OK Go is known for their complicated, flashy music videos, so when the quirky four-man band launched "Obsession" Thursday, the internet took notice. With over a million views already, the video is an impressive visual feast that uses walls of printers (567 of them to be exact) spitting out sheets of paper as its backdrop.
It comes with a warning though. The band writes:
This video has a lot of flashing colors. If you’re susceptible to seizures, be careful, please. Your viewing experience will look significantly better if you manually set your YouTube resolution settings to 1440p or 2160p (for desktop, click the gear icon in the lower right). Just leaving it on “Auto HD” results in some pretty intense distortion during a few sections, because when the the colors and patterns get crazy, there’s actually just too much information flying by for YouTube’s normal HD compression. We broke the matrix. The good people of YouTube have been working with us to solve this (it’s a bit rate limitation issue) over the last 24 hours, but there’s no quick fix, and now it’s Thanksgiving in the US, and we’re all with our families.
The song is from their new album, Hungry Ghosts.
And yes, a lot of trees died in the making of this video but, calm down, the band has already recycled the paper and given the proceeds to Greenpeace. Read the rest
Here's a neat kitchen gadget — a toaster that "prints out" toast. It allows you to feed multiple slices at once from the feeder at top, and spits out finished products from the bottom. It's a concept by Othmar Muehlebach, and it won second place at a design contest in Switzerland last month.
Artist's main page via Designboom Read the rest
Clay Shirky's essay on the past and future of bookselling is provocative. I think he really nails something with his taxonomy of the reasons that people worry about bookstores, but I'm not sure I buy his conclusion -- that bookselling might be best served on an NPR/nonprofit model.
In my experience, people make this argument for one of three reasons.
This first is that some people simply dislike change. For this group, the conviction that the world is getting worse merely attaches to whatever seems to be changing. These people will be complaining about kids today and their baggy pants and their online bookstores 'til the day they die.
A second group genuinely believes it's still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don't own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.
A third group, though, is making the 'access to literature' argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren't actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.
Read the rest
