First up, Kottke.org. This is one of the rare internet publications that I religiously read and actually read every entry. It’s billed as “liberal arts 2.0” and it is exactly that, an extremely artfully curated collection of bits of historical curious, the most unusual of the arts, weird bits of science, and stories from the news you may just have missed. I particularly like this one because Jason Kottke keeps his posts to just the essentials, just a couple a day. However, sometime I hunger greedily for more!

I think everyone and their brother (especially their nerdy little brother) reads Boing Boing, but it’s worth a mention. This is nerd stuff made totally accessible for the rest of us. They have several contributors with posts on cool inventions, natural phenomenon, and even relevant political politics. And I secretly really love their posts on Steam Punk junk.

This one is for art nerds. Art Fag City is an awesome, down to earth collection of brief reviews and art news from Paddy Johnson. It centers mostly on New York, but if you’re elsewhere it is a great way to keep in touch with what is happening in the art world there.

Eventually, you need to put a fork in the icons, to kill yr idols… to paraphrase. So can we please bury Pitchfork now? Please?

Pitchfork is one I stopped getting a while back. The praise and the popularity is well deserved but sadly, the quality of the writing had for the most part collapsed, but for a few certain people. So if that’s the case, where do we go now?

Fact Magazine continues to carry the anglophile torch, with a continuing series of interviews that cross genre from metal to techno, all the while avoiding the same clichéd sycophantic stuff that Pitchfork has gotten mired in. The writing is class, the content is solid and any site that can deliver mixes from everyone from LV to the XX, gets all the love.

The Quietus is another web publication which continues to astound. The older brother to Fact’s astute hipster, the Quietus is definitely looking further afield but with the same high quality of writing. Just like Pitchfork, they’re happy to give Sufjan praise just as much as they are to give it to Killing Joke or the International Rome Film Festival.

Different eyes on different prizes for sure, but if you’re not of the patience to go out and hunt down excellent, independently minded writers like Jace Clayton, Joe Muggs and Julianne Shepherd, then these are good stepping stones.

It seems that illegal downloading has taken a new and highly sophisticated turn.  Well, I don’t know if I would call it sophisticated exactly, but lately bloggers have been posting download links directly in their blogs.  Sneaky little bastards!  This is a great way for them to enhance the number of hits they get on their site as well as share music with their friends and the world.

Sure, yousendit, sendspace, and megaupload are fantastic at times, but their layout design is fuddy duddy, and often if you don’t want to pay to subscribe, you have to do annoying things like wait 60 seconds before you can download your files or suffer through painfully slow upload rates.  True, this is the cost of freedom, and that will always have a price tag of some sort, but with blog-linked file-sharing, downloading free music doesn’t have to a pain in the ass.  A couple of tasty ones worth checking out indiedontdance and walrusblog.

The drawback: you may find some files are missing or only downloadable in .rar format.  If this is the case, you could always try beemp3.  Now if only they could make mp3′s sound as good as vinyl.  Dayum!

Looking for a little eco-inspiration?  Check out Design Squish, the Contemporist, or Ecovitz to hear about the latest in sustainable art + design projects, or cruise over to Haute Nature to be inspired by the likes of projects like Future Flower, and to ogle eco-friendly clothing by labels like Hemp Couture and furniture and household objects by Maybe Design.  Because being green is a choice, not a sacrifice.

]]> http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2010/05/3512/food-for-thought-and-eco-design-blogs-of-interest/feed/ 1 http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2010/03/2230/bombs-and-bikes/ http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2010/03/2230/bombs-and-bikes/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:01:34 +0000 Jeff http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/?p=2230

Though it took me until it was released on DVD to check it out, I finally got around to seeing The Hurt Locker — a day before it was nominated for Best Picture for this year’s Academy Awards.I had read on blogs after it was released in theaters that it was a great film. I read reviews from critics I trust like Roger Ebert, who raved about it. Then after Avatar came out, it seemed like everyone started talking again on blogs and in Tweets about The Hurt Locker and how the two would likely be going head-to-head with Avatar in a David vs. Goliath-like battle. They were right.

The Hurt Locker is a beautiful piece of film. I’m a big fan of the war film genre because it’s so hard to get right. But when it’s done right, it is done right. I don’t really want to get too deep into the glorifying war vs. anti-war film debate, but The Hurt Locker is simultaneously a great commentary on the current wars we are fighting and a flat-out great action movie. The suspense in the film is palpable. I don’t think I have been as physically involved and on the edge of my seat during a film since Paul Greengrass’ United 93. Director Kathryn Bigelow does a great job of letting you feel the suspense that these soldiers must be going through every time they leave the wire. Nevermind the fact that they are defusing a bomb and never know when it might go off, but you also never know when a sniper is going to fire on you, or someone is going to pop around out of an alley an point an AK-47 in your face.

I’m not a member of the Academy, but it has my vote.

For the past year I’ve been waiting for the release of Empire after seeing its initial teaser. It’s a film about having fun on fixed-gear bicycles by a group of friends in New York City. There are a bunch of films out there on the internet generally about the same thing, but the guys at Empire have done a great job teasing the film by running a blog about it is and releasing these short trailers. I’ve found that for me, nothing really gets me more motivated to get out and ride than watching cycling videos, especially during the winter months. I can’t wait for the full-length version to be released.

