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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 140 most recent ones recorded in
Boing Boing's LiveJournal:
| Friday, March 29th, 2013 | |||
| 1:38 pm | Interview with Wrong director Quentin Dupieux ADVERTISEMENT The following is a sponsored post:
There’s nothing quite right about this hilariously delirious clip from Wrong, which hits theaters throughout the country this Friday and is already available on iTunes, featuring a suspicious gardner explaining the impossible overnight transformation of an everyday Californian palm tree to an evergreen. Its one of the many, many things wrong with Wrong from director Quentin Dupieux. After directing just a mere handful of features, Dupieux (aka international electro-musician Mr. Oizo) has already established himself as one of the modern cinema’s foremost fearless surrealists who refuses to play by the rules. The Cannes Film Festival selected Rubber about a serial homicidal tire (yes, a car tire), the viral short and soon-to-be feature Wrong Cops starring Marilyn Manson and now his latest comedic brainbomb Wrong all seem to be constructs of the same wholly original and strange deadpan daymare. With a laser-sharp eye, a pranksterish wit and the airy rhythm of a ballet dancer, this filmmaker has zapped a fully-formed artistic vision into our collective space. Wrong follows “Reno 911”’s Jack Plotnick after he loses his beloved dog and encounters a barrage of bizarro human roadblocks in his journey including a feces-hunting pet detective (Steve Little from "Eastbound And Down") and an ponytailed, face-scarred guru (a flat-out brilliant William Fichtner). This surreal comedy guides you through a fascinating and hallucinatory universe to which you’ll want to book repeat accommodations. In this interview, Dupieux chats about Wrong, his unique brand of nightmarish comedy, the construction an unconscious dimension and working with Plotnick. Wrong is the story of a man who loses his dog: Paul. Is this an excuse for talking about something else? QD: I love dogs and I am fascinated by the relationship between people and dogs. I get along with dogs better than I do with people! Wrong is an homage to this special love between people and dogs! The story about the character and his dog is the real subject of the film. In writing, you could think that it was some sort of pretext, but I soon realized that there was something poignant about the story of this guy Dolph who loses his dog. I talked about it with the lead actor, Jack Plotnick, and it didn’t take long for us to agree that it’s something you have to experience. The kind of telepathic exercises with his dog, the scenes where he cries in his car because his dog might be dead, all of that could have just been funny but I felt that the potential tragic side of those moments had to be fully explored. I had a very basic desire to see Dolph find his dog and to feel a sincere joy. At the same time, we had to avoid the slightly depressing aspect of a single man with his dog. That’s why he lives in a rather chic house: he has taste, there are lots of pictures on his mantle. You feel that he has a real life. What was the idea that led you to start writing Wrong? I wrote Wrong using the same method as I did for my other movies: in a rather random way. Once I have laid down all the random elements, I link them together to create an overall logic. I try not to have too much control. I reject steering the audience as part of the director’s role. On the contrary, I like the uncertainty that a film can generate. I refuse to take on the role of the director who controls the spectator. Instead, I like this idea of anxiety and uneasiness that the film generates. What a person should be thinking about this or that scene, is a problem for each viewer, not mine. The science of directing the viewers is not my cup of tea. There are already a lot of directors who do that very well. I prefer to create my own domain, which is to create the sense of unease. The film is sometimes very nerve-wracking. As you’re watching, you say to yourself that it could veer off into a complete nightmare or pure comedy. You’re never sure what to expect. The film is built on a bed of anxiety, through these scenes when characters don’t really understand each other. It’s the disappearance of the dog that guided my writing and I hope that plotline stays in people’s minds. I’m pleased to have forged an alliance between comedy and the anxiety linked to the missing dog. From the hero’s point of view, the situation is atrocious, especially when he picks up horrible snippets of information, like the burned-out van. The trap for a movie built on misunderstanding is that if everything is possible, nothing is important. The dog plotline anchors us to something tangible. How do you achieve an overall coherence while preserving this unconscious dimension? Once I have a certain number of ideas, I process them almost mathematically in order to find the overall logic. At the beginning, though, I love not understanding where an idea comes from. The process is the fruit of a lot of hard work. The short films I made when I was 18 were guided only by chance. They lack any logic. Reaching greater maturity, finding the cement that holds ideas together, took time. I sort through parameters; I check everything, like a pilot before take-off. The mere fact that I believe it gives the movie solidity. I’m my first audience. You don’t want to make it your style? No, I find artists who have a style boring. It’s too easy. When you know how to do something, I find it rather lazy to do it again. The filming of Rubber was very exciting because I was discovering my own method, finding my own grammar by inventing it. Thanks also to Jack Plotnick, who seems inhabited by his character’s quest. It was important not to play it cynically. In fact, it worked out quite the opposite. In some takes, Jack was crying too much because his character’s tragedy was so raw for him. Jack Plotnick is unforgettable in the role.
