Sense-ational Type

tasty type

delectable quote

^ Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles

I love dimensional type and stop-motion creativity and quotes where form follows function, so I am in love with this video by BYU students for the Typophile Film Festival. It always boggles my mind to think of how much planning and TIME something like this would have taken! Hope it inspires you as much as it did me.

[Via Serious Eats]

When Galaxies Collide

Felicia Day shot a film with the folk at NASA as an educational video about galaxy mergers. Fun, funny, informational, and also features the voice acting talents of Sean Astin. Check it out:

Cool: I just checked out NASA’s website, and they have a whole slew of educational materials and resources.

Scenes from my countertop

chop chop

I liked these colors enough to hold off my hunger long enough to snap a few shots. Unfortunately, the dish’s main attraction, a lovely Asian (?) eggplant, had gone brown and mushy on the inside, and these ingredients do not a meal make.*

CSA Farmshare + cooking ruts = sadness + waste.

*Random fact, did you know that the syntax in American Sign Language is object-verb-subject vs. English’s subject-verb-object? I want to learn ASL “in my spare time.”

whoo whoo

I also wanted to introduce you to our new little friends. We adopted them from one of the vintage stores on North Loop. We did not find Mike’s sister an Audrey-Hepburn-inspired dress for Halloween, but we did find these guys. Hallo!

Scenes from my desktop

Design blogs post a lot of artsy calendars with lovely prints and a teeny block of numbers in a pretty font. Most of them don’t usually register with me. Besides being impractical, in terms of size and space to write, I don’t use wall calendars…even during the years I find myself buying them. But this one, this one I keep looking at. Maybe just because it’s so different from all the others and therefore fresh to my blogroll-weary eyes. Whatever the case, caitlinkeegan’s Etsy calendar:

Handwritten calendar

printed with soy inks

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And then there’s things like this. Necessary? No. Beautiful? Yes! (Wasteful? Maybe.)(Oh, hush, little green fairy ever resting on my shoulder.)

Figure Tea Bags. Packaging by UQAM

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Coralie Bickford-Smith cover design

And I’m sure it’s wrong to purchase books judged solely by their covers (especially if you have no intention of reading Jane Eyre ever again), but Coralie Bickford-Smith’s book covers are so enticing! & The clothbound Penguin classics are coming to the States! Hmmm…I have been meaning to re-read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass…

Alice's Adventures

(Remember the heavy boxes on moving day! That should help keep your nimble online-shopping fingers at bay!)

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Oh, and this! Guess which site this screenshot came from?

crafty is in

Did you guess?

J. Crew! Eep.

Dead Man’s Bones

“It seems like an interesting time to come into music, because it seems like everybody’s leaving, every office we go into the guy’s packing up, and pulling all the final things from his desk in a box,” (Ryan) Gosling said. “It seems like, you can’t make money anymore, so people are trying to figure out how it all should work. My impression just seems to be like, it’s kind of the Wild West in a way. Whatever you think of you can do, and that’s really terrifying but also an exciting situation to be in, because you realize that you can create the way that this goes down for you…So people are in it because they want to be, and not because they think it’ll be profitable for them. It seems like it’s good creatively, but you also have to figure out how you want to present your music, because the old model doesn’t work anymore.”

Gosling (I know, I know) and friend Zach Shields and a kid’s choir from the Silverlake Conversatory of Music made an album about the creepy-crawlies, and it’s ambient and awesome. They resisted all forms of technical widgets designed to make them sound more polished or modern or anything and embraced real-world sounds, real voices, and real-life/three-take (new) instrument playing as well as the experimentation and process of working with the kids. The entire project’s ambitious, and the results are often beautiful and definitely don’t sound like amateur fare.

Gosling’s singing also suffered under the weight of conventional studio expectations. On the Dead Man’s Bones album, Shields’ indie-everyman voice complements Gosling’s more mannered tone, which exhibits a bit of Roy Orbison (or, some might say, Bryan Ferry) tremolo. However, encouraging Gosling to display his natural talent wasn’t all that easy. Shields explained, “I’d hear him do karaoke, or when he thinks nobody’s listening, like he’s in the other room singing, with his natural voice, when he’s singing and nobody’s listening, it has this old quality, like this 50s kind of croonery feel. Every time I would hear him singing, without trying to sound like anything, that’s how he sings. So we were trying to record one session, and they were trying to make us both sound so modern, which he doesn’t…”

Songs include titles like “My Body’s a Zombie for You” (could be mistaken for Arcade Fire if you don’t listen to the lyrics and great if you do!) and “For Weddings and Funerals.” They’re also touring and working on videos for all the songs. Here’s a collaboration with artist Arthur Ganson who makes movable sculptures:

Read more about Dead Man’s Bones and their process in this Pitchfork interview.

