Projecting the Lorax on a blizzard

[Hot damn. -egg]
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Projecting the Lorax on a blizzard:

As readers of Pirate Cinema will know, I love pointing powerful projectors at distant, public objects, because there’s something awesome about watching YouTube videos against the side of an office-building opposite one’s 15th-storey hotel room. But I never suspected how wondrous the results would be if I shone the movie-light into a blizzard, as Redditor bmaffitt did three days ago.

I pointed a video projector into the blizzard tonight, and took pictures. The results were… unexpected. (imgur.com) [Reddit]

Projector Snow [Flickr]

(via Hacker News)


Incredible Secret Money Machine

[Recommended by Kevin Kelly, which counts for a lot in my book. -egg]
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Sent to you via Google Reader

Incredible Secret Money Machine

When I first started to get serious about making money I ran into this book written in 1978 by a hippy-hacker living in Arizona. His advice was aimed at “craft and technical” types who wanted to create a small business “doing their thing” whether that was creating ceramic pots, designing outdoor gear, or writing computer code. He talked about doing a starting up before that term was subverted by the implication that your start up would take over the world. Instead the author preached one-person self-employment that made you a living. The concept of entrepreneurism as a small-time life-style has evaporated from the culture, and now entrepreneur and start-up means “get big fast.”

That did not appeal to me then, or now. But making a living doing what I was passionate about did. I learned how to earn a self-employed living from this book, which was mostly about what not to do. (I have been self-employed now for most of my adult life.) A lot of Don Lancaster’s specific examples are now terribly dated, but his core principles still stand and are worth listening to particularly if you are starting out. (If you are already successfully self-employed this book won’t help you much.) His idea that you should aim for a business that grows organically (income > expenses), is a total life-style approach (your business is you), and is dependent on your own value-added rather than market domination is as potent as ever.

If I had to sum up this book in my own words it would be; “If you are willing to build your business on expertise, you can make a living instead of making a fortune — and occasionally the fortune comes anyway.”

Best of all, unlike any other “make-money” book I know of, this one is free. You can read the author’s PDF version of the original paper book.

— KK

Incredible Secret Money Making Machine

Don Lancaster

PDF, Free

Available from The Guru’s Lair

Sample Excerpts:

Getting filthy rich should be nowhere in your plans. So long as you can continue doing what you like in the direction you want to go, that’s all that should matter. The great irony of your incredible secret money machine is that the less you strive for income, the more of it will come your way, and, more importantly, the more you will be able to do with what you already have. Any time or effort spent directly toward making money is time not available for your main trip. This is wasted time and energy that eventually hurts you rather than helps.

*

As a ferinstance, let’s talk about an ordinary piece of typing paper. If you are running an office supply store, you can make a penny on th…

Little girl hears Bad Brains for the first time

Little girl hears Bad Brains for the first time:

How did she know how to slamdance like that, you may ask? Some things are not taught. You just know.
I first heard the Bad Brains when I was 12, after their eponymous cassette came out on ROIR Records. And you know what, I did the exact same thing this little kid is doing in the video.
Link: “Adeline hears Bad Brains for the first time.”
(thanks, Sean Bonner, via Vice)


Indie rock, class, race, and culture in America

[Great essay. -egg]
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Indie rock, class, race, and culture in America:

Martin Douglas’s “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show” is a fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of Douglas’s life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing project who loved indie rock; partly a critique of the way we think about what blackness, whiteness and culture are.

The black kids of my generation and the ones before it were raised with the notion that it’s essential to hold onto one’s “blackness,” and that venturing outside of those boundaries meant you were trying to assimilate to white society, to “be more like one of them.” But essentially every African-American child growing up has an intimate knowledge of some version of the black experience, and the way we dress or the music we listen to still won’t hide the color of our skin. I never saw my interest in alternative culture as a way to obfuscate my racial identity. Aside from the annoyance of being typecast as a fan of a band purely based on superficial concerns, that conversation overlooked the one substantial reason why there are a lot of black people who relate to TV on the Radio’s music: They are a band primarily consisting of African-American men who often explore what it means to be African-American. For a generation of alternative music fans made to believe we were betraying “what it means” to be black, a band had finally come along that made that very idea a theme in its music.

But as TV on the Radio started to grow in notoriety, it still created a schism in my initial attraction to rock music; here was a band that was, for all intents and purposes, “socially acceptable” for black people to like. This falls into my earlier point about young children emulating people who look like them. I imagine if the band were around when I was younger — with their overtures to shoegaze, incisive and smart lyrics, steadfast commitment to experimentalism, and Kyp Malone’s beard — they probably would have been my favorite band throughout my entire childhood. At the very least, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outsider for loving alternative music.

