Jason Lytle, zombie ponies and social networks
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Jason Lytle show I attended at the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland on Saturday evening was awesome. I couldn’t have been happier that he played my very favorite Grandaddy song. “Jed’s Other Poem” transports me to 2001. I definitely got my Grandaddy fix. If you haven’t heard “Jed’s Other Poem” before, there is a now-official music video for it, released in 2005. Yes, there’s a story behind this video, created with Applesoft BASIC on a vintage 1979 Apple computer.
Ninjas, dinosaurs and zombie ponies
I was mildly amused by the Assessment Outcomes for Ninja University: The Pre-Ninja Program.
Here are a couple of Auto-Tune mentions: “Jay-Z Declares the ‘Death of Auto-Tune’” and the Auto-Tune the News series is four episodes strong (#2 and #4 are the best).
You should watch this video clip of Stephen Wiltshire, the Human Camera. Incredible drawings from memory.
Would also like to share this sci-fi cleverness from CollegeHumor: My Favorite Movie (Star Trek vs. Star Wars). Yep.
Maybe birds didn’t evolve from dinosaurs: “Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links.” Oregon State University scientists are disputing this widely held belief.
Would you like a My Little Pony figurine for your office desk? No? How about some zombie ponies? Yes, please.
I love this video from The Onion so much: “Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny’s.” Masking depression with laughter.
Technology, social networks and design
I agree: “Be Bold With Broadband, Wired.com Readers Tell Feds.” Just because the FCC and Comcast/Qwest are snugglebunnies doesn’t mean we can’t do better. The United States “pitifully trails Europe, Japan and Korea in both speed and affordability” of broadband. Let’s hope some good decisions are made.
This was interesting: “Social Networks Around the World.” The latest data says: “Facebook has almost colonized Europe and it’s extending its domination with more than 200 millions users” and “MySpace lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam).†I’d argue that MySpace’s only real niche in the U.S. is for musicians (and audio/video, at least more than Facebook, so far).
Check this out: “60+ Awesome Grunge Font That Every Designer Should Collect.”
Similar to the Google I/O Keynote I linked to in my previous post, here’s a video showing some HTML 5 goodness: Firefox 3.5 Treats Videos Like Web Pages. Still waiting for Internet Explorer 6/7 to die. Would be fine with IE 8 going away too, actually. Maybe someday IE will show evidence of supporting HTML 5 standards (and previous standards), like all modern, open source browsers? So we can keeping moving the Web forward faster. Standards, please.