Ratchet Up

If You Type It, He Will Build

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[Via CSS Vault Gallery]

Top 50 Music Videos of 2005

Of course there aren't many music videos on MTV these days now that they have started making teen-fare they hope will bring in more viewers and advertising dollars. So here's a blessing in a blog: links to 50 of [presumably] the best music videos of the year. [Via Metafilter]

ArtGames

Artificial has a new edition on the theme of Art Games. No deep analysis here, but some interesting stuff, and recommendations of several games you can noodle with.

Visualizing Yahoo News

It's not a Christmas wreath, it's a way cool new way of visualizing Yahoo News. Check it out.

Auditory Calendar For The Deaf

Fermata “is a web-based calendar application with a central repository for calendar data. It can run on a variety of mobile devices enabling users to access their calendar information from anywhere. Users navigate their calendars with a combination of simple voice commands, gestures and the universal keypad (up, down, left and right arrows plus an enter key) found on most all computing devices. Calendar information is represented through a multi-dimensional, spatialized soundscape.

Fermata creates a soundspace using a variety of audio icons (sounds that represent kinds of calendar items), human speech that is a navigable 3D model of a user’s calendar. Users are able to navigate to different ”views“ of their calendar from a month to a week to a day to an individual calendar item.”

Listen to a little MP3 scenario they have built as a demo.

[Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art]

Podcast About Film Noir

With so many specialized podcasts coming out of the woodwork, why not one on film noir? This one by film profs Shannon clute and Richard Edwards of Saint Mary's College of California is pretty tight. Gee, academics doing something that's educational, entertaining and couched in pretty much everyday language. What gives?

Open your ears and let some dark wet streets seep in.

Black Ink Monday

Today scores of new editorial cartoons are being unleashed on the world. All around the theme of the disappearance of the editorial cartoon itself.

In the last couple of decades ed-toons have declined by half, in part for financial reasons, but also because they anger and polarize people [which is what they are supposed to do] who then want to cancel their newspaper subscriptions [the ultimate terror for newspapers with already declining subscribers].

Be sure to click through this acid corpus of dispeptic penwork:

SoundTransit: Book Your Own NatSound Journey

am a big fan of natural sound. It's pretty much a non-commercial enterprise, so distribution of MP3s by the web has opened up a whole new set of options.

“SoundTransit is a collaborative community dedicated to sharing field recordings and phonography from around the world — folks who’ve recorded ambient sound from their environments in different locations across the globe upload their often wonderfully unintentional soundscapes for others to share. On the site you can book audio ”journeys“ by selecting a start point, end point and how many ”stopovers“ you’d like. The result is a mashed up MP3 file you can download or play in your browser which contains sounds from points along the path, each with an attendant description and artist information. Everything is Creative Commons Attribution licensed, so remixing and reuse is encouraged with attribution to the contributing phonographer. This site is a very well done execution of a great idea, and will end up having an appeal beyond the already active global phonography community.”

[SoundTransit]