“girls”

Amazing how compelling a dollop of interactivity an underwear catalog makes. (via reddit)

I figured someone had to have done something like this for hardcore porn. Apparently, the Virtual sex with.. series is just that. (Via NYT) Anyone tried it?

Or how about a 360 interactive a la Apple product showcase? Someone has to have done something like that but my google fu fails me. Anyone knows of something like that?

When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.

It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.

It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.

An important book, sure to change many lives.

Believe.

I can barely believe that this blog has been up for 2 years already (!) and I had’t yet posted this quote, which is one of all my all time favorites.

Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism—modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste—nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt—what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess—no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)

Of course I couldn’t have been the only one obsessed about 5th Element’s Leeloo. It’s just that it only occurred to me today to look for likeminded people. Indulge,

Aw, so young yet so fetishful already.

Sergio (MdC), one of my best friends, went last sixmonth to Ciudad Juarez^WP for a paid internship he got through his school. He went there with a schoolmate that went for the same reason. This roommate, I learned a couple of days ago, turns out to have Gael Garcia^WP as a cousin. Gael Garcia dated (dates?) Natalie Portman^WP So You → Me → Sergio → Roommate → Gael Garcia → Natalie Portman makes for five degrees of separation. Which is a deep, marvelous fact about the world that you should ponder at length.

(Five degrees is only an upper bound^WP. You, dear reader, could be even closer to Natalie—if so, please detail in the comments. You could even be Natalie herself—if so, my cell number’s on the left. Thanks!)

It was a very simple idea—a girl and a boy, in the subway—and yet actually drawing it was a nightmare. There are any number of things I would do different for my next webcomic. I guess that means the effort was worth it: much was learned.

So, again, the idea is a girl and a boy in the subway (I used this Flickr photo to “remember” the subway). None of them can muster the courage to speak to each other, none of them can come up with a clever excuse for starting the conversation. Until the girl realizes there’s no bad excuse for meeting someone. And that is her excuse. That’s it.

Reminds me a lot of an elevator sign I scrawled years ago.

I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:

Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.

More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.

I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.

Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.

The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:

Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.

I’ve been staring at this strip all day, pasted it on my wall, read all the strips from its parent webcomic (xkcd) —and still it dazzles me. It has got to be among the best I’ve ever read. Quirky, sexy, naive, upbeat—makes me happy every time.

Oh boy, I really love this strip. I’m going to be pasting it everywhere… :)

Dreams comes close after it; Pong, Donald Knuth, M.C. Hammer Slide, Words that end in gry, and Moral Relativity are also keepers; and both Escher Bracelet and Sudoku are almost single-panel-ly perfect in their simplicity.

Almost got myself killed driving—too distracted—to the worst theater performance of my life. Saw a girlfriend’s mean true colors. Lost my car keys, panicked, found them later in my own satchel. Back home, found the little brother of one of my high school’s closest friends died tonight. Ran at 2AM to the wake, dazed, crashed into the neighbour’s pickup. So many old friends there, so adult now. And my friend impossibly tall, so beautiful, so sad—his little bro killed himself.