SeoulBrother

I suck at self promotion

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:03:00 -0800

LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!

For one weekend only, Albert ‘SeoulBrother’ McMurry, will be in Austin, Tex. for South by Southwest where he’ll be a contestant in Battledecks 2010 in Room 18ABCD, Friday, March 13th at 3:30 with Avery Edison, Colleen Wainright, Mike Monteiro, Jeffrey Zeldman and others*.

You may know the Mullenville Chili Champion for his work here or here, here, here and here. Or maybe you watched this, this, this, this or this.

He took this really popular picture and is in this other popular picture.

These are his parents!

This is his wife, Sweetness! She’ll be there too!

He loves an Old Fashioned and a whiskey smash and once bought shoes.

* He really doesn’t belong there.

George Lois Tells the Stories Behind His Twelve Favorite Classic...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:42:09 -0800

George Lois Tells the Stories Behind His Twelve Favorite Classic Esquire Covers — Vulture

Ali As Saint Sebastian, April 1968
“It was 1968, and Ali was waiting for an appeal for draft evasion to reach the Supreme Court. I said to Hayes, ‘I want to do a cover with Ali, I want to depict him as the famous martyr Saint Sebastian.’ And I called up Ali, told him I needed him and his pretty white trunks and shoes. I showed him a postcard of a painting by Castagno, with Sebastian’s body relaxed, but his head back in agony. And he says, ‘Hey, George, this cat’s a Christian? I can’t pose as a Christian, I’m a Muslim.’ I tried to explain that it’s symbology, but he said no, and I asked if I could talk to Elijah Muhammad, who was the head of the Muslim community at the time. He calls him up, puts me on the phone, and there I am talking to Elijah Muhammad about religion, imagery, symobolgy, etc., and finally he said, ‘Okay, sounds good to me.’ And Ali did it. It really became a rallying cry, the anti-war poster at that time. It was a combo of race, religion, and war in one image.”

via kottke

Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a zombie?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:27:00 -0800

Yeah, I was hanging outside the gate to the house of a former bad guy in Gonaives, Haiti, B.S.ing with a bunch of kids. Billy Badass (Vladimir), a 14 year old punk with the smile of a shark, turned and started yelling at this woman across the street. Starling-like, the kids shifted from the jokes and games we were playing to taunting. Some ran across the street directly in front of the woman and some just started yelling “Go home, zombie!” in Creole.

I looked across the street. “Why is everyone calling her a zombie?” I asked. Billy laughed and looked up at me. “Because she a zombie.”

My orders were explicit when we entered country: Don’t mess with anything of religious significance, including and especially zombies. So I watched. To be honest, that was all I could do.

The zombie walked slowly, like her feet were asleep. You know when you get the needles but have to get up to answer the phone or something? Like that but slower and with purpose. She was dressed like any other Haitian woman— a shirt, a cotton dress down to about mid-calf and an orange and white striped scarf tied around her hair— except she was filthy and her clothes were ripped.

It was difficult to determine her age because she was coated in dirt, ash and soot. Her nappy hair was dusty and covered in twigs and what looked like maggots nestled in each disgusting lock. Tear-trails went from her wide, unblinking eyes, down her face and neck. The open sores on her knees, elbows and hands glistened.

Years later, after the World Trade Center fell and the images of New Yorkers walking around stunned, covered in dirt, ash and soot hit the air, I thought of the zombies again.

As the zombie walked past, the kids broke into a chant about a bloodthirsty general named Badagri, the spirit of war, keeper of the storm and sender of thunder and lightning.

Sitting there, in front of the gate as the zombie kept walking and the children chanted to a war spirit, I, for the first time as an adult, truly appreciated the power of religion and began to question my own beliefs.

And it was bad ass.

Sleep tight.

Please consider a donation to Partners In Health.

atsween: Twitter: The Criterion Collection What if Twitter…...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:33:53 -0800

atsween:

Twitter: The Criterion Collection

What if Twitter… came to life?

We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.

This is what they gave us.

We hope you enjoy it.

@poeks & @sween

This is the kind of shit I want to do with my life. @poeks, @sween

, great job!

Yeah. Last night. So fucked up.

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:57:12 -0800

Yeah. Last night. So fucked up.

On adulthood

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:36:28 -0800

Being an adult is filled with ah-ha moments. Like the first time you paid attention to international news or understood compound interest or like me, tonight, figured out that two airplane bottles of Rumple Minze were clogging the ice machine in the fridge. In other words: Drink.

samhey: jessieshmessie: samhey: Working on the clip for...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:05:00 -0800

samhey:

jessieshmessie:

samhey:

Working on the clip for Criterion, my son walked by, saw this image and asked, ‘Dad, how did you get Monkey to think?’

HEYSAM REAL ORIGINAL USE OF STOP ANIMATION AND THE MAPLE LEAF RAG !

