Kid Casting. When a movie has a flashback of a character as a child. So good.
Leonard has gone through all the music he listened to in the 2000's and created a way to pull songs from his playlist in groups of four tracks for each year. Listening to a mix is a fun way to run through the 2000s.
No two snowflakes are alike? Not so fast. Now I can't UNSEE that snowflake, I'm going to see it everywhere. Just like the clouds/bushes in Super Mario Brothers.
Found via Coudal, who by the way, runs such a fantastic link blog I tend to never repost stuff from their feed because I figure everyone reads them. But if you don't, you should start.
Joshua's post about unbundling the tools for deploying publishing components reminded me of a service I wish someone would make.
I want someone to build a user preferences service that would free up developers from having to re-implement settings and preferences in their applications. Something like Cocoa's NSUserDefaults that provides an interface for retrieving and storing user preferences in a user's local library.
update: Someone pointed out I wasn't completely clear with this. The idea is the service runs in the cloud and provides an interface for any application to query and store key/value pairs per user.
I previously wrote about this idea (five years ago!) and I still want it.
Every year I make a new year's resolution that sound nearly impossible. I enjoy the challenge of putting a goal in front of me that at the beginning of the year seems entirely ridiculous, but at the end of the year seems completely doable.
The best resolutions I've made are rarely about doing something, they're usually the challenge of restricting or cutting out something in my life—usually involving the act of media consumption. Self-portait-a-day projects sound fun, but I am far too forgetful to remember to take a picture of my dumb face. I see it enough already.
A couple of years ago I decided not to buy a book the entire year. When I started it seemed completely insane. I love books. I was commuting 45 minutes both ways by bus or boat at the time, and books were a favorite diversion. I finally broke down and made a rule that let me buy comic books, but it did create this reason for me to dive back into books I'd already read, and finish some I had given up on.
The following year I tried it with video games. I couldn't buy a new video game until I had played through every unfinished game I had sitting on my shelf. I wasn't able to keep that one. Some of those games were really terrible.
Last year I vowed to finish five projects or let the domains I had purchased for them expire, which was heartbreaking because I had some good domain names. I was unsuccessful launching those projects and the domains expired.
While I was walking to work this morning I came up with my next resolution for 2010. I was listening to Le Tigre's self-titled album (now 10 years old), and flipped to Operation Ivy's (now 20 years old). Then on the walk from the Embarcadero I switched to the xx (1 year old) and it struck me how I've probably missed a lot of good music because I was spending it listening to old Modern Lovers records.
So then it hit me: what if I only listened to music released in 2010? Okay. That's just crazy enough.
The rules are:
- This includes re-issues/re-masters.
- For the month of January I am allowed to listen to anything from 2009.
- I will probably come up with more rules as I think of them because not listening to Bad Brains for a year is starting to make me sad.
And you can play along at home if you'd like: here is my last.fm stream. It has over 50,000 songs I've listened to over the past few years. The top 18 has 11 bands that aren't even bands anymore (counting Weezer).
Who steals a wreath? If you live in S.F. and happen to know who is in this video someone wants their wreath back.
Who the fuck steals a wreath?
So there's another Andre Torrez on the web. And not just on the web but in my city. And not just in my city but writing for a local paper called the San Francisco Bay Guardian. AND not just for the local paper, but the local MUSIC section of the paper which is something I was briefly connected to while in Sweetie.
I sort of want to meet someone who has the same name as me, but then what? Do we just shake hands? I am pretty sure we're not related since my last name was altered by my grandfather.
Once when I was a kid my mom excitedly ran over to me with the newspaper opened to the obituaries column because someone named Andres Torrez had died. I remember she was so excited that it didn't really register in her mind that she was showing her son an obituary of someone who happened to have the same name as me.
When I made a bit of a sour face at this, it suddenly hit her what she was doing and she took it away from me, folded it up, and acted like it didn't happen. Later that day I asked her if I could clip it out she said she had thrown it away and I shouldn't be so morbid.