MacDara Conroy: Self, aggregated

John K reviews Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
One from the backlog, here. The verdict? It’s pure formula, but with enough interestingness in the animation to put it above the competition. That’s probably why I enjoyed it more than I expected, too. Permalink   ·

Chart of 2009 New York Mets Injuries
We want much less red this season, please. And some wins would be nice, too. [c/o Subtraction] Permalink   ·

ANC’s Julius Malema lashes out at ‘misbehaving’ BBC journalist
South Africa can’t and won’t improve until dangerously misleading relics and liars like Malema are out of the picture. Permalink   ·

Deadspin on the life and career of Andre the Giant
A wonderful feature piece (with YouTube clips) on the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’; part of a series on dead wrestlers that Deadspin’s treating with the kind of respect the business doesn’t usually get. Permalink   ·

The Editor and the Curator (Or the Context Analyst and the Media Synesthete)
In short, the concept of curation is being corrupted by the use of the term as a fancy synonym for ‘editing’ or ‘selecting’. After all, the act of curating is about preserving things, not cutting them away. [c/o Fimoculous] Permalink   ·

Film Noir Checklist
A primer for anyone who always wanted to but was afraid to ask. I defy you to watch Sweet Smell of Success and not be knocked out of your socks. Permalink   ·

The League of Moveable Type
High-quality open source fonts. Because we don’t all have the resources of a design house. Permalink   ·

Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness
I knew something was off, and now I know why. Permalink   ·

Dunkie Drinks Dunkin’s Coffee
Sadly it’s only an April Fool’s prank. I wish it was real. Permalink   ·

150,000 join start line for first day of London 2012 Olympics ticket race
Tickets go on sale in spring next year? That’s closer than I expected; not long left to decide if I’m going. Permalink   ·

Infovore: A book of photographs that I made
Very, very nice. I may have to make one myself. Permalink   ·

Where to turn when you can’t ask the hive mind?
So nice to see there’s more to online advice than Yahoo! Answers (which really lives up to its name, come to think of it). Permalink   ·

Every issue of Spin magazine on Google Books
More publications should do this sort of thing. (See also: every issue of Plan B magazine in a handy torrent.) Permalink   ·

Kottke on ‘the new rules for reviewing media’
It’s an interesting phenomenon, but not the kind of trend I want to see. Kottke says: “In the end, people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts.” I disagree: people DO buy content. If I buy a book, I’m buying it for the story; the format is entirely secondary, regardless of my personal preferences. Giving a book a bad rating because you can’t read it on your Kindle or whatever? That’s just bullshit whatever way you cut it. Permalink   ·

Confessions of a Book Pirate
“In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.” This here is the kicker; the spectre that looms over all forms of electronic copying. And the reason why the question still lingers is because ‘piracy’ is just as easily compared to the second-hand marketplace as it is to outright stealing — and nobody would call someone who buys second-hand books or music a thief, would they? [c/o Kottke] Permalink   ·

Charles Bukowski and the Computer
Reading this makes me sad at how little the literary world has embraced the digital age. They can’t all be reactionary luddites, surely [c/o MetaFilter]. Permalink   ·

Serendipity Killed the Cat
For Dave Pell, ‘controlled serendipity’ is more like an uncontrollable addiction. In my view, guess it depends on whether those doing it are doing it for others or themselves; the difference is significant. Permalink   ·

‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web
Someone at the NYT discovers link-blogging, even though hundreds if not thousands of people have been doing it for YEARS! Everything said here, everything quoted by others, it can all be said of blogging in general — or at least blogging as it was a decade ago [c/o LinkMachineGo]. Permalink   ·

How to use a semicolon
I may have blogged this before, but it’s worth posting again. Indeed, the ‘divine semi-colon’ is nothing to be feared. Permalink   ·

The 24-Hour Cycle at Clean Rite Laundromat
I love stories like this. Is there anything like it outside of the US? It’s such a contrast to my local laundrette, where I’ve never met another soul (apart from the guy who takes in the binliner full of clothes). Permalink   ·

Your pal, John K.
A fan of John Kricfalusi (of Ren & Stimpy fame) wrote to the man himself, and received a more than generous reply. This is for all of us who are too scared to say hi to our heroes (although I’ve shaken the hand of mine, and he complimented my shirt). Permalink   ·

Some visualisations of stories and narratives
I’d like to see one for The Wire, or The Sopranos. Or The Simpsons. Or better yet: one tracking crossovers between different movies/series (cf. The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis). Permalink   ·

Jonathan Lethem on the streets of Brooklyn
An interview with the author of The Fortress of Solitude upon the release of his latest, Chronic City. According to Lethem, the Brooklyn he loves is marked by “a definitive incompleteness”. Couldn’t the same be said for any city-with-a-soul? Permalink   ·