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| 5:46 am | Zombie houses: 300K+ in America
Zombie foreclosures: 300,000 'undead' properties stalk ex-owners (Image: Foreclosure, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from juggernautco's photostream)
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| 5:23 am | How the amazing UK cover for Rapture of the Nerds came to be
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| 5:07 am | Last week to subscribe to Mark's 3rd Quarterly.co mailing  Quarterly.co is a subscription service for wonderful things. People can subscribe to a curator (such as Joel Johnson, Veronica Belmont, Tim Ferriss, Joshua Foer, Gretchen Rubin and others) and pay $25 per quarter to receive a box of surprise items selected by the curator. My first mailing included a number of "fantastic plastic" gadgets (shown above). My second mailing contained a length of EL wire, a tiny microscope, and a black light flashlight. My third mailing is still a secret, but I'm really excited about it. Here's a hint -- it requires a flame to enjoy. Mark's Quarterly.co subscription
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| 1:35 am | Cory speaking in Bradford tomorrow Here's details of the public event I'm doing in Bradford while I'm in town for Eastercon: I'll be at the 1in12 Club, as part of an event called "Can Technology Save the City?" that runs from 12-6. I'll be there around 1430h. Hope you'll come out! 
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| Thursday, March 28th, 2013 | |||
| 8:28 pm | Disneyland Dapper Day: when Disney fans dress up
Dapper Day at Disneyland, the nattiest place on Earth [LA Times/Rick Rojas] (Photo: Christina House)
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| 6:18 pm | Songwriting podcast with Richard Sherman of Disney's Sherman Brothers
Episode 38 – Richard M. Sherman (Image: "it's a small world" holiday, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from harshlight's photostream)
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| 5:09 pm | FOUR MORE ASTOUNDING THINGS THAT BOING BOING READERS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW! Last week, I put up a post asking BB readers to tell us (and each other) about their projects. You-all upvoted your favorites, and herewith presented is a list of some of the coolest things you're up to (there's plenty that didn't make the cut but still fascinate -- have a look). There's so much awesome here that I'm going to split this into a morning and evening post. Here's this morning's bunch (for an unfiltered view, go read the totally awesome thread for yourself). First in this batch: Matthew Heberger is translating "Where There is No Doctor" (an amazing book I relied on extensively when I was a volunteer school-builder in Central America) into Bambara for use in Mali:
Emojk runs a site called FindersKeepers:
avoision's site Spitshake makes it easy to produce formal-looking contracts for stupid bets:
Bok's running a Kickstarter for a comic-strip documentary:
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| 3:13 pm | Editorial board of Journal of Library Administration resigns en masse in honor of Aaron Swartz The entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned en masse. Board member Chris Bourg wrote publicly about the decision, and an open letter elaborates on it, stating that their difference of opinion with publisher Taylor & Francis Group about open access, galvanized by Aaron Swartz's suicide, moved them to quit.
Pretty amazing that Taylor & Francis thought that they could convince authors -- who weren't paid in the first place -- to cough up $3000 for the right to use their own work in other contexts. Talk about being out of step with business realities of publishing!
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| 2:02 pm | Equality
From the Boing Boing Flickr pool: "Equality," a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from Rich Renomeron's photostream.
