A fairly exhaustive inventory of each tree in San Francisco

"And so to provide myself with some new co-ordinates by which I could situate myself, I found myself using the Classical distinction between otium and negotium (disengagement from and engagement with the world, respectively; see glossary) to rough out the zones of my life, give it some sort of broad form: like scratching out the perimeter of a new city in the dry earth with a pair of oxen and a plough."

As with every chapter of Anatomy of Norbiton, which I graze through slowly on Instapaper, this is a goddamn joy to read.

I alert twitter users that they typed sneak peak when they meant sneak peek.

artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city

"Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. The app combines directions generated by a routing service... with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, among others."

"Beliefs and actions are like two separate musical tones, each with its own pitch, each repeating at a certain wavelength. Integrity is when the two come together, when beliefs and actions are in total alignment. A certain cosmic vibration occurs — there is resonance."

One of the nicer tributes to Steve Jobs, and an interesting hypothesis as to why the passing of a corporate CEO is so affecting to so many.

"...To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity."

"Could a painting on a dope dealer’s storefront be the last work of Jean-Michel Basquiat?"

Interesting perspective on the idea of an artist's estate scrubbing lesser/morally compromised works from his oeuvre. Here is another rhetorical question: Are Basquiat's art dealers any less culpable in his death than his drug dealers?

How to work (for Tom Sachs)

Generates loading animations without images. It's the small things.

"So instead of an independent born-digital press, publishing next-generation multimedia novels (or magazines or textbooks or children’s books or cookbooks), Facebook will probably get marginally better iOS apps... We sorely need independent innovation in digital publishing. We need talented people who are willing to try things. Meanwhile, all of the money, attention and technological skill is marching in the opposite direction. Most big media companies with plenty of capital and deep technical talent see few if any reasons to innovate or invest in books."

The selling of Push-Pop Press to Facebook: another of the ways that the big tech companies--Facebook, Google and yeah, Apple--are ultimately stifling innovation (the light, nimble, avant-garde kind), just by virtue of the money they can throw around. If you're serious about what you're making, don't sell your company.

"How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force... During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt." Etc.

"The Anatomy of Norbiton is a field guide to Norbiton: Ideal City, and a manual of the Failed Life."

"There is no paradigm for this kind of place. Accidental Norbiton is contingent, marginal, superfluous, an ugly necessity; it is like the wires coiled under your desk, behind your bookcases; it is like the suitcases gathering dust under your bed, on top of your wardrobe; an adjunct to living, part of the logistics, the bureaucracy, never what you might call life itself, the movement and centre and focus of which seem to prevail elsewhere... Perfect, then, for a life of accidental failure. Welcome to Norbiton."

A disorientingly thorough exegesis of a vaguely Ballardian(-sounding) shithole outside London. This is what the internet was made for. All places of sufficent size should have a quiet, depressed bureaucrat whose job it is to write things like this.

"But then what to fund? It would have to stress individuality over corporate conformity, be 'inner-directed' as opposed to 'outer-directed,' hard instead of soft, and it would have to outshine Soviet art in the eyes of Europeans, speaking in a visual language they could understand, but modifying it in a way that was distinctly American. And it would have to clearly say: Freedom."

I knew Abstract Expressionism was deliberately promoted as an arm of the Cold War, but I had no idea how instrumental the establishment of the NEA was in this movement. Fascinating take on America's relationship to national arts funding, particularly the idea of "highbrow" culture ever serving as a marker of national identity.

And then:

"Now there’s a question worth asking: If the story of the Endowment in the 70s is a story of decentralization and pluralism, if the Endowment was funding community arts centers and youth programs and potters and metalsmiths and weavers and textile museums and mimes and jazz musicians and Hispanic art, to whom, exactly, did the NEA have 'no real value'?"

Interesting to note that without the specter of the USSR to define ourselves in contrast to, America is no longer concerned with promoting the fiction that artists are free to do whatever they want here.

"Art's not about making a sculpture out of scratch. I mean, where do you even find scratch in 2011? I thought we ran out of scratch in like the 60s after the Vietnam war."

