised as an artificial ruin became in the twentieth century a literal one, an irony whose poignancy has moved all of those who have pushed through the underbrush to enter into this forgotten place.

(The completely restored Column exterior, with the cracks and jagged roofline back in place.)

Secondly, as mentioned above, a program of restoration was carried out in the 1980s and one that still continues today. And therein lies some very interesting questions.

How does one return an artificial ruin, which became a true ruin, back to its original artificiality, a condition which aspired to be what it had become?

How does one restore decay from a state of real decay?

Here one imagines the restorers waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched with sweat, unwilling to return to sleep for fear of dreaming recursively the horrors of authenticity. "Is this a fake crack? A real crack? Fake? Real? Fake? Real?"

Such is the terror in a picturesque garden.

Books:
By Diana Ketcham, 1997.
By Michael Kenna, 1990.

Links:
The Broken Column on Google Maps
Flickr: Le Désert de Retz

2007-09-26T12:00:00.001-04:00

Blog of a Bookslut

The University of Nebraska is publishing a 140-volume set of the letters of Henry James, each volume priced at around $90. Edmund White considers the letters in the NYRB, focusing on the early education of Henry and William James.

There is also a 12-volume Correspondence of William James, that I have considered investing in alongside the 17-volume set of his complete writings. Somehow I ended up with an empty bookcase in my office, and I think it would like to be filled with James. I hear the set of William's letters, however, is missing the full correspondence between himself and Carl Jung. Hopefully that will be rectified soon as they ready the publication of every drop of writing ever produced by Jung. Until then, there are online archives we can wander around, and find gems like Carl Jung describing his first encounter with James:

After dinner William James appeared and I was particularly interested in the personal relation between Stanley Hall and William James, since I gathered from some remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper and her extra-sensory perceptions. Stanley Hall had prepared us that he had asked James to discuss some of his results with Mrs. Piper and to bring some of his material. So when James came (there was Stanley Hall, Professor Freud, one or two other men and myself) he said to Hall: "I've brought you some papers in which you might be interested." And he put his hand to his breastpocket and drew out a parcel which to our delight proved to be a wad of dollar bills. Considering Stanley Hall's great services for the increase and welfare of Clark University and his rather critical remarks as to James's pursuits, it looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder. James excused himself profusely. Then he produced the real papers from the other pocket.

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2007-09-26T11:57:00.001-04:00

Blog of a Bookslut

In an update on the Guilford High School controversy over Dan Clowes's Eightball #22 that led to the resignation of a teacher, we are assured that Nate Fisher "has not been charged with any criminal violations." Wow, that's a relief. For a minute there I was worried everyone was overreacting.

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Blackadder - The Russian Revolution

2007-09-25T04:51:00.000-04:00

2007-02-04T07:03:00.000-05:00

R. Crumb's Bigfoot covers for Fate

By Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder: Cryptomundo has some scans of the Fate covers illustrated by Robert Crumb. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Old copies of Fate magazine
• R. Crumb and Aline Crumb in the New York Times

2006-12-20T10:02:00.000-05:00

1850's graphic novel

By stbalbach

The Comic History of Rome (1852), illustrated by John Leech (1817-64). Image index. The Victorian Web on John Leech. The John Leech sketch archive from Punch (over 600 images). A recent reprint. via the always great BiblioOdyssey.

2006-12-20T08:52:00.000-05:00

Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?

By nuclear_soup

Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

2006-12-20T08:50:00.000-05:00

MetaFilter

No Context

By escabeche

"A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me." Goodbye to George W.S. Trow, one of the strangest, wisest, disturbingest writer ever to gape at, marvel at, and love his fellow Americans. His 1980 essay "Within the Context of No Context" (which shared with J.D. Salinger's last published story the distinction of taking up an entire issue of the New Yorker) placed television, irony, and distance at the center of the new United States. He also wrote the less well-known (but equally beautiful) short story collection Bullies, along with a novel and several screenplays, helped found National Lampoon, and was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1966 until 1994, when he quit in protest of Roseanne Barr's guest-editing stint. He died on November 24, in Naples, at the age of 63. Appreciations from the New York Observer, Slate, and Gawker.

