Watch the high-definition version here.
Via MetaFilter. (Sup Cotton Duck?)
A clever wallpaper by Effektive Design.
Barry Stiefel visited all 50 states in a weeklong vacation in 1998. He left work on a Friday at 5PM and showed up for work at 8:30AM on the Monday after next. It might have been a route tailored for efficiency (including rental drop-off and roundtrip flights from CA – AK and CA – HI), but it’s a beautiful idea nonetheless.
For years I’d been hearing about Montana’s policy of no daytime speed limits and had planned to quickly cover a lot of ground. I had planned to get in to Montana by Saturday evening, and then floor it all the way across, going one hundred miles an hour, the way God and highway engineers intended. Unfortunately, I got very delayed in Idaho, with two lane roads and slow traffic and one particular Idaho State Trooper. By the time I got to Butte, Montana, at 9:00 PM, I was exhausted and decided to get a hotel room, figuring I could make up some miles the next day. Unfortunately, I should have remembered that when you need to average 1,100 miles per day, it’s hard to “make up miles the next day”. I grabbed a room at the Best Western. Before going to my room, I asked the clerk in the hotel about how fast you can really go in Montana without getting a ticket, and she said “I go about 90, and my girlfriend, she always goes 100, and we never get pulled over”. At this point I was starting to really like Montana.
There’s something romantic about going 100MPH through a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. I probably couldn’t afford to eat a speeding ticket of that magnitude but I’d settle for ~85MPH.
I caught a 2:00 PM flight to Honolulu, Hawaii (#49), where I took a cab out to Waikiki Beach, where I realized that I had forgotten to bring my swimming trunks. I dashed in to one of the ubiquitous local tourist stores and bought a pair of Hawaiian board shorts and a towel and changed in their storeroom. I swam for an hour, bobbing in the warm water and watching the surfers. I thought long and hard about moving there and just surfing all day. Nothing soothes the tremors of road fever better than a soak in the warm, clear waters of the Pacific. But I had a plane to catch! I changed back in to my clothes in the tourist store, and then had dinner in a hotel. I saw that they were shooting off fireworks down at the next beach. It reminded me that it was the Fourth of July.
This trip is more of a grind than anything else, but I’ve been attracted to that sort of regimen for personal projects before, so I can still find some appeal in it. If I were to do this, I would take 14 days out of my life just be able to hit both coasts, sleep in motels, run around naked in the desert, meet some characters, and take amazing photographs.
You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.
Via McSweeny’s.
Apple’s new iPhone 4 features a front-facing camera for video calling. It’s called “FaceTime.” If mobile platforms are slowly encroaching upon multimedia — first with cameras and now with video — how will the psychology of communication evolve?
And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattles your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses to do hair-check in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their own TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s Video-Record option to record both pulse in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked like to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with the high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. (147)
But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you’re good-looking or not — e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. (Wallace 148)
Taken from an earlier quote-post for my reading of Infinite Jest.
Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease that can alter your predatory responses in the amygdala and influence your behavior.
So what about humans? A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive. Women less so, and this may have some parallels perhaps with this whole testosterone aspect of the story that we’re seeing. And then the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding.
If the discovery of toxoplasmosis in the early 20th Century has yielded only this much progress so far, I’m horrified at what other things might be lurking inside of us that are altering our perceptions of reality or even compelling us to do things we’re genetically told to avoid. On a somewhat unrelated note, toxoplasmosis may be the reason for Louis Wain‘s schizophrenia; he was famous for the evolution of his cat paintings — they became more psychedelic (and at his worse, they had an almost fractal-like quality) as his condition worsened.
Flat Head black mint shirt. Boomtime.
The Last Airbender boycotts itself
With all the craziness around its particularly white-washed casting, Avatar: The Last Airbender stinks so bad, apparently, that we don’t even need to boycott it.
Throw it in the trash bin with all the other bullshit yellow face films.