Links
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Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die. | Slog
“Everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality.” (via Tom Taylor)
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Responsive Web Design Frameworks, Grid Systems and Starter Kits
Good summary of lots HTML/CSS frameworks. (via mildlydiverting)
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Orbe.us | ReKognition
A replacement for the Face.com API? But, judging by the demo, it seems much, much worse at face detection than Face.com.
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D’Blog of ‘Israeli: Lowlife: Creation Part Five: All The Joy I See Through These Architect’s Eyes
Brief looks at many of the ways different artists have drawn Judge Dredd’s Mega City One. (via Haddock)
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Why the Southbank Centre redevelopment plan is sheer folly | Art and design | The Observer
What is it that makes people want to change pleasant, distinctive locations into chain-filled, plate-glass-fronted, shopping centres? (via everyone with any sense)
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Some Practical Writing Advice From Douglas Coupland | LitReactor
Number one in these lists should probably be, “Don’t spend all your time reading lists of writing advice,” but I still like this.
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How low (power) can you go? - Charlie’s Diary
Charlie Stross takes Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law (improving power consumption) for a walk and imagines a very, very conmected city. (via blech)
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Exquisite Tweets from @ftrain, @thelancearthur
Lovely little improvised text adventure. (via @blech)
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34 People You Probably Didn’t Know Were On Seinfeld
I still don’t recognise a whole bunch of these. But the other night I noticed A.J. Langer, Rayanne off of ‘My So-Called Life’, looking much more grown-up than in MSCL, which was only a year or so earlier. The suit helped. (via Kottke)
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Underworld’s brief to ‘frighten people’ at the London 2012 opening ceremony | Music | The Guardian
“The contrast between this summer’s two uber-spectaculars – the diamond jubilee concert and the Olympics opening ceremony – couldn’t be starker.” Yes, it felt like we’ve moved on from big events requiring 1980s musicians. (via Blech)
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London 2012: Danny Boyle’s story of Britain was a celebration of freedom | Shami Chakrabarti | Comment is free | The Guardian
“Humility”, “democratic”, “optimistic”. Words Shami Chakrabsti uses in association with Danny Boyle, which also help explain the appeal of the Ceremony itself. (via Alex Balfour)
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Building workers stories
Free PDFs containing oral histories from the men who built the Barbican, the M1, Sizewell A, the South Bank and Stevenage.
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Melissa Price
Topographic maps of (only) London’s rivers or London’s hills. Nice idea, although monochrome relief seems rather dull after seeing Stamen’s terrain maps. And the labels seem rather OTT.
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BuzzFeed’s strategy - Chris Dixon
“Many publisher sites … are Frankenstein products bolted together by a tech team that integrates other people’s products instead of building their own.” (via Kottke, bookmarking because I’ve needed it twice now)
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Collective Joy « LRB blog
Also on the opening ceremony: “It was love as sentiment, a nostalgic cry for what has been lost. And it is lost. There is no party of the left with a different attitude towards the economy, privatisation and cuts in benefits and the NHS.”
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Britain: this is for everyone - newsmary
On the Olympic opening ceremony: “The opening, pastoral and construction scenes showed clear class delineations; the joyous riot of music and popular culture that grew from it showed disparate, distinct but equal individuals. There’s a vision of utopia there, and it is neither homogenous nor segregated.” (via Blech)
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The night we saw our mad, fantastical dreams come true | Frank Cottrell Boyce | Comment is free | The Observer
On writing the wonderful opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics,
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The Daily Mail, And How An NHS Death Means… Racism Is Fine? - Botherer
The Daily Mail is the kind of dangerous thing that needs exposing, protesting against, fighting. Horrible. (via @D_Nye_Griffiths)
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BBC News - How to read London
Paul Mason, brilliant on the nature of London. Well worth a read.
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Olympic Games opening ceremony: irreverent and idiosyncratic – a very British coup | Marina Hyde | Sport | The Guardian
“I’m still reeling that a country that can put on a show that hilariously bonkers is allowed nuclear weapons.”
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(326) Pushpendra Mohta’s answer to India: What are some English phrases and terms commonly heard in India but rarely used elsewhere? - Quora
I love this. To my eyes it reads entirely like language from science fiction. Brilliant. (via Kottke)
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Olympic opening ceremony a Labour party broadcast? Yup, that’s about right | Sport | The Guardian
“This is it. This is Britain. Any idiot can industrialise. It takes a giant of a nation to make its healthcare provision free at point of need.” via @D_Nye_Griffiths
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London 2012: Beware billions bollocks. Ceremony to be huge TV hit, but not that huge « Sporting Intelligence
This is needed for every major TV event. And this doesn’t even take into account that NBC in the US isn’t showing the opening ceremony live.
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Pin pages to the wall and examine them with binoculars
Lovely, like a mini, themed David Markson.
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Dissent Magazine - Online Features - The White Negro (Fall, 1957) -
Norman Mailer’s essay on the hipster. Which I’ve only read through Adam Curtis, so I should probably read the actual thing.
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The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com
This is good - this generation’s “thing” is starting small businesses. “Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur.” Although it falls apart a bit when suggesting hipsters have only been around for 15 years. (via Waxy)
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Thinking out loud in paragraphs
Yes, there’s something here, between Twitter and blogging. See also Matt Webb’s “Instagram for Webpages”
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Road Test :: Boreas Bolinas
Interesting looking backpack, with plenty more if you click through to Boreas’s site.
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#WHENINLONDON
I do like this Tumblr. (via @iamdanw)
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Noisy Typer – a typewriter for your laptop. | F.A.T.
Enjoying using this a bit too much. The audio feedback is surprisingly nice. Not sure how much longer the novelty will last, and it wouldn’t be too good in the office… (via Haddock)