Adam Lisagor

atencio:

I did an interview with my friend Natasha Vargas-Cooper for comedy website Splitsider. It’s really self-indulgent, but if you’re interested in directing sketch comedy, I go into a lot of detail about how I approached doing the show. Which premieres tonight at 10:30. Please watch it, or else I have to go back to making porn.

So anyhow, I’m really excited about seeing the world get to watch this show my friend Peter directed. At heart, he’s a filmmaker in every sense of the world. He’s thoughtful about every technical choice, and obsessive about the language. Furthermore, he knows what’s funny. And furtherfurthermore, he’s one of the kindest people I know.

This interview by my other friend Natasha (I have two friends!) is a great one. I love when good things happen to the right people.

Here’s Peter on verisimilitude as a comedic device:

Ben Stiller did things that were very ahead of his time on his show. I think he’s really under-appreciated as a director for how he nails the look and the tone of the things he’s parodying. That show and SNL’s commercial parodies were my earliest influences. I was always drawn to comedy that looked exactly like the thing it was making fun of.

And so on.

Ha! Priceless.

Charlie Parker laughing at Coleman Hawkins’s attempt to do playback on his own recorded improvisation

This is the coolest thing ever. In one of two known pieces of footage of Bird performing, the music is pre-recorded and the band is supposed to be pantomiming along. But he clearly thinks it’s stupid and starts to laugh until someone off-camera tells him to stop and then just look at his face. Bird was too cool for this world.

Just found this, more than a year after the term was coined onstage in Lake Arrowhead, CA. God bless the fan base.

“Me and Robot” by Wes

This photo is by my 4-year-old nephew Wes, shot this morning with his brand new Discovery Kids Digital Camera. He’s got an eye!

Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)

The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.

(via buzz)

I’ve thought about this like Buzz has, but really, I don’t think it’s a concern. Entrepreneurs who take away these anecdotes of Steve’s sociopathic tendencies as instructive and critical to their own success are oblivious and no one will give a shit about them anyway. Watch this incredibly revealing documentary from his NeXT days in 1985 (probably the most intimate view of his process I’ve ever seen) and you’ll see a side of Steve that works well with others and weighs the ideas of others and feelings and things.

Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola

I love how all five of these titans of cinema are fully-bearded except Scorsese (always the maverick) wears his beard on his forehead.

via fuckyeahdirectors

:(

feltron:

Memo Atken

I think this is what music sounds like to particles.

There’s an unformed thought I’ve had bouncing around in my head since I first tried out Siri on my 4S. I’d have liked to develop it into something more robust, but it’s a pretty simple idea so I’ll just leave it here.

You can’t say to Siri, “I guess I’d like to do something later like maybe a movie or just something laid back like coffee in the area or probably not a bar because they’re so noisy—maybe one of those coffee places with lots of books and definitely not Jitters because that place smells like underarm” and expect Siri to help you in any way.

You learn quickly that Siri has certain expectations, certain limitations, and must be spoken to with a certain cadence reflecting a certain pattern of thought. Speaking to Siri is a lot like speaking to someone whose English isn’t so strong. It works better if you naturally pre-diagram your sentences and order them rudimentarily.

From Siri’s acceptance or rejection of our commands or requests, comes a feedback loop that trains us to constrain our thoughts to the crucial data.

As we learn to speak to Siri, we’ll learn more about how we formulate ideas into words, how to express those so that they may be understood with less margin of error, ultimately shortening the gap between intention and comprehension.

It’s safe to assume that as we learn to talk to Siri, Siri learns to listen to us. So we’re not simply assimilating with the robot culture, we’re fostering a new understanding between our vastly different types of intelligence.

Which is to say, Siri will teach us how to talk to Siri but maybe more importantly, how to talk to each other.

sandwichvideo:

Mixel “Introducing Mixel”

I’m so proud to have lent a hand to a project like this. When the brilliant designer Khoi Vinh showed me the new app he’s been working on, a lot of stuff just started to come together for me—pieces of the coming shift into what it means to create.

I think the future brings a world where all the elements of an object can be traced to their source, inherently and without friction—the DNA of any work self-evident and replicable into new forms. If I knew more about any of what I just said, I’d say that it’s a bit like life itself.

And Khoi has built a tool for creation whose user is free to play, experiment, share, collaborate, flourish, try, fail, make stuff, make more stuff. It’s fun, it’s intuitive, it works.

So for this, I drew inspiration from one of the earliest influences on my sense of creative play. I hope you enjoy the video, and more importantly, I hope you enjoy Mixel.

Oh god she’s about to eat his whole face and head.

Nash Metropolitan

Jobs was able to get his first car, with his father’s help, when he was fifteen. It was a two-tone Nash Metropolitan that his father had fitted out with an MG engine. Jobs didn’t really like it, but he did not want to tell his father that, or miss out on the chance to have his own car. “In retrospect, a Nash Metropolitan might seem like the most wickedly cool car,” he later said. “But at the time it was the most uncool car in the world.”

Scott Jackson is a really smart young man working on a project to figure out why you Like what you Like on Tumblr. Can you tell him? Sure you can. You’re a smart person who likes to use Tumblr and Likes to use Tumblr and Likes pictures of girls in cute outfits.

So install his extension and help him figure out what makes you tick, pervert.

scottjacksonx:

Hey, Tumblr.

I’m really interested in Like buttons. I think they’re a fascinating phenomenon. It’s something that’s not even five years old and yet it’s already become something that millions of people do every day. It’s something that we do without thinking, but can’t always explain. Long story short, I’m interested. So interested, in fact, that I decided that my undergrad research project at UQ should be about why we click Like buttons and how knowing that might be able to improve social recommendation systems. I need to gather some information from real live people, and I could really use your help — all you’d have to do is keep using Tumblr. Interested? Read on.

As part of my research, I’m investigating why people are Liking things online. To keep things simple, I’m focusing on users of one particular social network — in this case, Tumblr. I’m running a kind of diary study over the course of a week to find out why people are Liking things on Tumblr.

Here’s how it works. You download and install a browser extension (for Safari or Chrome). Then, for the next week, every time you Like a Tumblr post, a form pops up and asks you why you just Liked that post. You answer the question and submit the form, and then the form goes away. Too easy, right? Everything’s kept anonymous, and you can opt out at any time by just uninstalling the browser extension.

If you’d like to participate in the diary study (and boy would it be swell if you would), head over here, download the browser extension and get Liking!

Thanks for your time.

Sesame Street “What is a computer?” (1984)

“Do not despair.” - Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

via itsnotforyou

I love Steve’s stinky cheese face more than most things.

From his Q&A at the 1997 WWDC, at about 41:20 as an audience member asks him about some engineery thing that Steve clearly thinks stinks like stinky cheese.

Small Demons “Welcome to the Storyverse”

This was a fun one to make and to be a part of, and it all starts with a really powerful idea—that there’s value in connecting the details in all the stories in all the books in the world. Say you’re reading High Fidelity and want to listen to every piece of music. And some of those songs are mentioned in other stories, too. Small Demons. Not bad, right?

A million thanks to the Small Demons team (great people) and everyone who helped make this.

Credits