Archive: May 2008

• Dismissed as chance / Chip Kidd’s New York Times in photo, visual · May 9, 20:56

  Chicago. A man is about to get on a routine flight. Suddenly he pauses and decides to walk away. He doesn’t know why. An hour later the plane goes down in flames. It’s dismissed as chance … Britain. A woman has an image of a black mountain that’s moving, with children underneath it. Two hours [...]

• Muxtape / Non-interface interface excellence in ixd, music, web · May 8, 22:55

  Muxtape has blown up — just a matter of time, I guess — but I hope this doesn’t mean that they’ll add a bunch of “features” to it. It’s basically two things — the homepage where you pick a mix, and the player where you listen — and it doesn’t need much more. Really! Please! [...]

• Essential information / Mixing drinks, tying knots, arguing in reviews, tip · May 8, 15:58

  I like to tell myself that I don’t read stuff like this, but Esquire’s got a pretty excellent list of “75 skills every man should master”.
  33. Hit a jump shot in pool. It’s not something you use a lot, but when you hit a jump shot, it marks you as a player and [...]

• The NBA / Where accountability happens in basketball · May 7, 18:40

  Mark Cuban is not afraid to talk about the blockbuster trade that wasn’t …
  [Donnie Nelson, Avery Johnson and I] went back and forth about whether or not we should trade Devin [Harris]. We knew he was a good point guard, with the potential to be amazing. What we didn’t know was how long that [...]

• Flickr / Okay, I take it all back. in flickr, photo, visual, web · May 7, 18:11

  See, I criticize Flickr, and then this thing comes along to demonstrate once and for all its inherent goodness. No Flickr stylez or post-processing necessary. Via Sorry I Missed Your Party and BuzzFeed.

• The Flickr style / Ugh in flickr, ixd, photo, visual, web · May 7, 01:16

  It’s hard to ignore the fact that Flickr promotes a distinct style of photography; I say “promotes” because Flickr’s “Explore” tab displays photos that are deemed “interesting” by Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, and the photos in this area are generally characterized by what many are now calling “Flickr style.” This is shorthand for “extensively post-processed” — [...]

• Research / East Baltimore police narratives in ixd, lit, reviews, urban · May 4, 17:53

  Last week I picked up a book called

• Andrei Tarkovsky’s family polaroids in cinema, lit, visual · May 4, 17:05

  Back when the Berkeley Public Library was the hub of my social universe, I spent a lot of time in its video room — in the mid-90’s, it occupied a little corner of the basement — working my way through its extensive collection of foreign VHS movies. I had plenty of time on my hands, [...]