Buzz Andersen

tylr: tylr: everybody jump drunk. Here’s a picture of the...

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:23:11 -0700

tylr:

everybody ~~jump~~ drunk.

Here’s a picture of the Tumblr team I took Summer of 2011.
Congrats.

Front row left, directly above topherchris. A lot has happened between then and now, but I’ll always have fond memories of this trip. Congrats to the team.

It’s an honor to be featured on Beards of Brooklyn.

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:04:24 -0700

It’s an honor to be featured on Beards of Brooklyn.

zablotny: ‘photos every day’ this is a spot by tbwa/chiat/day...

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:08:00 -0700

zablotny:

‘photos every day’

this is a spot by tbwa/chiat/day for apple, called ‘photos every day’. the craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.

Great analysis of the cinematography behind the Apple ad. Lots of other people in tech industry try for this sort of thing in their advertising these days, but it usually ends up feeling cloying and twee. Apple just gets the feel right in subtle ways.

slavin: jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjk: NOW ACCEPTING...

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:57:51 -0700

slavin:

jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkjk:

NOW ACCEPTING PRE-ORDERS

Nailed it.

Bela Lugosi “I Have No Home” Speech from “Ed...

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:49:03 -0700

Bela Lugosi “I Have No Home” Speech from “Ed Wood”

Martin Landau is so great in this movie.

"And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 12:15:26 -0700

“And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ””

- Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine - NYTimes.com

"The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations [Google Glass] is that if you embed the..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 07:04:23 -0700

“The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations [Google Glass] is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.”

- Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface, John Pavius (via christmasgorilla)

"One could argue that the form taken by Glass offers up a lazy futurist’s vision of what might be —..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:49:09 -0700

“One could argue that the form taken by Glass offers up a lazy futurist’s vision of what might be — take the trajectory of one product (displays becoming smaller/cheaper/more efficient over time) and integrate it with another (eyeglasses), sprinkle in connectivity and real-time access to content and big-data-analytics. Our expectations of what it could be are raised in part because this join-the-dots vision of the future fits neatly into Western un/popular young-male culture, from “The Terminator” through to Halo. Glass has a certain inevitability about it, like the weight of expectation on of child born to a great composer or, if you will, to a middle-aged suicide.”

- You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass. – AllThingsD

"Most of what we “see” at any time is out of focus in the periphery where as long as the things going..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:41:25 -0700

“Most of what we “see” at any time is out of focus in the periphery where as long as the things going on in peripheral vision don’t trigger a threat response will probably pass the glance test. It will be interesting to see whether Glass is perceived as a threatening object and thus may force others in proximity of a wearer to maintain a hyperawareness of the wearer and their own actions — whereas today they are currently able to relax. This would be, in effect, like a blanket tax on the collective attention of society.”

- You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass. – AllThingsD

"Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:36:48 -0700

“Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity. Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven.”

- You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass. – AllThingsD

This article is the best thing I have read about Google Glass.

"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:43:33 -0700

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

- From Collected Sayings Of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan

(from Dune by Frank Herbert)

"Basically, news readers as they are implemented today, are fundamentally broken for commercial..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:41:03 -0700

“Basically, news readers as they are implemented today, are fundamentally broken for commercial purposes. There are a few reasons for this, both cultural and technological. Primarily, the core technology itself (polled or pushed RSS/Atom XML feeds) is brittle, bloated and bewildering, and to make matters worse, the benefits of using it are pretty unclear to just about anyone outside the most heads-down techie.”

- A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Russell Beattie (via tominsam)

marksbirch: Gigantic (live) by Pixies - One of my favorite...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:15:40 -0700

marksbirch:

Gigantic (live) by Pixies - One of my favorite Pixies songs. This live performance from London in 1988 is pretty killer.

