THEM THANGS, ‘ritualistic iconography’ (some images NSFW). Another blog of the neverending-stream-of-images kind, but in hip black and white. I like it. (via None00)

Nick Gentry, for instance, uses floppy disks as canvas.

I remember playing with my dad’s CDs when I was tiny, and then at school we’d put our projects on to CD-Rs to take home. But I never really owned any— by the time I was getting into music nobody bought them.

— An article about the CD revival of the 2020s. (via The Null Device)

Which I’m actually unsure if it’ll ever happen. It seems plausible at first, but unlike vinyl the compact disc is actually quite a sophisticated and unstable media. It’s unlikely many discs will survive into the 2020s, let alone players in good working order (this is why you’ll never see a Lomography-style revival of late 90s VGA digital cameras). I think CDs will instead go the way of the floppy disk or the VHS tape: charming pieces of retro plastic.

An absurd, over-the-top action sequence from the Indian film Alluda Mazaaka. So, who’d win a fight between Chiranjeevi and Chuck Norris? (via Igor Pascoal)

Newsweek points us to the very interesting Internet Archaeology. Of the above, they comment “This is where it all began to go wrong”.

I agree.

Home Hacks 2010

How to do… almost everything. It’s a big page. I never knew that instead of washing, you could just freeze your jeans for a week. Or that you could chill wine by adding salt to the ice bucket (which makes perfect sense now that I recall my Chemistry classes).

Ah, web typography. When I did my first website back in 1997, things were pretty much limited to a choice between Arial and Times New Roman. Then Microsoft introduced Verdana and a couple of others, and people found out they could get away with really small font sizes. Georgia was lovely but not for everyone, and Trebuchet… well it just replaced Arial in my mind. The fact remains, for the last twelve years designers had less than a dozen sure choices for web type, fonts readily available in both Windows PCs and Macs. Windows Vista introduced a few pretty good fonts (such as the Candara that used to be this blog’s first choice), and that had designers writing ridiculously large CSS font stacks in order to maintain a small amount of control. Some did go all the way and wrote scripts that replaced HTML text with Flash movies which had some font embedded, but that’s a pretty crude solution to a problem that should be easier to solve.

It took ten years but finally most browsers support font embedding. Internet Explorer is a nuisance, as always, because despite being the first browser to support embedding (since I first started making websites, in fact!), it does so through some peculiar font format which is incompatible with everything else. Anyway, I finally jumped right into the @font-face bandwagon. You should be reading this text in CartoGothic (Font Squirrel also has a pretty friendly tool to help with the CSS and the conversion to IE format); and the headlines should be set in Jos Buivenga’s Delicious. If you are using one of the latest browsers, that is. Enjoy!

Update: screw that, using CartoGothic brings too much of a lag on page load. So it’s back to Trebuchet. But I’m keeping the titles set in Delicious.

When in doubt, wear black.

— Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-Up Men (via Lifehacker).

I have the same problem the writer of this article had: no pressure at all to dress up. Which all fine when you’re in your twenties and don’t work in a bank. But now that I’m past thirty, even though I don’t intend to start wearing a suit, I think I should start dressing a bit more like my age. So that I don’t become one of those sorry middle-aged fools who dress like they’re not.

Anyway, nice to see I got the dark colors part right.

Boing Boing linked the Howtoons how-to guides for kids and adults alike. Such as this Visual Communication guide, a godsend for someone as inept at drawing with pen and paper as me.

There should be more things like this. It really pisses me off the fact that despite the exponential growth in access to information, there’s a thorough lack of great explainers in many areas. I wonder, for instance, if I could have learned any degree of programming without the kid-friendly ZX Spectrum programming books I read back in the day. I probably wouldn’t.

Quentin Tarantino himself curated an exhibition of alternative posters for Inglourious Basterds.