Ok, this video is funny for several reasons. Primarily, because it totally captures the viewing experience, in every way. The bad acting, stupid plot and feeling of “what did I just do for two hours? I don’t even remember…”

 Watching this video is actually like watching the whole movie, as the creators explain:

Edward leaves Bella after NOTHING HAPPENS at a party.
Bella spends a good third of the film wallowing in her misery instead of getting the hell over it.
Bella helps Jacob rebuild old motorcycles while NOTHING HAPPENS.
Bella leads Jacob on but NOTHING HAPPENS.
Edward almost kills himself BUT THEN DOESN’T.
Edward gets in a fight with the Volturi but IS THEN FORGIVEN.
Edward and Jacob make some kind of pact, THEN JACOB LEAVES.
Edward asks for Bella’s hand in marriage, THEN THE CREDITS ROLL.

And remember how I was all, “I think part of what bothers me so much about this movie isn’t that it exists, but what girls are taking away from it. Wired shares my concern, in their Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight. Including:

• It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.
• Even though you have no intention of dating an alternative male who expresses interest in you, it is fine to string the young man along for months. Also, you should use him to fix things for you. Maybe he’ll even buy you something.
• You should use said male to fix things because girls are incapable of anything mechanical or technical.
• When making or watching a major feature film, you should gleefully embrace the 20 minutes of plot it provides in between extended segments of vacant-eyed silence and self-indulgent, moaning banter.

Also good, in that Wired article, a link to the beautiful people who gave us MST3K “riffing” on Twilight.

The Blue Water Revolution

Farmed Tuna from Kona Blue I have not tried, but it on first look seems to be a novel idea.

Yoga podcasts by Peter Barnett who is also the owner of Black Dog Yoga Studios in Sherman Oaks, California

Airtime: FRI 27NOV 2009 1:56 PM ETWired Magazine has opened its annual “Wired Store” in lower Manhattan, with Joe Brown, Wired Magazine Associate Editor. Hot devices include the Dyson Air Multiplier and Spot Satellite GPS.

At the beginning of summer I clicked through to a forum debating the development of DSLRs beginning to include HD video recording. A group of Oregonians had utilized a Nikon D90 to shoot a feature length movie and I mentioned this to my editor who encouraged me to dig around and build a story. Sent out some e-mails to the filmmakers, a camera reviewer/photographer and a favorite indie director of mine. My editor liked the facts and color commentary I had collected when he finally got around to reading the draft, just not how I had written it.

He proposed a redirection and focus but I was well in the midst of getting ready to move. One evening I brought my notes up to a cafe by my parents’ (where I lived for a month before disembarking) to try and make sense of it all and failed miserably. Flew across the world and got my bearings before making another stab at it, which essentially meant rewriting the fucker, double-checking for new developments in the field and seeing if anything new was going on with the film.

The second copy went ignored for a while until my editor had the time to go over it. Together we worked out some clarifications and then he posted it, telling me I was holding the top slot of the front page overnight. Why? That answer remains a mystery, but any and all zombies awake at indecent hours had the opportunity to see me in all my glory underneath and Apple ad.

Evan Ratliff is a contributing writer for Wired magazine, and in August, he announced he would attempt to disappear as a part of a story he wrote for the magazine on people who left their lives behind. Ratliffe and Wired offered a $5000 bounty ($3000/$2000) for the person(s) who found him. Check out the story at Wired magazine.

A massive manhunt materialized. Simultaneously, here reality disappeared.

Hundreds of people, for a multitude of reasons, began hunting Ratliffe. I don’t blame them. $5000? Prestige? A challenge? All worthwhile pursuits, in general. But this exercise missed the main point: while Ratliffe became paranoid, worried that people were following him, searching for him (and he was right), he was unique. Most people who try to disappear don’t challenge the readers of a widely-read magazine to find them.

While some disappearances do inspire manhunts (when the disappearee has committed a heinous crime worthy of pursuit), seldom do they publicize their intentions (or offer rewards for finding them). So my question, quite simply, is this: for normal people, not guilty of a crime, how easy is it to disappear?

Who hasn’t thought about it?

Yes, but how hard is it for someone to disappear in the digital age? Author Evan Ratliff goes on the lam for WIRED Magazine with that question in mind. The article “Gone” reads like a techno-thriller,but ends with a poignant twist that touches the heart of story, and why we need one.