Check out Dead Man’s Bones MySpace.

[Heard via All Songs Considered]

New model(s) for publishing?

One author, Robin Sloan, is financing his new book project through Kickstarter, and it’s working. It’s an interesting distribution model because readers get to choose whether they want a digital copy, a digital copy and a hard copy, or more. You have until midnight Oct. 31st to get in on the action and to get a copy of the book (detective story about the “digital and the occult.”)

It helps that Sloan has compelling previous work up online, a la his short story “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store,” which convinced me his new project was worth a look—and worth financing.

Robin writes a book and you get a copy

I like the idea of Kickstarter, but is it a viable option for many? A few? Or only people who already have a cult following, guys like Joss Whedon? Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” came out last year. It was made as a work of love—with no budget, had no publicity…yet it succeeded, to most people’s surprise. Does this present a new alternative for movie-making, tv-making, media-making that can bypass the studios? Whedon himself acknowledges (in this awesome interview with Ira Glass*) that the model doesn’t scale very well for Hollywood. We haven’t seen a lot of people inspired by this model and following it to stardom.

Similarly, is Felicia Day’s “The Guild” a model (build it with love and they will come) or an exception?

I don’t know, and I don’t really have any answers, just lots of questions…
And I just wanted to point you to an author/book that might be worth following.

*”We did this [interview event with Ira Glass and Joss Whedon] hoping to raise money to teach writing to kids. We’re kind of, you know, into writing. If you listen, and you’re against helping schoolchildren with their homework and expanding their literary horizons, then certainly do not click the donate button. Everyone else, please click. Throw in a buck, or five bucks. We think we might be able to raise enough this way to cover all of 826NYC’s costs for a month which would be incredible and also incidentally blow their minds. Help us do that! Help us shock them with the generosity of strangers on the Interweb.”

Make every picture count

"Double Yellow Lines"

Martin Wilson is crazy…in an amazing way. What patience and planning! No Photoshop or editing involved in these whole-roll(s) photos. If he messes up a frame, he redoes the whole thing. He recounts that on the Boxing Day he received his first camera, his dad, worried that they would run out of film before the day was out, kept saying, “Make every picture count.” So he does.

"New Life"

Check out “Oranges and Lemons” and its story, too.

[Via It's Nice That]

Time-Out for a Smile

Need some lift-me-up’s this week, and I found some perusing my Google Reader:

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Untraditional cover of Fleet Foxes’s “White Winter Hymnal”

(…whose bantering reminds me of GamePlusBlog’s podcasts. Even for those who aren’t videogame connoiseurs, the beginnings and ends of their casts are pretty funny.)

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4-year-old Finnish rap duo! Come on!

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[Both via "Oh!" Thanks.]

Lockdown Drills

The elementary school where I was tutoring today had a “Lockdown Drill”! Can you imagine? Huddled together in the corner, in silence, lights off, jumping when the doorknob rattles once. And again five minutes later. The students and teachers seemed unconcerned, as if this were just another fire drill. They’ve probably practiced this all before. Are they as unreal to these kids as tornado “Duck and Cover” drills were to us? They say they started doing these “Lockdown Drills” about a year after Columbine, so of course that’s what was running through my head. I, personally, was a bit frightened, a little creeped out.

Crossed & Worded

I thought myself into a corner, and gave myself a head cold last (last?) weekend. I know I’m probably not the only one out there who can bring on the sniffles with stress and negativity.

But an upside to that weekend was my newfound addiction to crossword puzzles. Badside…it’s also a might addictive form of procrastination.

the paper NYTimes ones are more fun

Check out these beauties:

http://www.xwordinfo.com/ShowPuzzle.aspx?date=2/13/1994

http://www.xwordinfo.com/ShowPuzzle.aspx?date=3/21/2002