 /blag
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Welcome, Eli writes
here.
See also Imagery and his other projects. |
| The Web is mainstream. | 2 0 0 9 |
Nov 16 |
Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.
| this is how we will talk after symbols | 2 0 0 9 |
Jun 23 |
World Builder is a stunningly beautiful video.
A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.
| Credit Crisis visualized | 2 0 0 9 |
Mar 06 |
This is such a great animated explanation of the credit crisis—a success in using new media in the service of clarity. It almost makes me angry of all the sweet hours I spent in the Economist, Answers, Wikipedia wrangling with finance jargon.
| Elegance & quantified selfhood | 2 0 0 9 |
Feb 21 |
For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:
It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.
The thing that most grabbed me, though, was that I had just started making my own similar introspective list of my friends’ attributes, in the spirit of quantified selfhood. While I’m floored by Very Small Array’s commitment (it has been doing this for almost a decade—the chart above is just one of several great graphs and metapgraphs), my brief exercise in self knowledge has already told me two unexpected things: I have a history of liking extroverts and polyglots.| Quantity vs. Quality | 2 0 0 9 |
Feb 20 |
This rings so true it hurts.
| Starkly, selelectively nude, mecha-chimeric, cop femme | 2 0 0 9 |
Jan 24 |
Fascinating, so much more enthralling to me than most museum art. Notice the lobsterish, demonic, shielding, bloody left arm, the snaking, perforating tubes beneath, the right mecha cat-paw, the “fingering” finger within it, the cat-fox-shaped helmet, the nipple patches (that’s one badge you’ll pay attention to), the pubic paleness, the CAUTION - SEX TAPE yellow tape. Such a great image—and it’s not every day you get to make a word like mecha-chimeric.
| Axe effect discovered true, sort of | 2 0 0 9 |
Jan 02 |
As a man, perfume can boost your self-confidence and your way of carrying of yourself so that women, without needing to smell you, will find you more attractive.
Another freaky fact: you’re attracted to smells that hint of a different genetic mix to yours (and thus more evolutionary advantageous). For yourself, you tend to choose smells that more loudly proclaim your particular genetic mix.| Chimera fetish | 2 0 0 8 |
Sep 26 |
The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.
Reading the book, as many things else, got interrupted by the exile, but I’ve been possessed downloading ebooks lately and I just found a great HTML version of the book. Let the reading recommence!
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation.As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilty desire.Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck … not that she would have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
| Schismatrix Plus | 2 0 0 8 |
Jul 12 |
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
