Holo-Cat Goodness.

iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.
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Thinks?

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Hipster Requiem

"Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed...

"We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

"An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society." http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

via adbusters - Douglas Haddow

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Know-Nothing Politics

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

via Paul Krugman / New York Times read article

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Pandora Thumbs Up.

Whoa. Ben turned me on to Pandora, a iPhone streaming radio app that allows you to punch in artists or songs that you like and it then streams tunes it thinks you'll like based on a ton of parameters. It's based on the Music Genome Project. Pretty cool stuff, and free, which is nice.

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Geauxbama!

Check out the killer Geauxbama shirts & stickers from Dirty Coast!

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Shive on the Scene.

These crazy bastards are too funny. The NSFW Dirty Coast jingle reminds me a little of one of my favorite local NOLA commercial jingles, for Broad Warehouse furniture.

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One Laptop for Xmas.

This year, my company Annunciation donated 'One Laptop Per Child' laptops on behalf of our clients for the year-end holidays. We ended up with one of them at our offices. Very neat. The attentiveness in engineering is immediately apparent. Couldn't find the hand crank on ours - we must've gotten the domestic model. Great program, and we're excited to watch it progress.
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The Davos Question.

Every year many of the world's top leaders attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to make the world a better place.

This year, you get to join them.

First, submit a video answering The Davos Question:

"What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"

Then, starting January 1st, watch and rank others' ideas. The highest-rated videos will be screened in Davos (January 23-27), where world leaders will watch your videos and make responses of their own. Your idea could be the start of something big.

Visit The Davos Question website.

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R.I.P. Evel

Evel Knievel died last week. He was huge when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. The Daredevil Stunt Cycle was a Big Deal. They don't make them like Evel these days. David Blaine and Chriss Angel et al pale in comparison to the impact and awe this strange, probably brain-damaged madman created.

Update: just read that the Stunt Cycle has generated over $300MM in revenue. Wow.

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Old-fashioned Vandalism.

The guy across the street got TP'ed over the weekend, and it struck me that this expression of juvenile mischief seems a lot fewer and further between than it used to. I enjoyed the art of heaving Charmin back in the early eighties, but don't see it much anymore. I suppose everyone gets TP'ed virtually on Facebook these days. Yeesh.

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Email Standards Project.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

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NOLA BarCamp

There's talk of organizing a BarCamp here in NOLA this coming January. Details to follow!

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The name "BarCamp" is a playful allusion to the event's origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O'Reilly.

The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19-21, 2005, in the offices of Socialtext. It was organized in less than one week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 31 cities around the world, in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Australasia and Asia. To mark the one-year anniversary of BarCamp, BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations world wide on August 25-27, 2006.

UPDATE: I believe the date is narrowing to the 5th and 6th of January. Please visit the wiki that has been set up for up-to-date info!

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Facebook's Flaw: Humans

Great article on the nuances of social networking, titled How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook, by Cory Doctorow (co-author of the Boing Boing blog)...

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

full article

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Bush Pointillism

I really like Phil Hansen's work - do a search on his name on YouTube - neat stuff.
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What's a Girl to Do?

Saw this on Newstoday® - love it. File under "morose beauty BMX stunt pop videos"
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Faub.org Meets the Public

We had a launch party last weekend for the creative group we formed about a year ago here in New Orleans. Lots of fun, see some of the pix going up here. Thanks to all who came out and signed in to keep the independent creative community talking. Special thanks to Andy at Barrister's Gallery for hosting the event space on St. Claude. The weather was perfect, the DJs were rockin, and the hazy recollections suggest people had some fun...

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Please Don't Shoot.

There's something very strange and unsettling seeing your hood get militarized. After Katrina, NOLA was flooded by machine gun-toting Army, National Guard, and Blackwater personnel. Despite the media saturation in the weeks and months surrounding the storm, I just can't get used to seeing gangs of these nuts strolling around. If you zoom to the large image, you'll see that at least one of these guys' rifles is unloaded. Perhaps they felt that the sheer power of their camo outfits would serve as deterrent enough.

