Descending to a ghost hike.
Unf I love “fucks” pics, I want all the fucks
Spotting Aaron Paul at Coachella was maybe my most exciting celebrity sighting ever.
What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com (via felixsalmon)
We are doomed as a society.
HAPPY FRIDAY
(via maura)
Trying to think of a way to translate this quote to some other era of human history is causing my brain to shut down and take a nap under my desk.
(via maura)
Chris Ryan, about hologram Tupac, Hollywood Prospectus - ESPN.
I usually have a hard time getting into podcasts, but this one about Sunday night television and sometimes music from Grantland’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald has quickly become appointment listening.
Point/counterpoint to the previous.
This is a really good essay by Amanda Petrusich about the ways Instagram lets users “age” their digital camera phone shots with filters that mimic the look of various analog photo printing effects. I totally understand why people would look at this and think “ugh, too easy, cheap nostalgia,” etc. I am not a photographer anymore, but I have a degree in photography from Parsons School of Design, and I finished the program just as digital was being introduced to the curriculum, so I have a lot of first-hand experience with printing photographs. I could easily play the snob card here, but I can’t – though I really loved the printing side of photography and enjoyed the analog aspects of the craft that allowed for happy unrepeatable accidents that could yield great effects and unique objects, I just can’t get mad at people using Instagram or Photoshop to simulate these effects.
This is why: I just can’t see the difference between these automatic filters and effects pedals for guitars and other instruments. Effects pedals - particularly digital effects pedals – do more or less the same thing, and simulate analog sounds that could be achieved in homemade ways, like with the flanger effect. I am very pro-effects pedals in music, and don’t think anyone is wrong to use these shortcuts. The really good artists usually get creative with the pedals anyway, combining them in interesting ways or modifying them to get a precise signature sound.
Instagram gives its users the same freedom to juice up otherwise bland or ugly camera phone photos in the same way entry-level Danelectro pedals can make blah, mediocre chords played on a cheap guitar with unremarkable tone sound a bit better than it would otherwise. The problem with Instragram isn’t that it propagates cheap nostalgia but that it doesn’t yet offer users the fine control to adjust and mutate its out-of-the-box effects. I mean, yeah, you can do that stuff in Photoshop and other digital photo programs, but not in this particular mass-market app.
Yes, to all of this. In particular: I feel like there are just so many broad and not necessarily correct assumptions and assertions about the past and present and technology and progress in so many instacritiques of instagram that it’s really difficult to engage with the backlash in such a thoughtful way.
But, that said, as far as decisive moment authenticity goes, I much prefer Hipstamatic if only because it aims to simulate using camera and not a point and click effects suite.
Monika Aichele’s illustration for the New York Times Book Review’s take on the Tiger’s Wife. I finished reading it this week. With its vague mournful realism intertwined with light fabulist recollection it felt a little like a more restrained/grounded Everything Is Illuminated; so obviously I liked it a lot.
Modified-bear at Coachella
Aaargh. Somehow it never occurred to me that this was anything but a feltcraft Deadmau5. Obviously, it was a Radiohead bear.
I love hearing about all of these rules, logistics, and organizational quirks. My only complaint about this piece is that I wish that it included even more of the behind-the-scenes details that I find disproportionately fascinating.
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
Reader Submission: Title and Redesign by Jimmy Lo.
I laughed even though it isn’t true.