2006-12-17T13:15:00.000-05:00

Blog of a Bookslut

Over at The Washington Times, a publication I do not usually read, Kelly Jane Torrance asks why on earth PW named Jane Friedman its Publishing Person of the Year:

Remember the O.J. book scandal?...The publishing world seems to have forgotten....
The president and chief executive of HarperCollins was one of those responsible for the O.J. fiasco -- she approved the reported $2 million to $3.5 million paid to Mr. Simpson's representatives for his participation. Instead of being chastised for her misreading of the public mood -- not to mention a shocking lapse of taste -- she's being rewarded by the very industry she tainted.

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2006-12-13T16:27:00.000-05:00

Charitable giving guide for the end-of-year

By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow: It's time to donate -- the time of year when you have to give your money to charity or turn it over to the gubmint. I've just done a marathon round of end-of-year charitable giving:

US Charities

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF always gets my largest annual donation. No organization works harder, spends smarter and gets more done for your personal long-term technological liberty than EFF. I spent years inside the org and I know for a fact that every dime donated makes a difference.

Creative Commons: Just four years after launching CC has turned into a global movement. More than 160,000,000 works have been released under CC licenses. It's good news for creators and audiences -- but it's amazing news for the public interest. The proof that there's more than one kind of rightsholder using technology today has stayed the hand of more than one regulator. CC keeps getting better, smarter and more global.

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design: It's wonderful to see a campaigning group based on fighting DRM. Defective by Design has pulled off a number of audacious and clever actions that have raised public awareness of DRM. The fight starts here.

The Internet Archive: What would we do without it? I use it every day. Its mission: Universal access to all human knowledge. What could be more noble?

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library.

The MetaBrainz Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands.

The Participatory Culture Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which produces ass-kicking media software in the public interest. The best-known of these is Democracy Player, an Internet TV program that just works -- add feeds based on YouTube keywords, or published feeds from creators, and new video arrive automagically and just play. Because TV is too important to leave up to Microsoft and Apple.

The Clarion Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Sheppard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and I'll be back in 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year.

Hospice Net: I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts.

ACLU: For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society.

Consumer Project on Technology: CPTech was the first copyright activist group to take the fight to WIPO, the UN agency that makes copyright treaties (you can thank WIPO for the DMCA -- they have the same relationship to bad copyright laws that Sauron has to evil, a kind of origin-node for all the crap that's destroying the infosphere). They marshalled a huge and effective activist opposition there, and are presently turning the agency upside down with a progressive treaty called Access to Knowledge.

Public Knowledge: Public Knowledge are the best copyfighters on the Hill, real DC insiders who know the ins and outs of fighting in the halls of administrative agencies like the FCC. We never could have killed the Broadcast Flag without PK, and I'm grateful that someone else is willing to be the person who puts on a suit and explains things in plain language to Congressional staffers. It's a thankless task. These days, they're leading the charge on Net Neutrality, a fight that we have to win if we're going to have any online future to speak of.

Canadian Charities

Online Rights Canada: ORC (awesome acronym, huh?) is Canada's leading cyber-activist group, a collaboration between EFF and CIPPIC at the University of Ottawa. They really mobilized during the last Canadian federal election and managed to kick out a corrupt politician who took campaign contributions from huge multinational media, software and pharmaceutical companies and then wrote laws in their favour.

Youth Challenge International: YCI sends young Canadians abroad to work on sustainable, community initiated development projects. Challengers work in international teams that include Costa Ricans, Guyanese, and Australians. I'm an alumnus, having done a hitch in a Nicaraguan squatter village in rural Costa Rica when I was 21, and it changed my life forever.

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation: My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause.

UK Charities

Open Rights Group: Danny O'Brien and I co-founded ORG a couple years ago and I continue to serve on its advisory board. ORG has done stupendous work since its founding, culminating in its aggressive lobbying of the Gowers Commission review of copyright. The Gowers Report is out now, and ORG won -- the Commission has strongly recommended that UK music recording copyrights not be extended to 95 years. This is the first time that I know of that a copyright term extension has been shot down, and it's in no small part thanks to ORG.

NO2ID: As the UK sleepwalks into a surveillance state, NO2ID stands as the nation's best, last bulwark against an Orwellian nightmare of universal tracking. NO2ID has won substantial victories against the Blair regime's compulsive move towards a national ID card, keeping it at bay for years.

MySociety: Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers.