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| 1:13 pm | What problem are we trying to solve in the copyright wars? My latest Guardian column is "Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet" and it looks at what we really need from proposed solutions to the copyright wars:
Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet
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| 12:02 pm | TSA screener finds pepper spray on the floor, gasses five other screeners because he thought it was
Oops, TSA guy goes spray-zy! [NY Post/Josh Margolin] (via Digg) (Image: Pepper Spray Cop - White background, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from donkeyhotey's photostream)
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| 11:42 am | Prisoners in Scotland are "watching too much TV" The parliament's justice committee is concerned that inmates in Scotland's jails "have unlimited opportunity to watch television," and say "a reasonable amount of time to watch television is fair as part of a prisoners' relaxation time," but warns of the importance of establishing "guidelines regarding the appropriate amount of television viewing." [BBC News] 
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| 11:38 am | Mapping Twitter tongues of New York City  8.5 million geolocated tweets. Above: a map created by James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and John Barratt, who collected 8.5 million geo-located tweets between January 2010 and February 2013. Fast Company Design reports: "To build the image itself, they placed a point every 50 meters across the city. Tweets falling in close proximity were translated into a grid that you see here." Among the revelations: Midtown is massively multilingual, "like a someone spilled a jar of confetti across the island." More: Infographic: The Languages Of New York, Mapped By Tweets
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| 11:33 am | Owner reunited with camera she lost in Hawaii after it washes up on Taiwan beach 6 years later  [via CNN]
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| 11:22 am | The science of screen time vs. face time, and human connectedness University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill psych professor Barbara L. Fredrickson had an interesting recent piece in the New York Times on what she and research colleagues argues is a concerning downside of "the instant electronic access" provided by smartphones and tablets and the like: "one measurable toll may be on our biological capacity to connect with other people." The theory isn't new, but the science she points to seems to be. 
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| 11:20 am | HOWTO improve your startup's chances Anil Dash has got ten dynamite top tips for people hoping to run a successful startup, based on his wide experience:
The other five are just as great! Ten Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Startup Success
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| 11:01 am | Dolphin funeral? Adult dolphin "carries calf around for days," but is it grieving? Participants on a "Captain Dave's Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari" off the coast at Dana Point, CA (I've been on a few of them, they're great) witnessed an emotionally moving form of bottlenose dolphin behavior this week: a deceased dolphin calf was being carried around on the back of an adult bottlenose dolphin. To onlookers, it felt like a kind of funeral procession, in the sea. "I believe this calf has been dead for many days, possibly weeks," said Captain Dave. "You can see the flesh is decaying. In my nearly twenty years on the water whale watching I have never seen this behavior. Nor have I ever seen anything quite as moving as this mother who refuses to let go of her poor calf." More video, and background, here. It'd be interesting to hear how marine biologists explain the science behind this apparent mourning behavior. Because it could also be a tasty fermented treat. [petethomasoutdoors.com via Brian Lam]
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| 10:54 am | Officer linked to torture tapes' destruction advances within C.I.A. At the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti reports on the promotion of a C.I.A. officer "directly involved in the 2005 decision to destroy interrogation videotapes and who once ran one of the agency’s secret prisons." 
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| 10:19 am | The Shangri-Las perform "Out in the Streets" (1965) Bad girl group The Shangri-Las, best known for "Leader of the Pack," perform the far superior tune "Out in the Streets" on a 1965 episode of Shindig! For all you ever wanted to know about these talented young ladies, look no further than right here. (via Ben Gibbard)
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I'm really impressed with the 
Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world. If you're lucky, like we are at Amazing15, you get to work with incredibly talented and lovely people, on some of the most fiendishly interesting projects you can't even begin to imagine without the aid of viralised nootropics. 
Books which can manipulate reality aren't easy to design covers for. When you start a new project there's generally two initial ways in: 1) you step into it and find a moment, a scene, an element and pin your cover design on that or 2) you step back and look at the overall picture - try and find the theme. But what do you do when that picture seems to keep changing? The answer is, you keep chasing it. And what happens when there's other people involved in the process, each of whom has their *own* take on the book, a take which fluctuates as wildly as your own? The answer is you chase even harder and you don't look back. 
The first ideas we turned in were turned down. They looked non-fiction (
We chased harder. We imagined a bright spectrum filtered through a fractured pattern, clean fonts with nothing to hide. We got close. We kept the chaos subtle, a radiation of binary noise printed in spot varnish so you can only see it in angled light but you can feel it all the time under your fingertips. We got close and we caught it (
"People are looking for an excuse to dress up," said Justin Jorgensen, who started Dapper Day in 2011 and has organized five of the events, all at Disneyland. The latest Dapper Day — the same Sunday as the Oscars, Hollywood’s own dress-up day — drew an estimated crowd of 10,000 to the Anaheim park and about 1,000 more at Florida's Disney World. 
Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took photos on her Canon PowerShot during a vacation on Maui in 2007, and lost her new camera (in its waterproof case) during a night scuba dive. "The seas were really rough. There was a lot of sand stirred up. It was hard to see," 