So good. I honestly don't know why I persist in living sometimes.

"I can't possibly sit on all these chairs: ART."

This was deserved. I'm sorry for everything.

"It is a give-and-take between an idea, what one might call 'text', and what is recorded using the medium as 'subtext'... The text, which I regard as a private matter, must be able to stand being dragged diagonally across the canvas. If it loses something along the way, so much the better, since it then gains something that it may have urgently needed: sensuality and a truth that is rooted in non-verbal space."

>>-♥--> I could quote this entire article:

"Solutions don’t come into it. My pictures supposedly have a vital quality, like an animal, a living thing. There is no need to understand, only to feel that this creature is, to the greatest possible degree, at peace with itself. It is not always possible to realise, but that’s how I imagine a functioning picture. As soon as I have the feeling that the thing has blood circulating through it, a nervous system, a skeleton, then questions as to the message become completely marginal."

Time-based Art Forum

"My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine."

47-year experiment finally confirms that gravity is a depression in space-time and that a space-time vortex exists around Earth, as predicted by Einstein.

Mark Bittman's 25 favorite Minimalist recipes.

An exhaustive list of (legitimate) places/things/ways you can opt out.

"In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all..."

Did you get the memo? This is the memo.

Proper studio setup for documenting art/design work.

"Between 1887 and 1892, John C.H. Grabill sent 188 photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Grabill is known as a western photographer, documenting many aspects of frontier life — hunting, mining, western town landscapes and white settlers’ relationships with Native Americans."

"Situationist is an iPhone app that makes your everyday life more thrilling and unpredictable. It alerts members to each other's proximity and gets them to interact in random 'situations'."

A truly Situationist app probably wouldn't curate the suggested situations, but that's a minor quibble. Now if they had only coded it in such a way that it destroyed all other iPhone apps by proximity.

Webfont kits for "the best available ampersand." - &y

"After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pâté, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction. The fat clings to the roof of my mouth with the oleaginous insistence of dentist’s wax."

There is no writing as gratifying as a florid cataloging of complaints.

I call dibs on "Atlas Plume" and "Lifelike Pancake Carcass."

"So most people buying modern art are just paying for the
privilege to participate in the in-joke of which they are the
punch-line."

A Canadian mining town that no longer exists. Pretty marvelous treatment of analog materials, and one of the better examples of website-as-documentary so far.

"Over the last few years, I've been collecting examples of metagames — not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames."

Amazing material here.

"We need a starting point. We know HTML is the future so why not build a core design template for long form tablet reading? With this in mind, I set out to build just that. The end result is called Bibliotype. It’s a simple set of CSS, HTML, and JS files that provide a base for anyone looking to bring long form reading to tablets (be it in a CMS, blog, iOS app—anything using WebKit as a renderer)."

Also includes some good, common-sense considerations for designing for the small screen.

"Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input."

Incredible.

"For as long as two months at a time, I couldn't get down the stairs. Bathing became nearly impossible. Once a week or so, I sat on the edge of the tub and rubbed a washcloth over myself. The smallest exertion plunged me into a 'crash.' First, my legs would weaken and I'd lose the strength to stand. Then I wouldn't be able to sit up. My arms would go next, and I'd he unable to lift them. I couldn't roll over. Soon, I would lose the strength to speak. Only my eyes were capable of movement. At the bottom of each breath, I would wonder if I'd be able to draw the next one."

Brutal description of 15 years with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

"By this measure, the printed book lasts forever, but the digital book—as yet—does not. A cast iron pan, properly cared-for, will last forever; a cheap aluminum pan may not. A well-crafted chair, loved by its owner, will last forever; an allen-wrench constructed Ikea chair will not. Forever, then, is defined by the presence of two unique but necessary components: the physical ability to survive one hundred years (give or take a few), and the presence of a caretaker."

Of course she's right. But, freed from it's organic, decaying, pulpy prison, the *text* can and should last forever, regardless of what happens to the book. Or eBook. Ideally, immortality will come from ever wider (and less corporeal) dissemination and translation. We have enough simple and open source formats ("well-crafted" HTML will see us far into the future). What we need is some kind of open source standard for future-proofing *hardware*. The people who crack that one open deserve Gutenberg status.