The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show

(via Andre’s Notes)


Strange, scammy director made the same movie over and over for 40 years

Strange, scammy director made the same movie over and over for 40 years:

A filmmaker named Melton Barker travelled America from the 1930s to the 1970s, making and remaking a short movie called “The Kidnapper’s Foil,” which featured a large cast of kids. He’d roll into small towns, announce that he was going into production, and advertise for proud parents who wanted their kids to break into the movies. He’d raise local money to (re)make the film with an all townie cast, have it produced, and leave it behind. There are lots of versions still extant, but there are probably hundreds more that may never be recovered. They’re a fascinating insight into the lives of Americans across the country and the years.


She estimates that Barker made hundreds of versions of “The Kidnappers Foil,” but fewer than 20 have been unearthed and digitized. In advance of his arrival to a new town — like Reidsville, N.C., or Allentown, Pa. — Barker, who Ms. Frick said probably died on the road in 1977, would broker a deal with a local theater to screen the film upon completion, handing over the reels once they’d been developed, either by himself (working in his hotel room) or by a lab in Dallas. (During part of his career Barker, like the filmmakers of his era, was working with cellulose nitrate, a wildly flammable film stock that is difficult and dangerous to store.) All the currently accessible prints are available to view on meltonbarker.org, a Web site Ms. Frick and her colleagues built to raise more interest in Barker’s work. That collection, Ms. Frick reasoned, might lead to the recovery of more prints.

Dan Streible, a film historian and an associate professor of cinema studies at New York University, is the director of a recurring symposium for so-called “orphan films” like “The Kidnappers Foil.” Mr. Streible said such films, which he defines loosely as “amateur films and home movies, medical films, outtakes, uncompleted films, fragments — things which were not commercial features,” are also “the ones that need the most preservation and advocacy.” He added, “There wasn’t an obvious commercial value to them, and there isn’t always an obvious owner in the legal sense, and they’re films that are left behind in archives for any number of haphazard reasons.”

These lost artifacts can become essential cultural documents, and what they occasionally lack in narrative coherence or flash they make up for in historical worth. Unlike Hollywood films set in fake small towns and populated by professional actors, “The Kidnappers Foil” captures, however incidentally, an authentic American culture and locale. “By going to all those small towns, throughout the South and all over, Barker was preserving regional dialects that cannot be heard in a single Hollywood film,” Mr. Streible said. “No one else was recording people in Childress, Tex., in 1936, and here they are, a large group of them all talking in their natural voices.”

The Legacy of a Camera-Toting Huckster [NYT/Amanda Petrusich]

(via Making Light)

(Image: Texas Archive of the Moving Image)


Confessions of a fifth grade punk

Confessions of a fifth grade punk:

From Taylor-Ruth’s Tumblr, a page from her fifth grade diary. She was unquestionably the most punk fifth grader she knew, and possibly the most punk fifth grader in history. If you’re trying to place the chronology here, note that Taylor-Ruth identifies as an Indiana high-school senior (she’s also a great cartoonist!).

actual diary entry from when i was in 5th grade oh my god
(via Wil Wheaton)


The myths about GMO food — on both sides.

[I agreed with most of this. -egg]
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A reasonable and fair breakdown of the facts on GM food: There’s no reliable evidence that GM crops are dangerous to eat. On the other hand, they aren’t the best way to reduce world hunger, and you can basically roll your eyes at anybody claiming GM crops are environmentally sustainable. Greg Jaffe cuts through the myths of GM food at The Atlantic.


"What if we could receive real-time feedback on our social interactions? Would unbiased third party…"

“What if we could receive real-time feedback on our social interactions? Would unbiased third party…”: “What if we could receive real-time feedback on our social interactions? Would unbiased third party monitors be better suited to interpret situations and make decisions for the parties involved? How might augmenting our experience help us become more aware in our relationships, shift us out of normal patterns, and open us to unexpected possibilities? I am developing a system like this for myself using Amazon Mechanical Turk. During a series of dates with new people I meet on the internet, I will stream the interaction to the web using an iPhone app. Turk workers will be paid to watch the stream, interpret what is happening, and offer feedback as to what I should do or say next. This feedback will be communicated to me via text message.”

– social turkers, project by Lauren McCarthy.