Stanley Donwood, microscopic Alice, SXSW, Twitter
Sunday, March 15, 2009
I enjoy the insights and random tidbits found in artist Stanley Donwood’s Slowly Downward Taglibro. See last week’s issue, Taglibro 14, and subscribe to Donwood’s irregular ‘news’paper.
(For the uninitiated: Stanley Donwood is perhaps most famous for producing a lot of Radiohead’s album and promotional art over the years. I love the guy. I received a Fast Track screenprint, inspired by Victorian engravings, for my birthday this year.)
This is cool: Lewis Carroll + scanning electron microscope + Photoshop = Alice’s Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland.
In other book news: “The New Book Banning.” Here is an interesting quote from the article: “the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute.” (Let us all accept that 1984 was a turning point.)
Why did I briefly have to use iTunes recently for the first time in ages? To acquire these two free items: NPR Music at SXSW 2009 Sampler and an episode of Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic. And because I recently received an iTunes gift card for my birthday.
I have been keeping up with SXSW ’09 this past week via Twitter, because a bunch of individuals I follow are currently attending in Austin, Texas.
Note: Despite having assisted clients with various social media efforts, I’d been avoiding active personal use of Twitter and Facebook for years because I feared they would be too addictive (and because I have an anti-establishment streak that makes me very skeptical of investing my own creative energy in anything that’s popular . . . perhaps until it becomes so popular that I can’t avoid it, if that makes a ridiculous kind of sense). And I guess I couldn’t hold out any longer. Now, after a week, the addiction has set in. I’m going to try to keep my Facebook/Twitter usage in check.
My Twitter profile is currently an experiment in ambiguous, sometimes nonsensical status updates (that I simply feed into Facebook and embed in this blog). I’m currently following over 60 people (including web developers, designers, artists, musicians, directors and actors). I think I’ve actually enjoyed Steve Buscemi‘s Twitter updates the most (I still dislike using the word “tweets” for some reason). WeFollow, a user-powered Twitter directory, is the newest way to find people who use Twitter.
(Check out my previous posts about WebVisions for more social media/web technology talk.)
I guess I’ll end with this: Recently I stumbled upon another LOL site (specializing in WTF) called Picture Is Unrelated. Here’s a sample: In Present Day, You Eat McDonalds.