Taken last year on vacation with pfleidi. We picked a windy, slightly rainy day for our trip to Brighton and consequently had the pier almost to ourselves. There was something magical about this empty, rusting theme park out on the sea. It almost feels like a discarded movie set.
This is also the test post for my shiny new photo post feature in octolog… if you feel like checking it out, head over to Github.
Great ambient music, glorious artwork and, above all, a beautiful idea: Solace, the soundtrack to a nonexistent game.
I’m listening to this while slogging through the basics of electrodynamics, an unexpected, but very pleasant match.
The Atlantic has compiled a collection of some photos shortlisted for the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, and they are utterly stunning. Head over there now.
I’m quite bummed that there seem to be no high-res versions of the images available, they would make excellent wallpapers.
Then, somewhere between four and six minutes past the hour, the faraway servers turned off for good. Another world was gone, but not forgotten.
An almost haunting report on how and why MMOs end, how these virtual worlds people pour endless hours into just vanish, leaving nothing but memories behind.
CINEMA IS A LANGUAGE AND THE WAY WE USE IT, INVERT IT AND COMMUNICATE WITH IT IS EVERYTHING. AND WITH THAT UNDERSTANDING YOU CAN STRETCH THE LIMITS OF CINEMA, TEST THE BOUNDARIES OF ART AND JUXTAPOSE STORY AND MEANING AND THEMES AND SYMBOLS AND SHAPE OUR EXPERIENCE IN THE NAME OF SOMETHING BETTER. TO OUR HIGHEST POSSIBLE SELVES.
Probably the best thing in all caps I have ever read. A brilliant introduction to cinematography, delivered under the pretence of arguing why Les Misérables is not a very good movie. It’s insanely quotable:
AND WHEN YOU TRULY UNDERSTAND CINEMA YOU CAN TAKE THAT INVENTIVENESS TO AMAZING NEW PLACES. YOU CAN MAKE A REFLEXIVE WESTERN SLAVE REVENGE FILM IN THE SOUTH THAT’S TECHNICALLY PART OF A SERIES OF ITALIAN FILMS.
Okay, I got to go watch Django Unchained now. You go read this essay first.
(For your sanity, you might want to apply
* {text-transform: lowercase; }
to the CSS of the site using something like the Live CSS Editor)
If you keep track of the via links in my posts, you will notice that I’m an avid reader of Boing Boing. This article details how the blog works behind the scenes, how money is made (ads) and how the posts are curated (eclectically). Fascinating stuff. I love that Boing Boing refuses to turn into a Gawker-esque media empire and still manages to be one of the most read sites on the internet. There’s still room for weirdness out there…
Ein kleiner Spaziergang mit der GX1 bei Sonnenuntergang… Ich kann langsam verstehen, warum so viele diesem Objektiv eine beinahe religiöse Verehrung entgegenbringen.
Exactly what it says on the tin: An exhaustive essay on how realistic combat in space could work. If we ever start fighting our wars in space, it’s not going to be romantic and faintly reminiscent of naval warfare; instead it will involve a crapload of nukes and a healthy dose of Newtonian mechanics.
An excellent report on the Obama campaign’s tech staff. My favourite part is probably the short profile on Harper Reed, the campaign CTO who has a fascinating motto:
“I always look like a fucking idiot,” Reed told me. “And if you look like an asshole, you have to be really good.”
I haven’t got much more to say, it’s just an interesting, well-written piece of reporting. Not that easy to come by, these days…
For a bit more information on the insane amount of quantitative analysis involved in managing a presidential campaign, you should also take a look at this piece from Time Magazine.
I got to read Cloud Atlas in a slightly roundabout way: I first read this amazing article in the New Yorker on how the film got to be made, and that got me interested in actually reading the book before the film was released. So when I was on holiday in London, I dropped into my favourite bookstore and picked it up, along with Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” which I had been meaning to read for ages. But that is another book for another post.
So, Cloud Atlas. I finished it a while ago, really keen on writing a blog post about it, promptly lost track and now here I am, trying to recapture the excitement I felt when I put the book down. There is something deeply appealing about this book, about its unusual structure, the constant, slightly oblique self-referencing, the playing around with language… but first, we need a quick description. Cloud Atlas tells six different stories, in six different times (from the 1700s to the far future), in six different styles, all interconnected in a way that is never quite explained. For the first half of Cloud Atlas, these stories are told in their chronological order, after the one set in the far future, the order reverses and we end where we have begun. It’s hard to make a book like this work, and miraculously, this one actually does.
