Culture

This morning, Warren Ellis said: It’s Wednesday. I want to see the world, please. Send me a photo from your futurephone or webcam. Send it to dadatag@aol.com, which is an email address I have created for the purpose (dadatag = easy to key in on a phone). I will show what I receive here. (This will even work for Sprint PCS phones.) Show me something. And people are. Start here (original), and work forwards. Pictures of the world. Sparse prose, tying it together. ...

The BBC just announced that it was going to put its archives online, for free. Danny O’Brien has the best post yet (original) on the announcement, with thoughts on what that might mean, and what the problems could be. I like the theory that it could be a Creative Commons project.

Morning quick-links, morning quick-links… possibly I should get a sidebar. Dunno. Anyhow, Asian Historical Architecture is 6500 pictures of, well, Asian historical architecture arranged in an easy to browse format. Check out, for example, the Patuxai in Laos.

Well, it’s not as good as the Walken original (original), but if you’re going to remix Fatboy Slim songs with stick figures, this is the way to go (original). I can no longer believe that Flash is evil.

CNN ran a nice story on Warren Zevon (original) the other day. The new CD comes out Tuesday; there’s a VH1 special airing 10 PM on Sunday, Eastern time. Set your TiVos.

Matrix: Revolutions trailer. Available now. The site is so hammered it isn’t worth trying, though. Ah. Bittorrent link here. That’s better.

Yeah, I’m pretty brainless today, so I’m just gonna steal something I said over at Mike’s LJ. You pretentious little punk. You Rebels make me sick, and the Imperials do too, so stop trying to involve me in your petty little wars. Listen. Your political arguments are obsolete, and you’re too calcified to realize it. We have achieved happiness, but because you’re running the Force meme, you haven’t noticed. The world is not what you think it is. The real fun — the real world — exists in the interstices between the planets. Starships are merely achingly slow vectors for meme infection. There is a very old AI in a sector you’ve never heard of; we think he’s playing a complex game of chess with himself using Star Destroyers as pieces, but we’re not completely sure. It doesn’t matter enough to find out. ...

Via Unqualified Offerings, it’s the first song off Zevon’s next album. In MP3 format, no less. And the whole album “available as a stream” on August 19th, which is tomorrow.

The first flash mob with purpose probably won’t be political after all. Rather, it’ll be hordes of people handing out free comics (original). At the least, it’ll be a noble attempt, although I have an image in my mind of a bunch of people giving comics to each other rather than to random strangers. Also, the organizer is doing a piss-poor job of keeping it secret, which will minimize impact. Helpful hint to flash mob organizers: the minute you write anything about your mob on a public forum, the media probably knows.

For all its flaws, we must admire Google for knowing the length of a smoot. Alas, it does not know the value of a quatloo, but then again, neither do I. On the other hand, while searching for quatloo valuations, I did find a proposal for an XML standard for Shadowrun (original). But I digress. Smoots (original) are real.