What do you get when you mix an actor famous for his mustache, waterfalls and sandwiches? Apparently, all are the ingredients for one of the most hilarious blogs to hit the internet in a while, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich.Gone are the days where simply writing funny captions over a picture of a cat will suffice. Selleck Waterfall Sandwich pulls out all the stops. These photos are seamlessly Photoshopped, with Tom Selleck and a sandwich in front of a beautiful waterfall blends together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly. Some even take it to an entirely different level and are animated .gifs, my favorite being the one featuring a submarine sandwich that — you guessed it — surfaces from the lake in the background.

In an effort to capitalize on the fame, the creators of the blog have submitted an official SWS shirt to Threadless in hopes it will be produced. But their biggest (current) claim to fame could be that Beach House‘s Victoria Legrand is a huge fan of the site.

Google Buzz was introduced this past week in an attempt to jump into the social networking game. As far as I can tell it’s supposed to be a mixture of Facebook and Twitter, where people can basically add status messages, links, photos and video to broadcast to their stream of followers. I’m not sure how I feel about it considering I use my Gmail account for business. I don’t want to post something that I only want my friends to see, but will also be seen by a business associate that might be offended or put off by it. With Facebook’s privacy settings you can control who sees what and can delete it if you change your mind. I haven’t played around with it enough, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Buzz. But one thing is for sure, I’m already sick of the jokes people are making about getting buzzed.

Last month I wrote about mainstream artists scoring points with the indie crowd. This month the roles are flipped, and back to a more traditional situation.If your eardrums were pleasantly surprised by some of the tunes used in Super Bowl commercials on Feb. 7, don’t be alarmed. While most people talked about which commercials were their favorites, I was most surprised and delighted by the music that accompanied a couple of the better commercials. Some could argue that Grizzly Bear is hitting the big-time, but they’re still relatively obscure on the mainstream radar. But Volkswagen exposed them to more than 100 million sets of ears for the big game by using the song “Two Weeks” off Veckatimest for its “Punch Dub” commercial, which features — hilariously — Stevie Wonder and Tracy Morgan.

But the big winners for the big game had to have been Arcade Fire, whose song “Wake Up” was featured in the NFL’s “Best Fans on the Planet” commercial (below), which aired a number of times throughout the game and could be seen on the Jumbotron at the stadium in Miami (I could hear it in the background as the broadcast came back from commercial break). For those not familiar with Arcade Fire but recognize the song, it was also re-recorded and used in the trailer for the recent Spike Jonze film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

It’s funny that the song is getting all this recognition now, because it was received tons of critical and indie praise when it was released in 2004, yet barely registered a blip in the mainstream.

Thanks to those dastardly music blogs that the RIAA hates, I recently was turned onto Holly Miranda, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter I instantly fell in love with. Had I not followed this blog, it’s likely I never would have heard of her, but I have since gone to Google and found a lot of great live videos she’s put out, including this amazing 17-minute, one-take, three-song performance that starts in a bar, moves down a couple of blocks, up a stairwell and into an apartment. I gladly plopped down the $5 to buy her EP from HollyMiranda.com and am anxiously awaiting her debut full-length album, The Magician’s Private Library, due out at the end of the month.

[Holly Miranda photo via her MySpace]

I’m not a fan of music websites (pitchfork bores me) but playgroundmag.net is a madrid based, spanish language page that has one foot in obscure indie, the other in electronica and dance music, and isn’t all that concerned with being hip or the first to a certain band (although they often are). It’s got a simple interface, and is informative without being condescending. It’s also got a lot of video and mp3 up which nicely does away with TLDR (too long, didn’t read) syndrome.

Other good spanish music blogs I’ve come across recently are circbengay, and young and insane.

Where would we be without the internet traveling in our pocket? Some people may like to do a crossword or Sudoku the old-fashioned way, on paper, during their commutes. But a lot of people are turning to the internet to play a version of the board game Scrabble.Me and a bunch of friends are hooked on Words with Friends, an iPhone app that just barely skirts around the trademark infringements of Scrabble, which its parent company is known for going after like it did for the Facebook app Scrabulous, now known as Lexulous. Words with Friends is an easy way to play a game of “scrabble” at your own pace since it’s played via cell phone, and you can have multiple games going at once. It’s said that games are automatically ended after a certain amount of inactivity, but I’m still waiting for someone to acknowledge that I’m about to beat them by 200 points some 14 days after my last move…

Single-topic blogs have been the rage for a while now, with the popularity of sites like This is Why You’re Fat, LOLcats and Look at This Fucking Hipster, but it seems lately there are memes being created out of these memes. Some hot sites that have popped up recently are definitely still single-topic oriented, but they are ripping on single-topic genre with irony. Great sites that pull this off include Hotchickswithstubbedtoesmakingsexfaces.com, Dudeswithbeardseatingcupcakes.tumblr.com, Hotchickswithdogswithboners.com, and more.

What won’t be considered book deal material these days?