I'm Justin Dickinson. I design for FiLife.com, write about How I Met Your Mother and bears, and cook better than your mom.
Follow me on Twitter here where I do most of my talking.
Can’t sleep and shopping for large-print wallpaper I found myself at Anthropologie. Their e-commerce experience is pretty straight-forward but there is one thing different that I like:
Download this image.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s an interesting idea. The image that downloads is nothing fancy, just the one in the listing (it’s not even well named, mine was “960040_001_b.jpg”) but I could see the utility in this for sure.
Audience members took turns, often in pairs, using the Chatroulette station on the stage. The conversations with strangers began as they normally seem to, with sarcastic banter getting tossed back and forth. But the interactions began to change as soon as the stranger became aware of the larger audience. A pretty blonde in Brazil, for example, began by playfully flirting with two redheads using the station. When she saw the crowd, she started biting her lips excitedly. The meeting climaxed with loud catcalls from the audience before she was “nexted,” which is website slang for moving on to a new stranger. For the countless nudists on the site, encountering a large crowd was also apparently an exciting treat. A drinking game was made of it: Whenever nudity appeared, the crowd took a drink.
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We Went to a Chatroulette Party Last Night — Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/03/we_went_to_a_chatroutlette_par.html#ixzz0h3gG0S5b
I am absolutely fascinated by chatroulette. Sometimes technology makes something possible socially that is brand new, interesting, a little dangerous, and undefined. It’s in the infancy of these ideas that all the magic happens. The chaotic infant stage before someone figures out how to monetize it, or game its system. Enjoy it now before prochatroulette opens and publishes “All the Cherries: 10 Ways to Win Big at Chat Roulette”.
Check out all the miniatures from this Flickr user. They’re all full of anthropomorphic hope and empathy.
I’d love to see a stop motion series with these characters.
Squid on Stilts! (via Articulate Matter and @supersgp)
This is a (admittedly long) fantastic critique of pop music in the late 90s written by The Onion’s AV Club. I highly recommend you fight through your “TL:DR” impulse and give this a chance. Load it up before you get on the subway and you’ll be done by the time you hit Brooklyn.
Pieces I like the most:
On Britney Spears in the …Baby, One More Time era:
Spears coos, pants, and purrs the song’s come-ons in a crazed libidinal frenzy. She embodies the aphorism I just made up that if you can’t sing well, sing sexy.
Regarding Semisonic, their lead singer Dan Wilson who I’m a huge fan of, and the meaning of the song Closing Time:
On the surface, the song finds the romance in barflies scrambling for a closing-time hookup, but according to So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star, the likeable memoir of Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter, it was written about the birth of Wilson’s first child. The song’s key line is purloined from the Roman philosopher Seneca, who originally wrote, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” It’s a line with multiple meanings; there’s the end of life in the womb and the beginning of life outside, but also a father and mother forsaking the pleasures of youth for the responsibilities of parenthood.
The rest of the article is just as good. It’s an interesting take on such a memorable period of pop music when…holy shit I’m old enough to be nostalgic.
This app is incredible. I just installed it and will report back in a couple weeks after I get used to it but right off the bat the list of things it does is staggering. It really is Quicksilver for the browser.
Great infographic with some very interesting usage data. (via @supersgp)
Just posted my recap for the latest episode of How I Met Your Mother. It’s long, but it was a good episode.
One of my favorite new artists from the past year is Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. While he’s not new to the world, he’s new to me. He’s all at once sad, hopeful, wistful, cynical, fragile, damaged, unaffected. If Bon Iver lived in Brooklyn instead of in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and had a penchant for low-fi production he’d sound something like Casiotone.
This is the first of three or four songs I’ll post this week. All of his songs are biographic in content. This might be my favorite and is definitely the one that I most emphasize with and am moved by. Maybe it’s the country music I grew up listening to with my grandparents but I love a story in a song with bonus points for unrequited or lost love.
This song is lyrically heartbreaking. It’s incredible how the first verse establishes these characters and creates immediate empathy. The hope of the protagonist is palpable and makes the chorus even more heartbreaking.
“Elle’s the only one besides my dad who’s ever said ‘I love you, Creedence’.” is the most emotionally loaded line of the song. Within it lies the implication of a broken man who’s grown up mother-less and desperate to hang onto the one woman in his life for whom he’s ever felt—and had reciprocated—love. Such a rich story full of loss and heartbreak in such a small package.
Via GrubStreet: Grimaldi’s Will Open 24/7 Chelsea Location.
Maybe this will cut down on the lines outside the original DUMBO location.
