This is New Zealand hip hop group Organized Rhyme. (Unrelated to the early 90s Tom Green project.) I found this on YouTube while browsing around for, of all things, New Zealand rap. (Hey, I was just curious.)
This track, “We Bak”, is actually pretty good. The production is really cheesy but I enjoy their flows a lot, and man that hook is great. They have a couple of other videos and they’re worth checking out but I think this one is probably the strongest.
Josh Dixon of Cultso has collected a bunch of pieces of art by Bryan Lewis Saunders. One of Saunders’s projects is taking a drug and drawing a self-portrait under its effects. He has taken some really nasty drugs and been hospitalized as a direct result of this project.
The picture accompanying this post was drawn while he was under the influence of cocaine. Click it to view the rest.
Iran’s News Agency Reruns The Onion as Real News:
This is… simply astounding.
It’s Friday, so that means it’s time to learn about combinatorial explosion and the tragic future loneliness of robot teachers with anime!
The first part of it is a little boring, but please stick with it to the end. Everything that happens after the five and a half minute mark makes it worth it.
SIGGRAPH always has some amazing stuff. For example, if for some reason you were simulating cloth in 3D and needed to generate sound effects for the cloth’s movement, now you can do that, thanks to some folks at Cornell University.
Cul de Sac comic ends as homage to ‘dying yet mighty art form’
Philip Potempa for The Times of Northwest Indiana:
Last month Universal, the syndication company for [Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac], announced the newspaper feature, which they described as “one of the most celebrated comics of this generation,” would begin what was termed “an indefinite hiatus after Sunday, Sept. 23.”
The comic, acknowledged by talents such as Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and iconic editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, is “closing its curtains,” according to the Universal press contact, due to Thompson’s battle with Parkinson’s disease.
I heard that Cul de Sac was ending a few days before it ended, but for some reason I never posted anything here about it. Now’s as good a time as any.
Cul de Sac was, quite simply, my favorite comic strip that was still updating. Parkinson’s is an awful, terrible thing, and I wish him all the best.
The strip’s suspension was announced through a Q&A with Thompson by an exec of his syndicate, and you should probably read it.
This is a MIDI written by video game composer Yousuke Yasui in 1999 titled “Que Cela Cela.”
I’m linking this mostly because of the amazing MIDI visualizations. First the PARALLAX SCROLLING OF MIDI CHANNELS happening in the first half because they’re apparently being rendered in 3D space, and then later the endless staircase of keyboards. Astounding.
Bees Plan Routes to Minimize Travel Distance
As part of our continuing coverage of bees, I’d like to bring to your attention some research by folks at Queen Mary, University of London, as summarized by Virginia Morell for ScienceNOW:
Bumblebees foraging in flowers for nectar are like salesmen traveling between towns: Both seek the optimal route to minimize their travel costs. Mathematicians call this the “traveling salesman problem,” in which scientists try to calculate the shortest possible route given a theoretical arrangement of cities. Bumblebees, however, take the brute-force approach: For them, it’s simply a matter of experience, plus trial and error, scientists report in the current issue of PLoS Biology. The study, the first to track the movements of bumblebees in the field, also suggests that bumblebees aren’t using cognitive maps—mental recreations of their environments—as some scientists have suggested, but rather are learning and remembering the distances and directions that need to be flown to find their way from nest to field to home again.
So this isn’t some major natural algorithmic discovery or, as Wired put it, “BEES SOLVE TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM” (fuck Wired), but it’s a pretty cool find that bees will in some way remember distances and plan routes to minimize travel.
Japanese Collectors Face a Record Shortage of Obscure Music
Wonderful story about Japanese music collectors in The Wall Street Journal by Neil Shah:
For decades, Japan’s record shops have scoured the globe for records to feed the nation’s collectors. Employees of Japanese retailer Disk Union once spent $20,000 in a day at Nashville’s The Great Escape record store hunting for tunes including ones treasured by Japan’s soft-rock and easy-listening fans. With U.S. record stores closing, this focus on obscure music is making supply difficult to find—and fueling secretive competition.
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Japan has surpassed the U.S. as the biggest seller of CDs, vinyl and cassette tapes, with 25.4% of global sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan. Tower Records Japan Inc.—which survived its U.S. parent’s closing in 2006—opens its 87th store this month.
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Much of what the Japanese want goes for higher prices. Collectible artists in Japan include female pop singers like Patti Page, whose “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window” was a 1950s hit, and 1980s teen idol Debbie Gibson. A “Doggie” record-single goes for $5 in the U.S. and $30 in Japan, while Ms. Gibson’s LPs can fetch $200 on eBay. The Japanese “like sugary sweet pop,” collector Alec Palao says.
Japan is apparently all about the cheap crap that none of us care about any more.
Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation
Max Fisher for The Atlantic:
Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and Park’s “Gangnam Style” video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish caricature of a Gangnam man. That alone makes it practically operatic compared to most K-Pop. But I spoke with two regular observers of Korean culture to find out what I was missing, and it turns out that the video is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society. That message would be awfully mild by American standards — this is no “Born in the U.S.A.” — but South Korea is a very different place, and it’s a big deal that even this gentle social satire is breaking records on Korean pop charts long dominated by cotton candy.
My gut reaction to this piece was that perhaps it was a bit of overanalysis of a funny music video.
It’s difficult to imagine that much of this could be apparent to non-Koreans, which [Jea] Kim told me is why she decided to write it up on her blog. “I thought people outside Korea might take it just as another funny music video. So I wanted to explain what’s behind [it] and the song.”
Oh. Well then.
Check the piece.
