Second Cousins

7 June 2011

That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.

The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.

via BBC News

Seems pretty serious. Going from a culture with sparsely raised voices and rare rudeness to a country that, while not particularly rude or inconsiderate (no more than across the Channel, anyway) is so different to the culture portrayed in films such as Amelie it can cause shock due to the harsh realities. Oddly seems treatable through hospitalisation.

The Japanese embassy has a 24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock, and can help find hospital treatment for anyone in need.

However, the only permanent cure is to go back to Japan - never to return to Paris.

via BBC News

6 June 2011

From today’s keynote, seriously Apple, a space after the sentence and then 8 exclamation marks? There should never be more than one. Unless this is an intentional ironic meme. All it needs is a ‘lol’ at the end.

6 June 2011

You know what annoys me? Well, actually, that would be a long list. You know one thing that annoys me? The way some people on the internet use the word “curator.” People find cool stuff online and put links to that cool stuff on their website, and they say that they’re “curating” the internet.

The New Atlantis, May 31 2011

This sums up Tumblr, and continues my post from a couple of days outlining the problem with Tumblr. I don’t have much to add really; curation isn’t a journal of cool things, it’s placing informed work within context, educating the public about the piece. Linking to a cat lying on a banister, no matter how cool that cat looks, is not curation. It’s not curation of thoughts, it’s not curation of personality, it’s just a link to a funny picture (most likely with added Impact typeface with black border, or impersonating a motivational poster for extra points).

The New Atlantis have gone to the trouble of creating a taxonomy, which I couldn’t agree with more (with special mention of Things Magazine - an example of true internet curation).

The Linker: That’s what most of us are. We just link to things we’re interested in, without any particular agenda or system at work. That’s what my Pinboard page is, just a page of links.

The Coolhunter: People who strive to find the unusual, the striking, the amazing — the very, very cool, often within certain topical boundaries, but widely and loosely defined ones. I think Jason Kottke and Maria Popova are exemplary online coolhunters. 

The Curator: There are some. Not many, but some. The true online curator tends to have a clear and strict focus: he or she doesn’t post just anything that seems cool, but instead is striving to illuminate some particular area of interest. The true curator also finds things that other people can’t find, or can’t easily find, which means either (a) having access to stuff that is not fully public or (b) actually putting stuff online for the first time or (c) having a unique take on public material so that images and ideas get put together that the rest of us would never think to put together. I think Bibliodyssey is a genuinely curated site; also, just because of its highly distinctive sensibility, Things magazine. 

via Text Patterns, Curators and Imitators

6 June 2011

It’s time for the worldwide ‘Shed of the Year’ contest again, with the winners due to be announced during Shed Week 2011. A shed is a place so private that it’s where Dexter hid his blood samples collected from the people he’d murdered, Google unfortunately throws up no results for ‘dexter morgan shed’ but it’s pretty excellent. Everyone knows you can’t go in another man’s shed uninvited.

6 June 2011

Says Dieter Rams. As someone who rarely speaks on the effect of his influence on the design of Apple products, to mark a new book celebrating Rams, he’s spoken with the Telegraph about it. 

I am always fascinated when I see the latest Apple products. Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them. For me, I had to queue to receive food at the end of World War II. That’s quite a change.

Someone validly points out in the comments of the Telegraph post that it’s not really Rams who’s influenced Apple though, it’s the personal taste and design of Jonathan Ive who influences Apple, he just happens to be a Braun era Dieter Rams fan.

But the Apple cult is becoming frustrating in the same way Arcade Fire did when everyone started liking them after The Suburbs. Apple fans are becoming increasingly self-righteous, using Apple products as a ticket to signifying that they have good taste and respect good ‘design’. I’m a firm believer that it’s all about context, so this guy ruined everything the day he covered his £1500 MacBook Pro with a £1.50 bright red clip-on case and took it to McDonald’s.

I’ve also been reading the same quote a lot over the past week taken from Bill Gates in 1998.

What I can’t figure out is why he [Steve Jobs] is even trying? He knows he can’t win.

Thirteen years ago, Microsoft’s market cap was something like 48 times larger than Apple’s, which doesn’t say to me ‘Bill Gates was wrong and my team, Apple, won’, instead it says ‘A lot can change in thirteen years’.

6 June 2011

Taken from Herr Frau.

6 June 2011

Prince Philip is married to the Queen, and in four days he turns 90. What a guy. In celebration, here are some of his ultimate comments, as chosen by the Guardian’s excellent G2 team.

How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test? To a Scottish driving instructor, 1995.

You are a woman, aren’t you? To a woman in Kenya bearing a gift, 1984.

Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now? To a woman with a guide dog, 2002.

So who’s on drugs here? … He looks as if he’s on drugs. At a Bangladeshi youth club, 2002.

Representing the United Kingdom. Here’s another compilation of his top 15 quotes and the BBC has compiled a lengthy list of ‘gaffes’.

4 June 2011

Reblogging. 54 thousand ‘notes’ in a day. I’d guess half of those are reblogs and the other half ‘likes’, which makes 27 thousand blogs which all have the same content at the same time. I love Tumblr for it’s ad-free hosting of lots of images and easy theming system, and whilst the success of some Tumblr sites depends solely on the community aspect of Tumblr, the vast majority of said sites are really just a mashup of a thousand other blogs, all with the same horrific memes and animated GIF’s and the occasional topless tattooed emo girl (the exception to the GIF issue being If We Don’t, Remember Me).

So it’s somewhat ironic that Tumblr is seen as an easy way to create a directory of your personality, when in reality there are probably about 10 themes and 100 posts in circulation at any one time (exaggerated, but you get the idea). Tumblr isn’t a collection of lots of micro blogs, it’s instead a whole ecosystem; a single huge blog of memes.

Saying that, I saw Miles Barger’s Journal yesterday, not only an interesting take on the theming limitations (Tumblr’s max width for posts of 500px is ridiculous; its 2011 and my screen is 1440px wide) but also contains interesting content which appears pretty representative of his interests (he’s a cartographer).

3 June 2011

[via Flickr]

3 June 2011

And in other news, we recently took some press shots for musician Russ Chimes. He’s just launched his own label Uno Mas, so take a look (you may remember his extremely popular videos for his last trilogy, Midnight Club).