Aaron Durand’s Streaking Trains. I used to love taking this kind of photos (exhibit A, B), but it quickly started to feel old and gimnicky. Perhaps a new, systematic approach is in order, as I feel this might be the kind of thing where one good photo is just meh, but fifty good photos make an awesome project. It’s been a while, after all, and those dusty lenses aren’t going to clean themselves.

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The Art of Google Books curates interesting scanning glitches.

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Slavoj Zizek writes about The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. ···

The Scale of the Universe 2 is an interactive Powers of Ten. ···

EUscreen is an archive of free videos from a number of Europe’s public TV broadcasters. Portuguese RTP is conspicously absent — after all, our state broadcaster is notorious for its expensive and thoroughly copyrighted archives, despite being funded by taxpayers (our government does intend to fix this, though, by privatizing all this publicly-funded heritage as prescribed by the neoliberal zeitgeist, rather than giving free access to the archives to those who paid for them — for that would be Socialism, and therefore evil). ···

It seems an English plainclothes police officer was running after himself for a while after being mistaken for a burglar by the CCTV operator. The whole incident has ‘idea for short film’ written all over it. ···

Here are recipes for ‘old-school Instagram filters’. Meaning: how to take analog photos that look like those digital photos that look analog… I think I’ll have an headache. No wonder I’m more interested in messing with JPEGs. ···

GIF: A Technical History is quite an interesting and accessible post about that nasty but cute, little image format that won’t go away. ···

David Bordwell’s analysis of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is something I recommend you read if you’ve seen the film. I’ve found it great and demanding like a very fragile but precise piece of clockwork. It’s unfortunate we spectators aren’t used to stories this intricate told in such an economical fashion. I’d like more of this, please. ···

Lists of Note lists lists. Of note. ···

Rob Bechizza’s Mixtape of the Lost Decade. A pop history of the phantom decade between the 1970s and the 1980s. Which explains a lot, even if it’d mean I would now be on my forties. ···

On Goals Scored, a blog about great football (soccer) infographics. Football for nerds, yay! ···

musicForProgramming(); has a few cool ambient mixtapes that are quite good for all kinds of work that require focus (and not just computer programming). ···

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Here’s my first attempt at databending (here’s the original image). Using a text editor to fiddle with JPEG files might be a nice way to actively procrastinate. I like the drastic results.

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How Art Works? by Tymek Borowski and Pawel Sysiak. I really recommend you take twelve minutes to watch this to the end.

Art desperately needs a resurgence of ‘coarse’, earnest artists. Forty years of evolution of the least common denominators between conceptualism, the postmodernist outlook of history, the liberal markets and the academic tradition led to a vicious cycle of non-stop bullshitting in the art world, which fed both the speculators and the dandies who brought about the twin curses of ‘creative industries’ and hipsterism — which in turn eventually led to this guy.

So let’s ‎”try to communicate as simply and directly as possible, even if it sounds stupid.”

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Sanna Dullaway does some incredibly realistic color restorations of old photographs. (via Neatorama)

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Wondermark is all about lost cats this week. Keep’em coming!

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Robot Readable World is an interesting video made from recorded footage of computer vision sytems. Despite the fact these ‘behind the scenes’ images are actually generated for the benefit of the humans programming and debugging such systems, as computers don’t really ‘see’, I still find them somewhat creepy. To me, all look like Terminator-vision. (via Boing Boing)

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For comparison, here’s a screenshot of my real Geocities-hosted homepage, made in late 1997. The downside to years of data-loss paranoia and redundant backups is that I keep all kinds of embarrassing stuff, readily available for me to share with you readers whenever I find myself on a Cory Archangel-esque, aesthetic-appreciation-of-crap mindset. (Perhaps the Internet equivalent of my not-totally-ironic conversations on the merits and demerits of individual episodes in the Rocky series.)

Anyway, as it has been years since I last looked at this, I have a few questions to my 18-year old self: What the hell is that typeface in the title and background? And how could you even include that handheld-scanned ID photo? And is that darker background color purple or blue? (At 32, I can’t tell them apart.)

For the record I’m pleased no Comic Sans was found anywhere on that page. And surprisingly enough, no hitcounters!

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