Recently in cool Category

Ohh I just love Hel Looks, a street fashion blog for Helsinki. I've been following the site for over a year now and they consistently catch the best-dressed of all current subcultures, as well as those who just stand out. But god I can't express enough love for this girl's furry legwarmers!!! She's 16 and she says, "I mix cyber punk and Japanese style. Colourful style brings me joy."

How fun to be young and growing up in a big city.

Doing my part for the environment today because I love her dearly.

So, kids, unicorns, and others. Don't use plastic bags anymore when you go shopping. Seriously. They plug up our landfills, suffocate small children and animals, and use up precious petroleum. Plus it's sooooo easy to use your own bag. Have you ever supported PBS or your local library? If so, perhaps they gave you a tote bag! This tote bag can be carried along with you to the supermarket, mall, sex shop, etc., and used to carry whatever goodies you picked up that day.

One bag not enough? Don't like PBS or your library? Easily solved! You can buy tote bags year-round at H&M in the US for $7.90 - they're stylish and nicely priced! Envirosax is also a good option for you eco-savvy fashionistas out there. If you find it ridiculous to spend money on a bag you're carrying groceries in, you can find things to reuse around your home. For example, take a smallish rice woven bag and a larger woven rice bag. Cut the handles off the large one and sew them onto the smallish one. Voila! Cheap, very sturdy, reusable bag! It might even have a picture of an elephant on it, which would be really cool. Elephants rock.

The She's A Betty blog has a very comprehensive post on how to cut out plastic bag consumption from your life. I highly recommend it for extra reading. Reusablebags.com unsurprisingly offers a lot of insight into this issue, and the wikipedia post on plastic shopping bags is also worth a glance.

My post is coming a little late in the day, but it's a good promo for MCC's Sustainability Day on October 24. From 12-2 PM that day, tables offering ways students can live a little greener will be set up in (I'm guessing right now) Building 3. Providing no one else's table is talking about this, Cabbages + Kings (literary/arts magazine) will have a table talking about reusable bags! And if this topic is taken, Kris will do some quick research to come up with a different table!

P.S. Native Rochester business Wegmans sells reusable bags for $1 each! Tell your friends! Save the Earth. :)

Hey, who wants to go to Ft Worth with me? October 19? We can go to this awesome thing at the Modern Art Museum - "Modern til Midnight". It features the hyperrealist sculptures of Ron Mueck, and abstract paintings of four post-WWII artists who really expanded the world of abstract art. Also, St Vincent is playing a show there! Right at the museum. I saw her open for Arcade Fire in May, and she's something else. There was a birdcage onstage for her performance, and I'm pretty sure that's where the chirping noises were coming from for one of her songs. It was delightful. If that's not enough of a draw, current indie dear Peter and the Wolf (and his "junk orchestra") will be opening.

Cooooome on! Texas, guys! Art! Music! Wonderfulness!

Photo courtesy of Haddhar on flickr.

This music video from Bat For Lashes is deliciously creepy. Reminds me a bit of that part in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and her brother are walking out at night and you think someone unseen is watching them....I think it's when Scout's in the ham costume, or she's playing with a tire or something. Anyway, it's the same feeling of watching someone young and carefree all alone on a deserted street, just knowing something's going to jump out at them...or is it? Ha, maybe it's because the girl's riding her bike and wearing a sparkly sweatshirt like a 6-year-old.

The timing and transitions work really well in this little vid. The beginning is entrancing almost to the point of boredom - but it gets spine-tingly awesome less than a heartbeat later. If David Lynch had to direct a photoshoot for Teen Vogue, it might go something like this.

(There is a car accident scene at the end of this video...Just a warning in case you are sensitive to that kind of stuff. It's a dark blue car and it's flipped over. You don't see it happen, but you see the car.)

