You can download and remix tracks from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. How cool is that?
For the first time ever, fans are able to legally remix and share their own personal versions of two songs from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s groundbreaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The interactive forum bush-of-ghosts.com has been developed to celebrate the reissue of the album 25 years after its original release.
By agreeing to the terms of download, users will be able to download the component audio for two tracks from Bush of Ghosts – “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody.” This component audio is licensed to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Consistent with that license, users can legally create remixes and upload them to the site. Visitors can listen to, rate, and discuss the remixes, and are also encouraged to create their own videos, which will be streamed on the site.
Everybody’s favorite geek news site, Slashdot, is having a redesign contest. From the designs that CmndrTaco, Slashdot’s big cheese, has posted, it looks like he’s getting what he’s paid for. Most of the designs he’s deemed worthy of posting are outright terrible. And to top it all off, he’s actually critiquing them. It’s fun to play art director.
Design contests can be great, but they inherently put the designer in a subjugated position, making it nigh impossible for many, if any, real improvements to be made. It’s hard enough to get clients to listen to you when they are actually paying you, but when you volunteer to work for a “prize” you pretty much sign away any credibility you have.
I think it’s safe to say that whatever Slashdot ends up with will be better than what they had before, but if they really want an improvement they are going to A) actually hire a designer and B) give up on much of their current branding (if you wanna call what they have a brand). As part of the contest rules, designers must stick to the green/gray color scheme and use round edges as they are on the current site. So really this is more a a re-skinning than a redesign.
Have a look-see at what’s been presented so far:
First Batch of Slashdot Redesign Contest Notes
Slashdot Redesign Contest Continued
Slashdot Redesign Part III
There was only one thing missing from a Vespa to make it the ultimate in cool. It wasn’t a hyrbid. Until now.
TreeHugger has a neat thing on recycling computer hardware, check it out. If you’re in the Austin area, you can take your old or broken computer hardware to the Goodwill Computer Works.
Really a simulator but kind of an emulator, it’s System 7 in your web browser. I just messed around with MacDraw after playing a satisfying game of Asteroids. It really brings back some memories.
Seems like half the people I know would like this. The Fib, the inevitable and logical merging of poetry and the Fibonacci sequence.
I stole this from Moby’s blog. Chevrolet is having a contest, the winner gets to create a commercial for the auto maker. Apparently they don’t screen the entries before putting them online. This one definitely gets my vote.
Wired News has a brief but embarrassing interview with Peter Brown, CEO of AMC Entertainment. Brown responds to the simultaneous (attempted) release of Steven Soderbergh’s film Bubble in both theaters and on DVD, and explains why his theaters refused to show the film. From the interview:
Wired: Why deny theatergoers the chance to see Bubble?
Brown: We want to put up on the large screen a product made with that format in mind. Bubble, and some of these other direct-to-video titles, are simply not. We want to serve steak, not hamburger.
I’m going to avoid making any quips about the bad meat metaphor. Instead I will say that Brown has a point, no film that is released on DVD the same time as in the theaters could ever be as good as quality films like She’s the Man or Big Momma’s House 2. Those films deserve the big screen, and no small budget film put out by hack director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) should ever be allowed into theaters.
Fact is, people are going to theaters less and less, and watching movies at home more and more. Home theater systems have come a long way, and the cost of going to the movies just keeps going up. The downloading of high definition content is an inevitability, and when that happens people will have even less of a reason to go to the theater. Industry execs like Brown almost certainly know this, and apparently instead of finding a way to adapt to this new situation, they are going to fight it tooth and nail. I have to wonder if they believe they can actually force people to go to the theater by black listing films released like Bubble. Meanwhile, local movie theaters and small theater chains, like the Alamo Drafthouse, are making the movie going experience more compelling and continuing to attract audiences, and in the process are eating AMC Entertainment’s lunch.
Fighting robots are extra super cool awesome! Look at ‘em go!
Facebook, a MySpace competitor geared towards the high school crowd, is for sale for the bargain price of $2 billion, according to BusinessWeek. The Facebook folks obviously saw the sale of MySpace and want to cash in big time too. Is that another bubble I smell?
