Put mum on the phone !

Keep an eye on the jars. Brilliant.

Foxhunt !

Today marks the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0. To celebrate this, the Mozilla Foundation is trying to set the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software. So if you've never tried out Firefox before or were bound to update anyway, go ahead. World-wide release times can be viewed here.

Version 3 adds faster rendering (through Gecko 1.9), intelligent bookmarks and smaller memory footprint. Pages load noticeably faster. Firefox is available for all Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.

Firefox is a web browser. I know there are tons of people out there still thinking Internet Explorer is The Internet. I have to cry myself to sleep every night over it.

P.S: Congratulations to the Mozilla Art team for having that giant retro robot in the beta.

FT(cat) = Meow(f)

How can a man every concentrate on studying filters and digital signal processing when every Google search on the matter eventually leads him to a vortex of inproductivity ?

A Skin, A Night

I bought the slightly brilliant documentary A Skin, A Night by Vincent Moon last week. It's about The National, a Brooklyn-based rock band which have been making their way to the spotlights slowly in the last few years. Their latest album, Boxer, got some great media coverage in Europe last spring.

Moon didn't shoot a rockumentary: it's a - quite depressing at times - sober montage on the subject of the band members and the recording of the album. A lot of the songs have multi-layered sequences with a lot of instruments, and it's wonderful to see how it all comes together.

Also, the photography is quite odd: instead of using the standard interview and overview shots, we often look at scenes from a fly-on-the-couch perspective, the band members often not even noticing that the tape is rolling. There's also a lot of zooming in to small details, like eyebrows, mouth twitches and ... well, legs.

The DVD came with The Virginia EP, but with it's length of nearly an hour, it's fair to call it an album. Sure, it's a collection of live registrations, b-sides and demo's, but other artists would give a kidney to come even close to these gems. Make sure to check out the Rest of Years demo and the live version of About Today.

Which brings me to another project of Mr. Moon: Concerts a Emporter.

The idea is simple: follow a known (or less known) artist for a couple of hours (I'd like to know how exactly he tackles that part), which often results in a spontaneous street performance or very intimate versions of songs, all at unusual locations. Some of the highlights: The Arcade Fire performs Neon Bible in an elevator , Beirut performs Nantes in the streets of Paris, and once again, The National plays Ada on a mountain top.

Sex, Drugs and Video Games

Okay, you can stop the giggling now.

This is a lecture by Daniel Floyd (Savannah College of Art & Design) on the subject of sex in videogames, and why it is a necessary step to accept intimacy in videogames in much the same way we accept it in movies: a strong part of the storyline, a major factor for emotional involvement. Never mind the high-pitched not-really-Yahtzee voice.



Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun !