Crickets Chirping

Edible Augmented Reality:

I Eat Beats from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

via tomc.

Went through my old laptop looking for songs to salvage and I found one. Recorded it back in the garage in Austin.

MP3: Shooting Scars.

We’re tight
Tonight
Our trails are burning bright

Can’t get it right
Every time I find you it seems

Thought you were a shooting star, but no
You’re just another scar in a sky gone black

Mistook
Misery
For your sympathy

You’re just like me
Fucked up and I don’t that ’cause

Thought you were a shooting star, but no
You’re just another scar in a sky gone black

Drums: Brent. Guitar, vocals: me.

Not one of my more uplifting pieces, but it’s resonating with me lately.

Newly open-sourced goodies from teh goog: Thrift, meet Protocol Buffers. I believe you two have a lot in common. Mark Slee (one of authors of the Thrift paper) apparently interned at google.

Anxiety in the cockpit surged.

The pilot checked the instruments in front of him. Gibberish. You see, this airplane had Lite-Brites instead of radar screens.

Violent thunder storms approached. Menacing clouds, sketched in crayola hung from Big Chief horizon lines, like electrified half notes in the score to Hot Cross Buns.

The navigator tried to make out what was left of the map, but turbulence had erased most of his diligent cartographical Etch-a-Sketch work.

The cabin then “experienced a sudden drop in pressure,” as they say. Finding Nemo flickered and disappeared from the movie screen. Sippy-cups rolled into the aisle.

I took a photo of what subsequently fell from the overhead compartments:

Pipe cleaner oxygen masks.

That’s the last time I fly Kid Air.

“Toe Jam” by Brighton Port Authority featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal (maybe NSFW but there’s no actual nudity):

THE BPA - THE BPA ‘TOE JAM’ FEAT. DAVID BYRNE & DIZZEE RASCAL from Fabio Resende on Vimeo.

The video is directed by Keith Schofield, who has a lot of other great videos on his site.

via hoyhoy

Did that title strike you as pretentious? I mean it in earnest I swear.

During a design meeting at a previous job, a consultant suggested we use the “visual thesaurus” for brainstorming ideas about names for the company. That term “visual thesaurus” made me think of something pretty ambitious. It turns out that what she meant and what I imagined were two different things.

She was talking about this but I imagined that a “visual thesaurus” would be more like a catalog consisting of pictures of objects, organized by the degree to which they resembled each other visually, regardless of functional or nominal similarity (in fact, the further apart they are in those dimensions the better). It would be alphabetical by the name of the reference object, and would show pictures of other objects that tend to resemble the reference.

Visonyms (Homoglyphs?), if you will.

Examples:

• Key limes and tennis balls
• Studio headphones and earmuffs
• Microwave ovens and older televisions
• Roaches and a microchips (or IC packages, more precisely)
• Cars and quad roller skates
• Armoirs and Refrigerators
• Bronchial tubes and trees

Maybe these things only resemble each other in my mixed up mind. Otherwise I’m sure some book like this exists but I haven’t found it yet.

There’s got to be a word for objects that are named after things that they resemble, like mouse, which can mean the thing connected to your computer or the rodent it resembles. Another example is “cell” which can either mean a place where you put a prisoner or a biological structure that resembles the former when viewed under a microscope (that was the etymology, according to my high school biology teacher anyways. Texas public schools FTW!).

Links: I have recently run across a couple of websites that remind me of this visual wordplay more directly.

WikiWars

logologos.blogspot.com is in Spanish which is interesting because it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable even if you don’t speak the language. The author deconstructs popular logos with visual equations.

The other link is Scribbls, which is a game of sorts. You try to fill in a pre-set equation a + b = c where a, b and c are pictures (and words, which leads to many a visual pun). This works much better (only?) if you are an English speaker though.

So I made this image back in February of 2007:

Then today while browsing through overpriced t-shirts at some random shop in the upper Haight strip I saw this:

Hm. Flattery aside, I think I like my version much better.

This is a masterpiece remix of Radiohead’s “Nude” - although not exactly under the terms of the original challenge:

Big Ideas (Don’t get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.

Jason Scott, of textfiles fame gave this presentation at ROFLCon archived courtesy of archive.org:

I actually missed his presentation but it’s a good one. Watch it. You’ll learn about Thurl Ravenscroft, who has the most awesomest name ever.