Looking into the past
Is there an augmented reality app for this kind of thing? If there isn’t, there should be. Just imagine the possibilities! Permalink   ·

Everything I Learned About Game Design I Learned From Disneyland
People can scoff about theme parks all they want, but there’s nothing like the attention to detail that imagineers bestow upon every element of the Disney experience. That’s the key to the whole shebang. Permalink   ·

The 50 most intriguing games of 2010
New games for the Wii are conspicuous by their absence. Nintendo, what are you doing? Permalink   ·

The Weird Book Room
Just goes to show there’s a market for just about everything, however small that market might be. Permalink   ·

Kottke on Greg Allen on rotating the dishes
I’m already getting in the habit of stacking from the bottom, after noticing half of our plates weren’t used in months. Permalink   ·

Omphaloskepsis for the nation
The Irish blogosphere gets itself in a tizzy about the ‘death of blogging’. Blah blah blah, whatever. If the only thing you care about when you blog is doing it for other people, then you’re doing it wrong. End of story. Next! Permalink   ·

Charlie Brooker: why I love video games
The man really does love his videogames. But sadly not the Wii, which has its place for casual-but-interested gamers such as myself. Permalink   ·

Touch and Go: The Complete Years
The fanzine that begat the label that begat a metric shitload of bands that changed people’s lives forever. Permalink   ·

In praise of… pies
“There is… an essence of pie; it dwells in the borderland where pastry meets with filling to create a third taste, and complete the pie-makers’ holy trinity.” Mmm, yes indeed. Permalink   ·

Wall of Knowledge
Isn’t this more or less what Trinity’s Long Room would look like if you turned the shelves by 90 degrees? Permalink   ·

Falling out of love with Murakami
I love Murakami, and I don’t care about the clichés (the enigmatic women, the jazz, the pasta), nor that his stories are one-off experiences (as I never re-read books anyway). Permalink   ·

MUJI & LEGO
This is lovely. I can haz it now? Permalink   ·

Why progress-bar traffic lights are long overdue
This is a great idea (more about it here) akin to the countdown timers for pedestrians on many traffic lights here in Dublin. Those certainly work for me — but then my mammy raised me right. Permalink   ·

How to buy on eBay
I thought this was how everyone did it. Permalink   ·

‘These videogames are not art. They are extreme pornography’
O RLY? Actually this might be one of the few instances where the comments section is better than the article itself — which needless to say is hideously ill-informed. Permalink   ·

Khoi Vinh on the tradeoff between convenience and high-definition
“The essence of [the] argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience… Actually, it’s the content that really matters.” Hear, hear! Fidelity is great and all, but there comes to a point when I care less about the quality and more about the content. Actually, it’s more a spectrum of appreciation than any fixed point on a graph. Permalink   ·

Google Zeitgeist 2009
The annual Google Zeitgeist seems like the only time of year when us English-speaking Westerners realise that there’s a whole other world out there using the web just like we are. Permalink   ·

Inside the topsy-turvy world of record label royalty reporting
Do people really still believe that (the vast majority of) artists get anything like a fair deal from major labels? Permalink   ·

Trailblazing
Courtesy of the Royal Society, a pretty neat timeline of cultural and scientific achievements from 1650 to the present (and beyond…) Permalink   ·

Man ‘finishes’ World of Warcraft
I thought this was an Onion story for a minute. Permalink   ·

Lou Albano obituary
Nice of the Guardian to pay tribute to Captain Lou. Permalink   ·

Immaterials
Matt Jones of BERG describes the company’s work in the tangible-ness of intangible things. I particularly like the idea of raw data as a material to tell real stories that are ‘human readable’, for lack of a better expression. Permalink   ·

Is modern web design too like print design?
“If I was standing in 1995 and looking ahead to 2009 and was told how all of those technical restrictions would be lifted, of what would be technically possible, I’d imagine 2009’s web to look a lot more exciting than it does. I’d expect it to look less like a magazine or a newspaper and to look more like what the web could be.” Agreed. But I think that the fact that this question is even being asked is a sign that we might see a more exciting web in the near future. The last few years have mostly been about function, about what’s under the hood. But we’ve got that sorted, more or less; now’s the time to have some fun with the web again. Permalink   ·

Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows is streaming online
Hosted by the National Film Board of Canada, no less. I never got around to seeing this the first time round. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on trolleybuses
I’m fascinated by trolleybuses. Probably because I’ve never been on one or even seen them in operation. Permalink   ·

Formula 1 user interfaces
Some hot car/tech pr0n, in anticipation of the new F1 season starting this weekend [c/o Daring Fireball]. Permalink   ·

The Onion: Oh No, Performers Coming Into Audience
My greatest fear realised. And I’m going to see Cirque du Soleil next week; I swear, if they try it I’ll run screaming out of the building. Permalink   ·