Andi Elliott

The photo above is when I met William Gibson during his "Idoru" book tour, at Andromeda in Birmingham, 1997.

Loved Ulysses 31 as a kid (can’t remember the ending though). Nice little find via Facebook The History of Ulysses 31: A Worldwide Hit Barely Registered in the US.

I’ve had the MP3 of this for years, but of course somebody would have uploaded it to YouTube. William Gibson’s epic Neuromancer, dramatised by the BBC. H/T to The Loop for reminding me I had this - very jealous he managed to buy William Gibson a pint, I just met him briefly in Forbidden Planet Birmingham at the book singing for Idoru (the first day I ever skipped sixth form).

Every time I read something about LinkedIn I get the guilty feeling that I should actually do something with my profile. If Tobias Van Schneider is giving it a recommendation, maybe I should schedule some time.

Mixed emotions on the impending end of Flash. When I started my professional career back in 2001 Flash was a big deal, and I spent years building sites and product specifiers with it. Even now I’d defend the “Lego Technic” quality of the IDE, and how quickly you could get a proof of concept demo up and running. Shame that Adobe never went fully down that route. Are Technica has a good article here.

Some seriously great work here Womb Stories H/T Creative Boom.

LA fireworks filmed by drone, set to Blade Runner Main Titles by Vangelis.

Deep dives going on in Spotify this week. I was fortunate to catch Stabbing Westward on tour with White Zombie on the Astro-Creep tour. This was the single at the time, What Do I have To Do.

And sometimes after a long day making things, you just fancy listening to the track from Cars, Life Is A Highway.

Amazing how often a working day can dissolve into this kind of thing - Malcolm In The Middle, Hal changes a lightbulb.

The DUST podcast keeps getting better. I can’t seem to link to specific episodes but if short “immersive science fiction audio stories” are your thing, you need to check this out.

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs H/T The Register

The photo above is when I met William Gibson during his "Idoru" book tour, at Andromeda in Birmingham, 1997.

Loved Ulysses 31 as a kid (can’t remember the ending though). Nice little find via Facebook The History of Ulysses 31: A Worldwide Hit Barely Registered in the US.

I’ve had the MP3 of this for years, but of course somebody would have uploaded it to YouTube. William Gibson’s epic Neuromancer, dramatised by the BBC. H/T to The Loop for reminding me I had this - very jealous he managed to buy William Gibson a pint, I just met him briefly in Forbidden Planet Birmingham at the book singing for Idoru (the first day I ever skipped sixth form).

Every time I read something about LinkedIn I get the guilty feeling that I should actually do something with my profile. If Tobias Van Schneider is giving it a recommendation, maybe I should schedule some time.

Mixed emotions on the impending end of Flash. When I started my professional career back in 2001 Flash was a big deal, and I spent years building sites and product specifiers with it. Even now I’d defend the “Lego Technic” quality of the IDE, and how quickly you could get a proof of concept demo up and running. Shame that Adobe never went fully down that route. Are Technica has a good article here.

Some seriously great work here Womb Stories H/T Creative Boom.

LA fireworks filmed by drone, set to Blade Runner Main Titles by Vangelis.

Deep dives going on in Spotify this week. I was fortunate to catch Stabbing Westward on tour with White Zombie on the Astro-Creep tour. This was the single at the time, What Do I have To Do.

And sometimes after a long day making things, you just fancy listening to the track from Cars, Life Is A Highway.

Amazing how often a working day can dissolve into this kind of thing - Malcolm In The Middle, Hal changes a lightbulb.

The DUST podcast keeps getting better. I can’t seem to link to specific episodes but if short “immersive science fiction audio stories” are your thing, you need to check this out.

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs H/T The Register

The Project Behind a Front Page Full of Names

"Putting 100,000 dots or stick figures on a page “doesn’t really tell you very much about who these people were, the lives that they lived, what it means for us as a country,” Ms. Landon said. So, she came up with the idea of compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them."

How we made Airplane!

LibraryThing. Feels like a more community driven version of Good Reads, and it has an API 😎 (H/T Dense Discovery, issue #88)

Looking forward to kicking the tyres - Strapi reaches stable release.

100 things every UX designer should know, including A Nuclear Warning Designed to Last 10,000 Years.

I could easily get lost in Astronaut for a while (H/T Swiss Miss):

Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100
miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this
is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments.

These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

Astronaut starts when you press GO. The video switches periodically. Click the button below the video to prevent the video from switching.

The Project Behind a Front Page Full of Names

"Putting 100,000 dots or stick figures on a page “doesn’t really tell you very much about who these people were, the lives that they lived, what it means for us as a country,” Ms. Landon said. So, she came up with the idea of compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them."

How we made Airplane!

LibraryThing. Feels like a more community driven version of Good Reads, and it has an API 😎 (H/T Dense Discovery, issue #88)

Looking forward to kicking the tyres - Strapi reaches stable release.

100 things every UX designer should know, including A Nuclear Warning Designed to Last 10,000 Years.

I could easily get lost in Astronaut for a while (H/T Swiss Miss):

Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100
miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this
is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments.

These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

Astronaut starts when you press GO. The video switches periodically. Click the button below the video to prevent the video from switching.

Cozy Lego

I’ve never heard the term before I listened to the tested.com “This Is A Test” podcast but wow these photos look amazing. Words don’t do it justice, go and check out Architeclego over on Instagram.

The Five Deeps

Great article over at The New Yorker about the expedition to visit the 5 deepest points of the 5 oceans. They also stopped at Titanic.

The real Lord Of The Flies

For his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman uncovered the real-life story of 6 schoolboys who were stranded on a Pacific island for 15 months in 1965-66. What he learned was not the familiar tale of savagery & death told in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. Instead, the boys cooperated and thrived.

via Kottke

AR grab into Photoshop file? Well, this looks like the future.

When users take a photograph with AR Cut & Paste, the software finds distinct objects and automatically removes their backgrounds. In a video below, Diagne shows how a plant is captured on a mobile device before being snipped from the surrounding image. Once he hovers over the computer screen, the cut-out plant is placed directly into Photoshop.

via Colossal

Cozy Lego

I’ve never heard the term before I listened to the tested.com “This Is A Test” podcast but wow these photos look amazing. Words don’t do it justice, go and check out Architeclego over on Instagram.

The Five Deeps

Great article over at The New Yorker about the expedition to visit the 5 deepest points of the 5 oceans. They also stopped at Titanic.

The real Lord Of The Flies

For his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman uncovered the real-life story of 6 schoolboys who were stranded on a Pacific island for 15 months in 1965-66. What he learned was not the familiar tale of savagery & death told in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. Instead, the boys cooperated and thrived.

via Kottke

AR grab into Photoshop file? Well, this looks like the future.

When users take a photograph with AR Cut & Paste, the software finds distinct objects and automatically removes their backgrounds. In a video below, Diagne shows how a plant is captured on a mobile device before being snipped from the surrounding image. Once he hovers over the computer screen, the cut-out plant is placed directly into Photoshop.

via Colossal