Turns out the biggest hazard is loneliness.

He writes:

Had I shown that a person, given enough resources and discipline, could vanish from one life and reinvent himself in another? . . . More than all that, I’d discovered how quickly the vision of total reinvention can dissolve into its lonely mundane reality. Whatever reason you might have for discarding your old self and the people who went with it, you’ll need more than a made-up backstory and a belt full of cash to replace them.

The story of what happens when you don’t have a story is worth reading.

Trek Bicycle and Wired Magazine have teamed up to produce a limited edition Project One Trek Madone, which will be featured exclusively at the Wired Pop-Up store in NYC.
Project One is Trek’s version of NIKEiD, a service that allows you to customize thousands of color, component, and paint options to build your dream bike.

info: LimitedHype

Last week saw an announcement that posh publishers Condé Nast and Adobe are teaming up to build an online eReader platform specifically for magazines, most notably a digital launch of Wired next year.

Wired UK already had a digital presence on the Ceros platform for at least the first few issues. Now however it doesn’t seem to be continuing or at least I can’t find it. Maybe this is in preparation for next years launch?

I find this whole idea very intriguing. Condé Nast have been quite slow on jumping aboard the digital magazine bandwagon. We had Wired UK and now have a digital GQ which has received a lot of praise despite it being very average. And eReaders? Does anyone really think by the middle of next year eReaders will be capable of displaying rich media interactive magazines? They can’t even do colour yet.

And what of Adobe’s investment? Are they finally fed up of waiting for Apple to release Flash on the iPhone? Do they know more than rumors of Apple’s impending Silverlight competitor, and have decided to beat them to the punch?

Conde Nast have declined to speculate on their cash investment, but could it be linked to Hurst Publishing’s $200 million investment in eInk? And the subsequent development of their own magazine reader…

There are a lot of questions, to which I have bugger all answers. Obviously Condé believe portable technology is nearly good enough to make their dreams a reality. I don’t. Unless of course their dreams are quite dull.

I think eReaders are still 2 years away from being viable portable magazine readers. I think Hurst are the ones to watch and I think a real change could be instigated by the rumored Apple Tablet and whether that supports Flash or their own, new alternative.

One thing I do agree with however and thoroughly support is Condé Nast Chief Executive Chuck Townsend’s comment “We can’t sit back and wait for somebody else to do this.” A step in the right direction can only ever be welcomed and any investment by publishing companies is absolutely necessary. I just wish someone could shed some light on this…

Bruce Sterling. Atemporality & The Passage of Time. 2009.

Critic, science fiction writer and noted Net theorist Bruce Sterling speaking on atemporality and the passage of time as reflected in images at the EGS in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in May 2009. Sterling spoke about computer security, post modernity, time, the digital frontier, the nature of the archive. Sterling attempts in his lecture to “get away from words” in order to focus on an atemporal sensibility in order to get the audience to see images in the way he sees them.  Using a different approach to a human standpoint of time, Sterling attempts to examine futurity, history and the present from the standpoint of “contemporary temporalism.” Looking at the archive and our relationship to objects from Leonardo Da Vinci to contemporary fetishes, Sterling examines each subject from the standpoint of atemporality. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland.

As well as being a leading science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling has been involved with numerous projects and written several books of futurist theory. He was the founder of the Dead Media Project, an on-line reliquary, or archive, to forgotten, or dead, media technologies.  In this way, he looked to the past through the future, anticipating, almost, in the shininess of new media, its utter destruction.  He also founded the Viridian Design Movement, an environmental aesthetic movement founded on the ideas of global citizenship, environmental design and techno-progressiveness. His numerous book length essays both question and promote how the future is shaping our concepts of self, time and space. In “Shaping Things” (2005) offer a history of shaped objects, moving from the most rudimentary hand-made artifacts through to the complex machinery which defines our current existence. In “Tomorrow Now; Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” (2002), Sterling examines how today’s technologies will affect our future lives.  Written in a wry, intelligent style, Sterling’s book makes bold claims on the future, examining scientists use of medicine to extend our lives while examining at the same time our seemingless bottomless thirst for oil. Sterling’s most acclaimed book, “The Hacker Crackdown; Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier” (1993) is a deep history of the birth of cyberspace, following the periphery of the development of technology from the first telephone hackers to the government’s attack on several prominent hackers in 1990.