(via pheezy)

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:49:27 -0700

(via pheezy)

I’m not normally one to reblog a GIF, but Briana and I...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:05:00 -0700

I’m not normally one to reblog a GIF, but Briana and I almost couldn’t sleep the other night because we were laughing so hard at this.

I’ve been using the website for my upcoming wedding as an excuse...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:24:00 -0700

I’ve been using the website for my upcoming wedding as an excuse to teach myself vector illustration! I still have a lot to learn, and would have loved to keep adding detail if the missus hadn’t compelled me to ship, but I’m pretty happy with how things came out. The type is a reference to “Valley of the Dolls,” while the illustration details are nods to some of our favorite Palm Springs-area landmarks. FWIW, the dinosaur’s legs were the thing that gave me the most trouble (due to the fact that a lady was blocking the view in my reference photo)—still not entirely satisfied with them.

midcenturymodernfreak: More on the Kaufmann Desert House, as...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:53:00 -0700

"Cimmerian Landscape" | Artist: Helen Lundeberg, 1960, 36x20 inches, oil on canvas, Collection of Brent R. Harris

midcenturymodernfreak:

More on the Kaufmann Desert House, as mentioned in a post here a month ago. Incidentally, Mid-Century Modern Freak and South Pacifica are my new favorite Tumblrs.

Eat your heart out Google—Mr. Burns was a master of the...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:55:00 -0700

Eat your heart out Google—Mr. Burns was a master of the free lunch as exploitation tactic long before Silicon Valley caught on.

"Embedded in the game is a classic immigrant story. Mario and Luigi are Italians in a strange land,..."

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 13:14:00 -0700

“Embedded in the game is a classic immigrant story. Mario and Luigi are Italians in a strange land, blue-collar workers who travel back and forth between an above-ground mainstream and various undergrounds, moving through worlds (or class strata?) accumulating stuff, strength, and respect, all in a quest to get to a big house where they’ll liberate a beautiful woman — the final stage of the class-passing dream. Along the way, they hustle and fight and scrape to collect artificial performance enhancers (mushrooms, fire flowers) and currency (all of which can extend their lifelines), banging their heads against rocks to get ahead. They quickly learn the only thing more important than timing is artful cheating: With the prevalence of warp zones, shortcutting the system is part of the superstructure. As the landscape becomes more treacherous and competition more fierce, they find that they can no longer survive without the “boost” of mushrooms and invincibility stars. In the final stages, they race against the clock in abject desperation, roided-out addicts making stupid, careless mistakes in their frenzy to ascend just one more level. Maybe they find and save the princess in the end, but at what cost? It could be a lost Godfather sequel. It could be Scarface.”

- The Strange Case of the Super Mario Bros. Movie - Grantland (via Jason Goldman)

I have a longstanding fondness for tales of moviemaking disaster (“Hearts of Darkness,” about the torturous production of “Apocalypse Now,” is one of my all-time favorite documentaries), and this article about 1993’s shockingly clueless/soulless film adaptation of “Super Mario Bros.” is a great one. I particularly like the above attempt on the author’s part to put herself in the shoes of one of the film’s succession of non-gamer screenwriters and extract a film-able narrative from the game. I often play the same game of “armchair script doctor” when I’ve just seen a particularly shoddy adaptation of something.

(Update: Briana points out that this synopsis could almost match “Requiem for a Dream”)

A screenshot of my very first blog, circa 2001, via Archive.org....

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:31:22 -0700

A screenshot of my very first blog, circa 2001, via Archive.org. So much to comment on here: a post about the Afghan Whigs breakup, the k10k/Kottke-inspired pixel art design (complete with cutting edge iframe); references to “Erin Brockovich” and “Slacker”; a blogroll name checking several of the early blogging in-crowd types I was in awe of in those days (including nearly forgotten early Pyra/Blogger employee Jack Saturn); and links to: a page about my high school senior prank, an audio file archive I created of old Beatles Christmas records, and a Java cron implementation I wrote for a college class. I was pretty awesome.