May262012
If you really hate the song “Call me Maybe,” then you’re going to hate this cover of the song MUCH less! It’s by a great band called Fun. and I’m marginally obsessed with it right now.
May182012
Back from Asia! Here’s Shanghai in living color. The trip was incredible, and I’ll hopefully be back there sometime!
May72012
I’ll be out of the country for the next 10 days in Tokyo and Shanghai, so have posted the above picture because it seemed fitting. The top frame is Shanghai in 1990 and the bottom frame is the exact same view over the river in 2010. Pretty incredible.
April272012
"China has hundreds of millions of not only new middle-class consumers but also first-time buyers in any number of product categories who haven’t yet established brand preferences. In that sense, Chinese consumers are like the golden demographic for marketers in the United States: youngsters with disposable incomes who are just learning to prefer Pepsi or Coke."
— From “As China Goes, So Goes the World” by Karl Gerth (I’m finishing up a research paper on China and Japan, and both of their histories are pretty incredible. I oddly want to learn Manadarin or Japanese. If I’m going to learn a second language, might as well start with one of those easy ones, right?)
April262012
I promise I’ll stop posting only Toothpaste for Dinner cartoons soon. That’s a lie. I love TfD.
April222012
April212012
"A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.
Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.
"
— The Reader and Technology | New Writing | Granta Magazine (via ayjay)
Reblogged from more than 95 theses.
April172012
I’ve gotten a little tired of this song (“Somebody That I Used to Know) after the 500th play on the radio, but I have a soft spot for fantastic covers like this one.
(Am going to see Ben Kweller this Friday, and last time I saw him in concert he covered “Friends in Low Places.” A Texas boy covering a Texas song in a Texas town…. let’s just say he was well-received.)
April152012
A short video on how iPads are made- pretty interesting. I’m headed to China in a couple weeks for a school trip and the labor force in China is pretty incredible. The country seems to be caught between trying to raise the living standard for its population and wanting to keep providing cheap labor to continue outsourcing as much as they do.
April42012
From The DW: “Budweiser Canada surprises two recreational league hockey teams from Port Credit, Ontario, with professional-league-grade theatrics, including a flock of fans, play-by-play commentary, and other accouterments of a professional game.”
As far as viral ads go, I just loved this one. I’m a sucker for anything with a “triumph of the human spirit” feel to it.
April32012
This is, GUARANTEED, the best video about an order-fulfilling warehouse robot that you will watch TODAY. No seriously, watch this because it answers the question of how all those Amazon orders, etc. get to you.
Also, I can’t even imagine the complexity of building a system like this. Pretty incredible.