Who: Tech-savvy Rochestarians
What: Ad-hoc gathering of like-minded people interested in technology and its impact on our future. A day of discussions, demos, learning, and sharing from all those present.
Where: B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences (Google Map) - 70-2400, 2455, and 2690
When: Saturday, 12 May 2007. 10 am - til you can no longer stand it. ;-)

Short film by Miranda July, shot in one day after completion of Me and You and Everyone We Know. It's based off a short story MJ wrote. I love how she plays with tension in artificial moments created by real ones, and vice versa:
- "My girlfriend might like one."
- "...Well, take three!"
It's pessimism embraced in a dapper, whimsical way. I feel sooo uncomfortable watching her films, but I also want to giggle like mad. Terribly brilliant woman. She's coming out with a collection of short stories later this month, No One Belongs Here More Than You. I'll be grabbing that one off the shelf on the 15th!

The possibilities in web 2.0 have launched us into a new phase of communication, interaction, and of course, consumerism. Even though many of the nastier kinks in society can be attributed to consumerism, I see this as the beginning of a great thing. There's been too much emphasis in the last century placed in selling selling SELLING. What we actually needed was largely ignored while they shouted and stripped for us to show us what we wanted. Now, with applications like VisualDNA, it looks like a new communication is being opened with the market. We can return to a more personalized consumerism by showing the market what we want and need. Fighting fire with fire, basically. Like all great ideas, I wonder why no one thought of this one before!

So, what's VisualDNA? It's an online profile of you that's more visually appealing than either myspace or facebook, and probably gives a more accurate depiction of "what you're like". VisualDNA forms a personality analysis based on your age, where you live, and the selections you make from a series of photographs linked to questions about your feelings on music, love, excitement, etc. The result is a little notebook that shows the breakdown of which personality groups you fall under, exploring "mood," "fun," "habits" and "love". I can see this causing unease in some people, because, groan, "Here I am being lumped into a subgroup once again..." This is true to an extent, but it's definitely a step in moving away from that. The description you get for each of your personality components is more tailored to you - from what I can tell, it looks like age and location are definite factors in this profile, but I have a hunch the total sum of the four facets has an influence on the overall result as well.

I see a lot of promise in this project. Right now, once you've established your profile, you can see how your answers compared to others', and you can see the users who most closely resemble you. You can add a photo of yourself, message others on the site, and you get a neat-looking widget to share with your friends and invite them to the network! Even cooler, you can customize the widget to explain the pics you chose! Other aspects of this project are still being worked out...you've got messy-looking URLs, there's no actual private messaging through the site (it's an email form), and when I first attempted to assess my VisualDNA in the Mac browser Camino, it almost crashed (worked fine in Safari though!). Still, this is a cool thing.

According to the Imagini vision, they've realized that businesses spend a ridiculous amount every year on market research, and even more to advertise and entice us to be in the market. The people behind Imagini say that's all bunk now, and they're looking for ways to suit people's needs rather than exploit them. Imagini sees the internet as a medium for facilitating the communication between all people, by showing others both what we want and need. This is already in the beginning stages of implementation, as the other project they've got going is a recommendation of travel sites based on your profile. Neat!

From the Imagini blog:

Our view...is to open up a completely new method of communication - a language that everyone who can see can interact with and understand - a language of images that enables people to understand each other in a different way.

The reason we have chosen images as a way of doing this is because about 90% of the way we all communicate is non-verbal. This 90% is made up of all sorts of different components that include many visual aspects such as who we look, act and behave.

This is definitely an insightful use of the new communications technologies we've been seeing in the past couple years. You can check out my VisualDNA profile widget after the jump. Thanks to the lovely Johanna for linking me to this!

654 South Ave, Rochester NY, 14620
Tues-Sat 11-7
Sun 12-5

Finally, a place to shop in Rochester! No more picking through the multitude of cheap & gaudy to find the 1 or 2 affordable & cute pieces at H&M or Gadzooks. And no more knock-offs, thank god. This is the real thing. Real designers! Hurray. Gentle Fawn, Fyasko, Little by Jenny, and more. There's even some cute home products designed by Pop Ink. This place is cooler than some stores I've been to in Montreal. Maybe that's because I can't afford to shop in the really cool stores in Montreal, but shhh. That just brings me to my next point, anyway. This place is super affordable. I walked out with an adorable tee-shirt that only set me back $19. And 19 is my favorite number! Felicitous? I think so!