2006-12-11T19:29:00.000-05:00

Boing Boing

Scherezade meets every fable of every land - comic

By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow: Bill Willingham's Fables is one of the select, wonderful group of long-running graphic novels that I follow religiously. The premise is that all the mythical creatures of our fables have been chased from their homeworlds by the Adversary, a shadowy figure who sends an army of goblin warriors before him to rape and plunder. The Fables have settled on our world, in New York, back in the days when it was New Amsterdam, and they have lived there ever since, hidden in plain sight.

A new volume in the series, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, has just been published. It is set outside of the main action of the series, with Snow White visiting Scheherezade's Sultan to beg his help in rallying the Arabian fables to fight the Adversary, who even now marches on their worlds.

The Sultan imprisons and threatens to kill Snow White, but she charms him with her life's story -- a retelling of the Snow White myth from the dankest, filthiest Grimm rendition, mixed with enough vivid detail to curl your hair. The Sultan spares her life, but promises to kill her the next night if she doesn't have another story. So the next night she tells the origin stories of two more of the Fables whom we've met through the long-running series, and then again the next night, and the next.

I love origins-of comics, Peter Parker and his radioactive spider and all that. But this is absolutely the cleverest frame for an origins story I've ever read, capturing (as all the Fables storylines do) the true feeling of old legends and the odd dissonance of imagining them unfolding today.

The wonder of Fables is the treat that comes from the mixing of all the fables together, the great mythic 16-car collision. Willingham wrings genuinely original stories out of these old, old characters. Of course, he's just the latest steward of their storylines, in a centuries-old tradition of storytelling that has every generation reimagining its heroes and villains, fools and tricksters. It's the path that goes from Pygmalion to My Fair Lady to Trading Places.

1001 Nights of Snowfall mixes the artistic styles of several guest illustrators, each a loving tribute to the subject and each different from the ones that preceded it. This is a handsome hardcover gift-book, and it was certainly part of my Christmas present to myself.

Link, Link to all Fables collections

Update: Jeremy sez, "the first issue of the Fables series is available for free from the Vertigo website."

2006-12-11T18:40:00.000-05:00

Boing Boing

Great list of underappreciated blogs

By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow: Fimoculous's "Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren't Reading" post has some real gems in it. I picked up a couple of new RSS subscriptions out of it.

27. T-Shirt Critic
I've got this theory that the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media -- informative yet dispensable. Probably the most frequent email query I get is "where do you get all those t-shirt links?" The answer is all over the freaking place -- but this site is one of the best. (See also: Preshrunk & iloveyourtshirt.)

26. Pruned
Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it, usually by gathering all sorts of random pieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.)
Link (via Waxy)

Bloglines - Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

2006-11-25T15:12:00.000-05:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

MetaFilter

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

By Meatbomb

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz , Witkacy for short. Art ist, photographer, absurdist playwright, surrealist novelist, philo sopher, witness to the Russian revolution, art theoretician and critic, the Great Malinowski's closest friend, drug fiend, and by most accounts a raving maniac and self-involved pain in the ass. His greatest novel was sadly prophetic: fleeing east to escape the invading Nazis, and then hearing the news that the Communists were also on the way, he slit his wrists on September 18, 1939 in the village of Jeziory, a martyr and victim to his obstinate belief in the freedom and independence of man against the bankruptcy of ideology and the coming wave of totalitarianism.
Previously here, but this guy's work is just too bizarrely compelling, and his legacy too obscure, to not get a little bit more attention.

Bloglines - Complete Digital Issue

2006-11-22T09:34:00.000-05:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Fine Books Blog
Notes on book collecting from the editors and writers of Fine Books & Collections magazine.

Complete Digital Issue

By Scott Brown

Today we launched a new feature on our website - a complete sample issue in a cutting-edge digital format. A lot of people want to see a copy of Fine Books & Collections before buying it so we created an online version of our January/February 2006 issue.

I think the technology's pretty cool - you can flip through the magazine, click the page when you want to zoom in to read. Click again and you're browsing again. You can even print a low-res version. As an added bonus, all the hyperlinks in the text and the ads are live.

Personally, I hate reading an entire magazine like this, and we don't plan to start publishing a digital edition, but for a sample copy, I've never seen anything better.

So take a look, and then subscribe. Six issues - nearly 500 pages on book collecting in full color - are just $25 (in the US). It's hard to beat.

