Josh Nguyen

It’s that time of night where The National makes an appearance on TumblrHQ’s airwaves.

rachelwebber:

paperbackgirl:

My breakdown of Murakami themes.

genius.

(via Mango Affogato)

Interesting. 

seanlennon:

This article is terrifying. I think everyone should read it. Please reblog.

brycedotvc:

About a year ago, while on a trip to NYC, I had back to back to back meetings at Pastis. For those who know, this isn’t that far out of the ordinary.

What was unusual about this particular morning were the two names that kept surfacing in each of the three meetings- Wegs and Benny….

Really hoping this evolves to more than just a feature. I love the idea of DOING STUFF with all the ‘ephemeral’ data that we launch into the streams.. so curious to see how the promise of a more thoughtful media experience can be achieved from what appears to be a neat little email feature.

Call me a cumurgdgeon but I’m thinking the team must have crazy ambition - because the app is really no different than Photojo’s Time Capsule built off Flickr’s API — which was introduced years ago - and now repackaged as the possible saving grace of our overconsumption and crazy noise-to-signal problems. 

But I guess in this game, timing is key, salesmanship is even more important, and the belief and willingness to chase after something hard can potentially lead to something amazing.  So color me skeptical, but intrigued.

blech:

I put some thoughts about the Oscar nominations into a reply to Joshua Nguyen, but here are some more.

• Hugo and The Artist lead the Oscar nominations by count. I suppose that proves that films about film go down well with people who make films.
• … either that, or they like nostalgia about…

Replying to a reblog to my reblog; movies I saw this year:

Margin Call: Wow. What a brilliantly executive movie - cinematography, acting and script were perfect-pitch.

Drive: Pretty to look at; great score; I’m not sure if that carried the slow pace of the first half.  There are a lot of good intentions in this movie, but directing killed it.

Hoover: Great character acting but with a script that’s devoid of any real (or metaphorical conflict) it’s hard to be engaged.

Norwegian Wood: Great cinematography and but the screenplay adaptation failed to flesh out (a genuinely hard task) Murakami’s characters.  But notwithstanding a couple of scenes of overacting, a decent movie for the year.

Cowboys & Aliens: I admire the cojones of the producers to throw every imaginable cliche about westerns and sci-fi in this movie.

Crazy Stupid Love: Wow - a decent adult comedy that’s not dumbed down.

Young Adult: Brilliant screenplay and even better acting from Charlize.  It may not leave you satisfied but it certainly pricks the mid-adult itch you have throughout the entire 90 minutes.

50/50: A happy movie about cancer? I think not. It wasn’t bad - but it’s hard to make a movie about cancer.

Colombiana: Saw on the plane because I was bored.

Hangover Part II: Saw on the plane because I was really bored.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: A bit too much in love with its own intelligence.. but Werner Herzog’s skill with the camera — and how he can make cave paintings be interesting for hours is a feat in and of itself.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Blowing up Golden Gate Bridge. That’s a new one.

Kung Fu Panda II: On Netflix! And the accent of the goose really pisses me off after ten minutes.

X Men: First Class: A decent enough origin story. I’m looking forward to the next one.

To see: The Guard, Super 8, Coriolanus, Louder than a Bomb, The Artist, The Descendants,

matthew:

My only consolation re The Help’s four Oscar nominations is that the French version of the title is so hilariously saccharine it approaches parody: La Couleur des sentiments (“The Color of Feelings”).

Seriously, though, last year was a parade of remarkable films; that’s not something you would conclude from these nominations.

War Horse???? It’s ET with a horse. Horse runs home.

Midnight in Paris? It’s a postcard extended to two hours.

Moneyball? A baseball movie where the audience’s attention span is the only meaningful antagonist.

Tree of Life: There’s a reason why the best movies tell stories. Visual poetry that’s more than two hours needs to be serialized.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Schtick.

What a disappointing year for film-making.  

texturism:

i have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. i blog about real life; i talk about the internet. it’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a…

Amen.

thenextweb:

Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp admits that one area the blogging network hasn’t performed well enough at thus far is content discovery – and you can expect to see a lot of development in that area at Tumblr.com this year.

Karp is at the DLD conference today as part of a bid to expand the international impact of the blogging service. As we reported earlier today, the startup now serves 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month.

We caught up with him a little later to find out more about what’s in store for 2012. A focus on growth outside the US and a larger staff headcount are planned but product development is also a priority, Karp says.

First snow in Prospect Park.

Foursquare geeks may enjoy this one:

Aaron has tinkered again to come up with something dubbed Privatesquare . At first glance it’s piggybacking on Foursquare’s API to add public/private things related to check-ins:

Check-ins can be sent on to foursquare (and again re-broadcast to Twitter, etc. or to your followers or just “off the grid”) but the important part is: They don’t have to be. As much as this screenshot of my activity on foursquare cracks me up it’s not actually representative of my life and suggests a particular kind of self-censorship.

But he then goes beyond that to introduce some new taxonomies that should be interesting cases for Explore:

Second, privatesquare has its own internal taxonomy of event-iness. It is:

• I am here
• I was there
• I want to go there
• again
• again again
• again maybe
• again never

Much more nerdiness into the project if you’re so inclined over at Near Future Lab.

Prospect Park, two January days.

christenduong:

Thank goodness for snow days. We launched Explore on Web 9 days ago, and I’m just getting around to blogging about it.

This product helps our users find a place for dinner, worthy sights for their next trip, or just what’s interesting around their neighborhood - whatever they want to do, wherever they want to go. Rather than basing our recommendations on star ratings, we base it on real-world check-in data. This means we get to show you places you haven’t gotten around to trying yet, the places your friends have gone, your go-to spots, and places where you can snag a deal. I love this because I think this is how people talk about places in real life. (btw, my favorite query to combat FOMO = places I haven’t been to yet + places my friends have been to)

This is why I joined foursquare - to help people discover new experiences, big and small, in their everyday lives. So proud that this product is a step in that direction.

On a personal note, I’m really psyched because it’s the first capital letter feature I’ve launched at foursquare. We’ve got an amazing team (not so humble related article here) and there’s just an incredible energy in the air around launch time. It’s like we’re magnetized to GSDing.

Speaking of, cooking up a new batch of stuff now!

Explore web coverage:

NY Times - Foursquare wants to Plan Your Next Meal - and Vacation 

Venture Beat - Foursquare’s mobile recommendation engine, Explore, hits the web

david:

My talk at DLD this morning with the lovely Martín Varsavsky!

I love that Creators/Curators/Audience slide.

Looking good.

Neutral Uke Hotel | A Take Away Show | In The Aeroplane Over The Sea 

I like how people are just eating and walking past - a million lives on different tracks.

curiositycounts:

Exquisite timelapse of day and night in Yosemite National Park.

Lots more to explore here.. one of those places I can come back to again and again.

bijan:

The Chieftains - Down In The Willow Garden (featuring Bon Iver)

thx to @davehopton for the recommendation! 

Perfect song for a silent snow-blanketed morning.

35 Magnum Photographers Give Their Advice to Aspiring Photographers — Eric Kim Street Photography
Eric Kim, erickimphotography.com

(Above image copy­right­ed by Alex Majoli)

Bill Reeves, a pas­sion­ate pho­tog­ra­ph­er who is for­tu­nate enough to have Mag­num pho­tog­ra­phers Eli Reed and Paolo Pel­le­grin as his men­tors, told me about a blog post that Mag­num had …

Good reminders all around.