Usually, I’m mainly attracted by good storytelling, interesting ideas, well-crafted prose– Cloud Atlas has all of the above, but also a structural beauty. There is symmetry to the chapters, and elegance in the way they hint at each other, bouncing themes and ideas back and forth.
It is, of course, by no means absolutely perfect. Some of the stories are more interesting than others, but they are never bad or boring. Some are outright fascinating. There might even be a bit of kitsch in some. But this book affected me, I deeply enjoyed it, and maybe, you will too. In a few days, the movie will come out here– I’m looking forward to it.
Marco Arment’s newest project: The Magazine, an unimaginatively named, but otherwise excellent iOS-only magazine “for geeks like us”.
These are exciting times in publishing. While the value of raw news rapidly approaches zero–no matter how quickly you publish, Twitter is faster–there is ever-increasing demand for commentary, for good, curated content. That’s where I see the value of magazines, of newspapers, of pretty much any kind of media. In opinion pieces, essays about things I genuinely care about.
The nice thing is: You don’t need a big corporation to create a publication like that, all you need is an idea of your audience, taste and a delivery method. Marco chose a quite complicated, but beautiful one: An iOS app. It is a very minimal one, in many ways the polar opposite of the ridiculously bloated magazine apps we get from the likes of Condé Nast. I quite like that, but this is by no means the only way of designing a digital magazine. It is, however, one that is appropriate for the kind of content Marco intends to deliver: Medium-length essays that don’t need images, info graphics or custom layouts. Just writing about the ways technology touches our lives.
Every issue is going to consist of (about) four articles from different writers, the first one had contributions from Jason Snell, Guy English, Michael Lopp and Alex Payne. I liked them all, I think they are well worth the price of a 2€ monthly subscription. At two issues a month, that works out to about 25 cents per essay, which is completely sensible in my opinion.
It’s going to be very exciting to see how Marco’s little experiment is going to play out. For now, I’m looking forward to the next issue.
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Isaac Asimov explains how science works.
Back from holidays! More posts! Wheee!
Wenn ich überhaupt mal dazu komme, in der Zeit zu lesen, dann ist es ja grundsätzlich mit einer Woche Verspätung. Dabei bin ich über diesen Artikel gestolpert, der ganz schön zusammenfasst, warum mir Amazon zunehmend unheimlich wird. Ich finde es ja grundsätzlich nicht so furchtbar schlimm, wenn jemand die Verlagswelt ein bisschen aufmischt, aber Amazon scheint mir dazu ein eher ungeeigneter Kandidat zu sein. Die Firma strahlt eher eine Liebe zum Monopol als zur Literatur aus.
[…] Bell and Kelvin, the two supreme ninja hacker mage lords of global telecommunications, have formed an alliance to challenge AT&T and all the other old monopolies.
Any article that calls brilliant scientists “mage lords” deserves being read. If it’s a sprawling and incredibly good report by Neal Stephenson on the laying of an undersea fiber-optic cable, even more so.
Seriously though, this might just be the best piece of non-fiction that has ever crossed my desk. I love pieces like this, that show our world in an entirely new, distinctly science-fiction light. It’s amazing what kind of interesting, weird stories lurk behind the infrastructure we use every day without ever thinking about it.
While reading this, I couldn’t help but think about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. In some of the later books, the “clacks”, a semaphore-based communication system, play an increasingly large role. The stories he tells about building the semaphore towers have the same… well, feeling. It’s always about building the best platform possible, in the face of insanely difficult obstacles. And reading about this quest for perfection is a truly a treat.
People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be an environment to think in.
Bret Victor, who you might know from this amazing talk, has outlined some of his ideas for the future of text in this blog post. Now, he has implemented some of them in the redesign of a well-known paper on network theory. It is nothing short of amazing, how just a few interactive elements make the paper much easier to read and understand. This kind of thing would have been very useful indeed in dealing with the physics textbooks I read last semester…
Hi, I'm Marcel. This is where I put stuff on the internet. You can follow me on Twitter, or read the about page (if you're into that sort of thing).
