It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people—they’re so stupid.
Source: laphamsquarterly.org
BlackBerry Future Concepts. Less space-age than Microsoft’s (even the one from 2009) but just as bullshit.
I understand that it’s fun to speculate about the Amazing World of Tomorrow, but demonstrating extremely specific use cases with extremely specific interfaces is just depressing.
They imply they’re part of some grand scheme of usability, a future where interfaces are smarter and easier. But if it were possible for these companies to conceive such things, why aren’t they doing it now?
Michael Bay films: Every explosion. I love the soothing steel-drum version of An der schönen blauen Donau.
Source: supercut.org
Massive collection of title screens tills from cinema 1900-now. Brilliant. So much to explore.
Source: annyas.com
FabuList - BlackBerry App World: terrible UI taken to a radical extreme of poo.
I especially love how the gallery of explanatory images are all too undersized to actually read.
If you’re curious what it would actually look like on your brand new BlackBerry PlayBook: http://crackberry.com/keep-track-your-projects-fabulist-blackberry-playbook
I don’t mean to be a snob or anything, but jeez.
Source: appworld.blackberry.com
Shape Type, the letter shaping game
Remember how I raved about Kern Type a little while ago? Mark MacKay, its designer, now has a new one where you have to whip letters into shape with Bezier curves.
Mmmm. Bezier.
My new favorite Tumblr of today, again courtesy of @astolpho. How does he find these things?
WHEREIN noses from photographs are made into turtleheads.
This is AWESOME.
Source: teenagemutantninjanoses
Cheeky prints and t-shirts from Division of Labor. “Stop tweeting boring shit.” Hee.
Source: divisionoflabor.com
The emotional shape of a story, by Kurt Vonnegut, with commentary by Yours F. Truly.
An excerpt of a longer talk; thankfully the original source provided a link to an illustrated transcript.
Hint: read the illustrated transcript after you read this. Or instead, I don’t care. Vonnegut’s more important than I am, but he’s dead and I’m alive, so make your choice.
My academic career, long and inconclusive as it was, started with a passionate flirtation with Theatre Studies, where my exposure to semiotics profoundly changed the way I viewed fiction.
Even more interesting was the vast set of analytical tools to which I was introduced in classes on dramaturgy. How to graph relationships or plotlines.
In practice I’ve found these methods to be way too much work and far too square for a writing rock-and-roller like myself. But simply being taught how to think about your story from a helicopter’s perspective, thinking about the significant events in a story and the slope of the emotional graph at any given point, has always stuck with me.
Here, in an illustrated transcript, Vonnegut graphs a few familiar stories with the book’s chronology Beginning-End on the X axis (he selected dominantly linear stories) and Good Fortune / Ill Fortune on the Y axis.
This is such a useful tool.
Take your favorite books. You probably remember the whole of the story, so try to draw it out like Vonnegut did. Broad strokes, whole cloth.
is there a pattern to the shapes of your favorite stories?
And what if you graph the stories you’ve written, of which you’re most proud?
Source: laphamsquarterly.org
Sentiment Analysis applied to the Bible: Fascinating statistics work on a well-known corpus.
Sentiment analysis algorithmically guesses whether a given phrase in a given language on a given subject has a positive (‘I enjoy milk’) or negative (‘I am deadly allergic’) charge.
Companies often hire analysis bureaus to perform these analyses on Twitter and the blogosphere to get aggregate opinions on their brand and products — it should yield better results than polling.
What’s particularly interesting in this analysis is observing the trends as the Bible progresses — though it should be noted that the order of the books in the Bible aren’t always based on their chronological order of writing.
Also note that negative sentiment makes no moral judgment. “I hate gays” and “I hate racism” are both considered negative sentiments; “I enjoy long walks” and “I enjoy seeing my enemies driven before me” are both positive.
But sentiment analysis still provides insights into the attitude of the writer. Notice how Psalms is overwhelmingly positive, and Judges is very negative.
Source: openbible.info
Does the homepage of The Verge look this ugly to everyone, or is it just me?
I have a hard time believing that these dudes spent so much time and thought on the excellent design and functionality of their new site, only to allow the article titles on their site’s debut home page rendered utterly illegible.
Then again, their articles, while awesome, defy Instapaper, so…
