Sunday, July 16, 2006

Modern Living / Neurotica

Thank goodness for Mr. Hoogerbrugge, who takes the sour side of living seriously! Do you believe that it's possible to hear music through the mutilation of your face? In anima 97 "Rash" he would have us try out what it may be like. Using his own likeness. If he were not so ready to deface (or is that efface?) himself, I would say he has a case of Narcissis Musicis.

Or one of my favourites 98 "Prelude", where Mr Hoogerbrugge's face is masked to sinister effect, his mouth covered while it sings a wordless song.

The fact that these animations were created between 1999 and 2001 is testament to some creativity ahead of its time. I am also reminded quite a bit of Red Meat.

Other snippets to check out are (by number only): 15, 26, 32, 35, 40, 57, 73.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Stumble Upon

One of the great ideas for netizens: StumbleUpon. Definitely one of the more interesting trends I've come across - and above all: useful. So what is the idea? Discover unexpected web pages on your topic of choice.

First download the toolbar. You will be asked to select your topics of interest (choose what you will - Games, Film, Self-help, what have you) Now you will notice a new toolbar with several icons - the one you are most interested in is the one on the left: "Stumble!" Just click there and you will be transported to a webpage that someone in the community recommended, of one of the categories you chose. Just to the right of that icon you can find the categories icon - either let it randomly select the category for you (All), or specify the category you want.

The other side of the coin is that you can also tag pages for other people. So suppose you have a favourite page about dance culture you'd like to share - simply give it a tag (tag textbox) and confirm it by clicking the tag icon. It's as simple as that.

And in addition you can keep track of your favourite stumbles by clicking on the "I like it!" icon and later view them on your StumbleUpon userpage - just click on the "pages" icon to get there.

There's a community growing around this, but it gets my vote and I hope it continues to expand. It's rare that I find a net trend as useful as this one - now whenever I have a free moment I find myself stumbling upon new web pages. Explore the internet!

Have fun!!