We had the privilege to hang out and talk to Xeni Jardin, and I have to admit I was a little nervous. I'd talked to her at industry events and social gatherings, but it's not often that Zadi and I spend time with people who, like us, have such a vast knowledge of the web and its culture going back ten or more years. There is something special about the people who came of age with the first Internet boom and worked online during the transformation of the web from a tech curiosity into a mainstream cultural force. Luckily for us, she is completely charming and down to earth, and considering her efforts over the past two years with Boing Boing video, we had tons of common experiences.
Each week, we here at EPIC FU highlight someone or something who is giving the ultimate FU to the status-quo. This week, the FU of the Week is being served by Jonathan Coulton, the former computer programmer turned Geek Rockstar.
In 2005, Jonathan stopped writing software and started writing song lyrics. He immediately tapped into his online roots and decided to release a song a week for an entire year as free downloads on his site. The combination of the web's love of free things and Jonathan's readiness to take creative risks turned the experiment into a crazy success. The project, called Thing a Week, garnered a legion of loyal fans, who are now the core of his online community and continue to fuel his music career.
Smashing Magazine has done an amazing job collecting an incredible variety of pixel art in this blog post. The sheer variety and creativity of these artists is inspiring. There's something about pixel art that is so basic and familiar, and, yes, comforting to me. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I grew up on pixel art on the computers and video game systems of my youth.
More pics after the jump.
[ Via: [via smashing magazine] ]
Just received a message from Vance (Behold the Mundane) alerting me to these super cool Super Mario Drum Pads for Rockband! He and his friend/co-creator Jennifer toiled long and hard on these, so show some love. There are also Flickr pictures.
[Thanks Vance]
Sure there's the Macbook Air, but just look at all the stuff you can get for almost half the price. I mean really -- I'm thinking The Bureau crew is onto something here.
For those of you who loved the 1982 classic, you will probably get a kick out of this. It's funny how one of the first computer generated movies is remade here into cardboard stop motion craziness. This definitely follows my rule of: "If you're going to remake something, you better give it a twist." I think introducing cardboard into the equation is a pretty good twist.
This week Zadi talked about a few of the personal aggregators out there that let you pull your feeds from services like Twitter and Pownce so all your updates show up in one centralized location. If you use an aggregator like FriendFeed, Socialthing, or iminta it doesn't matter which networks you use and which ones I use -- we can keep up with each other on the same website.
An alternative approach sort of accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact opposite -- instead of pulling from multiple places, it lets you send to multiple places, and it's causing a bit of controversy in the social space. I'm talking about "status blasting" services like HelloTxt, which let you to ping multiple services with the same message simultaneously.
The EPIC Tumblr Rock Party from David Karp on Vimeo.
Seriously, I watched this and I got reaaally jealous. Our Tumblr friends in NYC had a Rock Band party together with our friends at N3 and Frederator Studios. Looks like tons of fun. Makes me think we should form a west coast rock band, and revive the whole east coast/west coast rivalry thing. :)
[ Via: Via: shey.net ]
