This is a much better idea than getting James Cameron in on the action.

That’s ‘live action role play’ for the uninitiated.

More dreamy pop! I loved the first single Harmony to my Heartbeat (just try getting it out of your head), but worried that a whole disc of it might be a bit too soppy poppy, but the album is perfectly pitched.

Snapping your fingers, tapping your toes

You were humming the tune you know, you know

This is a new day, this is a new day, this is a new day today

sallyseltmann.com

Super impressive short film about WoW players showing their avatars in the real world.

Intense stuff - “their entire daily routine consists of eating, cleaning, laundry and games”:

Prospective gamers take tests based on the skills they have picked up in PC rooms, and passing scores allow them entree into “clans,” or guilds. Those who aspire to become pro gamers pay move-in fees and go to live at group dormitories, where they practice playing games all day long. Following a “courage match” for semi-pro certification, the hopefuls must take a test to become apprentices in a pro-gaming group.

I completely agree with this - BP aren’t the problem, oil addiction is the problem. Could just as easily have happened to any other oil company:

Recently I tweeted (and I apologize for the coarse language): “Unlike apparently everyone, I’m not pissed at BP. You gonna live on fossil fuel, shit gonna happen. BP drew the short straw.” Which didn’t seem to me that radical a thing to say. It’s far from established that BP is significantly worse (or better) in its practices than the rest of the industry. Seems to me that it’s not one oil company that’s befouling our species' only nest, it’s our systemic addiction to cheap energy and aversion of our eyes from what that does to us.

Nicholas Carr for Wired:

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies-including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases-show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online.

Rings very true - I feel a bit lost when my RSS, twitter, and email feeds are all clear. Distract me, quick, the real world is out there, and I haven’t got time to focus.

Interesting to note that the article is a strong vote for the combination of longform.org & Instapaper. Longform celebrates the art of in depth writing, and Instapaper strips the distractions.

Magical penmanship. I remember loving his illustrations in Roald Dahl’s books.

A barebones Rufus featuring just vocals and piano, which is refreshing after several albums of lush music-hall. It’s very personal stuff, largely about the recent passing of his mother Kate McGarrigle and how he is coping, whether it be talking to his sister Martha or seeking to make peace with his father Loudon. So it’s quite a solemn album, and he uses the simplicity of the arrangements to reinforce that emotion, though never to the point where it becomes drab. 

It must be extremely strange living in the Wainwright family, all famous and all not afraid to make public their various trials and tribulations.

I love reading about the obsessive detail that goes into magazine production - fonts, page navigation, column gutters, etc.