Check them out sometime. If clothes ain't your thang, there's always fun stuff like light-up oinking pig keychains and lomography cameras. Plus it's right next to Lux so if you're fed up, buy yourself a beer.

From the RocWiki:

The newest addition to the South Wedge, Thread: entertaining with design, art, and fashion -- gridding the scale from clothing to meticulous necessities. Scavenging from grassroots and established companies as well as providing an outlet for local artists to showcase and sell their work. Never serving you the same course twice, Thread will always stock the newest (clothes, clothing, garments, outfits, attire, garb; dress, wear; togs, duds, getup, threads; apparel.) to keep the eyes, mind, and soul stimulated, ascending your style into heightening fashion.

Check out this submission to Radar Film Festival from Will Perrens and Jenny Cobden, and try not to smile. (Not possible!) So many things to love here! The cardboard set, the cut-out props, the actors' expressions...the silliness! These guys must've worked their butts off pulling this thing together (and apart). Great song choice too.

Thanks to Gabriel for showing me this a few months ago.

Edit: Oops, both the filmmakers' sites are down. Here's a lesser-quality youtube version.

Around Christmastime, I did a websearch for cool alarm clocks. I was staying up 'til 3 AM every night talking to the love of my life, so getting up for class at 9 AM tended to...not happen sometimes, and my mom suggested buying me a new alarm clock for Christmas. In my search, I came across the Industorious Clock , which is not an alarm clock at all. It's a clock application that syncs to your computer's clock and displays the date and time down to the last second, all using animation of a hand drawing and erasing each number.

Why? Why would anyone do this? Ha, besides being plain cool, this thing really has no function. But I visited the creator Yugo Nakamura's website and found a whole bunch of interactive digital art projects coded using motion logic. Nakamura uses simple shapes that move in beautifully hypnotic ways, but in these compositions, you are also part of the creation process. By interacting with the images onscreen, you affect the neverending construction of the piece. The cleverest part is that it's all based on algorithms of kinetic energy. The project is not all up to you, but is not possible without you, the artist, and the laws of physics. I could spend hours playing with this stuff! Try 1, 3, and 6 on for size.

Secret Wall Tattoos is an "anarchy art" project bringing interesting hidden paintings to hotel rooms, public restrooms, and hallways near you. The object is to find a neatly-hung painting in a public place and leave a secret painting the same dimensions as the frame, right on the wall behind it. It's not clear to me if this is one person doing all the artwork, or a small group of artists, but you can see on the myspace page that many others are being inspired to follow suit. Fun stuff!

One of the best things about 2007 for me so far is that I finished all three of Cory Doctorow's novels, and he is now one of my favourite authors. I've been a boingboing reader for the past year, but for some silly reason it never occurred to me to read any of his books. But once I picked up Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I couldn't put it down. In fact I read six chapters sitting stark naked in my living room because its lovely bright green cover caught my eye on the way to the shower! I had to hide the damn thing under a pillow.

The book is basically about a guy, Jules, who is a "castmember" of Walt Disney World - he lives there and is part of a faction that takes care of part of the park. He loves the Haunted Mansion ride because of its human performers as well as the very clever illusions provided by age-old mechanical tricks - ropes, smoke and mirrors, acoustics. Unfortunately, a faction that got big overseas is moving in with newer, cooler technology that's completely revolutionizing the way rides work in the Magic Kingdom. You know, digital/brain interfacing, better robots. But Jules is convinced that what looks better in theory is not actually what's best for the park. He starts a grassroots movement, involving the castmembers and fans to save the true spirit of Disney World from becoming just another thing you can buy out of a box. The story is brilliant, told in witty, beguiling narrative that will make you want to go out and tell all your friends to read it too! After finishing it, I immediately bought it and his other two novels. He's that good.

Because Cory is so awesome and believes in fair use and all that good stuff, you can see for yourself and download the entire novel right here, in a variety of formats. You can read it on your cell phone, smart phone, palm pilot, etc. Or just right in your web browser. You can even sign up to read it in installments through email!