Bruce Sterling’s novels incluce Intuition Ocean (1977), The Artifical Kid (1980), Heavy Weather (1994), Zeitgiest (2000), and most recently The Caryatids (2009). His essay collection and non-fiction books include The Hacker Crackdown; Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier (1993), Tomorrow Now; Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), and Shaping Things (2005). He currently blogs at Beyond the Beyond for Wired Magazine.

Shit, I’ve been busy. I’ll explain, but first part of my excuse is:

Got assigned to profile a New York photographer who mashes up prints and exposures. Didn’t really know how to deal with the obtuse, approach but I tried to represent the guy as fairly as possible– my editor really likes to trim quotes down. I’ve never seen anyone get savaged by Wired readers like this guy and I do feel bad for him.

My good friend Pete suggested, then insisted I interview a San Francisco shooter named Michael Jang. I hadn’t interviewed anyone since I was fourteen or fifteen and oblivious to most forms of discomfort so it was particularly scary, not to mention I had a black eye and was missing part of a tooth at the time. Jang didn’t seem to mind and was a gracious subject and host, talking for over an hour about everything under the sun. Putting everything into a cohesive narrative was a challenge and paring it down to internet-ready chunks of reading was painful but eventually we managed to come up with the article. Then Jang freaked out about how he was being represented and a lot of back and forth took place over the e-mail until radio silence settled in.

I interviewed him at the end of May or maybe the first week of June. Eventually he made a couple simple clarifications and held his breath hoping the world wouldn’t hate him or savage him like Brett Beyer. The world didn’t and I think everyone’s happy with the outcome.

After another round of budget cuts and layoffs at Wired the culture editor was looking for people willing to write for bylines. Okay, originally it was introduced as really cheap and then when I actually was contacted by the editor we were down to bylines. Anyways, I started trying to figure out what constitutes Wired culture and my first attempt resulted in an examination of the commodification of nostalgia, ignoring the fact that nostalgia often was a commodity to begin with.

Still struggling to understand Wired culture and a blurb on the SLPC blog mentions this fear-mongering game. Checked it out and e-mailed the makers who were delusional, paranoid and didn’t believe I was actually writing anything for Wired. I almost didn’t get to prove them wrong because the Underwire editor was sick and overrun for two weeks while the article languished in draft-land. I’m afraid it got published a little late to have really reaped the rewards of controversy but it’s nice to finally see it up.

My Worth The Dough postings have been opinions by me, the consumer, on whether a product is worth my hard-earned cash to purchase. Robert Capps of Wired Magazine discussed the corporate side in his recent article, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” He discusses the success of some simpler products to show why it’s not always WTD for companies like Sony and Canon to develop complex and expensive products. He even goes on to talk about other industries like the military and medical field and how the most advanced and full featured products and services aren’t always the best or most useful. I thought it was an interesting read so check it out!

(via WIRED magazine’s RAW FILE blog)

Things have changed in the 30 years since Jang began taking pictures. Digital processes and instant communication have saturated our culture with images — to the arguable detriment of aesthetic standards. Professional photographers find themselves crowded out by amateurs while the market for their work shrinks.

- – -

Jang: In the ’70s you could pick a subject: freaks, twins, brothers and sisters, and you’d be the first one to get it. Everyone’s done everything now. You’ve got dead body parts — we’ve done everything. So how do you carve out a niche for yourself now as a photographer? Is it more about the best person who can market themselves? The best schmoozer? The person who can make the connections? It’s a whole new ball game. I don’t know what I would do now.

Part of the desire and drive to want to shoot something is because you know no one’s doing it. Remember when Hussein got hung, someone got it who just happened to be going up the stairs. That’s access. Even if you’ve gone to five years of school or worked 20 years, some person that’s just in there has got the shot because they’re already in there.

In the ’70s I happened to get a guy who committed suicide in Golden Gate Park. I knew I had the only pictures — I sold that stuff to the 11 o’clock news. But now it’s like, “send it to us for free” and you go, “yeah, I can get my name on there.” That kind of sucks for photographers making a living, right? It’s just so diluted now.