Great minds think alike, Shmessie. Great minds. I claim complete ignorance of that film, but it is lovely and very well made. Only problem now that you’ve made the connection is that I will forever associate Delicious Monster with handjobs. Kind of gives new meaning to the name.

From now on, whenever I hear this song, I will call it The Handjob Rag. Thanks you two.

Miss Effie B.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:49:51 -0800

Miss Effie B.

Twitter / Search - #eatadick

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:22:59 -0800

Twitter / Search - #eatadick:

With love. You know who you are.

h/t @nostrich

Themes of the iPad Announcement

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:58:00 -0800

Many smart, wonderful people have written volumes about the iPad since the announcement. I keep replaying Apple’s January 27th iPad presentation in my head. Not because I’m interested in what multi-touch gestures were used or what this means to the future of Apple, human-computer interaction (HCI), software distribution or any number of things about the device itself. While interesting, we’ll have answers for that as the iPad SDK matures and when the iPad actually ships.

No, what I keep going back to are the broad themes of the iPad demo which are arguably the device’s killer features: Consumption, Presentation and the Future.

The Demo
Six minutes into the presentation, Steve Jobs stated that in order to create a new device between the iPhone and a laptop, it had to excel at certain operations. Specifically browsing, e-mail, photos, video, music, games and eBooks.

During the first demo, Jobs didn’t give the technical specs of the device other than its width and weight. He jumped right into the pleasant experience of consuming media and accessing information on the iPad while seated on a couch.

The second portion of the announcement focused on presentation or sharing. The iPad’s screen has a wide viewing angle making it easy to share content with another person or even an intimate group. Hook the iPad up to a projector and one can share with a larger group like a classroom or an auditorium. Finally, the iPad is a wireless device which allows a person to present or share publicly on the intranet or release an idea to the wilds of the Internet. The 3G version will allow you to do this from just about anywhere*.

So What
Big deal, right? So watching a video on iPad is easier on the eyes than on an iPod Touch. The form factor makes it easier to read an eBook than on a 15” MacBook Pro. So it’s Internet enabled. Whoa. Gee, I can hook it up to a projector. So what. There are other devices that allow you to do that already. Let’s look at couple of seemingly unrelated things; iLife and iWork and a research paper.

Apple’s iLife and iWork suites use the word “share” in several places within the UI. People understand sharing while computer scientists have had to train average computer users what “export” means over the past three decades of the personal computer. Sure it’s common now but sharing is something that humans do while exporting is done by machines. The sexiness of importing, exporting,rendering and the like is so very 1997. Or as Adam Lisagor (better) puts it:

What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re getting closer and closer to that happening. But there are still many layers between our intentions and our environment. As time progresses, we will strip away those layers one by one. And it’s always disruptive to do so.

Exporting is just one way to share.

The other day I linked to a research paper titled Research Instruction at the Point of Need. I’d encourage you to read the entire paper but in a nutshell:

“point of need,” [is] that moment in a student’s research process when she actually needs access to a certain kind of information.

Point of Need Instruction accelerates a student’s learning and retention because it keeps them engaged at the moment of their interest. In other words, the lab, library and tutors are at their fingertips or, at worst, in their hip pocket or backpack.

Since the iPhone, how many times have you said “If only there were some sort of hand held, Internet enabled device…” while out with friends, trying to remember the name of a character from a childhood TV show? Plenty. This is Point of Need. The iPhone commercials are demonstrations of the Point of Need.

Future?
But what about content creation? Too many people jumped on the lack of content creation with the iPad even though iWork looks pretty complete and Steve Sprang demoed Brushes, a painting application for iPhone and soon, iPad. They cite a lack of camera and the software keyboard as limiting factors. Frankly, they’re just small minded. As Neven Mrgan put it:

… think of the person for whom the iPad will be the first computer they use. They will come to it with no expectation of cameras, multitasking, Flash, or storage size. Now wait a few years (months?) and give them a desktop computer. They have to interact with it using these weird things on the desk which aren’t even where the content is. Like, you look here but you click here - crazy! You have to move “windows” around. And check out all those buttons. What, nothing happens when I tap and hold on this?

Now you tell me if that person, the person the future is made of, will leave their iPad because the PC has more gigahertz.

We don’t know what the person the future is made of™ will do with the iPad. Neither does Apple for that matter. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, did they see Podcasting as a thing or iTunes U or a place to store your medical records No, their focus was on the music industry and the personal music experience.

Apple didn’t spend much time on showing what could be created because they simply don’t know. Because they’ve been there before, they don’t want to narrow the focus of possibilities by showing what’s there today.

Intersection

This is why the iPad will be successful. It marries a concept from instruction and learning and that human need to share with haptic glass and an amazing assembly of technology.

Apple gets this like no other company.

Gadget fetishists, Windows/Linux fanboys and ~~Wall Street analysts~~ grammarians do not. Instead they’ve spent their energy collectively missing the point.

