Video mashup of epic proportions: Kanye West as Tetsuo from Akira featuring Daft Punk=hip hop-Japanimation-Franco-Italo-House-Disco goodness

Kanye West’s new video for “Stronger“
Akira=one of the touchstones of modern sci-fi/animation/Japanimation.
Daft Punk=one of the best modern music groups especially for their Discovery album.
In this video, Kanye West plays the role of Tetsuo from Akira, with Daft Punk playing the role of video surveillance operators, in a hip hop track with a sample from Daft [...]

We need a logo

We’re heading in the right direction. We’ve got some good content -some serious, some frivolous. Good regular posting schedule. A hopefully growing fanbase. Now all we need is a cool logo. I’m getting tired of looking at the boring design at the top of the page.
Mr. Trickle-Down, want to whip something up? [...]

It’s all in the charts

Want to make your dry, academic white paper more sexy?  Add a really sweet chart like the one above (click on the picture to zoom in).
This is taken from an essay called “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil“, and it’s actually pretty damn compelling reading.  I dig the argument, and I’m printing this chart out for my [...]

“They should have put down the Web 2.0 pipe”

This is a very entertaining story from Business Week about the advantages and dangers of using Web 2.0 marketing techniques.
Link from the new Ogilvy China Digital Watch blog, mostly written by ex-Tang Dynasty guitarist and notable Beijing expat Kaiser Kuo.

Music downloads of the day

For those of you who feel guilty about acquiring new music through dubious channels, there are plenty of very interesting & legal free downloads available these days.  From big names even!
 1-  Since they apparently admire The Dead and and have an ‘open source taping policy’, there are now 20+ Smashing Pumpkins live shows from 1992-2007 available for [...]

Hmm…

“As for the idea that universal education is the way to a meritocratic utopia, that’s pure crap whether it comes from old-style liberals or from neocons like Brooks. It betrays a fallacy of composition. Education may be a great way for an individual to increase his chances of moving up the pyramid, but there are [...]

Shellac-Excellent Italian Greyhound

Amazingly, after not caring much at all for any number of the last Shellac albums since At Action Park I find the most recent one to be very worthwhile. Maybe they are refining their more-stripped down-less frenetic sound, or compared to all the other junk out there their current “formula” (or lack of a [...]

The Indie-Prog-Analog Synth-Italo-Disco Convergance: The History of Current Underground Music

I was just thinking about this, and haven’t read anything directly addressing it.
Basically, it’s funny because with my interests in music like Lindstrom and Prins Thomas and Todd Terje, I realize it’s sort of like a culmination of several trends that started in the 1990s, in several musical genres–basically, all modern underground music [...]

Lessig to Wage War on Human Nature

Lawrence Lessig is shifting his focus from IP law to…fighting corruption. I too have decided to fight sunlight, gravity, and have declared war on that darned annoyance, the moon. Plus, there’s so much DIRT and DUST in this world…what are we going to do about that!!!???? And then there’s money…and people fighting [...]

Socially useful gambling? Forecasting and futures markets

ECONOMIX; Odds Are, They’ll Know ‘08 Winner
You know Google is going to do something like this with all the aggregated information it has from user searches, etc. Think of all the aggregated info they have access to…which is just one reason why some people are worried out at the thought of the DoubleClick purchase [...]