I just don’t know if this stuff is really going to help you take a better picture. It used to be like, wow, this is a good picture but now you’ve seen so many pictures — you’ve seen it! How many ways can you shoot something? How many different subject matters are there that you haven’t seen?

It might be a wonderful evolution of things. Maybe what I’m doing is kind of just a period. Documentary photography, I don’t know. And what would we call what’s happening now? I don’t know. My God, with Facebook and everything, there’s just so many images now that are out there.

Photo by Spadix

“We recognize the importance and value of being engaged online, BUT, our IT team has a lot of concerns about providing access to social media.”

Ouch.

Unfortunately, IT concerns continue to be a major social media roadblock for many businesses and organizations that have to maintain complicated Web infrastructures. To date, I have yet to hear of any social media site being solely responsible for taking down a company’s IT system. The reality is that the use of social media sites is no more of an IT threat than general employee use of email and the Internet.

Most social networking sites do capture some degree of personal information which is of course always riskier than capturing no information at all. That is why companies are now regularly supplementing existing email/Internet policies with social media policies that guide employee use of sites in the workplace. An IT supporting boss may counter by arguing that providing access to social media is simply flipping a green light for employees to waste time.

Let’s put the obvious aside for a moment (social media’s overall value for relationship building, brand extension and direct engagement) to directly address the concern of social media as a “time suck.”

What’s the Primary Threat to IT Blocking Access to Social Media?

Creativity.

Last week, I was reading Clive Thompson’s “Why an idling mind is the mother of invention” article in the latest issue of Wired (seriously, read this article). Clive struck a chord with a topic that’s been on my mind for some time. He notes that our current work culture is obviously heavily concerned with employee focus  and productivity. He then goes on to question whether we might all be more productive if employees were encouraged to allow our minds to drift throughout the day.

Wait a minute…

I know what you’re thinking. We’re not talking about hour-long work naps (though I have heard stories…luckies…) or complete disengagement from work during the day. Rather, Clive poses a strong argument around the notion that allowing employees to escape Word and Excel documents to sift through Facebook, post some tweets or take in a couple YouTube videos can actually be quite beneficial.

I for one, could not agree more – and not just because of my job title. If you’re like me, I’m a creative dweller as opposed to a creative firecracker. Rarely do I roll into a brainstorm session and churn up a final concept within an hour. Rather, to Clive’s point, I drift. My best ideas come when I least expect them. On the train ride to work, scrolling my Twitter stream, out on a run, surfing around the Onion, strolling the city on a photo shoot or mindlessly strumming the guitar. That’s when lightning strikes.

It certainly would be amazing to generate killer creative on demand. Luckily, I have a boss that realizes this is not the case. We’re regularly encouraged to get out of the office for a stroll, take breaks to bounce around and are encouraged to keep tabs on online marketing trends and social media. The result? A workplace opens the doors to a creative firestorm.

Gone are the days of process in/process out. If you want to start seeing some new ideas, a twist on the old model, a step forward for your company, open up those IT roadblocks and encourage employees to get active online. I guarantee you’ll start hearing a lot more brainstorms kick off with the following statement:

“Ooohh, did you all see the {website, video, tweet, etc.} that was kind of like this?”

-Scott

Did you know that the producers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 “encouraged the show’s viewers to videotape their copyrighted shows, and pass them along to friends — creating that sought after word-of-mouth buzz”?

Interesting article at Wired Magazine called Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media.

          Remember those amazing print sources full of information from yesteryear? No, not newspapers. The ones printed on glossy paper. I hear you thinking catalogs, which is close, but no. I’m talking about magazines and other periodicals like professional journals. While many of our young students may view magazines as quaint old disposable technology from a bygone era, we at the HHS Library Media Center still value and promote their use and usability.

          In the past, good libraries were measured by how many periodicals they carried and warehoused (remember the old guide to periodic literature … yeah, neither do most people). Nowadays, students often turn to Google and Wikipedia as their first (and unfortunately, their only information sources). Of course, we work hard to teach them that they should be using subscription databases such as those found through their public libraries, but I also remind them to turn to the web-sites of magazines and journals that we carry in our library.

          Every year, I try to update our magazine subscriptions according to feedback I get from our faculty, staff and students. Some publications are staples such as Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Scientific American, National Geographic, Discover, and Sports Illustrated. Other titles get shuffled around, as we try to find a balance between entertaining, informative and school appropriate publications. Here then, are four of my favorites from our newstand.