Sad but ultimately necessary. The retirement of MAYORBOB (just blinded you with cred) and that time the site went down for--what?--a month? pretty much killed it a long time ago. Still, I spent some futile seconds there. Every second of 2001-2, for example.

Also, yes: ha ha that there's a thread on Metafilter announcing the death of Plastic. How many good years does Metafilter have left? 5? 10?

Still and all, I would sacrifice Plastic.com in order to bring Suck.com or Feedmag back from the dead. Or--better yet--Word.com, which was worth a million Plastics.

Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards.

"There’s a jungle inside Vietnam’s mammoth cavern. A skyscraper could fit too. And the end is out of sight."

The perfect place to film a movie.

"Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago they had despaired of the job and surrendered. But the rain paid no attention to them…New York people never lived in houses or even in burrows. They inhabited cells in stone cliffs. They timed the cooking of their eggs by the nearest traffic light. If the light went wrong, so did the eggs…

'I don’t like civilization,' she said, to the rain."

The unsolved disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett, child author and my new life hero. Here is more:

"My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together — with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money."

Oh shit.

An epic linkdump from this new thing I'm doing: America WTF.

Everything is there.

"Now and then at night the image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter round which everything festers, throbs, and boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were about to ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of peace."

Just keeps going.

"Refusing either of these positions, this talk asks: what does opening up content do? What does the open both make possible and close down? Is open content enough? How, in other words, should the open be the beginning rather than the end of the discussion?"

Who is the "I" who learned these things?

An introduction to creating photo apps for the iPhone using openFrameworks, based on the tutorial by Atsushi Tadokoro.

"Documentary series in which 5 abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about."

Oldie but goodie: "The web is my medium of choice, not a medium of last resort."

An exhaustive introduction to Christian eschatology.

"Their ideas are not new. It is Guy Debord’s détournement turned loose on geography, Situationism without the politics...Yet these allusions betray UX’s modest code—to do interesting things without permission. This credo allows for superficial punkery, sneaking into backyards, but considered seriously, it becomes a formula for being brave, for pursuing dreams..."

“...'It’s a typically Parisian phenomenon,' Kunstmann sighs. 'Nostalgia for a period we didn’t know. Areas ‘flashed’ in time. The work of UX is to de-flash, to thaw, to transform.'"

Devolves into a weird conflict between elitism and populism and then further devolves into a literal whodunit, but the emphasis on misdirection and secrets is interesting. Marvelous intersection of secrecy, bureaucratic face-saving and French hubris. It's a ballsy move in this day and age to model your organization after a terrorist cell.

"In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?"

"We are the #1 site for downloading FREE public domain Golden Age Comics. All files here have been researched by our staff and users to make sure they are copyright free and in the public domain."

I think I am having a heart attack.

“Your breath smells like the — and I do not use this word lightly — but it smells like the Holocaust.”

“Well, I’m on this cabbage diet until I can feel comfortable riding a bus with my shirt off.”

Sometimes I wish there were a button I could use to "favorite" Josh Allen's entire life.

The Best of American Crime Reporting, online, 2007-2009.

"Countless fragments of existing architectural photography are merged into multilayered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer."

"The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works."

Is all this new research into cognitive biases and the myth of free will just laying the groundwork for some future fascism?

"Writing my own code, from <body> tag to finished blog post, is just time-consuming enough to make sure I'm writing from a place of balance, thoughtfulness, and intellectual honesty."

I never thought I'd live to see the mythologizing of "hand-crafted" HTML, but okay. I still appreciate the sentiment that *increasing* the friction of putting something out there makes it more likely that that thing is actually worth the effort. 2010-11 will go down as the year when everyone started realizing they were making too much crap for the internet. And by "everyone" I mean "hardly anyone."

"If this study has any validity and it really takes no more than a minute or two at less than two meters to cause permanent hearing damage, the 2010 World Cup will go down as the greatest mass deafening in human history..."