Bloglines - Findings fractals in the stock market

2006-11-20T03:20:00.000-05:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing

Findings fractals in the stock market

By noemail@noemail.org (David Pescovitz)

David Pescovitz:
Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, spoke last week to an audience at MIT gathered by the Molecular Frontiers Club. Mandelbrot focused his remarks on his recent efforts to seek out patterns in the NASDAQ. (Video of a 2001 lecture at MIT, where Mandelbrot touched on this subject, is available here.) The fractal nature of the market is the subject of Mandelbrot's latest popular book co-written with journalist Richard L. Hudson, titled "The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward." From the MIT News Office:

An unusual type of fractal that comes from a simple equation, the Mandelbrot Set (image at right) is popular outside of mathematics because of its aesthetic appeal and its complicated structure. No one has been able to prove the Mandelbrot Set is true, according to Mandelbrot. "But no one has been able to prove it's not true, either," he said, as large pictures of fractals filled the screen behind him.

Mandelbrot recently began to apply his knowledge of fractals to explain stock markets. "Markets, like oceans, have turbulence," he said. "Some days the change in markets is very small, and some days it moves in a huge leap. Only fractals can explain this kind of random change."

Link to MIT News Office article, Link to buy The (Mis)Behavior of Markets

Bloglines - Day of the Dead remix contest winners

2006-11-10T05:48:00.000-05:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing

Day of the Dead remix contest winners

By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow: FreeCulture USC has announced the winners in its contest to remix the original film, Night of the Living Dead. There are some fantastic entries! Link

Bloglines - Evaluating smut, by the numbers.

2006-10-19T18:54:00.000-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing

Evaluating smut, by the numbers.

By noemail@noemail.org (Xeni Jardin)

Xeni Jardin: Violet Blue writes,

WFMU's Beware of the Blog has a post up titled "Christian/Family Values-Oriented Movie Review Database Restores My Faith In Snobbish Film Criticism," which links to this "mathematical" biblical rating system of mainstream films -- wait, I know you're already laughing too hard to see your monitor:

Link.
Read the review of Sin City and most especially revel in the right-hand column detailing of offenses. I laughed so hard I had to choke a bitch.
In the end, the "good Christian" reviewer just gives up:
"Sin City is yet another film that tends to remind me of the paintings in which a gaggle of demons dance and prance about a boiling cauldron, shrieking with glee as they toss soul after soul into the cauldron of Hell, cauterizing any veins of escape.
I am not going to spend any time summarizing the listing in the Findings/Scoring section in this report. The listing speaks volumes about the content of this film. Nor am I going to provide a list of Scriptures which apply to the sins demonstrated in this film. You probably have a Bible."

Link.

Reader comment: Stacia says,

This site is hillarious to go to after you've seen movies because they pick up on things that didn't register (what? inappropriate spanking in The Incredibles?).
I just have a story to relate about a time I emailed the site owner regarding his somewhat arbitrary rating system. If you look closely you'll see that maybe only two films get a perfect score - Mary Poppins being one of them. I wrote under a false email address and told him that I wouldn't show my children this film because obviously Mary Poppins was using witchcraft and unholy powers gained from Satan to carry out her magical acts. He argued that Mary Poppins was a real life angel, getting her divine power from God. How does this differ from Harry Potter? I don't know.
Anyway, he's fun to get into arguments with. Give it a try!

Bloglines - New Mark Ryden print

2006-10-15T02:56:00.000-04:00

New Mark Ryden print

By noemail@noemail.org (Mark Frauenfelder)

Mark Frauenfelder: "Regina Gloriae Naturae,” based on Mark Ryden’s painting 'The Creatrix,' is a limited edition, giclée print with gold foil stamping, letterpressed title and embossed chop on archival cotton rag paper." It's limited to 60 prints and costs $3,000. Link

Reader comment:

Kevin Kelly says: Whenever you see the claim "giclee print" just substitute the word "inkjet." Same thing, but without the $64 dollar fake french accent. A giclee is a nice inkjet print, but inkjet nonetheless. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclee

Bloglines - It's imperative you keep your ass on the phone line.

2006-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Bloglines user Fredricktoo (gfred@optonline.net) has sent this item to you.

MetaFilter

It's imperative you keep your ass on the phone line.

By Wet Spot

How to mess with a telemarketer. (audio)