• Archaeology: New to our shelves, this publication comes from the Archaeological Association of America. I love this magazine because it is at the intersection of so many subjects that fascinate me such as art, history, ancient civilizations and science. There are many great pictures and articles about people at work discovering the truth about our common past.
• ID: This title is also new to our shelves and so far it has not disappointed. Full of beautiful photographs of mostly ordinary products given new appeal and flavor by design students, artists and commercial manufacturers.
• UTNE Reader: Their tagline is “the best of the alternative press”, and it’s a pretty accurate description. I discovered this magazine when I was in grad school and enjoy their offbeat, but interesting selections. One story in the latest issue for example, warns that, “Your Pet is a Global Warming Machine”. It seems Fido’s got a larger footprint than a Hummer. How cute would a puppy sized Hummer be?
• WIRED: Fifteen years ago, I used to find this magazine’s layout and design really annoying. But we’ve both changed a lot over that time, and now I find myself waiting for the next issue. Their website is also a great place to visit, combining good writing with graphics that are second to none. Whatever you do, don’t steal the LMC issue before I’m done reading it.

          I hope you find something interesting on the list, and invite you to stop by and have a good casual read. Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great Friday.

Copyright © henry toromoreno, 2009. All rights reserved

Chris Keating stuck two two quarters in the New Wave Coffee Button-O-matic and what came out, “cheered up an otherwise gloomy day filled with a friend in the hospital, a parking ticket and finding my passenger side mirror on the hood of my car.”  It was a gold-plated mystery button designed by Jennifer Daniel for Series 10, limited to one per Busy Beaver Button-O-matic with an edition of thirty buttons across the country.

Click here to visit the Jennifer Daniel website to see currency-inspired designs for The New York Times, Faesthetic Magazine, and Wired Magazine.  Her words about the Button-O-matic Series 10 are simple:

₤€$$ !$ MØR€ ¥€T I WANT MØR€

Click here to cruise BusyBeaver.net

1. And the secret to a happy marriage is. . . – finding a younger and smarter wife:

The secret to a happy marriage for men is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than you, say UK experts.

And in related news, money can be used to buy goods and services.

2. Anti-vaccinationists like Skepacabra’s recent commenter J.B. Handley prove nothing is off limits when attacking critics – Several days ago Amy Wallace wrote an in depth piece on Dr. Paul Offit and the history of anti-vaccination movement in Wired magazine. In response, JB Handley wrote an essay using rape imagery to describe Wallace’s relationship with her interview subject, Offit (which he then quickly removed and replaced with Jonestown Massacre imagery by the time I read it on Age of Autism). Anti-vaccinationists have since threatened and intimidated Wallace as well as calling her a “cunt,” because that’s what classy folk they are. David J Kroll also defends Wallace here.

3. What did Cancer Quack Hulda Clark die from last month? – Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

That’s right. According to her death certificate, the woman who claimed to possess the cure for all cancer (as well as all disease) died of…cancer.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-01/st_3st

(from the linked Wired magazine article): 

Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

It so happened that a key sentence fell between my editing fingers while publishing Annie Shum’s splendid post Cloud Computing: Agile Deployment for Agile QA Testing. Here is the corrected paragraph with the missing sentence highlighted:

By providing virtually unlimited computing resources on-demand and without up-front CapEx or long-term commitment, QA/load stress and scalability testing in the Cloud is a good starting point. Especially, the flexibility and on-demand elasticity of the Cloud Computing meet the iterative requirements of Agile on an on-going basis. More than likely it will turn out to be one of the least risky but quick ROI pilot Cloud projects for enterprise IT. Case in point, Franz Inc, opted for the Cloud solution when confronted with the dilemma of either abandoning their critical software product testing plan across dozens of machines and databases or procuring new hardware and software that would have been cost-prohibitive. Staging the stress testing study in Amazon’s S3, Franz completed its mission within a few days. Instead of the $100K capital expense for new hardware as well as additional soft costs (such as IT staff and other maintenance costs), the cost of the Amazon’s Cloud services was under $200 and without the penalty of delays in acquisition and configuration.

Reading the whole post with this sentence in mind makes a big difference… And, it is is a little different from my partner Cote’s perspective on the subject…

My apology for the inconvenience.

Israel