*Within AT&T’s coverage map. But I’ve discussed that before.

jimray: I ended up having to work the weekend I was supposed to...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:59:38 -0800

jimray:

I ended up having to work the weekend I was supposed to do my Criterion Collection video (which is awesome, btw) so I turned mine in late. Or, it was just too crappy to make the cut. Either way, this is MY blog, so, here it is!

Watch this.

"Avatar in IMAX 3D. Wow! I laughed. I cried. I’ve never experienced anything like this! After..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:59:30 -0800

“Avatar in IMAX 3D. Wow! I laughed. I cried. I’ve never experienced anything like this! After recovering from paying for a ticket, I went in.”

- @ThunderDolt

Do you remember last October when I wrote about how Walmart...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:03:53 -0800

Do you remember last October when I wrote about how Walmart sells sneakily smaller packages for their “lower prices,” so that they often actually cost MORE while bragging that they cost less? I used the example of Luvs diapers, which Walmart packages 70 to a box while Target puts 80 in a box: it SEEMS like the Walmart box costs less—-if you don’t happen to notice there are fewer diapers. WELL. Reader Christine sent me another example: I thought you would get a kick out of this one, please see the attached picture. I bought packs of Quilted Northern, 12 rolls each with identical packaging, one from each store. The roll on the left is Target, the one on the right is Wal Mart. Pretty funny huh? (via Swistle: Sneaky Sneaky SNAKY)

Wal*Mart is evil.

Our Lord Of Darkness (via Franco Brambilla)

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:09:55 -0800

Our Lord Of Darkness (via Franco Brambilla)

"For its part, Adobe would like to portray Flash as some noble gift that it has graciously bestowed..."

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:27:39 -0800

“

For its part, Adobe would like to portray Flash as some noble gift that it has graciously bestowed upon the world, leading to a utopia of ubiquitous porn clips, time-wasting tower defense games, and artsy “web sites” where you can’t link to anything specific. But it’s really about them trying to be the content gatekeeper instead of the content being in an open format.

Unlike Dowdell, the Macalope’s not going to issue a manifesto asking anyone at Adobe to talk about that.

”

- The Macalope Weekly: The Jerk Store

"While I was double dipping between the salsa and guacamole I started to weep. Is the closest I’ll..."

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:31:00 -0800

“While I was double dipping between the salsa and guacamole I started to weep. Is the closest I’ll get to a 3-way ass to mouth?”

-
Twitter / Albert

STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT

—Moltz

I know, I know. It’s sloppy. I should have actually edited this post before publishing but sometimes I get a little excited… and lazy. I was distracted. It’s a hell of a thing to have your life choices slap the fat dick of realization across your forehead, interrupting a delicious Mexican themed, afternoon snack. Plus, why it gotta be a dick?

“Is the closest I’ll get to a 3-way ass to mouth?” Doesn’t make much sense. Adding a comma, like so, “Is the closest I’ll get to a 3-way, ass to mouth?” makes the sentence clearer but implies that I’ve experienced ass hyphen to hyphen mouth sex.

I haven’t.

This really gets at the heart of the toot. I am not familiar with ATM, milking, rimming, foot rubs or any number of intriguing intimate acts; Including FFM+ATM. It’s unrealistic for me to think that what seems common-place on the Internet these days is possible for me to experience. Unless I make some drastic lifestyle changes or disregard my wedding vows, this won’t even make my bucket list. So I wept.

“Is this the closest I’ll get to a FFM 3-way or ass-to-mouth?”

I wept John and I’m OK with this. I am. Because this tweet is for me AND you’re right; I should try to be better.

OK. Enough navel gazing. Back to work, folks.

Click through. I mean it. Corporate Headshots via kimalah

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:04:25 -0800

Click through. I mean it.

Corporate Headshots

via kimalah

Last man standing

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:16:19 -0800

Last man standing

The Off-off-off-(off)-Broadway production of The J. Jonah...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:09:00 -0800

The Off-off-off-(off)-Broadway production of The J. Jonah Jameson Diaries.

Starring
John Moltz as J.
and
Jason Permenter as Parker

(the flick)

waxandmilk: Unsung Heroes of Black History: Panthro “And...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:10:47 -0800

waxandmilk:

Unsung Heroes of Black History: Panthro

“And despite the fact that Panthro, a black man of exceptional scientific expertise that far exceeds that of even the famed George Washington Carver, built the Thundertank with simple junk parts, the rest of the Thundereans made Panthro be the DRIVER OF THE FUCKING THUNDERTANK! They made him a fucking chauffeur! What kind of shit is that? Where else in history do you see this kind of hypocrisy? Did you ever see Lee Iacocca drive Chrysler car plant workers around? Does Wolfgang Puck ever bus tables? Did either one of those contemptible George Bushes ever offer to even so much as light a White House page’s cigarette? How many times must black men be the “Hokes” to countless Miss Daisies?”

HA Diplo + crew are pretty funny.

via maddecent