2011 music wrap-up, by jwz.
The New Web Typography, how about you give us proper justification and hyphenation first, before we talk about OpenType features?
You Say You Want a Devolution?, by Kurt Andersen. “For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”
Where will we be ten years from now? CRT’s will be a thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing with emacs. Pens and touchscreens are too low-bandwidth for real interaction; voice will probably also turn out to be inadequate.
— Rob Pike, A Minimalist Global User Interface* (1991)
Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone, “The TAZ may have remained a fringe work if it wasn’t for “cyberculture,” which proved among the more resilient memes in alternative art and culture from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.”
The quest for the most diminutive munitions program, RSA in three lines Perl explained. (And a shorter one.)
ijmenu is a small console-based selector. (And the rest of the page contains interesting ideas, too.)
Vac pots, probably the coolest sort of coffee gagdetry you can find.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945
Lana Sator explores a Russian Rocket factory
The Ever-Dymanic Tertial, so simple, so useful.