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Clean Is Happy?

This is a kind of funny site promoting what seems to be a bidet. I like all the hygiene euphemisms.

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Science Trip.

When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25.

He's one of many scientists turning to LSD. From Wired.

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Sign the Declaration.

Annunciation is working with Trumpet for Idea Village, a New Orleans-based non-profit. They're looking for the vanguard, and are developing great programs to facilitate innovative growth in the city.
Sign their Declaration of Innovation to hear more about the movement.

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Sneaker Pimps.

Check out this photoset from a Sneaker Pimps installation in L.A.

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Billions McMillions

Billions McMillions, a.k.a. Bill McMullen, is a phenomenal pop designer. Love the stuff. Bad Brains, Beasties, Star Wars and Drum Machines. How could you go wrong? Check out the nice site.

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The Secret of Design

Not sure it's this simple, but some neat ideas re: the cyclical nature of consumer ebbs & flows. From Baekdal.

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The Napkin iDea.

Check out this brilliant iPhone parody site from iDea. Thanks to Malcolm for sending it this way!

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Future of Web Design

The Future of Web Design is all about getting together leading practitioners and thinkers in the design field to talk about trends, directions and exciting new happenings in the medium. This isn’t just another web event, but one that’s dedicated to the creativity in the profession, bringing back the ‘design’ and drawing together the diverse fields that doing ‘web design’ now represents.

The date for your diaries is the 7th and 8th November 2007.

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Reboot

Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us...

2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.

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Too old for MySpace?

Everyone likes to belong, and that is one of the powerful forces of the Internet. Where once your service provider was your identifying online "community," today's equivalents are online social networks like Second Life, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

What's a career-minded grown-up to do amid such Internet playgrounds? [read more]
from International Herald Tribune
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Voyeur Launch

HBO's Voyeur project launched a spectacular site as a part of a larger campaign that included some really cool projections. Read more about the development and launch here.
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Real People Real Stuff.

This is a really neat concept - half craigslist, half YouTube, it allows people to show their stuff via video and sell it online. Click here or on the image above to see the woefully-underpopulated New Orleans section.
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My Fave is the Liger.

A photo provided by the Zoo Safari and Hollywoodpark Stukenbrock shows the zebra and horse crossbreed 'Eclyse' during its presentation to the public in Schloss Holte, Germany, on Wednesday, June 27, 2007. The father of 'Eclyse' is a horse from Italy, where the crossbreed filly was born in 2006, her mother is a zebra from the Safari park.
(AP Photo/uripress.de, Udo Richter)
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Apple's $3000 iPhone.

By Sinead Carew Tue Jun 26, 4:11 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc. said on Tuesday its hotly anticipated iPhone could cost as much as $3,000 with a required two-year service contract, but a handful of eager fans still lined up early to spend their money.

A small clutch of gadget enthusiasts staked out spots in front of Apple's store on New York's Fifth Avenue, days before the iPhone goes on sale on Friday evening 6 p.m. local time.

Plenty of potential iPhone consumers have said they would wait for Apple's next versions of the device to buy it, hoping for a lower price and faster network connection.

But industry analysts expect the first iPhone to sell quickly, at least in its initial months. Jessica Rodriguez, a 24-year-old student from the Bronx, seems to agree with them.

"I love everything Apple, and this is going to be something that goes down in the history books of cell phones," she told Reuters. [more]

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Transparency Triumph

The non-competitive and the downright incompetent have very few stones left to hide under: never before have consumers’ purchase decisions been so strongly influenced by all kinds of transparency. In fact, Transparency Tyranny now rules:

"Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. Transparency Tyranny for some, Transparency Triumph for others."

As promised in our Top 5 Trends For 2007 last January, we’ll expand on the Transparency Tyranny trend in this briefing: not only will we focus on what’s next for the by now ubiquitous transparency of recommendations and prices, but also on transparency of intention, of advice, of best of the best.

- Trendwatching.com