NFB - Film Archive
The Canadian National Film Board has released 700+ films, clips and trailers from their archive for free download. Ya for Canadian culture!
Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
A systematic approach to improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being through hci.
TrackMeNot
“A background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.”
Julia Nunes - All My Loving, The Beatles
“yeah i know, no one can cover the beatles”
Velato
An esoteric programming language that uses MIDI files as source code.
“There is a tendency for Velato programs to have jazz-like harmonies.”
Act Entr'act
For my stungeye.com readers I’ve enabled comments. The comment links are found on the left below the date markers. For the Tumblrs it’s business as usual.
Culture Machine - Pirate Philosophy (Vol. 10)
Culture Machine explores the culture and philosophy of piracy (as in P2P, remixing, culture-jamming, etc, not peg-legs and parrots).
My Thoughts:
Digital piracy is mainstream. Nearly all of popular culture (music, tv, movies, books, etc) can be acquired and consumed for free. Kevin Kelly tells us that ownership is no longer important.
Prediction:
The next step will be the wide-scale piracy of physical objects. More on this at another time…
Basement Reading
A Winnipeg-based zine maker.
Download: Hello, Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye / Whata Nice Place [zip]
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”
oldhat »
Hats sewn in Winnipeg by Nathan Dueck.
Meow Reader
Photos of cats reading and photos of cats learning how to read.
FluxBlog
The analysis of pop music easily devolves into righteousness and pretense, but Matthew Perpetua has been doing a great job since 2002. Fluxblog was my first (the first?) exposure to mp3 blogs, and it continues to deliver. Take the recent analysis of Lily Allen’s Fear, the inspiration for this post:
“Vapid, cynical, hyper-consumerist neo-celebs of the Paris Hilton/Heidi Montag variety are utterly loathsome, but when we tear into them in comedy and art, it can often seem too easy and overly mean-spirited in way that eclipses any righteousness we could hope to claim in calling out their grotesque antics. Yes, they are clearly villains in the context of our culture, but on scale, they’re more like the Goombas in the Super Marios Bros. games — cannon fodder along the path to the Big Bosses.”
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? (2003) by Robert Cauble
Me thinks Debord would have enjoyed this work of détournement.